Yes, let me pick up exactly where Clara left off. In the first 14 cases of UN sanctions of position from the nineties to the mid-2000s, we found that 11 of those cases resulted in some kind of negotiation between the UN or various actors and the targets. This notion of sanctions that punish exclusively or so arm-twist and inflict pain as to make a target capitulate are all a myth. They're not borne out by the history.
What you want to do is not only enrage the target that you've sanctioned them, but you want to leave that path, that incentive, that Dr. Portela talked about, for there being an engagement between the international community or the imposers of sanctions and the target so you can persuade them to change the behaviour and show them the rewards that may be associated with that. When that can't happen, the utility of sanctions, to be effective, is that they should deny unlimited access to easy resources of a financial type, or arms or other types, which leave the perpetrators of violence unaffected by what you're doing. It's very important to have a mechanism whereby you can measure the ability to constrain those resources and limit the ways in which they can find substitutes for their arms, for their technologies, and for greater followers.
Finally, I think I'd say that sanctions fail when they're seen as the major instrument or the pulse. Sanctions work when they're part of the tools in a larger set of policies. If I want to improve the human rights behaviour of a target, I will use sanctions to deny its resources and try to create a bargaining situation, but I'm going to use the other available tools to our country or to our international organization to find ways to strengthen and protect the people who were targets or victims of the atrocities and to find ways to change the international dealings with commercial actors within that country that are ambivalent or a little embarrassed by the actions of the regime.
I think that brings us back to where Dr. Portela began. Can you get to the elites who support the policy but haven't actually designed it or implemented it and want a better business and political climate than they currently have?