Mapping UN Sanctions Evasion
Sanctions busting is as old as sanctions. While we tend to think of sanctions as exceptional measures that require special considerations, the imposition of a sanctions is nothing more than the imposition of some sort of regulation of international trade. Sanctions are evaded in the very same ways in which any other trade regulations are evaded. However, very little research has been done connecting the literature on international political economy and the one on international security on sanctions. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by ‘normalizing’ the understanding of sanctions as a conventional tool of trade regulation. This paper aims to collect evidence of sanctions evasions that will enhance our understanding of how sanctions work, the extent to which they can be evaded and how they contribute to the criminalization of local economies. The case study for this exercise is the United Sanctions since the end of ‘90s. The empirical evidence of this study comes from the 201 reports prepared by the Panels of Experts from 1999 till 2019 as well as desk research and interviews on sanctions evasion.