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Profs and Pints DC presents: “Rethinking Sanctions,” an evidence-based look at a common foreign-policy tool, with Narges Bajoghli, assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and co-author of How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare.
The United States stands out among the world’s nations in its willingness to impose economic sanctions on other countries, with comprehensive economic sanctions imposed on Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, and Syria and more targeted sanctions imposed on governments, sectors, and individuals elsewhere. Especially when imposed by a country with the economic influence of the United States, sanctions induce clear shockwaves in the targeted state’s economy and political culture and in the everyday lives of that state’s citizens.
But do economic sanctions really induce desired changes in the behavior of targeted nations? Do sanctions work the way they should?
Join Dr. Narges Bajoghli, a scholar of Iran who earned rave views from Profs and Pints audiences for her past talks on the women’s uprising there, for an unflinching look at economic sanctions’ effectiveness and enormous consequences.
She’ll speak broadly about comprehensive sanctions as a foreign policy tool and how they are meant to induce uprisings, pressure a ruling establishment to change its behavior, or when such rulers’ hold on power.
Then she’ll turn her attention to groundbreaking research that she was involved in, on the long-term impact of sanctions on a targeted country. Using Iran as a case study, the scholars uncovered complex dynamics that challenge traditional assumptions about sanctions’ efficacy.
Their research found four decades of sanctions of Iran produced effects opposite those intended: they’d strengthened the Iranian state, increased state repression, impoverished Iran’s population, and escalated Iran’s military posture toward the U.S. and its allies in the region. Instead of offering an ‘alternative to war,’ sanctions had become a cause of war. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: A 2014 celebration of the anniversary of Iran’s revolution. (Photo by Sonia Sevilla / Wikimedia Commons.)
