Rethinking Sanctions: A Systems-Based Analysis of Economic Coercion and Civilian Impact

This article examines the effectiveness of economic sanctions by foregrounding their humanitarian consequences. Drawing on case studies of Russia, Iran, and Palestine, it argues that sanctions harm civilian populations while failing to achieve meaningful political change. Using systems theory and the concept of feedback loops, the analysis shows that sanctions strengthen authoritarian regimes, fuel anti-Western sentiment, and undermine long-term diplomatic solutions. The article concludes by advocating multilateral, human-centered diplomatic approaches that prioritize agency, stability, and sustainable international cooperation over coercive measures designed to preserve Western hegemony.

Keywords: economic sanctions, systems theory, feedback loops, coercive diplomacy, relative gains, absolute gains, ontological security, globalization, weaponized interdependence, neoliberalism, nationalism, perception, psycho-logic, multilateralism, unilateralism, international legitimacy, human-centered diplomacy, survival behavior, state sovereignty.

Introduction:

Globalization has undergone dramatic expansion since the 20th century, accelerating particularly after World War II and intensifying with the rise of neoliberal economic policies, technological innovations, and the end of the Cold War. As states have grown increasingly interdependent, sanctions have become a favored tool over effective diplomacy for policymakers seeking non-military means of coercion (Gutmann 2023). Consequently, the same interdependence that makes sanctions possible also creates complex ripple effects by disrupting supply chains, financial flows, and access to basic goods, ultimately harming civilians more than regimes. (Farrell 2019).

The case of Iraq illustrates this humanitarian toll: an estimated 227,000-567,000 Iraqi children may have died following the Persian Gulf War because of UN-imposed sanctions — a figure that is “considerably higher than the reported 40,000 military and 5,000 civilian deaths during the war itself” (Cortright 2001, Pape 1997). Moreover, in his analysis of the HSE database, the often cited empirical support of sanctions, Pape argues that among 40 cases cited as “successes,” only five met the criteria; the rest either misattributed, failed, or were indeterminate.

Sanctions, often framed as alternatives to military engagement, vary in form and impact, and are broadly categorized into five types: comprehensive, targeted, sectoral, secondary, and symbolic. Comprehensive sanctions restrict nearly all economic transactions with a target country and tend to have the most devastating effects on civilian populations, such as those imposed on Iraq in the 1990s. Targeted sanctions aim to minimize humanitarian harm by focusing on specific individuals, companies, or assets, like the U.S. Magnitsky Act sanctions against Russian elites. Sectoral sanctions apply to key industries (such as energy or defense), often seen in post-2014 sanctions on Russia’s finance and oil sectors.

Secondary sanctions penalize third-party states or firms that engage with the sanctioned country, thereby coercing compliance beyond borders — as evidenced by the U.S. measures discouraging trade with Iran. Symbolic sanctions may carry limited material weight but serve as expressions of international condemnation — such as travel bans or cultural embargoes. The effectiveness and humanitarian implications of sanctions depend not only on their political intent but on their design and implementation. Broad-based, unilateral, or secondary sanctions are particularly prone to generating systemic civilian suffering and authoritarian resilience.

Conversely, narrowly tailored, symbolic, or multilateral sanctions may serve diplomatic signaling functions with less collateral harm. Looking to weaken the targeted state’s economy to trigger policy or regime change, sanctions are typically utilized in three different ways: to punish, to deter, and to control. How a state uses them depends on its approach to economic relationships — whether it prioritizes absolute gains over relative ones, seeks advantage regardless of overall benefit, or exploits a partner’s gains as leverage. This framework is particularly useful in analyzing the cases of Russia, Iran, and Palestine.

Thus, if sanctions primarily hurt civilians and rarely achieve strategic objectives, can they still be considered effective?

Feedback Loops and Systems Theory:

The root of this critique is the concept of a feedback loop, drawn from systems theory: an action generates reactions that, in turn, reinforce or counteract the original action (Rosenau 1969). Applied to international relations, this reveals a key truth: even targeted sanctions are inherently abstract and dynamic, and the manufacturing of scarcity violates sovereignty while constraining agency.

