Better for whom? Sanction type and the gendered consequences for women

Introduction

Economic sanctions are an attractive tool in statecraft, particularly when one considers the violent alternatives. Applying economic sanctions sends a signal of resolve to the target state without the use of direct military action, which can cause tremendous collateral damage. However, sanctions themselves can have tremendous unintended consequences. The comprehensive sanctions regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, for example, inflicted widespread suffering on the citizens of Iraq, including crippling levels of unemployment, poverty, and starvation. During the first five years of the sanction regime, ‘the price for a family’s food supply for a month increased 250-fold’. ¹ The humanitarian consequences of the sanctions on Iraq were so severe, the international outcry forced the United Nations Security Council to revise their decision-making process related to sanctions imposition. ² While some have argued that the impact of the sanctions in Iraq was uniquely severe, all states targeted by sanctions incur some level of unintended negative consequences on their populace. ³

While nations design economic sanctions to create financial strain on the target state and coerce state leaders to alter their behavior, already-vulnerable populations, especially women and children, fare the worst under sanctions. ⁴ For poor, rural mothers and their children, the sanctions in Iraq had particularly devastating consequences as child mortality rates rose considerably, violence against women increased, and female employment rates fell from 23% to 10% in only 5 years. ⁵ Sanctions can therefore present a major set-back for the cause of gender equality in developing countries, which are most likely to experience sanctions. However, research on economic sanctions has not identified the mechanisms by which sanctions burden women. Furthermore, academic work in this area in recent years has suggested that two particular sanction types, human rights sanctions and targeted sanctions, are not only more effective in achieving the goals of the sender state but are also more humane. Evidence indicates that human rights sanctions and targeted sanctions produce consequences for civilians in the target state that are considerably less negative than those following the use of comprehensive sanctions, yet this is not proving to be true for the rights of those targeted. ⁶

In this article, I examine the impact of human rights sanctions and targeted sanctions on social spending, which correlates strongly with women’s health and welfare indicators, used to assess gender equality. I aim to unwrap the specific mechanisms by which these seemingly preferential foreign policy tools negatively impact women in the target state. Using a time-series, panel regression analysis of 150 countries from 1990 to 2014, I show that despite their supposed ‘lesser of two evils’ reputation, human rights and targeted sanctions severely restrict women’s rights in the target state via significant loss of government spending on education. ⁷ However, while post-sanction cuts in government education spending negatively affect women by significantly decreasing parity of literacy between men and women and decreasing women’s participation in the labor force, an increase in government education spending during the sanctions period can ameliorate much of the burden these ‘smart’ sanctions inflict on women. Unfortunately, target governments are highly unlikely to take such important steps to protect women, illustrating that even smart sanctions, despite their reputation as less corrosive of human rights, do not provide sufficient measures to address civilian needs.

Negative impacts of economic sanctions

Though states do not intentionally set out to hurt innocent civilians when implementing economic sanctions, such consequences occur frequently. Sender states impose sanctions for various reasons including compellence, deterrence, or even to satisfy interest groups within the sender state. Some states engage in sanctions more often than others. The United States institutes economic sanctions much more frequently than any other state. ⁸ Scholars and policy analysts alike criticize sanctions as often ineffectual, but success stories do exist. The financial restrictions placed on supporters of Slobodan Milosevic during the genocide of the 1990s crippled businesses by isolating them from the wider financial market and this eventually helped to bring Milosevic to justice. ⁹ Travel sanctions imposed upon Libya were at least partially successful in ending the brutal reign of Muammar Qaddafi, and targeted financial sanctions imposed on Iran have been credited with bringing to bear the 2015 nuclear agreement. ¹⁰ Despite a poor record of success, sanctions are increasingly used in place of military intervention and as such, the record of unintended consequences is growing as well.

One oft cited negative consequence of sanctions is an increase in government repression by the targeted state. Peksen and Drury ¹¹ argue that economic sanctions threaten the long-term political survival of leaders in the target state government and this motivates the regime to restrict democratic freedoms of citizens to hinder any challenge to its authority. In many cases, this harsh implementation of restrictive government ultimately solidifies power within the regime, particularly when these sanctions are comprehensive economic sanctions.

As the target regime attempts to deflect the worst consequences of sanctions, citizens within the target state absorb the anger of the regime through abuse of their human rights. Peksen ¹² shows that economic sanctions have a serious, detrimental effect on the human rights of citizens within target regimes, and extensive sanctions, such as comprehensive and financial sanctions, have the harshest effects. He argues that the longer sanctions are imposed, the greater accumulating human rights cost they will inflict on target countries. Ironically, many sanctions are implemented precisely to prevent or stop humanitarian crises from happening and yet, as the target regime feels the heaviest financial impacts of sanctions, the regime punishes its civilians with increasing severity.

