Why revolutionary states yield: International sanctions, regime survival and the security dilemma. The case of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Abstract

This article re-examines earlier explanations as to why Iran’s foreign policy had remained revolutionary for so long. Previously, Terhalle had argued that the main reasons could only be found at the domestic-ideological level. In light of Iran’s fundamental policy shift in 2013, this article argues that it has mainly been structural causes, such as financial and economic sanctions, that have forced the hand of Tehran’s leadership to dramatically alter its long-held foreign policy attitude. Theoretically, it takes the recent state-of-the-art literature as its starting point and assesses it conceptually and empirically. It finds that Solingen’s stressing that the design of any sanctions should look closely at the domestic politics of the target-state needs to be recalibrated. Instead of looking at winners and losers (as the result of sanctions), which turned out not to fit with the Iranian case, this article finds that meticulously studying the design of a given state’s economic structure and, thus, its pressure points, leads to much more effective results. Therefore, instead of Solingen’s ‘domestic distributional’ approach, this article proposes that theorizing about ‘domestic socioeconomic’ perspectives on sanctions is key. In practice, multilateral and comprehensive sanctions of such design may have the leverage to be effective against small or medium-sized countries with little-diversified economies.