By Ferdinand Arslanian
Abstract: This paper aims at surveying the existing literature on economic sanctions on Syria. It seeks to identify its key themes, arguments, trajectory, and prescriptions. Four key themes are identified: sanctions’ economic effects and political effectiveness, their humanitarian impact, the implications of the Syrian case on the EU’s sanctioning policy, and situating sanctions within the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict. The literature attests to sanctions’ devastating economic impact; however, it acknowledges that the complex interaction between economic and political variables has undermined their political effectiveness. While initially projecting that sanctions-induced economic deterioration might shift the domestic balance of power against the regime, the literature evolved towards examining factors contributing to regime resilience and elaborating frameworks that address sanctions’ disaggregated impact on the country’s political economy. The humanitarian impact of economic sanctions dominates the later literature. It examines the direct and indirect effects of sanctions on humanitarian aid, public health, and food security. The literature demonstrates the impossibility of disaggregating economic sanctions from their adverse humanitarian effects thus raising the question of whether such effects are intentional or unintended. While the Syrian case contrasts with the EU’s traditional policy of targeted sanctions, regional comparisons illustrate that the Syrian case represents the exception rather than a new policy. However, it highlights the EU’s implementation challenges related to coordinating among its different institutions, member states, and a plethora of emerging private actors. In situating sanctions within the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict, their function has changed throughout the Syrian conflict. While initially signalling Syria’s emerging pariah status, it gained an instrumental function aimed at coercing the Syrian regime into accepting diplomatic initiatives. Later, sanctions developed a constraining function aimed at tarnishing Syria’s reconstruction efforts. Finally, prescriptions vary among those calling for the return to targeted sanctions, proponents of improving the humanitarian channels within the existing sanctions’ regime, and proponents of conditional lifting in accordance with the degree of policy concessions.
Citation: Arslanian, Ferdinand, 2024. “Economic Sanctions on Syria: A Critical Reappraisal,” Security in Context Policy Paper 24-10. December 2024, Security in Context.
Introduction
The morality and utility of economic sanctions imposed on Syria since 2011 have been debated at the academic and policy levels. Landis and Simon (2020) question the ‘pointless cruelty’ of US sanctions, stressing their failure in achieving their declared strategic objectives while ‘immiserating’ the Syrian people. On the other hand, sanctions’ proponents, such as Sahloul, Sekkarie, and Alkoutami (2020), claim they limit the Syrian government’s ability to harm Syrian civilians by constraining its access to finance. At the official level, there’s a mutual blame game between government spokespeople in Damacus attributing Syria’s economic woes to sanctions and the sanctioning countries blaming the plight of Syrians on Syria’s economic mismanagement by the government (Greish 2023; International Crisis Group 2020). Erfan (2021) views the debate as a moral dilemma given the difficulty in ascertaining who would benefit from lifting sanctions:the ruling elite or ordinary citizens. Alongside the public debates a significant literature of academic papers by sanctions’ specialists and Syria experts, policy papers by research centres and international organizations as well as post-graduate theses has studied the impact of sanctions from multiple perspectives. This paper surveys this literature examining its key themes and how it has evolved over the past decade or so since the start of the Syrian conflict. It will also highlight the key prescriptions emerging from the recent studies and whether there is an emerging consensus on the topic.
The current round of sanctions on Syria emerged in response to the Syrian uprising turned civil war with two main stated objectives: cessation of Syrian regime violence and introduction of political reforms. The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are the episode’s two ‘primary senders’ while other Western countries, Türkiye and the Arab League are its ‘secondary senders.’1 Over the course of the Syrian conflict, sanctions have evolved from targeting individuals and entities allegedly involved in regime violence towards a de facto regime of comprehensive sanctions with an extra-territorial dimension targeting third-country individuals and entities that overlap with UN counter terrorism sanctions.
The paper identifies four key themes in the literature as well as the authors’ prescriptions for the way forward. The first theme addresses sanctions’ economic effects and their political effectiveness. The literature attests to sanctions’ devastating economic impact while also acknowledging that the complex interaction between economic and political variables has undermined their political effectiveness. Rather than spurring a groundswell of opposition to the regime, the opposite may have happened. The empowerment of regime cronies due to their involvement in sanctions’ circumvention activities, the Syrian government’s economic resilience, and the opposition’s dysfunctionality, have all contributed towards diverging sanctions’ economic and political effects. Sanctions-induced economic deprivation has rather led to the political demobilization of the general population.
The confluence of economic devastation and regime resilience paved the way towards investigating the second theme: the humanitarian impact of economic sanctions. The literature examines sanctions’ impact on the country’s agriculture and health sectors to demonstrate how import bans on production input, specialized equipment and dual use goods have contributed to Syria’s health crisis and raised its level of food insecurity. The situation has further worsened by the hurdles international organizations face in delivering humanitarian aid. Fearing sanctions’ violation, banks and commercial entities become reluctant to process any Syria-related transaction regardless of whether they violate sanctions or not. Finally, the literature contemplates whether such effects reflect the senders’ deliberate intentions or represents an unintended by-product of the sanctions regime.