A second criticism of economic sanctions is that they impose financial distress on already-poor civilians. Economic sanctions can instigate nationwide financial disasters including high levels of unemployment, low levels of production, and even a currency crisis in the target country. Peksen and Son ¹³ argue that sanctions can trigger a currency crisis in the target state by increasing the level of financial insecurity in the state which significantly reduces outside investment, increases inflation, and undermines economic growth. They point out that sanctions also contribute to a steep decline in a target state’s gross national product (GNP), the growth of black markets, and a reduction in access to markets for exports and imports. Like several other authors, they find that high cost sanctions are the most detrimental types of sanctions to the overall stability of markets and finances in target countries. Neuenkirch and Neumeier ¹⁴ strengthen this finding by showing that UN economic sanctions lead to an average decline of 25.5% in the target state’s GDP within the first 10 years of the post-sanctions period, and US economic sanctions lead to a 13.4% decline over the same period. Citizens feel these impacts in the rising prices of their goods, the loss of their employment or reduction in their wages, and in the loss of their personal health. ¹⁵

Importantly, economic sanctions are most effective only in the initial, short-term sanctioning period though they often persist for long periods of time. ¹⁶ This means that despite losing overall effectiveness, sanctions continue to deliver negative shocks to political freedoms, human rights, and health as they remain in place. Target regimes threatened by economic sanctions and financial turmoil may respond with violence against their own people or may begin with a slashing of government spending on the programs that the most vulnerable civilians depend on for survival.

Unique consequences for women

Drury and Peksen ¹⁷ show that economic sanctions negatively impact women, particularly in the poorest countries. The authors highlight the unequal suffering women experience within target states through higher unemployment, cultural discrimination in hierarchical social structures, loss of access to public health, and increase in human rights abuse. They measure the negative impact on women using the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Database utilizing the variables on women’s presence in the labor force as well as women’s political and social rights. The authors proposed that cuts to government social programs may be primarily responsible for sanctions’ undue harm to women, though they do not test this directly.

Women rely overwhelmingly on government social spending, far more than men. ¹⁸ Women are also instrumental in the creation and continued development of the welfare state over time in many countries. Andrew ¹⁹ documents the central role women have played and continue to play in advancing the welfare state, as both workers in and clients of the welfare state. In primary care giver roles, women utilize government social programs to keep their families out of poverty, especially during times of great financial crisis. In more developed countries and in most democracies, women have been able to exercise the right to vote to push for increases in government services. ²⁰ Unfortunately, this does little good in nondemocratic states or in states reeling from the immediate impacts of economic sanctions, given that, ‘sanction episodes are often associated with a shortfall in the provision of basic public goods and services’. ²¹

The fact that women rely more on welfare programs can work against them in many states in which political and social hierarchies place women at the bottom. Many states expect women to be married and largely dependent upon the income of their husband, placing single women and especially single mothers, as the most economically vulnerable group of women in the state. The significant impact of economic sanctions on income inequality hits women particularly hard, as women make up a smaller portion of the mainstream labor force and even when they are employed, make less than men for the same work. ²² Women who work attempt to do so within societies that usually pay them less, and women are the first to become unemployed when the government faces a financial crisis. ²³ Women are threatened by changes to government welfare programs even during strong financial times and even in developed democracies. As political tides change so too does policy on welfare, even in the richest and most developed nations. ²⁴ In less developed nations, women are even more vulnerable to poverty and disease, and shifting political policies can have an even greater impact on their wellbeing. When states are sanctioned, political policies change quickly, and women are most often the losers in such situations. ²⁵ As primary caretakers of the home, women absorb the consequence that ‘deterioration of infrastructure, a decline in welfare state services, and an erosion of public health standards, as well as shortages in the supply of water and electricity, are frequently observed side-effects of economic sanctions, further aggravating economic hardship’. ²⁶

Buck et al. ²⁷ focus specifically on the case of sanctions against Iraq and how those sanctions disproportionately impacted women. They argue that the Iraqi sanctions produced gender-specific suffering. Under these sanctions, women confronted a stark decrease in available food, clean water, employment, health services, and housing. While the sanctions decreased availability of these items, the targeted Iraqi government exacerbated the shortages by also participating in the capture of food. As women are frequently the primary care giver to the children in the home, women must work even harder to provide children with food, water, shelter, and health care. They shoulder the stress of managing shortages for their dependents as well as for themselves. In the cases where women are employed, most women work in low-skilled labor, which is vastly underpaid and exposed to higher levels of labor exploitation compared to skilled work performed primarily by men. ²⁸

A theory of sanctions and spending

Existing research on economic sanctions and women’s relationship with the welfare state suggests that decreased welfare spending is one mechanism by which sanctions disproportionately hurt women. Economic sanctions place a steep financial burden on the target state, and the government must scramble to reduce expenditures to survive the sanction period. A vulnerable regime is in a precarious position, particularly if sanctions are high cost and the state was already at an economic disadvantage prior to implementation of sanctions. ²⁹ States typically disperse welfare spending across three categories: health, education, and social (retirement, income subsidies). While spending cuts to all three categories may create financial hardship for women, education spending is likely to be most impactful because short-term disruptions in girls’ education can have a long-term impact on women’s economic opportunities outside the home. ³⁰

Education is critical to female empowerment, and girls face more barriers to attaining education, regardless of geographic locations or the imposition of sanctions. In India, for example, illiteracy rates are the highest among women in the world despite the democratic nature of India’s government and its increasing financial growth in the last decade. Even without pressure from economic sanctions, the reality for girls in India is that they will receive only 4 years of formal education on average and only one girl in 100 will receive 12 years of formal schooling. ³¹ Arms et al. ³² found that among special education programs in the United States, girls were underserved relative to boys and those girls not receiving learning disability services when needed, were much more likely to become teenage mothers, leave school without graduating, and live their adult years in poverty and on public assistance. Much of this may have to do with what Estevez-Abe ³³ notes is a ‘gender bias in education’. She argues that job training programs that rely on apprenticeships and are more vocational in nature, are more likely to be gender-biased against women due to a ‘statistical discrimination’ present in employers who believe women are more likely to quit the job early to fulfill family obligations. This leads to women having less opportunities at higher-paying jobs than men and ultimately earning much less over their lifetimes than men.

