Arms Embargoes

This chapter considers arms embargoes. It first examines the idealized case for arms embargoes, which holds that they reduce the aggressors’ access to weapons and frustrate their goals, whilst distributing the costs fairly and avoiding doing harm. It then assesses the vehement, nonideal critique of arms embargoes in some of the academic literature. This highlights various problems such as that they are violated by sender states, that weapons are still obtained on the black market and through porous borders, and that they are used to avoid undertaking more effective action. The chapter challenges this nonideal critique and argues that the idealized account is in fact largely correct: arms embargoes do often work once we adopt the correct measure of effectiveness (what it calls ‘morally valuable effectiveness’). In doing so, this chapter provides a defence of the importance and meaning of effectiveness—the central factor on the Pragmatic Approach.