Economic Blockade and Authoritarian Survival

This is linked to what can be described as the 'logic of authoritarian survival', where the ruling elites are more willing to burden society with the cost of sanctions than to give up power, especially in systems that possess tools of repression, clientelistic networks, and mechanisms for redistributing resources that enable them to absorb economic shocks and use them politically, either by doubling self-sufficiency efforts, building smuggling networks, using intermediaries, or redirecting trade. For example, in the case of Iran, sanctions have limited the state's financial and oil capabilities, but they have also encouraged complex circumvention networks involving ships, front companies, alternative payments, and gray trade routes; similarly, North Korea's isolation has pushed it into an economy of smuggling and illicit financing.

The ethical dimension of the economic blockade reveals a fundamental problem with this tool; if the stated goal is to change the behavior of the regime, the actual means involve pressuring the civilian population, meaning that society is used as an indirect tool to bend the authority's arm and force it to retreat. This places the blockade in a morally gray area, where the blockade turns from a political pressure tool into a mechanism for producing suffering as a means of coercion, which has led some researchers to classify it as a form of 'international structural violence'.

Therefore, hopes have been pinned on targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes and financial transaction bans, which affect political elites or segments of society believed to be responsible for hostile behavior, as a means to limit making civilians targets of economic sanctions intended to use their suffering to create a reaction against the existing political system.