Under a sanction regime, the marginal benefit and importance of educating girls and young women increases as a country’s economy falters. However, sanctions are likely to reduce the amount of educational opportunities available to girls and women. When families are unable to afford to send their daughters to school, basic skills, such as literacy, lapse. According to Al-Ali, ³⁴ ‘Illiteracy drastically reduced in the 1970s and 1980s, rose steadily after the Iran-Iraq war and grew between 1985 and 1995 from 8% to 45%. The drop-out rate for girls in primary education reached 35%. . .[and] 55% of women aged 15–49 are illiterate’.

Even short-term disruptions can thwart the long-term education and employment prospects for girls. Remedial schooling becomes difficult after just one or two missed years. Other times, girls leave school and become caretakers of younger siblings, and their household responsibilities become a reason not to rematriculate even if the government restores funding and educational attainment again becomes an option. One to two years of reduced educational opportunity can have an especially dramatic effect on women of child-bearing age, whose lives can change trajectory with the birth of a child. Intuitively, then, longer spells without education will only worsen women’s prospects in this regard. ³⁵ While the majority of countries that experience sanctions spend between 1 and two years under a sanction episode, many countries spend as many as 25 or even 40 years under sanctions and the average sanctions period is 12 years.

Education is a critical issue for women because it is the key to attaining gender equality. ³⁶ While it is difficult to measure a broad concept such as gender equality, scholars often operationalize the variable by measuring women’s fertility rates and women’s participation in the labor force. However, there is no specific consensus around fertility rates as a proxy for gender equality. Many scholars have used fertility rates as a proxy due to the consistent relationship between lower fertility rates and higher levels of positive outcomes for women such as participation in the labor force, higher levels of educational attainment, more personal time, and higher levels of economic success. ³⁷ For the purposes of this analysis, I continue to rely upon women’s participation in the labor force as one measurement of gender equality. However, given the causal connection I trace between sanctions and government spending on education, I have chosen to examine the level of gender parity in literacy in lieu of fertility rates as a complementary proxy for gender equality.

Education impacts gender equality as measured here, via its effect on women’s opportunities to leave the home. Fernandez ³⁸ finds that among other factors, education continues to play an important role in the evolution of female labor participation, with women participating more in the mainstream labor force as education opportunities increase. Reductions in support for education hit young girls and women hardest because gender parity in literacy is already a rarity in the world. ³⁹ As this uneven access to literacy plays out in the lives of these young women, they are more likely to have more children and less opportunities for labor force participation. Bloom et al. ⁴⁰ find that ‘on average. . .each additional child reduces female labor force participation by between 5% and 10% points for women between the ages of 20 and 44. Aggregating these estimates over the reproductive life of a representative woman, this implies that each birth reduces total labor supply by about 1.9 years per woman’. While sanctions will likely reduce the education opportunities for girls, states that resist the urge to cut spending on education will see better outcomes for women. Therefore, when education-spending increases, gender parity in education will increase as a sign of increased opportunities for women outside the home, and women’s percentage of participation in the labor force will increase for similar reasons.

Smart sanctions: only different in theory

While it seems clear from the literature that economic sanctions can and do have disastrous effects on civilian populations in target states, newer ‘smart’ sanctions should, in theory, be able to minimize the collateral damage to women. Most sanctions implemented prior to the 1990s were comprehensive in nature, meaning that they were meant to inflict economic damage on the target state as a whole to alter the behavior of a small number of actors within the target state. ⁴¹ However, following the disastrous consequences of comprehensive sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, the international community began to increase pressure on governments like the United States to mitigate the humanitarian consequences of economic coercion. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan requested a ‘less blunt and more effective instrument’ than the current comprehensive practice and policy experts answered this call for reform with ‘smart’ sanctions. ⁴²

Smart sanctions are designed to inflict economic strain on particular actors within the target state who are not only most responsible for the implementation of sanctions, but who are the few actors with the power to alter policy to meet the demands of the sender state. This ‘targeted’ approach to economic coercion is intended to shield civilians from the negative humanitarian effects of comprehensive sanctions while still maintaining a powerful foreign policy position. ⁴³ Smart sanctions are varied in form and content and can be designed to do everything from reducing funding for illicit criminal activity such as terrorism or human trafficking, to delaying the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction, intervening in unregulated banking activity, and enforcing peacekeeping efforts. ⁴⁴ While comprehensive sanctions are designed to impact the macroeconomy of the target state and therefore have a wider impact on a larger number of people, targeted sanctions are designed to impact the microeconomy of the target state and have a finite impact on a smaller number of people – the people authoritarian leaders must satisfy to maintain power. ⁴⁵

