economic sanction
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Encyclopedic overview
Economic sanctions or embargoes are commercial and financial penalties applied by states or institutions against states, groups, or individuals. Economic sanctions are a form of coercion that attempts to get an actor to change its behavior through disruption in economic exchange. Sanctions can be intended to compel (an attempt to change an actor's behavior) or deter (an attempt to stop an actor from certain actions).
Sanctions can target an entire country or they can be more narrowly targeted at individuals or groups; this latter form of sanctions are sometimes called "smart sanctions". Prominent forms of economic sanctions include trade barriers, asset freezes, travel bans, arms embargoes, and restrictions on financial transactions.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “economic sanction” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.