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Foreign hello and welcome to Security and Context. I am Anita Fuentes, and today I am joined by Jordi Bernal, Security and Context media and knowledge production intern, in what I'm sure will be a fascinating conversation with the award-winning anthropologist Nargas Pajoli. Hi, Jordi.
Hello, everyone! Happy to be here.
So, Nargas is an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and co-author of the upcoming book "How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare," which we are very excited to talk about more in depth in a bit. So, without further ado, I'd like to welcome our guest. Hello, Nargas! It's a pleasure to have you here.
Hi! It's so wonderful to be with you.
To start, I'd like to ask you how, as an anthropologist, you came to write this book about economic sanctions. I'm curious specifically about how the study of sanctions can benefit from an anthropological perspective.
Sure! Sanctions have typically been studied or looked at by scholars of international relations, economists, and public health scholars for a bit as well, and those have all been very valuable studies. But the reality is that sanctions, in addition to having impacts on the economic sort of sphere of life and on international relations and foreign policy, really the number one impact of sanctions is on the daily lives of ordinary people in impacted societies. Policymakers have been very clear about that. Folks who helped even create the apparatuses of sanctions throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century have also been quite clear that, in their mind, sanctions have to impact the citizens of the targeted country to be effective. Yet, we don't actually have much research done on what it means to live under sanctions, especially long-term sanctions, and what the implications are for everyday life for the citizens in the impacted country.
As an anthropologist, this was actually quite fertile terrain for beginning to understand what distinctions do to the day-to-day lives of people. That's something that we need to understand, especially as sanctions become a tool that's being used more and more in foreign policy.
Our next question is about the upcoming book you co-authored titled "How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare." What are the main themes and debates covered in this book?
So, I wrote the book with my co-author, Alibias, and we tackle a few themes in this book. I look at the impact of sanctions on society and on the political climate and political culture of the Iranian state. Professor Vadynas looks at sanctions from the perspective of both what they do to the regional policies of Iran as well as what they mean for U.S. foreign policy more broadly. Alibias looks at sanctions from the perspective of the historical impact of 40 years of sanctions—different forms of sanctions—on Iran.
It's not an edited volume; it's a narrative that we all wrote together. One of the reasons we decided to write it together was that we found that sanctions oftentimes, like I mentioned before, focus in on one angle. But comprehensive sanctions, which is what Iran has been under for quite some years now, really impact society comprehensively. We wanted to provide a book, a case study, and a narrative of what it looks like to target a society on multiple levels.
Iran is the most sanctioned country in the world and has been for quite some time now. We wanted to provide a book that is very readable. I think one of the things with sanctions is that it's either something that those who are involved in the policymaking of it are keeping quite close tabs on, but the language of sanctions is written in such a vague and often complex way that it feels very difficult to decipher for folks who are not involved in the day-to-day of reading sanctions policy. We wanted to take it out of that and bring it into a language that intelligent readers all around the world could read and begin to understand.
Since it is a type of statecraft and foreign policy that is being used more and more around the world, keeping it in such vague language feels a little intangible for all readers. I think this is done on purpose in many ways because it actually doesn't allow us to have the language to be able to question what this is. Whether at the end of the questioning you think sanctions are great and should continue or whether you think we need to discuss this more, it doesn't matter. Right now, the discussion is not even grounded in any kind of real understanding except for those who specialize in this field. We really wanted to bring it out of that specialized field and make it something that is more widely discussed.
I think this thing that you're mentioning about making this knowledge attainable for everybody is key. That's also what we try to do in these interviews, where you talk to the authors because maybe somebody does not know what the book is about just by reading the description. But then you can hear the person who wrote it explain it like a normal person rather than using more academic language, and it completely changes how you view the issue at stake.
The book focuses on Iran, which, as you just said, is the most sanctioned country in the world. So, in your view, why is it important to study sanctions from the perspective of impacted societies?
Because if we don't study it from the perspective of impacted societies, we only know half of the picture. When we only know half of the picture, we're not able to make the best possible decisions about whether these kinds of policies "work." One of the things we get at in the first few pages of the book is that the question of whether sanctions work is actually not even the best question because, of course, they work. You know, you're being sanctioned by the biggest economy in the world, so of course they work. It's a question of scale in that sense.
However, it's about how they work. What is it that they are actually doing on the ground, and do they work like policymakers say they should work? That's something that we actually find in the academic literature and the policymaking literature is not dealt with as robustly as it should be, and it's precisely because we have not had as many studies looking at impacted societies. We wanted to try to start to even out that conversation because otherwise, we're just having a one-way conversation, and that's not allowing us to make the most robust decisions.
A recent report published by the Center for Economic Policy Research discusses the ways in which sanctions are sometimes used as mechanisms to incite homegrown revolts. This is something we asked the author Francisco Rodriguez about in our last interview. Would you say sanctions against Iran influenced the 2022 protests, and do you believe the sanctions targeted at Iran increased repression within the country?