In this context, the loop operates roughly as follows:

Action: Sanctions restrict access to goods, finance, or technology.
Immediate Effect: Economic decline, rising inflation, scarcity.
Civilian Response: Fear, survival-focused behavior, withdrawal from civic engagement.
Regime Response: Exploits nationalist rhetoric, represses dissent, consolidates control.
Outcome: Policy goals (e.g., regime change, policy reversal) are less likely.

This pattern is especially prevalent in collectivist cultures, which are common in authoritarian regimes. Unlike individualistic societies, where state failure often leads to public criticism or protest, collectivist cultures “highly value the connectedness with their ingroup and thus, do not feel threatened by decisions coming from the ingroup” (Steindl 2015). In survival-focused contexts — where safety and stability hinge on loyalty to the state — citizens are more likely to blame external forces for hardship and rally around nationalist and populist narratives.

In these contexts, perception becomes policy. Fear — fueled by both rhetoric and economic hardship — is weaponized to consolidate control, as civilians face restricted freedoms, declining economic mobility, and heightened surveillance. This dynamic reinforces a distorted image of external actors and their intentions — one often shaped more by fear than fact, as “the actor may, for a number of reasons, misperceive both others’ actions and their intentions” (Jervis 1968). The human need for certainty, even if it comes through repression, outweighs the uncertain promise of reform.

The inclination towards certainty can be explored through ontological security — the need for individuals and states to maintain a stable sense of identity, continuity, and predictability (Mitzen 2006). This process recurs across historical sanctions regimes, from Iraq to Venezuela, where sanctions inadvertently consolidate authoritarian control rather than weaken it.

Case Study I: Russia and the Politics of Perception

The West’s sanctions against Russia, especially following the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, are rooted in a logic of containment and deterrence, reflecting a ‘psycho-logic’ in which even neutral or cooperative actions are perceived as inherently threatening (Jervis 1968). In this framework, Russia’s geopolitical behavior — driven by historic insecurities (ontological security), NATO encroachment, and domestic legitimacy concerns — is consistently filtered through a Western lens of assumed belligerence. Furthermore, when sanctions expanded in 2022, the Russian elite rallied around the regime, and domestic economic adaptation turned the crisis into an opportunity. Rather than weakening regimes, sanctions feed into state isolation and radicalization — a systems failure rooted in both perception and policy.

The Kremlin uses wartime economic conditions to consolidate power, rewarding loyalists across society and the elite. Military enlistment and defense employment became economically attractive, while well-connected business figures acquired stranded Western assets at a fraction of market value. The redistribution of property, combined with capital controls and asset seizures, strengthened the regime’s domestic coalition and created new stakeholders invested in the success of Putinism. This reorganization institutionalized an alternative political economy that privileges loyalty over merit, isolates Russia from Western integration, and pivots trade eastward, particularly toward China (CSIS 2025).

Media manipulation amplifies this dynamic. State-controlled outlets and carefully curated messaging allow Putin to weaponize sanctions as evidence of Western hostility, justify military aggression, and cultivate nationalist sentiment. By controlling the narrative, the Kremlin neutralizes domestic criticism and channels public frustration into support for the regime, reinforcing the cyclical effects that sanctions provoke.

Meanwhile, U.S. media coverage has compounded the crisis. By demonizing Russia as a monolithic aggressor while largely ignoring its history of interventionism, economic coercion, and civilian harm abroad, American news outlets present a selective moral narrative. This framing leaves the U.S. with “white gloves” in public perception, obscuring the hypocrisy of critiquing Russia while wielding similar tools to maintain global hegemony (CATO 2018). In addition, hyperbolic portrayals of Russian threats inflame tensions, feed public fear, and constrain policymakers’ flexibility. These media narratives reinforce the perception of the inevitability of the Russian-West conflict, magnifying sanctions’ domestic and international effects and embedding both sides deeper into a cycle of distrust and escalation.

Public perception and media framing, in both Russia and the U.S., thus magnify the relationship between sanctions, domestic cohesion, power consolidation, and international tension. Humanitarian consequences and systemic economic disruptions are frequently overshadowed, allowing each side to justify its coercive policies while condemning the other. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle in which sanctions paradoxically strengthen the Russian regime while intensifying global polarization and undermining prospects for diplomacy.

