Western sanctions violate the very principles the West claims to uphold, argues Mustafa Fetouri.
What, dear reader, do you happen to know about FIFe?
If you are a football fan, do not confuse it with our beloved FIFA. Beyond the similarity of acronyms, nothing connects the two, except that both banned Russia from their ranks. FIFe stands for Fédération Internationale Féline, the international federation of pedigree cat breeders and competitions. In March 2022, amid the wave of Western sanctions on Russia, even FIFe joined the moral crusade by banning Russian cats from international events. Cats are creatures that neither vote nor wage war. This irony captures the absurdity of sanctions: they target the innocent, while leaving the powerful untouched.
Sanctions: From Diplomacy to Coercion
From Libya to Iraq and Gaza – and across the Global South – entire populations have been trapped under economic sieges justified in the name of peace, democracy, or human rights. Sanctions are sold as humane alternatives to war, but for those who endure them they feel like wars by other means: slow, grinding, and indiscriminate. In practice, they have become a weapon of mass impoverishment, a form of collective punishment wielded most frequently by the same powers that claim to defend international law and human dignity.
Once marketed as a peaceful and principled tool of diplomacy, sanctions have evolved into instruments of coercion and control. Their language is moral, their impact merciless. What began as targeted measures to curb aggression or uphold international law has morphed into economic warfare that blurs the line between peace and siege. Whether imposed unilaterally by Washington or collectively through the UN Security Council, sanctions now serve political ends disguised as ethical imperatives, as tools to discipline defiance rather than deter wrongdoing.
Nowhere were the human costs of sanctions more devastating – or more cynically dismissed – than in Iraq throughout the 1990s. Following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, sweeping UNSC sanctions under Resolution 661 crippled every aspect of civilian life for over a decade. Hospitals ran out of medicine, water systems collapsed, and malnutrition spread like wildfire. A 1999 UNICEF study estimated that sanctions contributed to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under five. In a television interview that year Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, said the terrible cost was “worth it.” It was not Saddam or his inner circle who paid. It was the millions born on the wrong side of a geopolitical confrontation. By the 2003 US and UK invasion, the country was already in ruins. The Oil-for-Food programme, introduced in 1996 to ease the crisis, became a labyrinth of corruption and bureaucracy, a reminder that once economic war begins, human life is reduced to paperwork. In the end a war was fought to force Iraq out of Kuwait because sanctions’ devastations failed to achieve their objective.
Libya: The Lockerbie Years and Collective Punishment
If Iraq sanctions revealed the cruelty of sanctions, Libya’s exposed their cynicism. In 1992 the UN Security Council, responding to the Lockerbie bombing, adopted Resolution 748 with a suite of measures that went far beyond diplomatic isolation: an arms and civil aviation embargo, asset freezes, and restrictions on goods deemed ‘dual-use’ including spare parts and industrial equipment. Overnight, a country was cut off from the world in an attempt to compel its government to hand over two suspects in the Lockerbie disaster. Many argued that the measures’ real aim was to force regime change by toppling the Gaddafi government. As Owen Schalk described in the previous issue of SLR, the measures were severe and long-running (suspended in 1999 and formally lifted in 2003), and Libyan officials repeatedly complained of a “tragic toll,” at one point citing thousands of deaths and billions in losses. Independent analysts and rights organisations later concluded that the embargoes created real shortages of medical and industrial supplies, contributing to infrastructure decay. This was collective punishment at its best. Despite the harsh sanctions the stalemate was eventually resolved by diplomacy, not by coercion. The sanctions failed to remove the regime but punished millions who had nothing to do with Lockerbie. One telling bureaucratic absurdity underlined the reach of those measures: US rules at times made ordinary commercial dealings with Libyan-owned entities abroad illegal. US students studying in Malta University could not buy a sandwich from the only in campus cafeteria because it was Libyan.
Afghanistan: Sanctions Without End
The Afghanistan case illustrates the futility and cruelty of blanket sanctions. From the late 1990s onward, successive waves of punitive measures were imposed: first under the Taliban’s initial rule, and again after the Taliban effectively defeated the US and its allies and returned to power in 2021. These sanctions restricted almost everything, transforming the fragile country into a virtual wasteland. In one of the most bizarre and illegal moves, the Biden administration froze roughly $7 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves, officially to deny the Taliban access, but in reality as a form of revenge for their victory over the US. Most of the assets were later literally stolen to compensate 9/11 victims, for which neither the Taliban nor the Afghan people bore responsibility. The confiscation crippled the banking system, drove inflation sky-high, and left hospitals, schools, and aid agencies unable to function. Remarkably, the Taliban refrained from seeking compensation through selling the huge piles of military hardware left behind by the departing US forces, demonstrating a grim restraint that the sanctions’ architects never showed toward the Afghan population.
Today, over 90 percent of Afghans live in poverty, and millions face chronic hunger, not from drought or mismanagement, but because the world’s richest nations deemed punishing a small ruling elite worth starving the population for. Like Iraq’s embargo, this moral arithmetic treats suffering as virtue. Sanctions have never democratized Afghanistan; they only deepen despair and dependency.
