The Humanitarian Paradox: How Economic Sanctions Empower Authoritarian Regimes in Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea

Abstract

The future coercive diplomacy has taken the economic sanctions as the standard tool to be used by the influential states as a penalty to deviant regimes without necessarily having to engage in direct military action. The rationale behind this is that restricting access to capital by a ruler will result in a change of behavior or collapse of a regime. Yet a comparative study on Afghanistan during the Taliban rule, Iran during the highest pressure and North Korea during the long-term sanctions demonstrates the opposite. This article contends that sanctions tend to empower dictatorial regimes by promoting black economies at the expense of causing great damage to the lives of civilians. The qualitative comparative case-study study is complemented by a doctrinal legal analysis, which is a method that employs the qualitative approach to case-studies to analyze how authoritarian regimes adjust to financial isolation by relocating to smuggling, cybercrime, and forced labor. The results also suggest that sanctions often do not serve political purposes but instead cause humanitarian crises. In Afghanistan, assets freezes have given power to Taliban through taxing aid and illicit mining. The sanctions boosted military self-sufficiency and consolidation of hardliners in Iran. The evasion of sanctions has been institutionalized in North Korea. The paper concludes that the international community needs to shift to conditional engagement and humanitarian carve out in place of blanket non-recognition and sanctions so as to alleviate civilian suffering without justifying authoritarian rule.