.jpg)
The Sanctions Age
The Sanctions Age is a podcast that explores how sanctions are changing the world.
Twenty years ago, the U.S. Department of Treasury had imposed sanctions on fewer than 1,000 companies and individuals. Today, more than 10,000 entities have been targeted.
Leaders around the world are imposing sanctions in response to wars, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, human rights violations, and technological competition. As a result, a growing list of countries are targeted by sanctions, export controls, and investment restrictions, including China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Syria.
The Sanctions Age invites the people who understand sanctions best—economists, historians, lawyers, policymakers, and journalists—to explain their use and significance. Understanding sanctions is the key to understanding politics and economics today.
We are living in The Sanctions Age.
The Sanctions Age
Studying Sanctions Through a Feminist Lens
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Lisa Neal on understanding sanctions as a form of structural violence.
Debates about sanctions tend to follow a familiar script. Who is being targeted? Will the measures change behavior? What are the economic costs to the sender country? These are legitimate questions. But they have a common blind spot: they describe sanctions from the outside, in the language of strategy and pressure, and rarely address what life is like for the ordinary people who live under them.
This episode examines how scholars are working to put people at the center of sanctions research by studying economic coercion as a form of structural violence, often incorporating a feminist lens. Scholars are addressing persistent gaps in how sanctions policies are debated by changing the focus of sanctions research, by seeking new sources of information and insight, and by pushing back on false or simplified narratives in an ongoing information war.
Lisa Neal is a researcher and journalist. Based at the University of Hamburg, Lisa has a background in feminist security studies and conflict research, and is currently completing her PhD on the intersectional effects of sanctions in Iran.
The Sanctions Age is hosted by Esfandyar Batmanghelidj and Josefine Petrick.
To receive an email when new episodes are released, access episode transcripts, and read the hosts reflections on each episode, sign-up for the The Sanctions Age newsletter on Substack: https://www.thesanctionsage.com/