Dr Mehran Kamrava, Director of Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), speaking at the panel discussion at the Education City.
DOHA: The US-led sanctions on Iran appear to be failing, despite their harsh consequences on the lives of the Iranian people, said panellists during a discussion at the Education City.
The event ‘War by Other Means? Iran Under Sanctions’ was hosted by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Q).
The panelists, Dr Mehran Kamrava, Director of CIRS, Dr Mansoor Moaddel, CIRS Visiting Scholar and Dr Manata Hashemi, CIRS Post Doctoral Fellow, analysed the history and consequences of the sanctions on Iran, leveraged amid US concern that Iran’s uranium enrichment could be turned into nuclear capability.
“Despite the high cost to the vulnerable segments of Iranian society, this war appears to be failing to create indirect pressure on the Iranian government through internal market and social conditions. The sanctions are actually quite counter-productive. In other words, sanctions, our analysis shows, are having the exact opposite effect of their intended purpose,” said Dr Kamrava.
On the consequences of the sanctions, he said: “Sanctions impact the daily lives of millions of people in terms of their access to basic goods, especially medicines and other necessities. So we specifically want to know how the Iranian poor are coping with the sanctions, and to understand the mechanisms and strategies of circumventing blockages to these basic goods.”
He asserted that “there has always been an assumption that sanctions are a prelude to war, or a different type of war. The goal of this war is that through the imposition of sanctions, pressure will be put on the Iranian government in its negotiations with the US and its allies over the nuclear issue.”
Moderator, SFS-Q Dean Gerd Nonneman, said: “The effect of these sanctions has been anything but straightforward, either in terms of its impact on Iran’s population, politics and policies, or on the region and the global economy. A thorough analysis of these impacts, including unintended consequences, is absolutely vital.The Peninsula
