BOOK REVIEW: Multilateral Sanctions Revisited: Lessons Learned from Margaret Doxey

Margaret Doxey (1975) wrote much of her influential work on sanctions in an era characterized by young international institutions, against the backdrop of the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War. The 16 women who contribute to the book Multilateral Sanctions Revisited (Charron and Portela 2022) honor Doxey’s scholarship in a time of re-emerging global tensions. Indeed, since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has imposed only two new sanctions regimes, on South Sudan (in 2015) and Mali (in 2017). That is a steep decline from the peak of United Nations (UN) sanctions activity in the 1990s and 2000s. This engaging book makes an important contribution to the literature by recognizing two diverging but interrelated trends. Contemporary sanctions are smarter than ever, but they fail to make up for the eroding moral legitimacy of measures imposed outside of the framework of the UN. First, the sophistication of targeted sanctions increasingly constrains targets, pushing them further into the margins of the international system. Thanks to the contributions of panels of experts, financial institutions, counterterrorism intelligence, certification schemes, and the ombudsperson, the senders of sanctions stay on top of a complex cat-and-mouse game with the individuals, entities, and regimes that try to evade them. Zuzana Hudáková notes that scholars recognize more than 100 types of targeted sanctions, labeled in terms of their targets, activities, commodities, economic sectors, or geographical regions (Biersteker et al. 2018).