Rethinking sanctions: Exploring resistance and internal dynamics through a target‐centred lens

Over the past few decades, sanctions have become a key foreign policy tool in international politics. Sanctions involve states or international organisations pressuring target states to make political changes by restricting economic interactions, including trade, investment, and finance (Jones, 2015). The United States (US) has been the most frequent user of sanctions (Hufbauer et al., 1990), increasingly employing them to promote its foreign policy objectives by inflicting economic damage. US-led sanctions increased by 933%, rising from 912 in the year 2000 to 9421 by 2021, targeting 25 different countries (US Treasury, 2021). As sanctions became used against other countries extensively, literature around sanctions focuses on whether and when sanctions work or not. Such questions aim to address efficiency and/or deficiency of sanctions on target countries from a sender-centred lens, drawing from Eurocentric and Atlantic-centric discourses, which seeks to ameliorate the grand theory of how to improve the effectiveness of sanctions. Therefore, in return, this question results in the exclusion of potential dynamics within a target state to resist sanctions. To move beyond the Eurocentric, Atlantic-centric, sender-focused perspective that has long dominated discussions on sanctions, it is crucial to reframe the central question from whether and when sanctions work to why they succeed or fail. This shift involves adopting a target-centred lens, where the attention is placed on the behaviour, resilience, and strategies of the sanctioned country or countries rather than exclusively on the sanctioning power. By assessing how the targeted states adapt, resist, or comply with sanctions, scholars can gain deeper insights into the internal dynamics, socio-political structures, and economic capacities that affect the efficiency of sanctions. Shifting the prominence in this way challenges existing frameworks and encourages a re-assessment of extensively accepted theories and assumptions. It prompts a reconsideration of key concepts such as compliance, defiance, and resistance, thereby opening new avenues for understanding the complex and often unpredictable consequences of sanctions policies. This approach also highlights the agency of the sanctioned states, which has often been overlooked in conventional evaluations, and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between external pressure and internal response. To examine this approach, I have selected two books that implicitly address the why by examining the mechanisms of resistance. The books are titled, How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, authored in 2024 by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez; and Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash against the Dollar, written by Daniel McDowell in 2023. In How Sanctions Work, the authors explore the effectiveness of sanctions on Iran over 200 pages. They argue that US sanctions on that country have failed to achieve key foreign policy objectives while causing severe unintended consequences. The book emphasises the extensive humanitarian crises and social damage caused by sanctions through interviews with diverse Iranians, including academics, businesspersons, and so forth. It also reviews Iran's political history, protests, and contrasting policies on US relations. The book then traces the history of sanctions from Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) to Joe Biden (2021–2024), illustrating how sanctions have failed to achieve regime change or secure major concessions and how even lifting sanctions is complicated by political risks, as seen during Donald Trump's (2017–2021) and Biden's presidencies. Ultimately, the book evaluates secondary sanctions, which involve additional economic restrictions designed to ban economic activities of agents who are not subject to US territorial and personal jurisdiction, from transacting with a target of US sanctions. The second book, Bucking the Buck, examines the growing resistance to the US dollar's dominance in global finance. Written by Daniel McDowell, a professor of International Affairs at Syracuse University and an expert on financial sanctions, the book presents timely insights into how US sanctions drive global efforts toward de-dollarisation, making it highly relevant to current geopolitical debates. Supported by quantitative, data-driven research, the book addresses gaps in the literature on US foreign policy, dollar dominance, and the effectiveness of sanctions. The book explores mechanisms like correspondent banking and US Treasury enforcement, detailing how sanctions leverage the dollar to exclude foreign actors from the financial system. The book also examines the dollar's role as a store of value, the responses of countries like Russia, China, and Venezuela, the rise of gold reserves, and efforts to internationalise rivals such as the euro and the renminbi. In How Sanctions Work, the authors present a thesis known as the ‘sanctions counterproductive overreliance,’ which proposes that sanctions, when used broadly, can lead to outcomes that undermine the policy goals they were intended to achieve. Using US sanctions on Iran as a case study, demonstrates how these measures, aimed at kerbing Iran's nuclear ambitions, limiting its regional influence, and promoting political reform, have instead strengthened Iran's resistance to external pressures. This has fostered the development of a ‘resistive economy’ (7) focused on self-sufficiency, with efforts to bolster domestic industries and deepen ties with non-Western nations. The book also analyses how sanctions have encouraged national solidarity in Iran, with the population—especially the political elite—rallying around the government against foreign pressure. The ‘resistive economy’ has driven innovation in sectors like energy, agriculture, and defence, making Iran's economy more resilient. Instead of causing instability or regime change, as the US intended, the sanctions have enabled Iran to develop alternative economic and political alliances, particularly with China and Russia. In a complementary argument, Bucking the Buck argues (18) that US financial sanctions, by introducing political risk into the international currency system, have spurred de-dollarisation—diminishing the dollar's dominance in global trade. Using case studies from Russia, China, and Venezuela, the book shows how these nations have responded by diversifying currency reserves, developing alternative payment systems, and trading in currencies like the euro, renminbi, and cryptocurrencies, driven by the dollar's use as a geopolitical weapon. Bucking the Buck examines how US sanctions leverage the dollar's dominance in global trade, clearing systems, and reserves to isolate targeted states effectively. However, this strategy undermines confidence in the dollar, prompting nations to seek alternatives. By using the dollar as a geopolitical tool, the