Four days after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on the 2nd of August 1990, the Security Council subjugated Iraq to a series of financial and trade sanctions. Since then, comprehensive and partial sanctions became the security Council's favourite arm-twisting tool used at sixteen instances and against eleven countries compared to only two cases during its first forty-five years of operation. Economic sanctions fall theoretically somewhere between diplomacy and war. Their effectiveness as a coercive measure depends on multiple parameters concerning the socio-economic structure of the sanctioned state. ...