The impact of economic sanctions on political stability in Iran: A study of The stages and motivations

Abstract

: Do economic sanctions succeed in undermining the political stability of targeted countries, or do they become a tool for strengthening the regime's resilience and hardening its positions? This study raises a central question concerning the dialectical relationship between international financial pressures and the cohesion of the internal political front in Iran. The paper addresses this issue through a structural analysis linking the shifting strategies of sanctions (American and European) across different historical periods to their direct impact on the pillars of Iranian political stability. The study's primary variables are defined as the independent variable, "economic sanctions with their various historical phases and geopolitical motivations," and the dependent variable, "the level of political stability in Iran" with its various indicators (social, economic, and institutional). To analyze this relationship, the study employs a historical approach to trace the evolution of sanctions through their different time periods, and a descriptive analytical approach to link international motivations with the internal political reality. The study concluded with a number of results, the most important of which is that the impact of sanctions on political stability in Iran was not linear or constant, but rather varied according to the “stages” of the sanctions. When the smart and highly crippling sanctions caused inflationary crises and pressing popular protests, the state succeeded in exploiting the external “motives” for the sanctions to mobilize public opinion behind the slogans of “economic resistance.” The results confirm that the sanctions succeeded in draining Iran’s economic indicators, but failed to cause a collapse in political stability, given that the regime possessed institutional and security adaptation tools that gave the political structure a high capacity to contain external shocks.