Case Study II: Iran and the Politics of Pressure

One of the most consequential uses of sanctions occurred in the early 1950s, when Iran’s popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh sought to nationalize the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In retaliation, the UK imposed an oil embargo, froze assets, and lobbied for its international isolation. The economic strangulation devastated Iran, intensifying internal tensions and creating conditions for the 1953 CIA–M16–backed coup that restored the Shah (Friedman 2022, Elliot 1998).

Initially, with figures like Secretary of State Dean Acheson urging a fair settlement, Mossadegh hoped for U.S. support in his struggle against the British. Like many in the Third World immediately after World War II, he saw the United States as an anti-colonial power; yet Cold War geopolitics, NATO establishment, and Anglo-American solidarity during the Korean War overrode considerations (CIA 1998).

Although the Truman Administration was somewhat sympathetic, under Eisenhower, the U.S. actively engineered regime change. As Ursula Wolfe-Rocca documents, CIA “backing” meant Kermit Roosevelt arrived in Tehran with suitcases of cash to manufacture opposition by hiring people to protest, bribing newspaper editors to print misinformation, and creating a sham communist party to act as a straw man.

This historical precedent is valuable in understanding the long-term effects of economic coercion: sanctions, although positioned as strategic, produce enduring consequences. When civilian life is marked by uncertainty due to perceived external threats, people retreat to survival instincts — plenty of studies have associated economic uncertainty with the rise of nationalism, isolationism, and othering practices.

Furthermore, exiting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) during both terms, the Trump Administration reimposed sanctions under the policy of “maximum pressure.” This move was justified under the primary claim that the deal bolstered Iranian nuclear capabilities, yet neither denuclearization nor political reform has been achieved. The inconsistent behavior of the U.S. — shifting between multilateralism and unilateralism — reinforces anti-West narratives by deepening public skepticism toward the values of democracy and liberal internationalism.

Economic coercion is rarely humanitarian; it typically cloaks national interest in moral rhetoric. Thus, no state can credibly claim moral superiority while wielding tools of coercion. When economic and political hegemony are exercised under the guise of international order, they often prove counterproductive to peace, generating cyclical effects in which sanctions worsen conditions, justify further coercion, and perpetuate instability.

Sanctions often succeed in ways we least desire, and fail in ways we most intend. The neoconservative doctrine of maximum pressure illustrates this paradox by reducing the interplay of cultural, political, and psychological dynamics within states to a crude tool of hegemonic coercion. By disregarding these internal systems, sanctions attempt to engineer behavioral change through scarcity, fear, and desperation.

In the Iranian context, “rather than hurting the Iranian regime leaders, sanctions have strengthened the Iranian state and military, and ended up hurting the exact people they’re supposed to help — the middle class. More than 20% of the middle class has fallen below the poverty line, the World Bank reported, and 80% of citizens now rely on government handouts. And it’s the middle class who could be the force for change in the country” (Bajoghli, Nasr 2024). This erosion of the class capable of driving reform traps the state in a feedback loop — one where sanctions fortify the regime, undermine potential agents of change, and justify the very policies that created the crisis in the first place.

Case Study III: Palestine and the Politics of Aid Manipulation

The restrictions on movement and goods in Gaza imposed by Israel date to its inception (Jiryis 1966). Sanctions take the form not only of blockades and restrictions but of international aid conditionality. As noted by Alix Ziff, although one expects aid to be allocated to recipients based on the intensity of need, research shows “donor countries allocate aid to further their own geo-strategic interests; recipient-country governments channel foreign aid to match their own domestic political agendas; and aid flows to areas that are safe, inexpensive, and convenient for aid organizations to work.”

The disproportionate violence following October 7th — a dreadful event — must also be viewed in the broader context of decades of settlement expansion, blockades, and systemic restrictions to Palestinian agency. The following data underscores that what is framed as targeted pressure against Hamas often manifests as total economic warfare on civilians — a structural violence that undermines claims of democratic or humanitarian legitimacy.

By early 2024, 80–96% of Gaza’s agricultural assets — including irrigation systems, farms, orchards, and storage facilities — had been destroyed, crippling food production and deepening chronic insecurity. The private sector was equally devastated: 82% of businesses were damaged and GDP collapsed by 81% in the last quarter of 2023, shrinking the economy to less than one-sixth of its 2022 level (OCHR 2024). Civilians face widespread hunger, malnutrition, and collapsing healthcare, while growing dependence on aid is exploited by political authorities to consolidate control.

