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

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article advances a sustained critique of the sanctions policy of particular states and assesses their conduct in ongoing conflicts. That assessment reflects the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral as between the parties concerned. The figure cited for child mortality in Iraq derives from surveys that have since been substantially revised, and this is addressed in the section added by this journal rather than altered in the author’s text. Casualty figures for Gaza are those reported by the Ministry of Health there and cited by United Nations bodies.

ABSTRACT

This article examines the effectiveness of economic sanctions by foregrounding their humanitarian consequences. Drawing on the cases 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 suggests that sanctions strengthen authoritarian regimes, fuel anti-Western sentiment, and undermine long-term diplomatic solutions. The article concludes by advocating multilateral, human-centred diplomatic approaches that prioritise agency, stability, and sustainable international cooperation over coercive measures.

KEYWORDS

Economic sanctions, systems theory, feedback loops, coercive diplomacy, relative gains, absolute gains, ontological security, globalisation, weaponised interdependence, perception, multilateralism, international legitimacy, human-centred diplomacy, state sovereignty

INTRODUCTION

Globalisation has expanded dramatically since the twentieth century, accelerating after the Second World War and intensifying with the rise of neoliberal economic policy, technological innovation, and the end of the Cold War. As states have grown increasingly interdependent, sanctions have become a favoured tool for policymakers seeking non-military means of coercion (Gutmann et al. 2023). The same interdependence that makes sanctions possible also creates complex ripple effects, disrupting supply chains, financial flows, and access to basic goods, and ultimately harming civilians more than governments (Farrell and Newman 2019).

The case of Iraq illustrates this humanitarian cost. Estimates published in the 1990s suggested that very large numbers of Iraqi children died following the Gulf War as a result of sanctions, figures considerably higher than the reported military and civilian deaths during the war itself (Cortright and Lopez 2001; Pape 1997). Moreover, in his analysis of the principal database offering empirical support for sanctions, Pape argues that among forty cases cited as successes only five met the criteria, the remainder being misattributed, failed, or indeterminate.

Sanctions, often framed as alternatives to military engagement, vary in form and impact, and are broadly categorised 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 severe effects on civilian populations, as in Iraq in the 1990s. Targeted sanctions aim to minimise humanitarian harm by focusing on specific individuals, companies, or assets. Sectoral sanctions apply to key industries such as energy or defence, as in the measures imposed on Russian finance and oil after 2014.

Secondary sanctions penalise third-party states or firms that engage with the sanctioned country, thereby extending coercion beyond borders, as with the 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 political intent but on 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 signalling functions with less collateral harm. Seeking to weaken a target state’s economy in order to trigger a change of policy or of regime, sanctions are typically used in three ways: to punish, to deter, and to control. How a state uses them depends on its approach to economic relationships, and on whether it prioritises absolute gains over relative ones. This framework is particularly useful in analysing the cases of Russia, Iran, and Palestine.

If sanctions primarily harm civilians and rarely achieve strategic objectives, can they still be considered effective?

MAIN CORPUS

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 that even targeted sanctions operate dynamically, and that the manufacture of scarcity constrains agency.

In this context the loop operates roughly as follows. Sanctions restrict access to goods, finance, or technology. The immediate effect is economic decline, rising inflation, and scarcity. The civilian response is fear, survival-focused behaviour, and withdrawal from civic engagement. The response of the government is to exploit nationalist rhetoric, repress dissent, and consolidate control. The outcome is that the policy goals, whether regime change or the reversal of a policy, become less likely.

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

In these contexts perception becomes policy. Fear, fuelled by rhetoric and by economic hardship, is used to consolidate control, as civilians face restricted freedom, 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 by fact, since an actor may for a number of reasons misperceive both the actions of others and their intentions (Jervis 1968). The human need for certainty, even where it comes through repression, outweighs the uncertain promise of reform.

