Sanctions, Embargoes, and Trade Exclusion: Tools of Economic Coercion by Hegemonic States Amid Democratic Decline

• In Event: 50662 - Section on Peace, War, and Social Conflict Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Conflict and Action

Abstract

This article examines the sources of power and efficacy behind the U.S. economic sanctions through the lens of Marxist and Left Weberian theories of imperialism, highlighting how sanctions function as tools of economic and geopolitical domination within the global capitalist and states system. Drawing on a core-periphery framework informed by world-systems theory, it situates U.S. economic sanctions as an extension of the hegemonic role of the United States in maintaining and perpetuating global financial and trade hierarchies, even amidst its relative decline as a global hegemon. Specifically, U.S. financial hegemony—anchored in the dominance of the dollar, control over international financial institutions, and trade mechanisms—is revealed as a critical pillar enabling the projection of economic coercion against peripheral and semi-peripheral states such as Iran and Venezuela. Further, this Macro-global analysis on the world scale is complemented by a detailed meso-level state fields analysis to map what we term the US Sanctions Foreign Policy Nexus. That is the sanctions policy nexus is emergent from struggles between foreign policy experts at the State Department, economists in the US treasury, congressional lawmaking and executive power in the political field and think tanks lobbying for influence on sanctions policy. After identifying the key mechanism of sanctions policy creation and implementation, we pivot to focused and detailed case studies of tracing the effects of sanctions on countries like Iran and Venezuela. It will be demonstrated that contrary to the discursive claims of sanctions policymakers that economic coercion can be enabling of democratization in these sanctioned states, sanctions can actually have the opposite effect of further distorting and narrowing of the respective political fields of each country. The siege mentality resulting from sanctions can empower and elevate the security apparatus and coercive hands of states to increase repression of social movements and civil society.

Authors

• Vali Shakouri Mansouri, Politico Media

• Anderson Bean, North Carolina A&T State University