If smart sanctions do indeed impact governments in nearly inverse ways to comprehensive sanctions, logic dictates that they may be especially effective against authoritarian or mixed regime leaders. ⁴⁶ Such leaders rely heavily on access to the direct economic support that targeted sanctions are designed to block, and such governments are the states most likely to have the lowest levels of gender equality. ⁴⁷ Authoritarian leaders simply have a smaller constituency to satisfy because such leaders do not rely on the masses for a democratic election. Authoritarian leaders rely on their small group of political insiders, prominent business owners, or high-ranking military officials to remain in power and it is this small group which must be financially supported by authoritarian leadership for power to be maintained. ⁴⁸

Some scholars differentiate between targeted and ‘selective’ sanctions, arguing that selective sanctions are limited in what they target (i.e. a single type of commodity or financial transaction) while targeted sanctions are limited in whom they target (i.e. one leader or a group of elites). ⁴⁹ Other scholars argue that the two types are too similar to separate because they have the same intended purpose, namely, to hurt the powerful who are arguably responsible for whatever actions must be corrected in the state while protecting the innocent who have little role in such actions. ⁵⁰

The application of targeted sanctions ⁵¹ includes choosing who will be targeted and in what ways, keeping in mind the intended outcomes the sender state hopes to achieve. Cortright and Lopez elaborate on this process:

Sanctioning authorities identify a distinct group of named individuals who are either engaged in illegal activity or who are known to have decision-making authority over objectionable government policies. These designated individuals and the entities they control are . . . subjected to financial sanctions and travel bans. . .A second option. . .is to adopt a functional definition of those to be sanctioned. . .The goal would be to capture all those within the inner circle of the targeted regime. Such an approach assumes that those who benefit from an objectionable policy bear some responsibility for it. . . ⁵²

While such planning is certainly important in implementing foreign policy tools, even this determined policy approach has created consequences for innocent people. The creation of this ‘Specifically Designated Nationals’ system means that the sender state gets to decide who is a threat and who is not. In fact, individuals designated as legitimate threats on these lists are not permitted standard human rights protocols including access to counsel, a right to make a plea or enter arguments, or petition for a delisting as an individual. Furthermore, the lack of transparency and protection of individual legal rights in this process has resulted in over 50 member states expressing significant concern around the use of targeted sanctions. ⁵³

Targeted sanctions are generally focused on limiting leadership and elite access to specific financial markets, closing off new investment opportunities, and preventing assistance from ‘black knight’ states that may protect the regime. ⁵⁴ The immediate financial impact of such financial targeting is problematic enough for elites, but there is often a wider international impact as well. Elites who are labeled as possible financial risks or criminal actors are likely to be shunned by the wider financial community which can lock them out of the market long-term. This makes accepting temporary illegal funding from sanctions busters an inadequate short-term solution to a much larger long-term problem. ⁵⁵

Restrictions on Visa allowances and travel bans can also target elites and leadership more directly, given that in many countries most overseas traveling is limited to the wealthy and powerful. ⁵⁶ However, such measures can backfire by restricting civilian access to foreign aid when flight bans are in effect. This specific concern halted the implementation of sanctions that included a flight ban on the country of Sudan in the late 1990s. While UN members wanted to implement sanctions to address human rights concerns in the country, a preliminary investigation into the possible impact on civilians determined that a flight ban would keep humanitarian aid away from desperate, innocent people and the UN ultimately decided to abandon the flight ban. ⁵⁷ Not all flights in a sanctioned state may be banned under such sanctions, yet banning specific airlines or international airports from operating can drastically impact civilians, a concern detailed in a report by the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs in 1996. As the report noted, bans on airports can ground flights across a country if such airports host maintenance personnel as in Sudan, or control access to the national postal service and thereby foreign remittances sent from outside the country by friends and family members of civilians. ⁵⁸

The effectiveness of sanctions is a controversial topic given that few scholars or officials agree on how to measure effectiveness. Further, effectiveness can change according to the intended goals of the sender state, the type of sanction implemented, and the response by the international community which can be supportive or conflictual. ⁵⁹ Some more powerful states are less interested in effectiveness and more interested in moral obligations or at least the public perception of a moral obligation. ⁶⁰ It also matters a great deal if the threat of sanctions is seen as credible by the target state which may alter its behavior prior to sanctions imposition or find outside funding sources to alleviate its discomfort during sanctions. ⁶¹ However, despite an unclear definition of ‘success’, some applications of targeted sanctions have been agreed upon as relatively successful. EU restrictions on travel for elites who supported Slobodan Milosevic during the conflict in Yugoslavia (1992–1995) are judged as effective because they severely restricted elites from conducting business outside the state which eventually pushed Milosevic to come to terms. ⁶² Cortright and Lopez ⁶³ argue that sanctions applied in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, Angola, and Cambodia were ‘at least partially effective’. The authors argue that in Libya, the dictator Qaddafi was isolated and weakened by sanctions and this placed him in a position of vulnerability that increased the chances of ending his brutal rule. Drezner ⁶⁴ argues that financial sanctions during the Cold War were effective at combating money laundering, and sanctions against Iran aided in bringing president Hassan Rouhani to the bargaining table to sign the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2015.