That's a wonderful question! Actually, one of the things that we look at is this very question in the case of Iran. Outside of this book, I also do a lot of research on the impacts of sanctions on mostly Cuba but also Venezuela, so I've been looking at this sort of transnationally and over time across different spaces. One of the things that we found and that we talk a lot about and write about in the book is that yes, sanctions increase frustration in society because people's daily lives become harder and harder as currencies begin to fall and inflation increases at exponential rates. That has also resulted in protests for things like the cost of living throughout these various societies, including Iran.
However, the other thing that we have found in our research on Iran, as well as in other places, is that in the same parallel time in which society is becoming poorer through the implementation of sanctions, the military apparatus of all of these countries becomes wealthier because they're the ones in charge of sanctions busting, which we can talk about if you want. They also become more and more militarized because they see themselves as being under a form of warfare. Economic warfare is not just about sanctions; when you are sanctioning a society comprehensively, like you are with Iran or some of the other cases that I mentioned, there are also covert actions involved, such as cyberattacks.
So, the government and military apparatuses of targeted societies begin to respond to their own citizens as well as geopolitically in a very militarized fashion. When we have uprisings, like we have been having in Iran, as well as Cuba last summer, which had the largest uprising since the revolution when Castro came to power, the response from the state is increasingly militarized and therefore becomes more and more repressive. As sanctions go on, the domestic sphere becomes more securitized. So, what you have is protests happening but also an increased ability by the state to repress those very protests. Therefore, over time, society and citizens become weakened.
We would also like to explore how sanctions force targeted countries to find alternatives to Western economy, finance, and currency. How does the Iranian case help us understand the geopolitical consequences of sanctions, especially regarding the dollarization of trade of hydrocarbons? Do you see any parallels between the consequences of the sanctions targeting Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions targeting Iran?
This is a great question! Societies learn and pay attention to other states that are being sanctioned. In the Russian case, not only have they been paying attention to what's been happening over time with Iran, but they also got sanctioned in 2014, learned lessons, and then have been applying them in this current circumstance. What you have is an increased awareness among states around the world that the United States is using economic sanctions as a primary tool—not just as an alternative to war, but in many ways as a form of confrontation.
Since the increase of maximum pressure sanctions on Iran during the Trump administration, which has continued during the Biden administration, and now with the implementation of sanctions against Russia, what you see is more and more societies and states beginning to realize that they could do something that would not be in the ideal interest of the United States. Their economies could suffer quite severely as a result. There has been a push towards moving trade away from the dollar by different states around the world.
This is ultimately one of the things that we discuss in the book when we look at the impact. Sanction policymakers have often thought that sanctions are a quite useful tool to have because you're not deploying militaries; you don't seem to have a loss for your own state. What you're doing is putting economic pressure on a state that's far away or even might be close to you, like Cuba. However, the more sanctions are being applied to bigger economies, the reality is that there is now a blowback effect of sanctions.
That blowback effect is that states are beginning to look at one another and their trade with each other, questioning whether it needs to continue happening in the dollar. If you can take trade off the dollar and begin to trade in local currencies, this is something that the Iranian state began to experiment with precisely in response to sanctions. They call it the resistance economy, and it's this idea that you can create an economy that is shielded from the impacts of U.S. sanctions. This is now something we are beginning to see other states developing, and that's a serious thing that U.S. policymakers need to be considering.
To end, is there anything else you would like to add that we haven't covered about the book or your area of research?
I think one of the things that we also found in the book is that sanctions are often used as an alternative to war. However, two things that are part of our conclusion in this book are: one, sanctions increase the potential for very real conflict between Iran, the United States, and its neighbors. Especially when you look at the height of the maximum pressure sanctions from the Trump administration, there were multiple times when there was a very real possibility of war in the region. So, actually, sanctions did not reduce the capacity of the Iranian state to confront those it saw as its enemies; it actually increased the possibility of further conflict.
That's one thing that needs to be considered. The other conclusion we have is that we have regulations and laws in place for hot wars, for example, that civilians should not be targeted if they are not involved in combat. We do not have any form of regulations when it comes to sanctions, and the number one target of sanctions is ordinary people. In just war theory, it is seen that we have regulations in place where we should not be targeting ordinary citizens. Sanctions are actually constructed so that ordinary citizens are not collateral damage but are the primary targets of the policy.
The idea is that you target the population enough to make their lives difficult under economic contractions so that they then rise up and either force their systems to change or create an atmosphere in which revolutionary or regime change potential is there. But what we see is that, first of all, you are dealing with systems in which these states are not democratic, so they don't care what the demands of their societies may be. Secondly, as we talked about before, they actually have a very militarized and repressive response when their citizens do rise up.
One of the other things we conclude with in this book is that sanctions are a form of collective punishment, and we really need to begin to question and think about very clearly who our targets are in sanctions policy and whether they justify the types of things that we use to economically suffocate these societies. The reality is that none of the cases we have looked at that have been under comprehensive sanctions have panned out in successful ways. So then, what is it that we're doing here?
I think this is a main takeaway: that sanctions are actually targeted at ordinary people. It's great to have an upcoming book that's also thought of as a way for ordinary people to be able to understand the impact of sanctions in countries like Iran.
So, Nargas Pajoli, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a very insightful conversation, and we hope that we can keep collaborating in the future.
Thanks so much for having me! It was wonderful to chat with you all.