The third theme assesses the implications of the Syrian case on the EU’s overall sanctioning policy. While imposing sectoral sanctions on Syria represents a shift in the EU’s traditional policy of targeted sanctions, regional examination fails to find evidence that the Syrian case represents a new trend in EU policy. On the other hand, the Syrian case does reflect the growing complexity in sanctions’ implementation given the burgeoning need to coordinate not solely among EU institutions and member states but among a range of private actors who are involved in the process.
The final theme situates sanctions within the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict. At its onset, sanctions signalled policy alignment among the ‘then’ emerging coalition of regime adversaries, the US, the EU, and the Gulf States. However, sanctions soon developed an instrumental function aimed at coercing the regime into accepting internationally sponsored power-conceding diplomatic initiatives. By the conflict’s late period, the US resorted to secondary sanctions aimed at spoiling the viability of a Russian-dominated Syria and undercutting reconstruction efforts.
Prescriptions are divided among those who support restricting sanctions to individuals and entities responsible for human rights violations and scrapping the sectoral sanctions that harm the general populace, proponents of improving the humanitarian channels within the current sanctions’ regime, and proponents of conditional lifting of economic sanctions in accordance with the degree of policy concessions from the Syrian side.
1. Background: The Syrian Conflict and Economic Sanctions
The Syrian conflict evolved from an uprising which began in March 2011 as a protest movement against the Syrian regime. Situated within the second wave of the Arab Uprisings, along with the Uprisings in Libya and Bahrain, the uprising was instrumentalized by international and regional powers. The Western leaders’ joint call for the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, to stand aside, in August 2011, represented a turning point in the conflict’s internationalization. This led to the solidification of two camps: the camp of regime adversaries comprising the US, the EU, Türkiye, Qatar and Saudi Arabia; and the camp of regime proponents, Russia and Iran. External intervention took various diplomatic, economic and military forms contributing to the conflict’s transformation into a multi-layered civil war by mid-2012. As such, the Syrian conflict witnessed its high intensity phase between 2013 and 2016 which led to the devastation of the Syrian economy and infrastructure as well as mass displacement of the Syrian population. The Syrian government’s territorial control receded significantly as various non-state actors filled the void. Beyond domestic armed opposition groups, several transnational actors emerged including Iranian-backed Shiite militias, various al-Qaida offshoots, most notably al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) and the local Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) with ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
In September 2015, Russia intervened directly in the Syrian conflict by providing aerial military support to the Syrian Army. The intervention put an end to the conflict’s high intensity phase following the Syrian Army’s recapturing of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, in December 2016. Afterwards, the conflict entered its late phase where military confrontation became less intense. Syria’s territory became divided into various spheres of international influence. Russia and Iran shared their influence over the Syrian government-held territories which recaptured significant swathes of territory. Türkiye projected its influence over opposition-controlled areas in Syria’s north while the US was based in the country’s northeast supporting the PYD-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).
Economic sanctions were the main economic intervention tool used by regime adversaries alongside humanitarian aid to opposition-held areas and refugees in neighboring countries. A sanctioning coalition emerged, with the US and the EU as primary senders while other Western countries of Canada, Australia, Japan, Switzerland and EU candidate countries acted as secondary senders aligning their sanctions’ regimes to the primary senders’ regimes.2 Regionally, the Arab League and Türkiye imposed their one-off round of sanctions in November 2011 imposing asset freezes and travel bans on top regime officials and prohibiting dealings with the Syrian public entities and banks (Arslanian 2020, 77).
Sanctions on Syria fall in line within the recent trend of what Mallard et al. have termed the “comprehensivization of targeted sanctions” (Mallard et al. 2020, 123) where the continuous rounds of targeted sanctions on persons, entities and sectors culminate towards a regime of comprehensive sanctions. The EU’s extensive economic relations with Syria, especially in the oil sector, renders it as its most significant sender. The EU’s main sanctions package was imposed between the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012, constituting an interim period between the initial internationalization and the full-scale militarization of the Syrian conflict (Arslanian 2019, 283-5). EU sanctions primarily target three interrelated economic sectors: Syria’s oil, financial and public sectors. In terms of political institutions and actors, sanctions target Syria’s military and security apparatuses, its civil political establishment, and business cronies (Arslanian 2020, 85).
The sanctions regime has grown in complexity as the Syrian conflict has transformed into a multi-faceted war. Between the fall of 2011 and the spring of 2012, sanctions transformed from targeted sanctions on top-level individuals and entities towards sectoral sanctions, mainly targeting the energy and finance sectors. Along with sanctions on the banking sector, sanctions on services, such as cargo flights and the provision of insurance and reinsurance, have further impeded the Syrian state’s capacity for international transactions (Arslanian 2020, 88-9).
By mid-2012, the centrality of sanctions waned as providing military support to the armed opposition became the external adversaries’ primary foreign policy tool. Nevertheless, their significance gradually resurfaced as they gained an extra-territorial dimension, better known as secondary sanctions, with the targeting of individuals and entities from third countries involved in Syria’s sanctions circumvention network (Arslanian 2020, 83-4). During the conflict’s late phase, secondary sanctions were systematized in the US Caesar Act, which aimed to obstruct Syria’s reconstruction process (Morenghi 2020). Overall, sanctions have developed into a complex system of overlapping regimes, which in turn overlaps with the UNSC’s ISIL (Da’esh) and Al-Qaida Sanctions, with different repercussions for the various Syrian territories under different military/political factions’ control.