Consequently, “every single person in Gaza is hungry, a quarter of the population is starving, and famine is imminent,” with 335,000 children under five at high risk of severe malnutrition (OCHR 2024); Israeli aggression has killed over 61,000 Palestinians and injured more than 151,000 — mostly women and children — since October (UN 2025). Economic blockades framed as security measures function as instruments of collective punishment, channel aid through political agendas, legitimize armed resistance, and undermine the moral authority of states claiming to uphold democratic ideals.

So, DO Sanctions Work?

Sanctions are often framed as “a tangible signal: either that support for opposition forces is explicit or that support for the ruling regime has been withdrawn” (Elliott 1998). Yet their effectiveness depends heavily on the perceived legitimacy of the sanctioning state. In an era of growing scrutiny, U.S. policies — such as disregard for international law, enduring support for Israeli military operations and economic blockades — have faced pushback from the UN, Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, ICJ, ICC, numerous states, and public opinion. A 2025 Pew Research study shows that U.S. ratings have dropped significantly in 15 countries since the previous year, reflecting a growing dissonance between intended signaling and perceived legitimacy.

The broader problem lies in the West’s tendency to impose ideals rather than cultivate them. This approach undermines the credibility of the international order. Asymmetric structures largely born from colonialist legacies create the potential for “weaponized interdependence,” in which some states can leverage interdependent relations to coerce others (Farrell 2019). Thus, attempts to engineer political change from the outside — without regard for internal agency, cultural context, or lived experience — are fundamentally anti-democratic and often perceived as evidence of Western imperialism. Economic coercion, while efficient on paper, appears to be the lazy alternative to diplomacy.

It would be incorrect to claim that sanctions never work; however, their perceived success often rests on misleading foundations. In her rebuttal to Robert Pape’s critique of the HSE database, Kimberly Elliott notes that Pape “excludes cases where economic pressure is intended to complement military force, and he attributes policy success to economic sanctions only if it occurred in the absence of accompanying policies, such as military threats or covert action” (Elliott 1998). This clarification exposes a deeper contradiction: if sanctions are popular as a non-violent alternative to war, why does their effectiveness so often depend on the threat or use of military force? Rather than functioning as genuine instruments of diplomacy, sanctions frequently serve as a form of escalation — a prelude to conflict rather than a substitute for it.

Conclusion:

In closing, when examined through a systems theory lens, sanctions reveal themselves as instruments that fracture social systems and entrench state power through uncertainty. The West’s moral authority to wield these tools is increasingly called into question, particularly as Global South nations reject subordination to a geopolitical order that echoes colonial dynamics. It is deeply contradictory to weaponize interdependence while claiming to champion human rights; this hypocrisy not only undermines legitimacy but also inflicts disproportionate harm on civilian populations, rendering sanctions both ethically and strategically flawed.

Ultimately, asymmetric global networks enable certain states to leverage interdependence as a coercive weapon (Farrell 2019). In sanctioning Francesca Paola Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Senator Rubio stated July 6, 2025, the U.S. will “take whatever actions… to protect our sovereignty and that of our allies,” — a move that starkly illustrates how legal sovereignty can be invoked to justify extrajudicial coercion, as well as the double standard at the root of U.S. foreign policy and reinforce the broader perception of the Global North’s selective application of international law and justice.

As Pape notes, sanctions rarely succeed on their own. When they do, such as in Libya, South Africa, or Serbia, success is closely linked to human-centered diplomacy: multilateral legitimacy, clear communication of expectations, and avenues for negotiation that respect local agency. In contrast, cases like Russia, Iran, and Palestine demonstrate that sanctions without such engagement often harm civilians, strengthen authoritarian control, and undermine long-term relations.

Thus, if the ultimate goal is sustainable peace and stability, the tools of coercion must be evaluated not only by their stated objectives but also by whom they systematically harm or empower. Rather than isolating states through sanctions, the international community should prioritize human-centered diplomacy, multilateral engagement, and economic integration — approaches that protect human agency, reduce conflict, and create durable pathways toward equitable, cooperative international relations.

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