The Instability of Domination: Economic Sanctions, Mass Labor Protest, and Authoritarian Resilience in Iran

• In Event: Authoritarian Politics

Abstract

How do economic sanctions impact state-labor relations in authoritarian regimes? To answer this question, I develop a relational theory of infrastructural power for studying authoritarian capacity to absorb mass worker protest under sanctions. I challenge theories that understand sanctions as facilitating autocratic labor control, as well as accounts that emphasize sanctions' capacity to fuel political unrest. Rather, I identify three microfoundations of authoritarian resilience under sanctions: protest bargaining, representational autonomization, and participatory deepening.

To specify these mechanisms, I analyze the Islamic Republic of Iran between 2011 and 2022, drawing upon archival sources, quantitative protest event data, and qualitative fieldwork.

I find that in Iran, these three mechanisms combined to entrench an ecosystem of games, imposing multiple sets of instrumental and constitutive rules that created strong incentives for worker groups to refrain from political protest and articulate their demands along non-political, socio-economic dimensions. As a result, sanctions against Iran did not only encourage unprecedented worker claim-making and protest, but they also helped to reinforce a system of autocratic labor governance that equipped the Iranian regime to depoliticize labor.


I conclude by probing the generalizability of this analytical framework through a discussion of secondary work on recent cases of comprehensive sanctioning. The heuristic framework calls for bringing labor back into the theorizing of geopolitics and authoritarianism.

Author

• Zep Kalb, Princeton University