Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez, How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez (NB, VN, DSI & AV): The idea for this book originated during the Trump administration's implementation of its maximum pressure sanctions on Iran. In 2019, we launched a comprehensive research project at Johns Hopkins University to deeply investigate the multifaceted impacts of sanctions on a society. Since the start of the twenty-first century, US sanctions have increased by over nine hundred percent, according to the US Department of Treasury. Most of the academic research on sanctions remains at the macro-level and very little is known about how sanctions impact a society in the long term. Our objective was to explore the repercussions of sanctions not only on Iran's economy but also on the daily lives of its citizens, social infrastructures, intellectual production, drug addiction, the environment, and other critical areas.
Through the Johns Hopkins SAIS Rethinking Iran Initiative, we engaged over a dozen internationally recognized scholars to conduct original research on these impacts. As our research progressed, we increasingly recognized not only the counterproductive nature of sanctions relative to policymakers’ stated objectives but also the extent to which sanctions have become a default policy tool in Washington. Furthermore, our findings highlighted a significant gap in public understanding: most Americans do not realize that sanctions constitute another form of American warfare.
... the book explores the economic impacts of sanctions, providing a comprehensive analysis of how sanctions have shaped Iran's economy.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
NB, VN, DSI & AV: The book delves into the everyday implications of sanctions on citizens across the socio-political and socio-cultural spectrums. It examines how sanctions affect the politics of a targeted country like Iran. Additionally, it includes a historical overview of sanctions, contextualizing Iran’s experience as the most sanctioned country in the world at the time of writing, with sanctions dating back to 1979.
Moreover, the book explores the economic impacts of sanctions, providing a comprehensive analysis of how sanctions have shaped Iran's economy. It also investigates the effects of sanctions on Iran’s foreign policy and discusses the phenomenon of sanctions blowback, highlighting the unintended consequences that these measures have on the United States itself.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
NB: My work is a political anthropological investigation into various forms of warfare. In my first book, Iran Reframed, I examined political formation, generational change, and revolutionary statecraft in the context of the eight-year conventional war during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. I also explored the dynamics of soft war and media wars, considering how the state directed these towards its population and responded to propaganda wars waged by the West.
This book extends that investigation to the realm of economic sanctions imposed by the United States and Western countries. It examines the impact of these sanctions on different generations within Iran, the diverse trajectories of the Islamic Republic, activists who oppose the state, and members of the political and military elite as they navigate the challenges of economic warfare. In many ways, it is a continuation of my exploration into the generational impacts of political change and warfare, focusing this time on economic warfare.
VN: This book is a collaborative effort that brought together scholars and practitioners with different expertise, but also methodologies associated with different disciplines. Putting all this into a cohesive narrative was both new and extremely rewarding for me. I had previously contended with the issue of sanctions as an important aspect of US-Iran relations but this was the first time that I was involved in a project that focused on sanctions, their impact on Iran, and also efficacy as a foreign policy tool.
DSI: I have been writing on Iran sanctions in my blog and in op-eds for over a decade, but only in the last few years, thanks to the SAIS Rethinking Iran project, have I had the chance to do academic research on the impact of sanctions on household welfare and employment. Although as of late the distinction does not appear to matter in the Washington discourse, sanctions are aimed at ordinary people and not the government of Iran, as the official narrative suggests. My research using Iranian survey data, some of which made it into the book, shows that sanctions took away twenty years of a potential increase in living standards, the middle class shrank, and millions fell into poverty. As a development economist, I am interested in how Middle Eastern countries that depend on world trade can pursue independent foreign policy, like India or Brazil. Iran is challenging the US hegemony in the region, which has brought on US sanctions that have derailed its economic progress. Understanding if and how Iran can grow its economy again will throw light on one of the most important political economy questions countries in the Global South face.