Afghanistan illustrates how sanctions invert both morality and law. Intended to punish rulers, they instead inflict unbearable suffering on the innocent, undermining justice and legitimacy. Children go hungry, hospitals run dry, and citizens navigate a collapsing economy. Sanctions are not merely economic measures but instruments of social control, forcing compliance through fear, deprivation, and humiliation. Far from promoting ethical governance, they deepen dependency, entrench resentment, and erode international law. The Afghan case highlights a broader pattern: sanctions punish ordinary people while leaving authoritarian targets largely untouched. They have become a perverse moral calculus, treating the suffering of millions as a strategic advantage. They are a grim testament to the human cost of geopolitical theatre.
Gaza: The Total Siege
If Afghanistan illustrates economic punishment by distant powers, Gaza demonstrates how sanctions and blockades can be enforced locally while the international community first watch helplessly, then later become complicit. Since 2006, following the democratic election victory of Hamas and its allies – a result acknowledged even by the Carter Centre and the late Jimmy Carter himself – Israel, backed by the US, has imposed a strict blockade on the Palestinian enclave. The siege restricts the flow of fuel, electricity, medicine, food, and construction materials, crippling everyday life. Under the false classification of items as dual-use, even basic necessities such as sewing needles, tarpaulins, chocolate, coriander, baby bottles, wedding dresses, and spices have been banned. The blockade has been enforced with the complicity, or at least the inaction, of neighbouring states and the broader international community, rendering them enablers of an ongoing humanitarian crisis perpetrated and reinforced by Israel.
Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide
When Gaza erupted under the pressure of the Israeli siege on October 7, 2023, Israel immediately escalated its actions to genocidal levels, not only by intensifying its siege but also by literally banning everything from entering Gaza and carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing. Backed by the US, Israel violated any acceptable definition of self-defense, aiming not only to kill as many Palestinians as possible but also attempting to empty the enclave. The UN, numerous NGOs, and independent experts have confirmed that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide. The UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories stated that Israel prosecuted its war with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” The International Association of Genocide Scholars reached the same conclusion, and has declared Israel’s war on Gaza to be genocidal, highlighting the deliberate deprivation of conditions necessary for survival. Israel’s actions have killed over 69,000, injured more than 170,000, and displaced the entire population of Gaza of over 2 million people at least once.
Despite these grave accusations, Israeli leaders remain unaccountable. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes, including using starvation as a weapon, but no prosecutions have followed, and the international response has been largely ineffective. The ongoing siege and military operations continue to devastate civilians, destroying homes, infrastructure, and essential services. Despite the ceasefire negotiated on October 10, 2025, Israel continues to restrict aid from entering Gaza, maintaining its suffocating grip on the enclave. The international community’s failure to intervene or hold perpetrators accountable underscores a persistent pattern of impunity.
The Moral Calculus of Sanctions
As these four cases demonstrate, the historical record is clear: sanctions even when framed as “smart” and “targeted” remain blanket punitive measures, which consistently fail to achieve their stated objectives. Instead, they inflict profound suffering on civilian populations, leaving children, women, and vulnerable communities to bear the brunt of poorly conceived policies. The cases examined here reveal a pattern of moral inversion, where the architects of sanctions celebrate ‘success’ while ordinary people endure starvation, destruction, and social collapse.
International law, meant to uphold justice and protect the innocent, offers little real protection. Paradoxically, Article 41 of the UN Charter permits sanctions as diplomatic tools without meaningful limits, enabling Western powers – armed with economic might and strategic influence – to wield them to their own advantage
Sanctions as Instruments of Social Coercion
Sanctions are increasingly used to enforce Western social norms in Global South countries, often tied to access to aid or loans from institutions such as the World Bank. In 2023, the Bank froze new lending to Uganda after its parliament passed a law criminalizing same-sex relations, while Washington imposed its own punitive measures. Similarly, donors in Ghana leveraged financial aid to pressure lawmakers on LGBTQ+ rights, framing it as “human rights conditionality.” In both cases, these demands clashed with prevailing religious and social beliefs. These examples show that sanctions and aid now extend beyond geopolitics or security, reaching deep into cultural, religious, and social life and turning financial instruments into tools of social engineering.
The human cost of these measures is rarely considered. From Gaza to Libya and Afghanistan, blanket sanctions have devastated entire populations for generations. Citizens have suffered under measures that deprived them of food, medicine, and basic necessities, while the international community largely stood by. The enduring suffering underscores the moral failure of sanctions as a tool of coercion. Economic coercion has become a tool of domination, disproportionately punishing the weak while sparing the powerful. This moral inversion betrays the very principles it claims to uphold.
History shows that sanctions rarely punish their intended targets. Instead, they inflict suffering on the innocent, entrench inequality, and reveal the moral contradictions of a world that claims to defend justice while wielding economic power as a weapon.
Mustafa Fetouri is a Libyan academic, journalist and analyst. He is a recipient of the European Union Press Freedom Award.