How International Economic Sanctions Harm the Environment

As soft political tools, economic sanctions aim at isolating a sanctioned state and hurt its economy to force it to change course, policies, and actions. In response to sanctions and to evade their grip, a sanctioned state adopts a range of survivalist, aggressive, and unsustainable policies that reduce the economic pressure of sanctions at the expense of accelerated environmental degradation. While economic sanctions cannot be blamed as the cause of environmental problems in sanctioned states, their role in catalyzing environmental degradation is noteworthy. This paper takes the first step in setting the theoretical ground for exploring the environmental implications of sanctions by developing a generic causal model that explains how economic sanctions can impact the environment. It is shown that sanctions lower the priority of the environmental sector in the public policy agenda in a sanctioned state and increase the natural resource-intensity of its economy. It is argued that although the environmental damages of sanctions are mainly unintended by the sanctioning and sanctioned states, such damages are unavoidable in practice. The study calls for attention to the transgenerational and transboundary environmental impacts of economic sanctions and their justice and human rights implications for which the sanctioning and sanctioned states must be held accountable.