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

Case study I: Russia and the politics of perception

Sanctions against Russia, particularly following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, rest on a logic of containment and deterrence, reflecting the psycho-logic in which even neutral or cooperative actions are perceived as inherently threatening (Jervis 1968). In this framework Russian geopolitical behaviour, driven by historic insecurity, by the enlargement of the Atlantic alliance, and by concerns of domestic legitimacy, is consistently filtered through an assumption of belligerence. When sanctions expanded in 2022, the Russian elite rallied around the government, and domestic economic adaptation turned the crisis into an opportunity for some. Rather than weakening the state, sanctions fed into isolation and radicalisation.

The Kremlin has used wartime economic conditions to consolidate power, rewarding loyalists across society and the elite. Military enlistment and defence 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 domestic coalition and created new stakeholders invested in the survival of the current order. This reorganisation institutionalised an alternative political economy that privileges loyalty over merit, isolates the country from Western integration, and pivots trade eastward, particularly toward China (Fenton and Kolyandr 2025).

Media control amplifies this dynamic. State-controlled outlets and curated messaging allow the leadership to present sanctions as evidence of Western hostility, to justify military action, and to cultivate nationalist sentiment. By controlling the narrative the government neutralises domestic criticism and channels public frustration into support for itself, reinforcing the cyclical effects that sanctions provoke.

Media coverage in the United States has compounded the difficulty. By presenting Russia as a monolithic aggressor while largely omitting its own history of intervention, economic coercion, and civilian harm abroad, coverage offers a selective moral narrative that obscures the tension between criticising Russia and wielding similar instruments (Cato Institute 2018). Hyperbolic portrayals of threat inflame tensions, feed public fear, and constrain the flexibility of policymakers. These narratives reinforce the perception that conflict is inevitable, magnifying the domestic and international effects of sanctions and embedding both sides more deeply in a cycle of distrust.

Public perception and media framing on both sides thus magnify the relationship between sanctions, domestic cohesion, the consolidation of power, and international tension. Humanitarian consequences and systemic economic disruption are frequently overshadowed, allowing each side to justify its own coercive policies while condemning those of the other. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle in which sanctions paradoxically strengthen the government they target while intensifying polarisation and reducing the 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 the popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh sought to nationalise the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In response the United Kingdom imposed an oil embargo, froze assets, and pressed for international isolation. The resulting economic strangulation devastated Iran, intensified internal tension, and created conditions for the coup of 1953 that restored the Shah (Friedman 2022; Elliott 1998).

Initially, with figures such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson urging a fair settlement, Mossadegh hoped for American support in his dispute with the British; like many in newly independent states after the Second World War, he regarded the United States as an anti-colonial power. Cold War calculation, the establishment of the Atlantic alliance, and Anglo-American solidarity during the Korean War overrode these considerations (Central Intelligence Agency 1998). Although the Truman administration was somewhat sympathetic, under Eisenhower the United States actively engineered regime change, and the operation involved cash for the manufacture of opposition, payments to protesters, the bribing of newspaper editors to print misinformation, and the creation of a false communist party to serve as a foil (Wolfe-Rocca).

This precedent is valuable for understanding the long-term effects of economic coercion: sanctions, although presented as strategic, produce enduring consequences. Where civilian life is marked by uncertainty attributed to external threat, people retreat into survival behaviour, and a substantial body of research associates economic uncertainty with the rise of nationalism, isolationism, and the construction of enemies.

More recently, in withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Trump administration reimposed sanctions under a policy of maximum pressure. This was justified by the claim that the agreement had strengthened Iranian nuclear capability, yet neither denuclearisation nor political reform followed. The inconsistency of American policy, shifting between multilateral and unilateral approaches, reinforces anti-Western narratives by deepening public scepticism toward the values of democracy and liberal internationalism.

Economic coercion is rarely humanitarian; it typically cloaks national interest in moral language. No state can credibly claim moral superiority while wielding instruments of coercion. Where economic and political predominance is exercised under the guise of international order, it often proves counterproductive to peace, generating cycles in which sanctions worsen conditions, justify further coercion, and perpetuate instability.

