Τα stablecoins ως υποδομή παράκαμψης της κυριαρχίας : προσαρμοστικές και εποικοδομητικές τυπολογίες σε μακροοικονομίες υπό κυρώσεις

The global Anti-Money Laundering and Counter the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) system, which includes international economic sanction regimes enforcement, relies on an intermediary-focused framework. That is, a framework applicable to obliged entities, such as financial and non-financial intermediaries, money and financial markets as well as to national authorities such as regulators, law enforcement and judicial authorities. These private and state players which are also required to exercise their responsibilities and tasks as prescribed in the AML/CFT in cooperation with foreign counterparts on cross border situations, with the aim of preventing or combatting typically non-state criminals from engaging in ML or TF for private purposes. This thesis investigates the structural failure of this paradigm to effectively address situations where sanctioned sovereign states, including public and private entities under their control and their other states affiliated to them, rather than preventing, are institutionally perpetrating TF crimes. In particular, the evasion of international sanctions by weaponizing stablecoins to bypass the US-dollar dominated market. Utilizing qualitative comparative process tracing and data triangulation, this study analyzes the digital asset evasion architectures of (the Islamic Republic of) Iran and (the Federation of) Russia in the years 2022 to 2025. The research identifies a novel theoretical framework: Institutional Infrastructure Evasion manifesting in two typologies. Iran that executed an adaptive evasion strategy, co-opting Tether (USDT) to access liquidity while remaining vulnerable to corporate compliance asset freezes. And, conversely, Russia that deployed a constructive evasion strategy through the A7A5 ecosystem, reducing exposure to Western- aligned issuer freezes by relocating settlement infrastructure outside conventional compliance chokepoints. The thesis concludes that current localized regulatory responses, including the EU's AML/CFT framework, remain geographically constrained and insufficient on their ownto neutralize decentralized sovereign financial statecraf