Sanctions regimes: emergence, practices and effects since 1945

The panel deals with a highly topical issue, which is currently also being addressed by many schools and media: how should governments and societies deal with states that violate human rights and international law? Sanctions have been imposed on countries such as Russia, Iran or China to influence political action. It is still unclear what effects this can actually have. The panel does not directly address current conflicts, but takes a comparative look at the emergence of sanctions in the 20th century. It aims to clarify how sanctions emerged in different parts of the world and what effects they had. The United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union/Russia are the focus of the panel.

Although the panel presents research-based contributions supported by archives, it is likely to be interesting and accessible for teachers, students, and the non-scientific public in several ways:

The contributions are in German and presented in an illustrative way. We limit ourselves to four shorter lectures without co-referents, so that a time frame of two hours is probably not exceeded. The contributions offer a fairly broad panorama and are less specialized. They strongly involve the social dimension in political decisions. They contribute to the historical classification of current international action. They illustrate the relationships between democracies and autocracies, in the field of political and economic interests. They address decisions in international bodies in the context of national state politics.