Yet the record of clearly unsuccessful targeted or limited sanctions is damning for policy makers warming up to this tool. Cortright and Lopez ⁶⁵ argue that sanctions in Haiti and Somalia were only slightly effective, while those in Sierra Leone, Sudan, Liberia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia (1998), and Afghanistan were abject failures. In Haiti, an oil embargo was implemented by the Organization of American States in 1991 and then strengthened in 1993 and 1994. The intent was to cut the leadership off from oil revenue but instead, ‘the trade sanctions provided the Haitian military with substantial rents; the illicit trade in fuel continued, with profits accruing to the military administrators of the trade. Meanwhile, the population at large suffered’. ⁶⁶ In the case of Yugoslavia, financial restrictions imposed in the first round of sanctions did hurt elites, but export and import embargos imposed in 1998 only exacerbated the trade in illicit goods and propped up Milosevic. ⁶⁷ Furthermore, among the 63 episodes of UN targeted sanctions over 25 years, only 22% of those episodes were successful in coercing, constraining, or signaling a target. Importantly, they note that these targeted sanctions are far more effective at constraining and signaling the target than in coercing a change in the target’s behavior. ⁶⁸ This poor record of effectiveness not only highlights the problem with embracing this tool as an alternative to other sanction types, but also illustrates that although targets are feeling the negative intent of this tool, they are not hurt enough to implement change the sender state deems necessary to lift the sanctions.

These examples illustrate that a major issue with sanctions is their capacity to increase illicit commodities in the target state. In fact, corruption and criminal enterprise is ‘the most frequently observed unintended consequence of targeted UN sanctions’. ⁶⁹ As leadership and civilians look for ways to overcome economic strain, they often turn to black market goods that are inelastic (like oil, alcohol, and tobacco) and carry little risk of detection from an unstable government. ⁷⁰ This increased interest in smuggling black market commodities feeds into the creation of and support for transnational crime syndicates in the target state and its border states. ⁷¹ As these syndicates become comfortable enough moving arms or goods, they naturally begin to trade in services and human beings. ⁷²

Financial sanctions imposed against North Korea resulted in an increase in bartering and illicit cross-border networks. Smuggling with the support of Chinese networks in the form of inadequate customs enforcement, false customs declarations to evade taxes and regulation, and corrupt officials at border areas helped North Korea evade some of the intended economic consequences of these sanctions. ⁷³ Furthermore, this increase in illicit economic activity continues beyond the initial imposition of sanctions, as the formal market shrinks and inflation increases. ⁷⁴ Importantly, when the illicit goods being smuggled are weapons, including small arms, not only do smugglers make a massive profit, but the increased presence of military weaponry makes the target state even more unstable and bolsters any conflictual relationships that may be happening simultaneously, such as civil conflicts or cross-border hostilities. ⁷⁵ Therefore, citizens must compensate for both the economic and the physical instability created directly and indirectly by sanctions, even targeted sanctions. Finally, if the type of limited or targeted sanction happens to be an arms embargo, the trade in illicit weapons will obliterate the impact of the embargo on altering state behavior. ⁷⁶

The assumption about targeted sanctions is that they will hurt leaders and elites significantly enough to alter behavior but prevent citizens from feeling unintended pain. Even public opinion supports this assumption as citizens prefer such targeted attempts to comprehensive punishment. ⁷⁷ Specifically, ‘as political elites face the cost of coercion more immediately through targeted sanctions, they should be more conciliatory toward the sender country’s demands for more respect for democratic freedoms and human rights’. ⁷⁸ Theoretically, targeted sanctions should have fewer humanitarian consequences for civilians, and the literature shows that they do, if what we measure is overall scores of human rights indices or cost of living increases. ⁷⁹ However, I illustrate here that even where targeted mechanisms may be more effective at altering state behavior than comprehensive sanctions, this altered behavior still comes at a price to civilians. Targeted sanctions meet the ‘behavioral change criterion’ of sanctions design, that is, ‘are expected to impose an economic burden on targets, prompting them to change their behavior in order to avoid the costs of sanctions’ which it appears they do achieve. ⁸⁰ However, the changed behavior of the target is not more in favor of sender state demands than comprehensive sanctions, but instead toward self-preservation and widespread pain to civilians, as leadership protects the pocketbooks of self and elites in the post-sanctions economic environment. ⁸¹ This widespread pain does not happen directly as it does under comprehensive sanctions when unemployment or inflation rises, or elites use force to suppress citizens, and it is not detectable by examining macroeconomic or generalized human rights measurements. The connection is not a perfectly straight line, from sanctions of elites to direct attacks on women. This pain happens indirectly, as these impacts are driven by leadership hoarding of resources desperately needed by civilians, and disproportionately so by civilian women, and can only be measured by disaggregating the impact of sanctions on specific sectors in the economy and society. Because the ‘rents’ paid by domestic leaders to elites to maintain loyalty are not publicly available, and because it is not clear how much economic pain is felt by elites compared to political leaders when targeted sanctions are employed, the connection between economic impacts of targeted sanctions on those in power to consequences for citizens must be understood via changes in leadership behavior when targeted sanctions are applied.

