With the outlawing of war in the 20th century, war has not disappeared. Rather, the need arose to justify a new form of use of force in order to guarantee compliance with international norms and enforcement of the ban on war. So-called “sanction wars” were already controversially discussed in the 1930s and still represent a political, legal and ethical challenge today. The paper (1) explains what sanctions are and under what conditions one can speak of sanction wars, (2) explains the varying political expectations that were and are placed on sanction wars, and (3) what empirical evidence exists about the effect of unilateral military sanctions on certain norms and the normative order of the international system as a whole.

Christopher Daase is Full Professor of Political Science and holds the Chair for International Organization at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He is also Deputy Director of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and heads the Department of International Security. Previously he held the Chair in International Relations at the University of Munich and was Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent at Canterbury as well as Director of the Programme on International Conflict Analysis at the Brussels School of International Studies. Educated at Universities in Hamburg, Freiburg and Berlin, he became SSRC-MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security and was Research Fellow at Harvard University and the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA. He received his PhD in 1996 from the Free University of Berlin for a dissertation on unconventional warfare. His research centres on theories of international relations, security issues and international institutions.

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