2. Four Main Areas of Sanctions Research
The literature can be categorized along four main themes, with an additional theme proposing prescriptions for the way forward. The first area assesses the economic effects of sanctions and their political effectiveness. The second assesses the humanitarian impact of economic sanctions, addressing their impact on economic sectors the third assesses the implication of the Syrian case for the EU’s sanctioning policy and the fourth theme situates the case within the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict.
3.1 Economic Effects and Political Effectiveness: Projections and Assessment
This theme broadly addresses the economic effects of economic sanctions and their contribution to sanctions’ political effectiveness, i.e. do they achieve their stated objectives? Early papers offered aspirational projections about the potential role of sanctions-induced economic deterioration in shifting the domestic balance of power against the regime. The literature has shifted towards examining counter factors that have contributed to regime resilience where it discusses the role of third parties and the political dynamics of the Syrian conflict in undermining sanctions’ political effectiveness. In line with the growing complexity of the geopolitics and domestic political economy of Syria, the literature has developed more elaborate frameworks for examining different sanctions’ impacts. An offshoot from this theme is the adoption of a sector/actor-specific approach where the impact of economic sanctions on Syria’s foreign trade, oil sector and its business elite are specifically examined.
The initial papers addressing sanctions on Syria (Marzouk 2011, Doha Institute 2012, Portela 2012) projected that the economic shock produced by sanctions would inevitably have political repercussions unfavorable to the regime, although how this would exactly unfold was considered difficult to predict. Syria’s small and relatively open economy was deemed particularly vulnerable to economic sanctions (Marzouk 2011, 2; The Economist). The EU’s oil embargo represented “the trump card of the sanctions package,” which, along with financial sanctions, aimed at “depriving the regime from key revenue” (Portela 2012, 155). Sanctions-induced economic deterioration represented the main transmission channel towards their political effectiveness. The qualitative shift in the sanction regime was projected – to act in confluence with the Syrian regime’s myopic economic mismanagement and the limited economic alternative provided by regional allies – to affect the political balance of power between regime and opposition forces (Doha Institute 2012).
However, such change in the domestic balance of power was not viewed as “automatically signifying the collapse of the political system” but rather as “engendering new balances or opening a new stage with multiple political outcomes” (Doha Institute 2012, 13). Marzouk (2011, 9) identified two parallel channels through which economic sanctions would affect this balance. The first was through the Syrian mercantile and industrial class, who would likely dissociate themselves from the regime given their reluctance to incur financial losses over the mid-to-long term. The second channel was through Syria’s marginalized classes, whose increasing impoverishment was projected to further drive new segments to the protest movement.
By mid-2012, the EU’s package of sectoral sanctions had been exhausted as the Syrian conflict metastasized into a full-scale civil war. The projections of the early studies did not materialize as neatly as predicted. Whereas signs of economic deterioration were obvious, the Syrian government was still managing to govern albeit at a more constrained level. Rather than shifting allegiance, there was a mass exodus of the Syrian population.
Accordingly, the literature shifted towards assessing the actual impact of economic sanctions and examining both the external and internal factors contributing to the resilience of the Syrian economy and its political regime.
In examining the external factors, Rabbani (2013) examines the role of third states and commercial entities in sanctions circumvention, specifically the role of Russian financial institutions and Iran’s shadow network in facilitating Syria’s oil trade. The paper also discusses politically neutral countries – such as South Africa and Angola – supplying Syria with diesel fuel and several European companies providing vessels and insurance coverage for many of these transactions. Seeberg (2015a, 67; 2016, 117) addresses how sanctions’ design can limit their political effectiveness. The paper stresses the incoherence of the sanctioning coalition, highlighting the lack of coordination between its international and regional senders, the divisions within EU member states, and Russia and China’s efforts to block the universalization of sanctions at the UNSC level.
Domestically, Fryburg Lyme (2012) discusses the uneven impact of economic sanctions on Syrian society. The state’s dwindling resources have increasingly been channelled towards its security apparatus while regime cronies have exploited opportunities from the emerging black markets to compensate for the decline in their formal businesses. Such dynamics stand in contrast to the deterioration in the living conditions of the general populace. However, contrary to initial projections, such deterioration is viewed as “less likely to produce significant political mobilisation” with “the conflict enter[ing] a stage where… people become more susceptible to wield a weapon in support of whoever may help them bring food to the table” (66). Impoverishment it turns out, does not induce the population to revolt against the regime. Similarly, Seeberg (2012) acknowledges the role of sanctions in the deterioration of regime institutions, constraining its access to financial resources and in turn adversely affecting its co-optation capacity. While these limitations have encouraged defections among its outer circles and contributed to its weakening and de-legitimization domestically, these factors remain insufficient to threaten the regime’s survival (11). Seeberg (2015b) elaborates further, attributing sanctions’ failure to induce political concessions to their complex political context. terrain they operate within. Within this setting, the regime’s resort to brute force, the fractured nature of the Syrian opposition and the rise of extremist groups have contributed to the shift in the calculations of domestic actors in favor of the regime.