Sanctions often succeed in ways least desired and fail in the ways most intended. The doctrine of maximum pressure illustrates this by reducing the interplay of cultural, political, and psychological dynamics within a state to a crude instrument of coercion. By disregarding these internal systems, sanctions attempt to engineer behavioural change through scarcity, fear, and desperation.

In the Iranian case, rather than harming the leadership, sanctions have strengthened the state and the military and have harmed the people they were supposed to help, namely the middle class. More than twenty per cent of that class has fallen below the poverty line, and a large majority of citizens now depend on government support, and it is the middle class that could be the force for change (Bajoghli et al. 2024). This erosion of the class capable of driving reform traps the state in a feedback loop in which sanctions fortify the government, undermine potential agents of change, and justify the very policies that created the crisis.

Case study III: Palestine and the politics of aid

Restrictions on movement and goods in Gaza have a long history (Jiryis 1966). Sanctions take the form not only of blockade and restriction but of conditionality attached to international aid. As Ziff notes, although one would expect aid to be allocated according to the intensity of need, research shows that donor countries allocate aid to further their own strategic interests, that recipient governments channel aid to match their domestic political agendas, and that aid flows to areas that are safe, inexpensive, and convenient for aid organisations to work in.

The scale of violence following the attacks of 7 October 2023 must also be viewed in the broader context of settlement expansion, blockade, and systemic restriction. The data underscore that what is framed as targeted pressure against Hamas often manifests as economic warfare affecting civilians.

By early 2024, a very large proportion 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 affected: the great majority of businesses were damaged and gross domestic product collapsed in the final quarter of 2023, reducing the economy to a fraction of its previous level (OHCHR 2024). Civilians face widespread hunger, malnutrition, and a collapsing health system, while growing dependence on aid can be exploited to consolidate control.

United Nations bodies have reported that the entire population of Gaza faces hunger, that a quarter of the population faces starvation, and that hundreds of thousands of children under five are at high risk of severe malnutrition (OHCHR 2024), with more than 61,000 Palestinians killed and more than 151,000 injured according to figures reported by the health authorities there and cited by the United Nations (United Nations News 2025). Blockades framed as security measures can function as instruments of collective punishment, channel aid through political agendas, and undermine the moral authority of states claiming to uphold democratic ideals.

Do sanctions work?

Sanctions are often framed as a tangible signal, either that support for opposition forces is explicit or that support for a ruling government has been withdrawn (Elliott 1998). Yet their effectiveness depends heavily on the perceived legitimacy of the sanctioning state. In an era of growing scrutiny, American policies have faced criticism from United Nations bodies, the Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, numerous states, and public opinion. Research published in 2025 shows that ratings of the United States have dropped significantly in fifteen countries within a year, reflecting a growing distance between intended signalling and perceived legitimacy (Wike et al. 2025).

The broader problem lies in the tendency to impose ideals rather than cultivate them. This undermines the credibility of the international order. Asymmetric structures, largely inherited from colonial arrangements, create the potential for weaponised interdependence, in which some states can leverage interdependent relations to coerce others (Farrell and Newman 2019). Attempts to engineer political change from outside, without regard for internal agency, cultural context, or lived experience, are therefore frequently perceived as evidence of imperial ambition. 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 apparent success often rests on misleading foundations. In her response to Pape’s critique, Elliott notes that he excludes cases where economic pressure is intended to complement military force, and attributes success to sanctions only where it occurred in the absence of accompanying policies such as military threat or covert action (Elliott 1998). This 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.

SUMMARY *

The article’s contribution is to explain a failure that is usually attributed to insufficient severity. On the systems account offered here, the sequence from restriction to hardship to fear to consolidation is not an unintended side effect but the predictable behaviour of the system being acted upon, which means that intensifying the pressure accelerates the loop rather than breaking it. Two further observations sharpen this. The population most damaged is the one capable of pressing for change, since a middle class dependent on state support is not a constituency for reform. And the assessment of whether sanctions have ever worked turns on a methodological choice, namely whether cases accompanied by military threat or covert action count as successes for sanctions, which the author uses to raise the question of whether an instrument justified as an alternative to force can be credited with results that force produced.