As I show in the following section, the use of human rights and targeted sanctions impacts leadership severely enough that elites and political leaders resort to pilfering funds from the government to support themselves, leaving civilians to rely on dangerous and illicit economies to survive. Even the threat of sanctions can result in a defensive and counterproductive response from target leadership that ultimately makes human rights of civilians worse. ⁸² When targeted and human rights sanctions are applied, leaders feel direct economic pain, and suddenly elites are competing for resources alongside civilians. Unsurprisingly, elites then choose to hoard resources away from civilians and drive them into an exploitative, criminal economy. This negative financial impact on specific targets is supported by the finding that financial restrictions like asset freezes and trade restrictions which are common in targeted sanctions, have a negative impact on the civilian poverty gap that is six times larger than that of less severe sanction types. ⁸³

Regardless of the type of sanction regime, there is good reason to think that it will jeopardize the regime’s tax base or sources of economic rents, and that the regime will, in turn, reduce public spending as it shifts remaining financial resources to its selectorate in order to maintain power. Statistical evidence in support of this theory should thus confirm the following hypotheses regarding the relationship between sanctions imposition, education spending, and gender equality:

Sanctions and education spending: analysis and results

Evaluating the first hypothesis requires an examination of the relationship between government spending on education and the imposition of human rights sanctions and targeted sanctions. Table 1 below describes the variables and sources used for analysis.

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Table 1.

Variable Types and Sources.

Variable	Type and Range	Source
Human Rights Sanctions	Dichotomous 0 (no sanction) 1 (sanction)	TIES v.4 dataset (Hufbauer et al. 2007)
Targeted Sanctions	Dichotomous 0 (no sanction) 1 (sanction)	Targeted Sanctions Consortium Qualitative Database (Biersteker, Eckert, Tourinho 2016)
Comprehensive Sanctions	Dichotomous 0 (no sanction) 1 (sanction)	TIES v.4 dataset (Hufbauer et al. 2007)
Government Education Spending	Nominal 0 (min) 4.35 (mean) 44.33 (max)	World Bank − UNESCO Institute for Statistics; percentage of government expenditures on primary education as a percentage of GDP in a given year (www.data.worldbank.org)
Gender Parity Literacy Index	Nominal .24 (min) .93 (mean) 1.24 (max)	World Bank Parity of literacy between boys and girls, ages 15-24; <1=girls are disadvantaged, 1=parity, >1=boys are disadvantaged (www.data.worldbank.org)
Female Percentage of Labor Force	Nominal 9.54 (min) 39.79 (mean) 55.86 (max)	World Bank Percentage of women active in the overall labor force (www.data.worldbank.org)
Democracy	Ordinal -10 (least democratic) +10 (most democratic)	Polity2 indicator of the Polity IV dataset (Marshall and Jaggers 2002)
GDP (log)	Nominal 4.13 (min) 7.39 (mean) 10.76 (max)	World Bank dataset (www.worldbank.org)
Population (log)	Nominal 11.9 (min) 15.9 (mean) 20.98 (max)	World Bank dataset (www.worldbank.org)
Wars	Dichotomous 0 (no war) 1 (war)	Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Disputes v.4.2 dataset (www.correlatesofwar.org)

Figure 1 below provides a double histogram of the rate of government spending on education as a percentage of GDP for the 84 countries in the sample that have experienced some form of economic sanctions. We know from Neuenkirch and Neumeier ⁸⁴ that UN and US economic sanctions can have a significantly negative impact on GDP growth in the target state, a factor that makes the proverbial ‘pie’ smaller from which this funding is drawn in the post-sanctions period. Hufbauer et al. and Drury and Peksen ⁸⁵ compile the sanctions data using primary sources on economic sanction behavior on countries that experience sanctions from 1990 to 2014. I aggregate the effect of all types of sanctions ⁸⁶ on education spending. UNESCO Institute for Statistics ⁸⁷ provides the data for government education spending, which includes government expenditures on primary public education (K-12) as a percentage of GDP in a given year. Given that this paper focuses on the impacts of women related to education spending, I chose this as my measurement of government social spending. ⁸⁸

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Figure 1.

Impact of Human Rights Sanctions on Government Spending on Education.

The darkly shaded histogram represents the percentage of GDP each government in the dataset spent on public education prior to the implementation of sanctions. Most countries in the sample spent between 3% and 7% of their GDP on public education. The white histogram represents the percentage of GDP each government spent on public education during the sanctions period. Most countries in the sample reduced their spending on education significantly, by 1% to 5% of their GDP. For large, very wealthy countries, a 1% or 2% difference in spending can be offset by private tuition payments, but for smaller, less developed countries, this difference can be devastating. This illustration provides a clear picture of how significantly sanctions impact government spending on primary education and allow for a transition into testing the second piece of this puzzle.

The method of analysis is a cross-sectional time-series feasible general least squares regression with panel corrected standard errors ⁸⁹ to address heteroscedasticity. ⁹⁰ All independent variables in each regression model are lagged 1 year to allow time for impact of sanctions on the dependent variables. Table 2 illustrates the use of this method to provide additional evidence of the quantitative impact of sanctions on government spending in education. The model includes control variables for size of a country’s population, the level of democracy, whether they are experiencing a conflict, ⁹¹ and a regional control to deal with time-invariant heterogeneity. ⁹²

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Table 2.

Impact of Sanctions on Government Spending on Education.