AV: I work in the field of conflict prevention. Sanctions are often seen as an alternative to war. But in practice, and especially when they do not deliver the intended results, they leave war as the only viable option. The case of Iraq is a good example. I have been covering nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West for a long time. The basic bargain has always been sanctions relief in return for nuclear restrictions and transparency measures. I have realized that the Western inability to deliver effective and sustainable sanctions relief diminishes the utility of sanctions as a diplomatic tool. The book highlights this major shortcoming, which is often an afterthought in policy debates about sanctions in Western capitals.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
NB, VN, DSI & AV: Sanctions are inherently abstract. They are crafted by lawyers and bankers, often intentionally vague, and their impacts are typically invisible. Unlike the immediate, visible destruction caused by bombs, the effects of sanctions are not readily observable. We use the language of warfare because sanctions policymakers themselves employ warlike metaphors.
A primary goal of this book is to “show” what sanctions do by taking the reader inside Iran. Through ethnographic analysis and narrative, we illustrate the impacts of sanctions on society and politics. It is important to note that this is not an edited volume; it is a cohesive narrative written by four scholars, but presented as a singular, unified account.
We had different audiences in mind, including social scientists beyond the fields of international relations and economics. Most studies of sanctions are framed from the perspective of sanctioning states, policymakers, or through a macro-economic lens. We aim to demonstrate that social scientists from various disciplines can and should critically examine sanctions and their impacts.
Additionally, we hope to reach students and educated Americans who are concerned with US foreign policy, as well as American policymakers. Given the extent to which US sanctions have increased since the start of the century, sanctions have become a central tool in American foreign policy. Despite this, there is very little discussion or critical understanding of what sanctions do, how they work, and whether they are effective. As the United States continues to sanction more countries, the consequences will be significant, and we need to engage in meaningful conversations about these impacts.
We also aim to highlight that sanctions are actually leading to increased conflict, contrary to the claims of policymakers in the West that sanctions help reduce conflict. It is often repeated by policymakers that sanctions are an alternative to war. But as we show in this book (and as is unfortunately becoming more obvious today), sanctions are actually a cause of war. By providing a comprehensive analysis of sanctions’ effects, we hope to foster a more informed and critical discourse on the use of sanctions as a foreign policy tool.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
NB: I am currently co-editing a book with Arzoo Osanloo that features contributions from sixteen scholars around the world. This volume examines “sanctions from below” across various regions, including Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Additionally, I am writing my next solo-authored book, which explores the long-term impacts of chemical warfare in Iran, Iraq, and the broader Middle East. This project investigates how the Middle East has become a testing ground for warmaking over the past four decades.
VN: I am currently working on finishing a book project on Iran’s grand strategy that examines the assumptions and historical experiences that have shaped its foreign policy posture, and how it has organized state and society to achieve them. This work looks beyond ideology to explain how and why Iran has adopted “resistance” as the polestar for its posture towards the West.
DSI: I am working on the history of economic and social inequality in Iran and wrapping up older projects on the impacts of the Iranian revolution on women and the rural poor.
AV: I am currently working on several projects. One looks at options for the future of nuclear diplomacy with Iran, trying to find a solution to the sanctions relief dilemma I mentioned before. I am also working on a report on the province of Sistan-Baluchestan in eastern Iran, which represents a microcosm of crises Iranians are facing, including economic deprivation, severe environmental degradation, ethnic discrimination, and popular protests that are often brutally suppressed. If the newly elected reformist government fails to address the underlying dynamics through political and economic reforms, the fault lines in this ethnically diverse border province could render Iran vulnerable to the same pathologies that have caused other countries in the region to descend into civil and proxy wars. And of course, tensions between Iran, Israel, and their respective allies is a constant preoccupation these days.
Excerpt from the book
PREFACE
WHEN SANCTIONS WORK
One of the most important developments in international affairs is the growing primacy of economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy. Increasingly, the US response to international crises is first and foremost the application of sanctions. But do sanctions work? If so, when and how, and at what cost? The case of US sanctions on Iran is particularly instructive in this regard. For over four decades Iran has been a foreign policy concern for the United States: a country that refuses to deal directly with the US, and that maintains anti-Americanism at the core of its foreign policy and even its identity. The United States has addressed its Iran problem primarily through sanctions. Since their first imposition in 1979, sanctions have become more far-reaching and sophisticated; so much so that, at the time of this writing, Iran is the most sanctioned country in the world. In the process, the US has come to consider sanctions as a nearly unassailable necessity; to the point, we will argue, of a counterproductive overreliance on them.
