Economic sanctions are frequently described by Western leaders as peaceful instruments of diplomacy, a softer alternative to military conflict. In reality, sanctions have become one of the most destructive weapons of modern geopolitics. They not only target governments or elites; they systematically undermine the daily lives of entire populations. By restricting access to medicine, food, financial resources, and trade, sanctions function as weapons of collective punishment. Far from being neutral tools of international law, they have evolved into a form of civilizational warfare, a way for the West to enforce ideological conformity and suppress resistance to its global dominance.
The history of sanctions reveals their roots in older practices of coercion. Colonial powers frequently employed blockades to starve populations into submission. The British blockade of Germany during the First World War led to widespread famine, just as the American embargo against Cuba after 1960 aimed to punish an entire nation for asserting its independence. In the post–Cold War era, sanctions became central to the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. Iraq in the 1990s, Iran since the revolution of 1979, Venezuela over the past decade, and more recently Russia have all been subjected to sweeping restrictions. The outcomes are consistent: collapsing currencies, shrinking economies, shortages of basic goods, and deepening poverty. Although sanctions are often justified in the name of democracy and human rights, they disproportionately affect ordinary civilians while entrenching authoritarian tendencies in the targeted states.
Nowhere is the civilizational logic of sanctions more evident than in Gaza. For over a decade and a half, Israel, with the support of Western governments, has imposed a blockade that severely restricts the flow of electricity, fuel, food, and medical supplies to over two million Palestinians. The blockade is not designed to change the policy of a government in the narrow sense. It is intended to break the will of an entire people, to render collective life unbearable, and to enforce the idea that certain populations can be deprived of dignity and survival without consequence. This is the essence of civilizational warfare: determining which societies are deemed legitimate and which are marked for containment, deprivation, and gradual destruction.
Yet the picture is more complex than a simple West-versus–Global South divide. Russia, for instance, is not part of the Global South and in the early 2000s even sought partnership with the West. When that door was closed, Moscow gradually redefined itself as a challenger to Western dominance. Although Russia and even China have not borne the costs that countries such as Iran or other resistance actors have paid for multipolarity, the war in Ukraine has pushed Russia into the frontline of confrontation with Western hegemony.
The case of Gaza illustrates another layer. Western governments remain aligned with Israel, but the public mood tells a different story. Since the war that erupted in October 2023, protests and moral outrage have pressured European governments, even prompting cabinet resignations in places like the Netherlands. This does not amount to a coherent state strategy against Israel, but it does reveal that sanctions and blockades increasingly clash with the universal human conscience.
Beyond governments, civil society has also responded through the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), which seeks to impose economic and cultural costs on Israel. Unlike state sanctions, BDS represents a form of “reverse sanctions,” a strategy by the comparatively weak to hold the powerful accountable. Its global resonance underscores that sanctions are not only instruments of domination but can also become tools of resistance.
The contradictions of sanctions also became visible during the Trump era, as some progressive voices have even called for sanctions on the United States itself. The irony is telling: Washington, long presented as the guardian of liberal principles that had once attracted dissidents from the Soviet bloc, was now seen to be undermining those very ideals. Trump’s wall on the Mexican border and his ideological approach to foreign policy marked a departure from the universalism that liberalism had promised. In contrast, even China—authoritarian at home—frames its external relations in terms of trade and pragmatic cooperation, closer in practice to Adam Smith’s liberal vision than to Washington’s increasingly exclusionary stance. These reversals suggest that the crisis of liberalism is not only external but internal to the West itself.
Sanctions expose the contradictions of the liberal order. Liberalism presents itself as the guardian of universal rights, free markets, and human equality. Yet sanctions demonstrate the selective and exclusionary character of this discourse. When the United States can unilaterally freeze the financial reserves of Afghanistan, when Venezuelan oil revenues can be seized, or when Iranian banks can be cut off from the global system, it becomes clear that international finance is not a neutral space. It is a weapon wielded by the powerful against the comparatively weak, justified under the language of legality but functioning as an instrument of domination. Liberalism’s claim to universality collapses when entire societies are deliberately immiserated in its name.
Paradoxically, sanctions are accelerating the very transformations they are meant to prevent. Instead of preserving Western hegemony, they are hastening its decline. Faced with exclusion from dollar-based networks, many states in the Global South are turning to alternative arrangements. The expansion of the BRICS grouping, the growing influence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and new forms of South–South cooperation all reflect an effort to reduce dependence on Western-controlled systems. Russia and China increasingly trade in their own currencies, Iran has joined the SCO, and even states traditionally aligned with the West, such as Saudi Arabia, are exploring new partnerships. These developments signal not just pragmatic adaptation but a deeper rejection of the assumption that the West alone can define the rules of global order.
The logic of civilizational warfare, then, produces resistance at a civilizational level. Nations of the Global South, though diverse in history and ideology, share an experience of exclusion and coercion. Sanctions, by attacking the material basis of their societies, have also fostered new solidarities. They encourage the imagination of a multipolar future in which no single bloc monopolizes legitimacy or access to the global commons. While the contours of this order remain uncertain, its emergence demonstrates that coercion breeds alternatives. The more Washington and Brussels resort to sanctions, the more they compel others to experiment with new alignments, financial instruments, and political narratives.
This is not to suggest that the post-Western order will be free of contradictions or inequalities. Multipolarity does not automatically guarantee justice. But it does mark a fundamental shift: the recognition that the West’s monopoly on defining norms and enforcing compliance is eroding. Sanctions, intended to discipline dissenting states, have instead highlighted the fragility of Western leadership and the limits of its ideological claims. They reveal a system willing to sacrifice human dignity in pursuit of geopolitical advantage. In so doing, they strengthen the resolve of those who seek a different path.
Sanctions today are the battlefield where civilizations confront one another without open warfare. They weaponize economics to enforce hierarchies of value, deciding which lives can flourish and which can be diminished. Yet in this very violence lies the seed of transformation. By exposing the contradictions of liberalism and forcing the Global South to imagine alternatives, sanctions may ultimately contribute to the birth of a new order. The struggle against them is not only about sovereignty or survival; it is about redefining the principles of justice and coexistence in a multipolar world. The outcome remains uncertain, but one lesson is already clear: civilizational warfare through sanctions cannot indefinitely suppress the aspirations of societies that demand dignity, independence, and a future beyond Western domination.