Unilateral coercive measures are condemned by the UN General Assembly on a yearly basis for being contrary to international law and for having negative effects on human rights and the economy of developing States. Although legal doctrine generally finds that the limitations of economic coercion are a grey area of international law, these resolutions could be indicative of an emerging prohibition. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it would appear that they do not satisfy the required criteria -as developed by international jurisprudence -for establishing a new custom. That being said, the resolutions clearly illustrate a divide between developed and developing States on the legitimacy of unilateral sanctions that should not be dismissed. In the interests of understanding how this division came into existence and how we can overcome it, the article proceeds to address the social factors that lead to its creation.

BackgroundIn recent years, a number of government-sponsored initiatives have been implemented in Germany that are focused on early preventive intervention in child protection. In response to the need for interdisciplinary training in this area, the internet-based e-learning program “Early Preventive Intervention and Child Protection” was developed for professionals in the child welfare and health care systems working with families with infants and toddlers. The program is currently undergoing evaluation for effectiveness and user satisfaction.MethodsIn a pre-post design, users are requested to complete questionnaires that assess three measures of expertise: theoretical knowledge of relevant fields, the ability to correctly identify subtle signals of infant communication, and the ability to assess maternal sensitivity. This article presents the contents of the program and the pre-training results (N = 1.294 participants). Descriptive analyses as well as Pearson correlations and Bonferroni corrections of error were conducted using the statistical program SPSS v. 21.0.ResultsThe findings show that a wide range of professionals are making use of the program, and that their existing theoretical knowledge about early preventive intervention, as well as their ability to identify subtle signals of infant communication, is relatively good. However, their ability to assess maternal sensitivity, which is considered a crucial indicator for the risk of child abuse, was low.ConclusionsThe outcome of the pre-training results indicates that professionals working in the area of child protection need to develop more capability in recognizing maternal sensitivity, in order to ensure early detection of families who are at risk and thus in need of support. Finally, the number of years of professional experience did not correlate with the scores on any of the three measures, which emphasizes the importance of providing interdisciplinary training in this area for all those working in child and family services, regardless of background.

Comprehensive sanctions were considered to be disproportionate in their collateral effects for the harm caused to the populations of sanctioned States. With the emergence of the concept of targeted sanctions, questions regarding proportionality were expected to fade away. After all, targeted sanctions were supposed to be inherently proportional precisely because they were targeted. Nevertheless, the use of selective embargoes, also known as sectoral sanctions, continues to give rise to issues of proportionality. One of the lacunas of the current system is there is no uniform proportionality standard that applies to unilateral sanctions as these measures fall with different types of legal regimes, each with their own proportionality standard. Drawing from recent State practice and the existing legal standards, the present contribution maps the respective interests that should inform proportionality discussions in distinct sanctions regimes and explores to what extent the proportionality principle can account for each of these interests.

No abstract

This article argues that sanctions are interactional tools; their interactive nature is evident if these measures are considered as a form of stigmatization, which is the outcome of an interaction between the group imposing the stigma and the actor that is stigmatized. Stigmatized states do not always accept the label that is placed upon them and can adopt strategies to counter or resist stigma. From a symbolic interactionalist perspective, this can be understood as a state's foreign policy role. Such an approach is illustrated through a study of Russia's response to being sanctioned by the EU and the US for its policies in the Ukrainian crisis. It is argued that Russian leaders are unlikely to cave into Western pressure because they reject the role of deviant that is placed upon their state and instead adopt the role of the 'untouchable' state, which is consistent with Russia's great power identity. Though the sanctions may enable the EU and the US to activate their roles as normative powers, in the context of the Ukrainian crisis, they have locked the parties into roles that contribute to the crisis' duration.