
Mitigating the unintended humanitarian impacts of UN targeted sanctions [ICP 2021]
Project summary
This project seeks to bring together UN Sanctions scholars with global humanitarian actors to explore ways to ameliorate the humanitarian consequences of UN targeted sanctions. It aims to produce tailored outputs and organize engagement activities to inform both humanitarian practitioners and sanction policy actors on practical ways to safeguard principled humanitarian action in areas under a sanction regime.
While considerable effort has been put into decreasing the unintended consequences of UN sanctions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, humanitarian impacts of sanctions seem to be on the rise in a number of different contexts.
Policymakers are increasingly questioning what urgent steps can be taken to resolve consequences related to over-compliance with sanctions and counter-terrorism regulation.
Numerous policy initiatives and research projects have sought to find solutions and highlighted the need for capacity building, clearer guidance, access to information, training, sharing of best-practices, and awareness-raising within and between relevant sectors (governments, financial institutions, humanitarian actors, and the wider private sector).
Collaboration between the scholarly and humanitarian community is vital. While the former is deeply familiar with sanctions and can thus serve as an important source of information for humanitarian actors, the latter’s experiences with both direct and indirect impacts of sanctions need to be better understood by scholars and policy practitioners.
This project aims to foster interaction across the academic-humanitarian-policy divide to make accessible new, policy- and practice-relevant scientific data on ways to mitigate the unintended humanitarian consequences of UN sanctions and ensure their effective dissemination via the digital policy tool UNSanctionsApp.
The humanitarian community has real time access to relevant information on how to mitigate negative humanitarian consequences of UN sanctions.
- Cross-training of sanctions scholars and humanitarian practitioners
- Joint analysis of humanitarian and policy needs for scientific information on the unintended consequences of UN sanctions
- Research and synthesis of relevant evidence and information related all current UN sanctions regimes.
- Update of the Sanction App with new data and consultations of end-users.
- Production of relevant outputs to facilitate uptake by humanitarians and policy actors
- Engagement of key stakeholders to facilitate uptake, scaling and sustain science-policy-practice collaborations
Duration
Project core partners
- Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Global Governance Centre
- Norwegian Refugee Council
Contact
- Prof. Thomas Biersteker, Professor, thomas.biersteker@graduateinstitute.ch
- Emma O’leary, NRC Senior Humanitarian Policy, Emma.Oleary@nrc.no
- Dr Frédérique Guérin, Executive Officer, GSPI: frederique.guerin@unige.ch
Other Projects:
Equitable access to outer space: specifying new regulatory needs for radio spectrum management [ICP 2023]
Collaboration project
This project aims to support the update of the ITU Radio Regulations with evidence-based insights through an analysis of existing national strategies in terms of space infrastructure.
Supporting the routine use of evidence during the health policy-making process: a pilot project of World Health Organization checklist [ICP 2023]
Collaboration project
This project aims to pilot the application of a new WHO guidance which assists countries in institutionalising their evidence-informed policy-making processes.
Satellite imagery as evidence in international justice proceedings [ICP 2022]
Collaboration project
Images acquired by satellites have become key sources of information and evidence within the international criminal justice system. The project aims to develop a focused training program to close the knowledge gap between the legal professionals and the satellite imagery experts.
A global diabetes research agenda [ICP 2022]
Collaboration project
This project seeks to address the research-policy gap in the field of diabetes by developing a policy-relevant, scientifically rigorous global research agenda on diabetes that can be acted upon by the newly launched WHO’s Global Diabetes Compact.
A toolbox for measuring immigrant integration and inform programming [ICP 2022]
Collaboration project
This project seeks to bring more effective policy expertise in the management of migration in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region in order to address migrants’ needs and increase social cohesion between migrant and local communities.
Building resilient migration management systems: Developing a World Migration Report digital toolkit for policy officials [ICP 2021]
Collaboration project
This project develops an interactive digital toolkit for policy officers to support them in leveraging migration research for evidence-based policy-making, drawing lessons for the scientific community for brokering knowledge in policy circles.
Disruptive technologies and rights-based resilience [ICP 2021]
Collaboration project
This project aims to facilitate a multistakeholder consultative process to identify knowledge gaps, generate new evidence and co-design evidence-based tools to support regulatory and policy responses to human rights challenges linked to digital technologies.
Supporting Multilateral Environmental Agreements on chemicals and waste with scientific evidence [ICP 2020]
Collaboration project
This project aims to foster engagement of the scientific community to support informed policymaking and effective implementation of the Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs).
REDEHOPE: Reliable Data for Evidence-Based Housing Policies [ICP 2020]
Collaboration project
Based on the rigorous study of existing data ecologies, the project intends to develop a diagnostic tool to help countries identify issues in their housing data ecology, respond appropriately to such issues and access appropriate datasets to formulate more robust, evidence-based housing policies for the benefit of people.
MAPMAKER: MArine Plankton diversity bioindicator scenarios for policy MAKERs [ICP 2020]
Collaboration project
Global marine biodiversity supplies essential ecosystem services to human societies. To protect them, information on the impact of climate-mediated loss of biodiversity on their function needs to be produced and taken into account in international agreements and policy documents.