8. Commodity Sanctions

Commodity sanctions take a special place in the UN’s coercive policy arsenal. They are part of almost every UN sanctions regime and have been subject to the most extensive reforms. Yet, their underlying utility has never been analyzed and thus, more often than not, they are deployed either as holdovers of past economic warfare practices, or to serve extraneous interests. Infamous as the ill-fated oil for food effort in the unrealistic and excessive Iraq sanctions, as part of the comprehensive regime against Haiti, and more recently in Libya and the DPRK, sanctions on the extraction and trade of raw materials regularly overshoot their political purpose. Recently, new forms of commodity sanctions that operationalize certification systems and corporate responsibility schemes are on the rise. As such, they serve not only the interests of advocacy groups; they also promote business interests as marketing tools for accessing global commodity markets. Such extraneous purposes serve the cause of international peace and security as little as does their deployment as a tool of economic warfare.