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Just over the last year, sanctions on Iran and North Korea led to troubling economic and humanitarian consequences. Professor Menevis Cilizoglu researches the results of sanctions imposed on such countries. She draws from current events, researching high-profile cases like Iran, North Korea, and Russia, reflecting on their domestic, economic, and humanitarian consequences. In the postwar era, states are increasingly utilizing economic sanctions as a tool of coercive diplomacy.

Theoretically, the threat of sanctions should convince target governments to acquiesce to the sender's demands, if credible (Drezner, 2003; Smith, 1995). However, a remarkable observation about economic sanctions is that they often fail to generate significant costs. According to the Threat and Imposition of Sanctions (TIES), 82% of imposed sanctions between 1945 and 2005 produced only minor costs to the target state. This observation may explain why Iranian President Ahmadinejad, North Korea's Chairman King Jong-Un and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro all dismissed sanctions as toothless and ineffective.

Menevis Cilizoglu is a Assistant Professor at St. Olaf College. She got her Social and Political Science B.A. from Sabanca University in Turkey and her Ph.D and M.A. in Political Science from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research examines the processes connecting foreign policy to international economics, primarily economic sanctions. She primarily examines governments' decision to impose and terminate economic sanctions, as well as domestic and economic effects of sanctions on imposer and targeted states. If you would like to know more about her research, visit meneviscilizoglu.com.

For more information on the Foreign Relations Council visit their website at www.icfrc.org.