As the sanctions regime evolved into a complex web of overlapping sanctions, papers backed their empirical analysis with more elaborate conceptual frameworks employing sectoral, disaggregated, and political economy approaches that address this complexity. Both Aita (2020) and Mehchy and Turkmani (2021) employ frameworks that distinguish between direct and indirect effects of economic sanctions albeit using different criteria. Thus, whereas Aita (2020) applies a sector-focused approach distinguishing between sanctions’ direct impact on Syria’s foreign trade and its indirect impact on the rest of the economy, Mehchy and Turkmani (2021) employ an actor-focused approach that examines the direct impact of economic sanctions on the sanctioned entities, namely, the security and military apparatuses, business cronies and the energy and banking sectors and their repercussions on non-sanctioned actors of households, businesses, NGOs and non-sanctioned government entities. Both papers restate Fryburg Lyme’s (2012) argument about sanctions’ uneven impact on the Syrian society. According to Aita (2020), sanctions have increased the transaction costs of foreign trade, which has led to their informalization, empowering the warring factions involved in such trade. In contrast, sanctions-induced scarcity in energy, electricity and fertilizers has indirectly affected the country’s agriculture. In conjunction with sanctions’ constraints on international finance, they have devastated the country’s food security, export capacity, and industrial small and medium enterprises. Similarly, Mehchy and Turkmany (2021) stress the role of sanctions and the development of the shadow economy in strengthening regime cronies while weakening the general populace and the overall economy.
Arslanian (2020) examines the impact of sanctions on state contestation between regime and opposition forces. The study assesses a series of intervening variables that connect the sanctions regime with Syria’s international economy, and its counter sanctions strategy with its domestic political economy. The mixed results of Syria’s counter sanctions strategy saw success in retrieving and utilizing its foreign exchange reserves for funding necessary imports while failing to fully and successfully reorient its oil exports towards Asian countries. In turn, this has contributed to the precarious maintenance of the country’s political economy and its embedded populist social contract. The analysis concurs with the early projections that sanctions have altered the domestic balance of power to the regime’s disadvantage, with the caveat that the precarious maintenance of the system, rather than leading to regime overthrow, enabled Syria’s descent to civil war.
The conflict’s late period is examined by Hinnebusch (2023), who assesses the additional impact of US secondary sanctions. In line with previous periods, secondary sanctions have led to further economic deterioration and an increase in predatory activities coupled with muted political repercussions. However, the period’s main feature involves the predatory practices reaching the regime’s inner circle and affecting elite cohesion as exemplified by the falling out between the Asad and Makhlouf families (13).
Beyond the direct approach in assessing effectiveness, an alternative approach is pursued by Giumeli and Ivan (2013). The authors examine “the comparative utility of economic sanctions” (11): arguing economic sanctions ought to not be assessed by their ability to coerce the target over the disputed issue but on whether other combinations of foreign policy tools would have been comparatively more effective. Within this framework, economic sanctions fulfil different objectives besides coercion, as they constrain the target’s ability to pursue its behavior towards the disputed issue while signalling norm violations. Examining the Syrian case, the sanctions regime is still viewed as comparatively effective given the limited alternative options. The absence of sanctions “would have given Assad impunity in dealing with the opposition” (24) while more comprehensive sanctions coupled with military intervention would have resulted in an acute humanitarian disaster.
Other papers adopt a more focused approach assessing the impact of sanctions on specific sectors and actors. Using parameters from the pre-conflict period, Mehchy, Nasser and Schiffbauer (2015) employ a gravity model to simulate the impact of sanctions on Syria’s foreign trade. Their proxy indicator for measuring the impact of sanctions is a modest variable restricted to the reversal of Syria’s preferential agreements with the EU, Türkiye, and the Arab Countries that fails to capture the impact of sectoral sanctions. Despite that, the analysis shows that sanctions contribute to a significant reduction in foreign trade estimated at 42.9% by the end of 2012. Soliman and Khwanda (2020) examine Syria’s trade with 72 countries between 1987 – 2017, and measure the impact of sanctions through a dummy variable for the conflict period (2011-2017). The authors distinguish between three types of countries: countries applying comprehensive sanctions (mainly Western countries); countries imposing modest sanctions (e.g. the Arab League); and non-sanctioning countries. Intuitively, they find a steeper decline in Syria’s trade with countries imposing comprehensive sanctions in comparison with countries imposing modest sanctions. More intriguingly, they fail to find evidence of trade redirection towards non-sanctioning countries due to the conflict’s disruptive effects and the geographic distance with Asian and Latin American countries.