US inadvertently accelerates de-dollarisation, threatening its currency's global supremacy and potentially shifting the balance of economic power. Problem-solving theories of sanctions seek to address the deficiencies of sanctions by approaching them from a sender-centred lens, drawing from Eurocentric and Atlantic-centric discourses, to cover how and when sanctions succeed, from various different lenses, such as liberalism, realism, or institutionalism. How Sanctions Work aligns with the liberal perspective on sanctions, as indicated by the claim that ‘the pressure on the living standards of ordinary Iranians was always central to the rationale behind sanctions, which was expected to result in them applying indirect pressure on the government to alter its behaviour’ (76). This statement underlines the liberal belief that sanctions are designed to create economic hardships that force citizens in the sanctioned country to impose pressure on their government for policy change—especially in authoritarian regimes where direct political engagement may be restricted. This perspective aligns with Johan Galtung's (1967) ‘naïve theory’ of sanctions, which suggests that sanctions create popular discontent, leading to internal pressure on governments. According to this theory, sanctions are meant to make life challenging for civilians, urging them to rise up for political change. Nevertheless, Galtung criticises this view as simplistic and excessively optimistic, arguing that it assumes hardships will spontaneously translate into political pressure. Conversely, Bucking the Buck analyses the topic through liberal and institutional theories on sanctions. In contrast to liberalism, institutionalism explores how international institutions shape and apply sanctions to enhance coordination and legitimacy. It also adopts three other distinct schools of thought that emphasise maintaining the dominance of the US dollar: the political economy of sanctions, currency competition theory, and geopolitical risk theory. The first theory connects to Bucking the Buck's argument that US financial sanctions create political risk, illustrating how using the dollar as a geopolitical weapon can prompt targeted states to seek alternatives. The second theory explains shifts in currency dominance and implications for global trade and finance as countries begin conducting trade in currencies other than the dollar, such as the euro and renminbi. Lastly, in the third framework, the book explores how geopolitical manoeuvres can create economic vulnerabilities and provoke systemic changes. Both books examine various theories of sanctions, including liberalism, political economy of sanctions, currency competition theory, and geopolitical risk theory, demonstrating how US sanctions can be counterproductive when they are overly relied upon and how then can push targeted states to seek alternatives to the dollar, impacting global trade and currency confidence. However, these books are ultimately complementary as they employ sender-lens perspective to ameliorate the deficiencies of sanctions - aiming to answer how and when without profoundly questioning why some sanctioned countries succeed or fail to counteract sanctions. The strength of How Sanctions Work lies in its nuanced analysis of the impacts of US sanctions on Iran, particularly how this overreliance has prompted Iran to develop resistance strategies. Key factors contributing to the book's effectiveness involve its strong emphasis on empirical evidence from in-depth ethnography, interviews with key stakeholders and academics, and economic data analysis. Moreover, it explores the broader geopolitical implications of US sanctions, highlighting how Iran's responses challenge US foreign policy by reshaping alliances in the Middle East and fostering cooperation with non-Western countries like China and Russia. Additionally, the book's insightful case study explores specific sectors like oil, banking, and healthcare, demonstrating the diverse impacts of sanctions across industries. These case studies enhance readers' understanding of how sanctions disturb daily life in Iran and how various actors, from the government to local businesses, adapt to the changing economic landscape. In contrast, Bucking the Buck excels in its detailed analysis of US dollar's dominance in the global financial system and the extensive impacts of US sanctions on targeted states and global financial dynamics. A key strength of the book is its robust theoretical framework, which integrates concepts from international political economy, currency competition, and geopolitical risk theory, providing a comprehensive understanding of how US dollar maintains its dominance. This theoretical grounding builds the discussion on how sanctions disrupt the economies of targeted states while also challenging global financial stability. Another significant contribution of the book is its focus on rising challenges to the dollar, particularly the process of de-dollarisation. The author explores how targeted states, especially Russia and China, are increasingly pursuing alternatives to the dollar by establishing bilateral trade agreements in local currencies, expanding cryptocurrency use, and creating new financial institutions. This global perspective on de-dollarisation clarifies how US sanctions have unintentionally sped up efforts of countries to reduce their dependence on dollar, potentially threatening its future dominance. Each chapter of Bucking the Buck builds upon the last to present a cohesive, structured argument about the long-term implications of US sanctions on the global financial system. Insightful case studies explain how countries like Russia, China, Turkey, and Venezuela have responded to sanctions, while statistical models propose empirical support for the arguments. These models help quantify the economic impacts of sanctions, providing concrete evidence of their impacts on both targeted economies and the global financial order. In contrast, How Sanctions Work lacks thematic cohesion, covering a wide range of topics without uniting them under a clear central theme, while its omission of statistical models further weakens its empirical support. Moreover, the book fails to conceptualise and characterise sanctions within existing sanctions theories, it generalises the concept of ‘resistance’ without accurately defining it, offering only implicit descriptions, and the analysis of the global costs of sanctions for both the US and the world is limited, as it does not address anti-sanctions rhetoric or the growing international concerns regarding the US dollar's role as the world's reserve currency. These shortcomings prevent the book from providing a more comprehensive and rigorously supported analysis of sanctions. Such serious accusations require brief substantiation. The authors study the impact of sanctions on poverty, healthcare, and humanitarian they fail to sanctions as and secondary or between comprehensive and sanctions. 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