CONCLUSION

Examined through a systems lens, sanctions appear as instruments that fracture social systems and entrench state power through uncertainty. The moral authority to wield these instruments is increasingly questioned, particularly as states of the Global South reject a geopolitical order they regard as echoing colonial arrangements. It is contradictory to weaponise interdependence while claiming to champion human rights; this tension undermines legitimacy and inflicts disproportionate harm on civilian populations.

Asymmetric global networks enable certain states to use interdependence as a coercive instrument (Farrell and Newman 2019). In imposing measures on the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories in July 2025, the American administration stated that it would take whatever actions were necessary to protect its own sovereignty and that of its allies, a step that illustrates how the language of sovereignty can be invoked to justify coercion beyond ordinary legal process, and that reinforces the perception of a selective application of international law.

As Pape notes, sanctions rarely succeed on their own. Where they have contributed, as in Libya, South Africa, or Serbia, success has been closely linked to multilateral legitimacy, clear communication of expectations, and avenues for negotiation that respect local agency. By contrast, the cases of Russia, Iran, and Palestine suggest that sanctions without such engagement harm civilians, strengthen authoritarian control, and undermine long-term relations.

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

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

One correction belongs at the outset, because the article’s argument is strong enough not to need the figure it opens with. The estimates of child mortality in Iraq derived from surveys conducted under conditions substantially shaped by the government of the day, and subsequent analysis has put the excess mortality far lower and has documented how the earlier figures were produced. The humanitarian catastrophe was real, the collapse of water, sanitation, and health provision is documented independently, and the Oil-for-Food arrangements did not prevent it. But a case that rests on a contested number invites dismissal, and the case built on the documented collapse of those indicators does not.

The article’s central mechanism can be stated with more precision, and the precision points toward what would have to change. Sanctions produce three distinct effects that are routinely conflated. They constrain capability, by denying access to particular goods and technologies, and at this they frequently work. They signal a position, and at this they always work, since the signal is the act. And they compel a change of policy, and at this they very rarely work, for the reasons the author sets out. Every serious review finds the same pattern, and the practical consequence is that the honest question for a policymaker is which of the three is being attempted, because an instrument justified as compulsion and delivering only constraint has been mis-sold.

The regime type argument deserves one qualification that strengthens rather than weakens it. The finding in the literature is not that authoritarian governments resist pressure better in general, but that they are better able to reallocate scarcity, protecting the coalition on which they depend and passing the cost to the population, which is precisely the mechanism the article describes in the Iranian case. Democracies lack that capacity, which is why sanctions against them are more effective and why they are almost never imposed. That asymmetry is uncomfortable and it is the strongest version of the author’s argument.

Two developments answer the humanitarian critique in part and deserve to be recorded. Security Council Resolution 2664 of 2022 established a standing humanitarian exemption across United Nations sanctions regimes, replacing the case-by-case authorisations that had made relief work unworkable. And the problem the article does not name, over-compliance, is now recognised as a principal driver of humanitarian harm: banks and shipping companies withdraw from a sanctioned economy entirely rather than assess each transaction, so that medicines and food which are formally exempt do not arrive. That is addressed not by changing the sanctions but by giving financial institutions clear guidance and legal comfort, and it is the most immediately actionable finding in this field.

Finally, the article’s constructive proposal is right and its own examples show what it requires. Where sanctions contributed to an outcome, in Libya over Lockerbie and in the Iranian agreement of 2015, they were attached to a defined path to relief that the target could reach without the collapse of its own position. Where no such path exists the measures become permanent, the target adapts, and the population absorbs the cost indefinitely. For readers of this journal the formulation is straightforward: sanctions are not an alternative to mediation but a source of leverage within it, and leverage applied without a process to which it can be attached is simply pressure. The design question is therefore not how severe the measures should be but who is authorised to negotiate their removal and on what terms, and that question is answered at the point of imposition or not at all.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

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