I. Introduction ? 1 One problem that has plagued international law has been the enforcement of human rights. There is no global supranational body to hold a state in breach of international human rights accountable for its action. Short of using force to initiate a regime change, the common options taken by international actors have been to either impose trade sanctions or to participate in engagement. Both these options have significant drawbacks. ? 2 One influential study on sanctions concludes from an analysis of more than a hundred cases that economic sanctions have only worked to some extent about a third of the time.1 However, even this relatively positive assessment has been disputed on the grounds that the authors were overly generous in judging what were successful sanctions and in not properly separating the effects of sanctions from the impact of the threat or use of military force.2 The study also does not clearly differentiate between sanctions imposed to affect relatively modest behavior modifications in a friendly state and those imposed to cause regime change in a rogue state. It has been suggested that sanctions are usually more effective in the former and less effective in the latter due to conflict expectations.3