Othman (2015, 106) examines the impact of economic sanctions on Syria’s oil Production Sharing Agreements between foreign and local companies. Sanctions have forced the foreign partner to invoke the ‘force majeure’ clause of the agreement. This leaves the Syrian side responsible for the production process, and facing multiple hurdles related to procuring equipment, spare parts and software programs and processing payments to sub-contractors and foreign technicians. Arslanian (2023) examines the impact of blacklisting members of the Syrian business elite on their decision to dissociate themselves from the Syrian regime. Overall, those with more outward-looking businesses and weaker regime dependency were more likely to dissociate in comparison with those with more inward-looking businesses and higher levels of regime dependency. Nevertheless, rather than dissociating from the regime some members managed to re-orient their outward-looking businesses towards either conflict-related domestic opportunities or non-Western countries.
3.2 The Humanitarian Dimension of Economic Sanctions: Impact and Motivation
The increasing contradiction between sanctions’ devastating economic effects and their ineffectiveness in inducing political change has shifted the literature’s focus towards examining their humanitarian impact. This shift highlights the impact of sanctions on public health, through their impact on healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors, and on food security through their impact on agriculture and their effect on the work of the humanitarian sector itself such as NGOs and civil society. The literature addresses sanctions’ impact on the delivery of humanitarian aid. Sanctions on government entities and import prohibitions on production input, equipment and spare parts have all contributed to the devastation of the relevant sectors and exacerbated the deterioration of Syria’s public health and food security. The delivery of humanitarian aid faces multiple hurdles related to the overcompliance of banks and complexity in meeting legal requirements further contributing to humanitarian deterioration. A key question is raised on whether this humanitarian devastation represents an intentional practice by sanctions’ senders or is an unintended by-product. Opinions diverge on the issue.
Moret (2015, 123) associates the shift from targeted to comprehensive sanctions with the resurgence of adverse humanitarian impacts; citing the devastating case of UN sanctions on Iraq. Accordingly, several papers examine the impact of sanctions on the health sector (Moret 2015; Kanfash 2023), agriculture and food security (Kanfash 2023; Kanfash 2024; Unruh 2022) and humanitarian aid (Walker 2016, Carter Center 2020a; Daher 2020; Moret 2023).
The Syrian pharmaceutical sector has suffered from extensive shortages owing to difficulties in importing medicine, raw material, and equipment. Furthermore, energy shortages have interrupted the capacity to store medicine and to conduct operations forcing the closure of several centres and increasing dependency on international organizations. Public health has also been affected by the ban on dual-use goods, with the failure in water treatment and network rehabilitation, leading to a decrease in water quality and an increase in water-borne diseases (Moret 2015, 130; Kanfash 2023, 11-3).
Similarly, Syria’s agriculture has been undermined by import prohibitions on production input, spare parts and equipment and prohibitions on relevant government entities leading to focusing on aid provision, a suboptimal policy when compared with one that encourages local agriculture recovery (Unruh 2022, 213-4). Along with the deterioration of agriculture, Syria’s food security has been exacerbated by the difficulty government institutions and banks face in procuring food imports, the deterioration of consumer’s purchasing power associated with the collapse of Syria’s foreign exchange rate, and difficulties in receiving remittances (Kanfash 2023, 9-10).
Kanfash (2024, 2) integrates these different factors as the “three key dimensions of food security: availability; affordability and economic access; and utilisation.” Accordingly, food availability is undermined by sanctions’ adverse effects on both agriculture and the capacity to import foodstuff. Food affordability is undermined by sanctions’ contribution to hyperinflation and constraining the inflow of remittances. Utilisation, on the other hand, refers to the indirect impact of sanctions through their effect on agricultural inputs such as energy and water provision. Cervi (2024) applies another integrative approach “addressing humanitarian needs” (5) through their interaction with ‘the WEF nexus’ of “water, energy and food” (4). Such an approach illustrates how energy scarcity undermines rehabilitation of infrastructure and public facilities and consequently prohibits the recovery of the agriculture sector. The framework attributes conflict as the primary role in Syria’s humanitarian devastation, nevertheless, sanctions play a significant role by limiting Syria’s access to international markets for fuel, equipment, spare parts and the necessary technical expertise for maintaining its power generating capacity and water infrastructure.
Walker (2016) and The Carter Center (2020a) examine the Syrian sanction regime’s humanitarian exemption system, comparing its design with how it functions in practice. Their research focuses on the system’s disparities between theory and practice stressing difficulties in comprehending the exemption licensing system, the constrained access to banking channels, and actors’ overcompliance. This disparity is attributed to “the chilling effect” (Walker 2016, 14), where the fear of a “technical sanctions violation” (14) entices actors to create a “compliance buffer zone” (15). Accordingly, banks pursue an “exception only policy” (16) where transactions related to Syria are generally blocked unless local NGOs manage to meet the complex due diligence process. These difficulties lead to an increased reliance on more costly informal financial networks (Carter Center 2020a, 12). Daher (2020, 8) investigates more thoroughly “the financial limitations and banking challenges faced by NGOs.” Challenges begin as early as attempting to open a bank account and are followed by legal challenges related to the host country’s “navigating the compliance environment.” (29) A simple transfer of funds faces continuous difficulties and delays, which at their most streamlined take up to a month; even the inclusion of ‘Syria’ in an NGO’s name can complicate the process.