Additional sanctions, and more punishing sanctions, have failed to realize US policy objectives. The experience of Iran shows how ineffective this seemingly effective foreign policy tool can be. Waged by warriors in dark suits in the US Department of the Treasury, the sanctions are assumed to be more efficient and less costly alternatives to what warriors in the Pentagon and diplomats at the State Department are capable of. The decades of sanctions exacted on Iran, and the application of “maximum pressure” sanctions under the Trump and Biden administrations, challenge this assumption. The extended period also allows us to gain a better understanding of the humanitarian, social, and political costs of sanctions, as well as the less noticed costs that sanctions inflict on the US. The case of Iran also shows that sanctions are far from being an efficient tool; while they are more easily applied than direct military or diplomatic measures, that very facility is also at the root of their failure because they become so difficult to lift, regardless of whether they are accomplishing their goals.
The forty-plus years of US and international sanctions, and recently the maximal use of sanctions, have been levied on Iran not only to punish its behavior but also to force the Islamic Republic to change course: desist from supporting terrorist activities, refrain from aggressive regional policies, and abandon its nuclear ambitions. President Trump in particular believed in the promise of sanctions to achieve this course change, but his administration failed on each of these three counts, and in fact the threat of Iran has appeared to become increasingly grave on every front of concern to the US.
Iran has shown greater defiance and more willingness to directly and dangerously confront the US and its allies in the Middle East. The application of maximal sanctions, beginning in 2018, provoked an aggressive response from Tehran. A year after the imposition of maximum pressure, Iran attacked four tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) port of Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman; downed a high-flying US surveillance drone; and launched a sophisticated attack with drones and missiles on oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia. The audacity of this latter attack, and Iran’s ability to evade Saudi and American radar and air defense systems, caught Washington by surprise. But all of the aggressive actions were cause for alarm, given that Iran carried them out while subject to the worst sanctions it had ever faced. In 2022, the world was shocked when Russia deployed lethal drones that Iran had developed under sanctions.
Throughout 2019–20, the US response to Iranian provocations only invited escalation. After US missiles attacked an Iraqi militia base in response to the killing of an American contractor, Iran and its Iraqi allies laid siege to the US Embassy in Baghdad. In turn, the United States used an attack drone to kill Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who played a key role in Iran’s regional policies. Iran was neither chastened nor deterred, and in January 2020 it launched nearly two dozen Iranian-built ballistic missiles at a military base in Iraq, which hosted US forces. This attack on the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq—in retaliation for the assassination of Soleimani—was not only a precise strike, but the largest missile attack US troops have ever faced.
Through such actions, Iran showed that Trump’s maximum pressure sanctions had not bent the nation’s will to accept Western demands. Instead, the sanctions had achieved the opposite effect: making Iran more aggressive, risk-taking, and dangerous. Indeed, this was a consequence of sanctions. Instead of sanctions offering an “alternative to war,” maximum pressure sanctions on Iran have shown that they could be a cause of war.
“Do sanctions work?” is often asked by policymakers and pundits. Perhaps that is the wrong question. When a country with the size and economic power of the United States imposes harsh sanctions on a country, of course they “work”: sanctions create massive disruptions in the everyday lives of citizens, impact the political culture of the targeted state, and induce shocks in the economy. But do sanctions—as some claim—bring about the behavioral changes in targeted states as intended by Western foreign policy? Do sanctions work the way they “should”?
Consider Iran, the most sanctioned country in the world. Comprehensive sanctions are meant to induce uprisings or instigate pressure that leads to a change in the behavior of the ruling establishment, or a lessening of its hold on power. But after four decades, Iran has shown the opposite to be true. In fact, despite periodic protests, sanctions have strengthened the Islamic Republic, weakened and impoverished its population, and increased Iran’s military posture vis-á-vis the US and its allies in the region. It is not only that the Islamic Republic is still around despite harsh sanctions; most importantly, Iran has become a more belligerent state as a result of increased American sanctions.
As this book shows, then, sanctions do work. But not in the way most think.
