"1.1 Background Once again like déjà vu the land of Myanmar splashed international front page headlines for its recent brutal crackdown on protestors and monks in the autumn of 2007. People intercepted the news with unsurprised horror as their memories flashed back to the infamous 1988 uprisings that prematurely ended the lives of at least 1,000 civilians in Rangoon alone and possibly 3,000 nationwide. 1 This time around it was different with the international community and media quickly coming to the aid of the protestors in voicing condemnation of the junta‘s actions and calling for support for the protestors. Human rights and exiled Burmese activists further increased pressure on the international community to take action against Myanmar and distance themselves from the military regime. The 2007 anti-government protests (lasting from August 15th until approximately October 31st) were initially led by students and pro-democracy activists in response to the government‘s increase of fuel prices, which consequently caused a spike in public transport and staple food prices.2 In what was already an impoverished situation with inflation at ahistorical levels, it was of course no surprise that social unrest ensued. This particular fuel hike served as a watershed event for all the economic problems that had been troubling the people of Myanmar for the last two decades since the last uprising of 1988 took place. Monks from all over the country eventually joined in and took to the forefront of the protests in what would be dubbed the ―Saffron Revolution‖ symbolizing the color of the robes the monks wore. This did not appease the junta leaders as they proceeded forward with a brutal crackdown on the protestors that resulted in the beating and killing of both civilians and monks alike. The final death toll of the junta crackdown varies between the junta‘s own official figures of 10 up to the 200 casualties claimed by dissident groups. In addition, many monks were consequently detained and put in prison camps while some fear that many of them were murdered. Upward to 6,000 demonstrators in all were arrested with many of them being gradually released.3 As if it was not enough that Myanmar had garnered worldwide criticism for its loathsome antics, Cyclone Nargis would draw renewed world attention and criticism to the country. On May 2nd of 2008, less than a year after the Saffron Revolution, Myanmar experienced the worst natural disaster in the recorded history of Myanmar claiming the lives of over 100,000 people. Abundant criticisms were directed toward the junta from the bungling of their own relief effort to the blockage of international aid, and of their undeterred determination to proceed with elections the following weekend. All of the mishandling and mismanagement of the crisis kept the junta on the front page news while the international community desperately explored alternatives to get help to those who needed it most. Yet again the junta reminded the world of its indifference to its own people and mocked the world community for its inability to do anything. It is unforeseen at this point whether this catastrophe has resulted in anything more than minimal cooperation from the regime and often it is only for handouts of international aid. Cyclone Nargis will presumably serve as a painful lesson that even in the worst state of crisis the junta of Myanmar will still refuse to buckle to outside pressure. Twenty years has now passed since the 1988 uprisings that initially brought international attention to Myanmar and Nobel laureate Daw Aung Suu Kyi to the forefront of the democratic opposition. Due to Aung San Suu Kyi and her party comrades‘ repeated arrests and detentions for their political activities, the international community has adopted numerous diplomatic strategies over the years with the hopes of coercing the junta into releasing the political prisoners and into accepting the 1990 election results that favored Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). There has been consistent international pressure and activism over the years for the release of the more than one thousand political prisoners locked up for their participation in the 1988 demonstrations and/or other political activities. Despite the myriad approaches undertaken by various actors the last two decades, Daw Aung Suu Kyi and many others remain in captivity and the junta still rules the country with an iron fist. The most popular approach utilized by state actors against the junta has by far been the imposition or threat of economic sanctions. The historical timing of Suu Kyi‘s arrests and Myanmar‘s deplorable human rights behavior against the backdrop of the post-Cold War relations proved a pivotal stimulus for the use of economic sanctions as a diplomatic tool. In terms of international cooperation in the United Nations, it wasn‘t until the end of the Cold War that the international organization finally achieved unprecedented cooperation in the United Nations Security Council (UN SC). Prior to this relations amongst the Security Council permanent members had chilled from the start of the Cold War and dimmed any hopes for cooperation in the Security Council. The renewed cooperation that brought an end to the chilly relations in the UN SC was marked by the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. As a result of this new unity, a string of peacekeeping and enforcement activities followed suit, howbeit it was not military activities that proved the most popular method of choice, but alternatively it was economic sanctions that proved most appealing to Security Council members. It comes as no surprise then that the 1990s has been dubbed ―the decade of economic sanctions.‖ 4 Howbeit, not all these economic sanctions consisted of multilateral mandatory economic sanctions as outlined under article 41 of the UN Charter. On the contrary, many economic sanctions were and are indeed today unilateral. Since the rejuvenation of the UN SC following the Cold War, economic sanctions have persistently been issued often to the detriment of the civilian population. A strong majority of the literature on economic sanctions have questioned and raised doubts over the efficacy of sanctions. A magnitude of political leaders, human rights activists, and scholars remain for the most part oblivious and aloof to the detrimental harms of sanctions despite that nearly all are aware that the infamous Iraqi sanctions campaign claimed the lives of half a million (of which the majority were children). This is clearly another case of ―collective amnesia‖ since the international community too often forgets the catastrophic errors of their time in spite of slogans that cry “Never Again”. Sanctions are assumed to be a less costly alternative to armed force when measuring the cost of lives, but as former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali expressed: Sanctions, as is generally recognized, are a blunt instrument. They raise the ethical question of whether suffering inflicted on vulnerable groups in the target country is a legitimate means of exerting pressure on political leaders whose behaviour is unlikely to be affected by the plight of their subjects. 5 An overwhelming amount of literature and research by experts and scholars concede that sanctions have had in fact drastic implications for vulnerable populations and frequently did not achieve the objectives it had aimed for. My particular concern in this debate, which is needy of more research, is the impact of sanctions on women. Women have appeared to suffer the brunt of sanctions according to numerous anecdotal evidence since women are often times more vulnerable to economic sanctions due to their gender and their relative impoverished and disempowered position. Be that as it may, research in this area remains obsolete or very minimal and is henceforth worthy of attention due to the urgency of this problem as this paper will show..."