Overall, the research illustrates the impossibility of disaggregating economic sanctions from their adverse humanitarian effects, which prompts the following question: Is the destructive impact of sanctions intentional or an unintended side effect? Here accounts diverge. Several reports assume their ‘unintended’ nature (Walker 2016, Aita 2020, Carter Centre 2020a) with Aita (2020, 9) relating their un-intendedness with the human rights-based rationale for their imposition. Portela (2012, 158) and Moret (2015, 132), on the other hand, view the suffering of ordinary people as an inevitable consequence of the shift towards comprehensive sanctions. Moret (2015, 121) highlights the contradiction between the humanitarian implications of this shift and the EU’s stated foreign policy values and signed international agreements.
Kanfash (2023, 4) takes the argument further by framing sanctions as a “siege warfare strategy.” His argument follows a line of literature (Gordon 1999, 2010; Mulder 2022; Bajoghli et al. 2024) that disagrees with the conventional presentation of sanctions as an alternative to war. Alternatively, economic sanctions manifest “the very essence of total war” (Mulder 2022, 4) as their invisibility strengthen their deadly effects. Thus, in the case of Syria, “the suffering of civilians,” in contrast to the stated objective, becomes “an integral part” of such strategies (Kanfash 2023, 14). Accordingly, “the slow enfeeblement of a country by siege… increases pressure on political elites to submit or surrender” (4). Shupak (2021, 244) follows a similar argument viewing economic sanctions as “a mode of control used to attack the populations of countries with governments that sections of the American ruling class regard as a barrier to their interests.” Adding to the analysis is the deliberate role of US media in ignoring the humanitarian impact of Syria’s sanctions (Shupak 2021, 254-6).
3.3 The Implications for the EU’s Sanctioning Policy: Design, Rationale, and Implementation
The question of whether the Syrian case represents a turning point in the EU’s sanctioning policy in terms of sanction design, rationale, and implementation challenges has been examined. More specifically, the literature discusses whether the Syrian case represents a shift from the EU’s conventional targeted sanctions towards sectoral sanctions and from its traditional security-based consideration towards normative considerations related to human rights violation and democracy promotion. Regional comparisons illustrate that the Syrian case represents the exception rather than a new policy. However, this issue is difficult, as are efforts to identify a clear rationale for imposing economic sanctions, which are subject to competing interpretations, shift over time, and can be inconsistent with stated foreign policy objectives. Finally, the Syrian case highlights the implementation challenges faced by EU authorities. These challenges are mainly related to the EU’s coordinative capacity, not only among its institutions and member states, but also among a wide range of private actors involved in the sanctioning process.
Portela (2012, 157) argues that by imposing trade sanctions, the EU has crossed its “red lines” and moved away from the conventional policy of targeted sanctions. Similarly, by imposing a “a whole set in less than a year” (153), the Syrian case constitutes a qualitative shift in terms of the speed of imposition and members’ unanimity. As such, Moret (2015, 133) questions whether the Syrian case represents “a new page in the EU’s sanctions practices.” Boogaerts, Portela and Drieskens (2016) address this question within “the broader Arab Spring context” (218). In terms of their broadness and speed of imposition, sanctions in Syria represent the exception rather than a new normal. On whether the Syrian case indicates a shift from the EU’s traditional security-based considerations towards normative considerations, the authors remain inconclusive, arguing that weakening a historically antagonistic state, closely aligned with Iran and Hezbollah, can plausibly act as an alternative explanation to the human rights-centred normative explanation.
Boogaerts (2018) further examines the interplay of historical factors, and normative and security-based considerations in shaping the EU’s decision to sanction during the Arab Uprisings. Normative considerations appear insufficient in explaining the decision to sanction as several Arab countries, with wide records of human rights violations, were spared from sanctions. Alternatively, the decision to sanction Syria, along with Libya, follows a path dependency pattern where previous economic sanctions reinforce the decision to impose new sanctions when human rights violations occur. Others argue that the rationale for imposing sanctions is neither a static process nor consistent with foreign policy objectives. Seeberg (2015b, 31) views the EU’s sanctioning policy as a dynamic process that has shifted from an “active” and normative-based policy towards “a more low-profile policy” associated with the EU’s security concerns over the rise of jihadist groups. Unruh (2022), on the other hand, discusses sanctions’ inconsistency in meeting the EU’s foreign policy objectives stressing the contradiction between the EU’s weaponization of reconstruction and its concerns over regional stability and refugee flows. Overall, identifying the Syrian case as a turning point in the EU’s sanctioning policy appears to be complicated by the complexities of the sanctioning process.
Such complexities are also reflected in the implementation process. Moret (2015, 132-3) cites the internal institutional constraints for implementing an effective sanctions policy, following the introduction of selective bans and humanitarian exemptions that are related to understaffing and lack of resources, the absence of clear procedures, poor coordination among different EU institutions, and the heterogeneous interests of member states. Such competency issues are reflected in Alalwani and Shaar’s (2021) examination of targeted individuals. The authors question the rationale behind sanction selection and view the actual blacklisted individuals as representing merely “the tip of the iceberg” of Syria’s sanctions circumvention network. Unruh (2022, 211) addresses the “ambiguity on the ground” in defining “who is who and what is government?” to determine where to draw the “red line” of dealing with the Syrian government at the local level. The similar logic applies to distinguishing between prohibited reconstruction and humanitarian relief.