Variables	Government Education Spending (%GDP)
Human Rights Sanctions	−0.600** (−0.197)
Targeted Sanctions	−1.105** (−0.138)
Comprehensive Sanctions	0.415* (−0.198)
Democracy	0.047** (−0.005)
GDP (log)	0.300** (−0.021)
Population (log)	−0.220** (−0.015)
Wars	−0.206** (−0.043)
Constant	6.040** (−0.348)
Observations	1,951
Number of Countries	150

Note: Standard errors in parentheses; **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

Table 2 above displays the results of regressing the first dependent variable, government spending on education, on various sanction types. These results support hypothesis 1, and suggest that when human rights sanctions are in effect, governments spend considerably less on public education. The coefficient on human rights sanctions is negative and statistically significant as is the coefficient on targeted sanctions, while the coefficient on comprehensive sanctions is positive and statistically significant. This suggests that more specific sanctions may impact government decision making differently than wide-ranging comprehensive sanctions, though this relationship needs further examination than the parameters of this project allow. ⁹³ The coefficient on GDP is positive and significant, suggesting that wealthier countries absorb sanctions impacts better than poorer countries. However, when governments have more people or are involved in an active conflict, they spend less on public education as revealed by the negative and significant coefficients on Population (log), and Wars, respectively.

Figure 2 below provides a marginal effects graph of the impact of sanctions on government spending for a more complete picture of this relationship.

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Figure 2.

Marginal Effects of Human Rights Sanctions on Government Spending in Education.

As suggested by the double histogram in Figure 1, the onset of a human rights sanctions episode dramatically reduces government spending on public education as a percentage of GDP. When no human rights sanctions in are in place, states average the mean value of spending on education, approximately 4% of GDP. However, when a human rights sanctions onset occurs, illustrated by a value of ‘1’ on the × axis above, government spending on public education drops nearly a full percentage point of overall GDP. Given that the average length of a sanction episode is 12 years, millions of young girls and women are at risk of losing a significant proportion of government spending on their education for the entire trajectory of their early schooling if the target state experiences sanctions just as the young girls begin Kindergarten.

Sanctions, education spending, and gender equality: analysis and results

To assess the remaining hypotheses regarding the effect of sanctions and education spending on gender equality, I run two additional panel models. I operationalize gender equality using two variables: gender parity in literacy and female percentage of the labor force. Gender parity in literacy, is part of the Gender Parity Index (GPI) provided by the World Bank via information reported by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. The variable here is a measurement of the ratio of females to males, ages 15–24, who can both read and write. ⁹⁴ The second dependent variable is the female percentage of labor force, also provided by the World Bank, which is the percentage of women who are active in the overall labor force. The labor force is made up of workers over the age of fifteen who meet the International Labor Organization’s definition of an economically active participation.

If welfare spending mitigates the negative impact of sanctions on gender equality, we should see gender parity in literacy go down under sanctions but rise under increased welfare spending. During times of economic crisis within states, spending on education – including literacy programs that substantially benefit girls and women – is significantly reduced as human and financial resources are stressed. ⁹⁵ If spending on education mitigates the impact of sanctions on female workers, the percentage of female workers in the labor force should go down under sanctions but go up under increased welfare spending.

The main independent variable in both models is an interaction term between government education spending, and the human rights sanctions dummy to measure the mitigating impact of welfare spending on this sanctions type designed to protect civilians. If government spending on education mitigates the impact of human rights sanctions on women, the interaction variable will be statistically significant. The models also include the same set of control variables in the first model: level of democracy, population, GDP, an indicator of whether a country is at war, and region. The sources of these variables can be found in Table 1 above.

Table 3 reports the results of the models that test hypotheses two and three, regarding the effect of education spending during various sanction types on gender parity in literacy and female percentage of labor force, which serve as proxies for the level of gender equality in a state.

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Table 3.

Impact of Human Rights Sanctions x Government Education Spending on Gender Parity Literacy Index and Female Percentage of the Labor Force.

Variables	Model 1Gender Parity in Literacy	Model 2Female % Labor
Human Rights Sanctions	−0.260** (−0.075)	−6.515** (−0.733)
Government Education Spending	0.004** (−0.001)	0.348** (−0.016)
Human Rights Sanctions X GES	0.090** (−0.032)	1.777** (−0.279)
Targeted Sanctions	−0.023* (−0.010)	1.576** (−0.37)
Comprehensive Sanctions	−0.055	−0.265
	(−0.033)	(−0.907)
Democracy	0.000(−0.000)	0.077**(−0.015)
GDP (log)	0.014**(−0.001)	−0.487**(−0.047)
Population (log)	−0.002**(−0.000)	0.051(−0.046)
Wars	0.007*(−0.003)	−0.993**(−0.114)
Constant	0.780**(−0.026)	47.98**(−0.932)
Observations	318	1,979
Number of Countries	109	151

Note: Standard errors in parentheses; **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05.

The model results support the remaining hypotheses. Model 1 reveals that all sanction types decrease gender parity in literacy, while government spending on education increases this parity. While the coefficient on comprehensive sanctions does not reach statistical significance, both human rights sanctions and targeted sanctions reveal negative coefficients with statistical significance at the .01 and .05 levels respectively. Furthermore, government spending on education during a human rights sanctions regime, as revealed by the interaction term human rights sanctions X GES, has the additional impact of further increasing gender parity in literacy. The marginal effects graph in Figure 3 below illustrates the substantive impact of the interaction term for Model 1.

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Figure 3.

Marginal Effects of Education Spending x Human Rights Sanctions on Gender Parity in Literacy.

