The Sanctions & Security Research Program is a joint effort of the Kroc Institute and the Fourth Freedom Forum to explore non-military means of enforcing international norms.
For more than a decade, principal investigators George A. Lopez and David Cortright have worked with the U.N. Security Council, government leaders, and international agencies to reform and refine sanctions as an alternative to military intervention.
Lopez and Cortright have written five books, including the award-winning The Sanctions Decade (Lynne Rienner), that established the team as leading authorities in the field of targeted sanctions. They have contributed to the development of “smart sanctions” – penalties that focus on leaders responsible for offensive policies but that avoid harming innocent people.
In 2002, Cortright and Lopez analyzed UN reports and other sources that detailed which weapons had been identified and destroyed in Iraq. Their articles (“Disarming Iraq” in Arms Control Today, Sept. 2002, and “Containing Iraq: the Sanctions Worked” in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2004) demonstrated that sanctions had succeeded in dismantling the Iraqi regime’s weapons program.
More recently, Lopez and Cortright have consulted with the UN and European Union on non-military means of counter-terrorism. Recommendations are found in their co-edited volume, Uniting Against Terror: Cooperative Nonmilitary Responses to the Global Military Threat (MIT Press, 2007).
Lopez's and Cortright's work has been supported by the Fourth Freedom Forum, the MacArthur Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs, the International Peace Academy, the Canadian Foreign Ministry, and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.