Olsen (2022) takes the issue a step further, examining the competency of EU institutions in coordinating with other involved actors. The complexity of the Syrian sanctions regime, exacerbated by the absence of EU diplomats from the Syrian scene, has binded “an unusually large number of various actors together” ranging from NGOs to private businesses and advocacy groups “creating an emerging actor network” (115). Consequently, the success of EU diplomats in implementing sanctions becomes pertinent to their acting as “obligatory passage points” (128) for these networks. This applies to their ability to define the rules, mediate between actors and steer the process accordingly. Assessing the EU’s role, for the Syrian case, yields mixed results. EU diplomats appear to have succeeded in building relations with non-state actors benefiting from their feedback to better address sanctions evasion and refine sanctions to accommodate humanitarian exemptions. However, EU diplomats have been limited in facilitating the interpretation of legal provisions by other actors and have also failed to address “disharmonised enforcement practices at the national level” (128) among different EU members.
A discussion of implications for the Syrian case on the EU’s sanctioning policy is contrasted by the absence of any discussion of its implications for the US’s sanctioning policy. The overlooking of the Syrian case even applies to the systemized application of secondary financial sanctions, a relatively recent trend in US sanctioning policy. In discussing Trump’s maximum pressure campaigns, Drezner (2019, 15-7) refers to the cases of Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela but refrains from mentioning the Syrian case.
3.4 Situating Sanctions within the Geopolitics of the Syrian Conflict
Sanctions played various functions throughout the Syrian conflict. Initially, they signalled policy alignment among the regime's adversaries, then the reconfiguration of regional power relations once Syria was relegated to a pariah status. With the launching of diplomatic initiatives, sanctions gained an instrumental function aimed at coercing the Syrian regime into accepting such initiatives prior to being eclipsed by the escalation of military confrontation. The US’s resort to secondary sanctions, during the conflict’s late period, had a constraining function, aiming at spoiling the viability of a Russian-dominated Syria and tarnishing its reconstruction efforts.
Situating economic sanctions within the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict has changed with the evolution of the Syrian conflict. Within its early stage, the EU’s sanctions package represented a sign of the EU’s policy alignment with the US and its regional allies. On the other hand, sanctions pitted the EU against its then strategic partner, Russia, and more generally the BRICS bloc, raising the question of the utility of ‘Strategic Partnerships’ in facilitating policy convergence on international issues (Portela 2012, 155-6). Sanctions also signalled Syria’s transformation into a regional pariah descending from its previous status as the self-proclaimed “bastion of Arab nationalism” (Seeberg 2015b, 28-9). Overall, regional sanctions are viewed to have contributed to “laying the foundation of the collapse of the traditional political order” and “restructuring of power relations” in favor of the Gulf countries at the expense of the traditional centres of Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo (Seeberg 2016, 118).
Arslanian (2019) situates EU sanctions within the overall policies of Syria’s adversarial coalition for the period (2011 – 2015). Accordingly, the EU’s shift to sectoral sanctions represented an attempt to coerce the regime towards accepting power-conceding diplomatic initiatives. The exhaustion of this economic tool by mid-2012, in parallel to the increased role of regional countries in providing military support to the armed opposition, undermined the EU’s capacity in the Syrian conflict while relegating economic sanctions to a secondary tool. Subsequently, sanctions during the conflict’s high intensity phase constraining the Syrian regime’s access to resources (Arslanian 2019, 290, 295; Seeberg 2015a, 74).
Hinnebusch (2023) analyses the role of sanctions during the conflict’s late period focusing on the role of US secondary sanctions in impeding the regime’s reconstruction efforts. Secondary sanctions have been premised on exploiting Russia and Iran’s geoeconomic weakness and, in turn, spoiling the viability of a Russian-dominated Syria. More broadly, the Syrian case is situated within the “global battle” (17) between Washington’s “sanctions hegemony” (30), and rival great powers’ quest for a multipolar world.
This battle has been heightened by the Ukraine war with the deepening divide between the West and the rest of the world amid initial signs of shifting towards financial multipolarity, a shift that the Syrian regime is capitalizing on. Alternatively, an enduring prevalence of US sanctions hegemony in Syria would imply the continuation of the global order as a “partly unipolar” one (30).
3.5 Prescriptions: Return to Targeted Sanctions vs. Improving Humanitarian Channels vs. Conditional Lifting
Prescriptions are divided between proponents for the return to targeted sanctions (Moret 2015; Alalwani and Shaar 2021; Aita 2020), proponents for improving the humanitarian channels within the existing sanctions regime (Walker 2016; Daher 2020; The Carter Center 2020a) and adherents for the conditional lifting of sanctions (Mehchy and Turkmani 2019; The Carter Center 2020b, 2022).
The elimination of sectoral sanctions and the restriction of targeted sanctions follows the ethical argument of limiting punishment to those “with proven responsibilities on human rights abuses” (Aita 2020, 71).