Figure 3 shows that when education spending is reduced to zero during a sanctions period, the rate of gender parity in literacy decreases by 0.2%. However, under the mean value of spending on education (approximately 4% of GDP), the change in gender parity in literacy increases by about 0.1% and the change is statistically significant. The impact of spending on the change in gender parity in literacy continues to grow as spending increases. Under the maximum value of education spending, the change in gender parity in literacy increases by a full 3.4% and this result is also statistically significant.

Returning to Table 3, Model 2 reveals that both human rights sanctions and comprehensive sanctions reduce the percentage of women in the labor force. However, targeted sanctions increase the percentage of women in the labor force. ⁹⁶ This result is interesting, given that in previous iterations of this relationship, targeted sanctions seemed to impact government spending similarly to human rights sanctions. As before, this project does not allow room for a full exploration of this deviation, though the result does provide impetus for further work on this issue.

The coefficient on the interaction term is positive and statistically significant, suggesting that government spending on education during human rights sanctions increases female participation in the labor force. This is an important finding, because increasing spending on education not only absorbs the negative impact of human rights sanctions on women, such spending increases the percentage of women in the traditional labor force. The marginal effects plot in Figure 4 better illustrates the substantive effect of this variable.

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Figure 4.

Marginal Effects of Education Spending x Human Rights Sanctions on Female Participation in Labor.

In Figure 4, when welfare spending is at its lowest during a human rights sanction regime, the female percentage in the labor force decreases, and this result is statistically significant at the 0.01 level. However, when education spending is increased to the mean value of at least 4% of a country’s GDP, the change in the female percentage of the labor force increases a full 1.5% over the lower spending values. This increase illustrates further that more government spending on education is not only mitigating the impact of sanctions on women in the workforce but reversing that impact in a positive direction. This result is statistically significant at the 0.05 level.

At the highest levels of education spending under human rights sanctions, or 44% of the GDP, the change in women’s percentage of the work force increases by over 66% from lower spending values, and this result is significant at the 0.01 level. This is an enormous increase and warrants some discussion. Given that the mean of government education spending is at 4% GDP, most of the cases in the sample cluster around that mean. The maximum amount of education spending in the sample is 44% of GDP, or to put it another way, if a country has the mean GDP in the sample of approximately $89 billion, the mean education spending would be approximately $3.5 billion while the maximum education spending would be approximately $39 billion. Naturally, this kind of financial commitment to public education spending is a rarity and highly unlikely to occur under the best circumstances to say nothing of the circumstances of a sanctions regime. However, the exponentially positive impact of government spending on public education for women is still impressive, even at average spending levels and must be acknowledged as an important key in protecting women in target states.

As with gender parity in literacy, the impact of government spending on education under human rights sanctions is more impactful and arguably more vital than when such sanctions are not present. The average change in gender parity in literacy and labor force participation for a 1% increase in education spending as a percentage of GDP is much smaller than when there are no sanctions targeting the state.

The control variables perform somewhat inconsistently across both models in Table 3. While democracy seems to increase gender parity in literacy, it does not have a statistically significant effect and the coefficient is minute – likely a result of a smaller set of observations. However, democracy does have a positive and statistically significant impact on labor force participation in the model with many more observations. Higher GDP increases gender parity in literacy and decreases female participation in the labor force which may confound the effect of democracy, given that democracies tend to have higher GDP.

The impact of sanctions on social spending and gender equality warrants a reconsideration of the effectiveness of sanctions, and a rethink of human rights sanction architecture. The imposition of sanctions may in fact be a ‘better’ choice in many ways than military intervention, such sanctions may in fact have unintended consequences on civilians, those civilians most impacted may in fact be overwhelmingly female, but none of these current realities are immutable. If sanctions must be imposed, sender states could consider results like those presented here to create sanctions that punish leaders but protect women. Sanctions can be designed by sender states in ways that specifically aim to not only alter leadership behavior but also protect civilian lives, and this intent is at the heart of the creation of human rights sanctions. Yet, despite their emerging reputation as a more humane way to coerce state behavior, so-called ‘smart sanctions’ are still not smart enough to protect the future of women.

Conclusion

When countries are targeted with sanctions, economic growth suffers, unemployment increases, and household incomes fall. When those overall conditions decline, the relative benefit of social spending becomes much more important and has a greater impact when the rest of the economy is struggling. Every dollar spent on civilians matters – especially for the lives of women. States targeted by sanctions reduce spending on education in the post-sanctions period, particularly on public education. When such spending is reduced, women’s prospects for education and earnings are diminished, and both gender parity in literacy and the percentage of women in the labor force declines.

Target states can in fact mitigate these negative impacts on women through an increase in spending on primary education in the post-sanctions period. Higher education spending translates into greater education attainment by women, which develops women’s literacy skills and investment in their own economic future. Increased government spending on education also mitigates the negative impact of human rights sanctions on women by increasing the percentage of female workers in the labor force. Taken together, the results in this paper reveal that gender equality in a target state can benefit significantly from increased spending on education under the imposition of sanctions, particularly human rights sanctions. However, a targeted government under financial duress is highly unlikely to suddenly increase spending for public programs. Countries that impose sanctions can demand a restoration of education funding as a condition of sanctions relief, though the international community has not yet attempted such a specific focus on civilian protections, even within human rights sanctions. While not a perfect solution, such a demand may encourage target states to work hastily to help women and girls recover the ground they lost during these sanctions and illustrate to the world that sender states have more than their own interests in mind when implementing economic coercion.

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