“Abandoning diplomacy for confrontation.....is a dive over a cliff,” - Antonio Guterres, UN Chief

Introduction Sanctions can be defined as restrictions placed on an entity with the aim of altering its behavior. Article 41 of the UN Charter mentions sanctions as one of the instruments the UN Security Council can use to maintain international peace and security although several governments as well as regional organizations have on their own initiative announced sanctions as a coercive tool. Interestingly, a majority of UN sanctions are preceded by unilateral or regional sanctions (Brzoska, 2015). Due to complaints that sanctions against a state tend to harm innocent civilians as witnessed in Iraq in the 1990s, there has been an emerging shift towards targeted sanctions on individuals, non-state entities, particular regions or sectors of the economies instead of the entire state ( Charron, Giumelli and Portela , 2015). However, Kanji (2016) is of the opinion that sanctions can never absolutely avoid affecting the general population hence the focus should be on minimizing that effe