Economic sanctions are commercial and financial penalties—such as trade barriers, asset freezes, and travel bans—used by states or institutions to coerce or deter a target's behavior through economic disruption. While they can target entire countries, modern "smart sanctions" focus on specific individuals or groups, though their overall efficacy remains hotly debated due to humanitarian concerns. Historically, major examples include Napoleon's Continental System (1806) against Britain, the League of Nations' failed sanctions on Italy during the Abyssinia Crisis (1935), and the U.S. trade restrictions on Japan before Pearl Harbor (1941). After World War II, the United Nations took over sanctioning, but since the mid-1990s, the UN Security Council has shifted from broad country-wide embargoes to more targeted measures. The post-Cold War era saw a massive surge in their use, with the Global Sanctions Data Base recording 1,325 sanctions between 1950 and 2022. Today, they remain a key foreign-policy tool, typically wielded by larger nations against smaller ones to address security threats or humanitarian violations.