Proponents of improving humanitarian channels focus on facilitating the flow of humanitarian aid by curbing the chilling effect of sanctions. This mainly involves encouraging dialogue among different stakeholders to improve banking and payment mechanisms, clarifying regulations and processes, standardizing terminology, and elevating the role of the UN in the procurement process (Walker 2016; Daher 2020; The Carter Center 2020a). Such dialogue has materialized with the convention of a series of stakeholders’ roundtables and publishing a manual guideline allowing NGOs to navigate legal and due diligence processes as its main output (Walker 2020). Furthermore, collaboration among stakeholders has facilitated the “creation of emergency carve outs,” in response to Syria’s February 2023 earthquake, smoothing the financial transfers process and facilitating relief efforts (Moret 2023, 19). Another mechanism for improving humanitarian conditions suggests a more technical engagement at the local level through engaging with local councils and Syrian ministries, and subjecting reconstruction to a funding consortium available for organizations that fulfil its fairness and transparency criteria (Unruh 2022, 215-6).
The final prescription involves lifting sanctions in return for concessions from the Syrian government. The process is viewed within a wider package of diplomatic initiatives that allows for “demilitarising the conflict” and “aiding gradual democratisation” (Mehchy and Turkmani 2019, 36). The Carter Centre (2020b, 16) suggests two main incentive mechanisms of “small-for-small” or “big-for-big.” As their names suggest, the level of rollback would be conditional on the level of concessions from the Syrian government with small issues such as the release of political prisoners while big issues address changes in the structure of the political system. The Carter Centre (2022, 18-9) proposes five negotiation tracks: the release of political prisoners; return of refugees; civilian protection; chemical weapons’ removal; and political reforms against which they could to track sanctions-easing and reconstruction facilitation. Alalwani and Shaar (2021) propose that the “carrot” of sanctions easing should be complemented with the “stick” of taking legal action in international courts against regime officials and enablers. The underlying assumption of such propositions is an acknowledgement that the current “choice is no longer between Assad and a transitional government,” as specified in UNSC resolution 2254, but rather aims at introducing “minimally accepted political reforms” while averting a failed state scenario (Carter Centre 2022, 20).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the main body of the literature on economic sanctions on Syria examines the economic effects of sanctions and contrasts them with their political ineffectiveness. This contradiction allows the literature to move towards addressing sanctions’ humanitarian impact and providing prescriptions for the sanctions regime. On the margins of these two main themes, the literature also addresses the implications of the Syrian episode for the EU’s sanctioning policy and situates economic sanctions within the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict.
Contrary to the pundit debates and officials’ blame game, the literature on economic sanctions is less polarized and in general tends to concur over sanctions’ adverse economic and humanitarian effects, their enforcement complexities and their political ineffectiveness. On the other hand, disagreement revolves around whether the ensued humanitarian catastrophe represents an ‘unintended consequence’ or a deliberate policy of the senders. Furthermore, the rationale for imposing sanctions between normative or security-based considerations remains undecided. Such disagreements feed into the authors’ differing prescriptions between the return to targeted sanctions, conditional sanctions lifting, and improving humanitarian conditions within the existing regime.
Several gaps in the literature can be identified. The shift in focus from sanctions’ economic effects and political effectiveness towards measuring their humanitarian impact has led investigators to neglect developments in sanctions’ economic and political dynamics during the late conflict’s period. As such, the implications of systemizing secondary sanctions remain a poorly investigated area. Alongside secondary sanctions, the Syrian case has witnessed the imposition of relatively recent types of sanctions, including sanctions on the central bank and prohibiting the provision of insurance and reinsurance coverage, whose individual impact has not been examined yet. Finally, whereas the implications of the Syrian case on the EU’s sanctioning policy have been addressed, similar investigations related to the US’s sanctioning policy, and its contextualization among the US’s other maximum pressure campaigns, are yet to be addressed.
Footnotes
1: In line with the terminology of the literature on economic sanctions, the country that imposes economic sanctions is denoted ‘sender’, the country that is subject to economic sanctions is denoted ‘target’, while other countries are denoted ‘third countries’. Sanctions can either be ‘unilateral’, when the sender is a single country, or ‘multilateral’ when sanctions are imposed by several countries or by an international or a regional organization. In multilateral sanctions, the country that initiates sanctions is the ‘primary’ sender while the countries that follow are ‘secondary’ senders.
2: Both the US and the EU had previously sanctioned Syria. US sanctions date back to 1979 and were related to its listing as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Nevertheless, sanctions were confined to prohibitions on aid provision and arms exports. US sanctions expanded during the period 2003-6 in response to Syria’s role in Lebanon and Iraq. The 2003 Syria Accountability Act entailed a general export ban except for food and medicine , a ban on Syrian aircraft landing in the US and was followed by sanctioning members of the regime’s inner circle and the Commercial Bank of Syria (Sharp and Blanchard 2011, 15-6). The EU’s predecessor, the European Economic Community, also imposed sanctions in response to the ‘Hindawi Affair’ with Syria’s alleged involvement in the 1986 El Al flight bombing attempt. Sanctions were restricted to a ban on arms sale and were lifted by the EU in 1994 (Hufbauer et al., 2008).
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