Arms embargo is a trade sanction that prevents the export of arms or military equipment to a person, group or state. Its primary logic is not economic, but rather to deny non-state actors weapons or military support and thus limit their options for action. It is often supplemented by other types of sanctions.
The effectiveness of arms embargoes depends on a number of conditions, including the nature of the state or group seeking to purchase and their capacity to comply with sanctions. For example, major arms exporters, such as Russia and the United States, are more likely to violate arms embargoes than minor ones. They also have higher production capacities and can benefit more from violating the embargo than do minor suppliers.
In addition, the effectiveness of an arms embargo is undermined by state-sanctioned illicit and grey market trade (in which unauthorized non-state actors or groups engage in covert procurement with governments). It can also be undermined by new technologies that make it easier to fabricate weapons or bypass restrictions on their export.
To heighten their impact, arms embargoes can be more effective when they are accompanied by strong diplomatic efforts that incentivize and coordinate the participation of intervening states. For example, a regional arms embargo that was imposed in 1996 on Burundi, which was backed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, was successful in forcing non-state militias into peace negotiations. Its success was partly due to the fact that the participating states spoke with one voice and coordinated their interventions in a way that prevented them from playing off against each other or giving in to pressure from some of the actors targeted.