Episode 68 - Emrah Yildiz

Economic Sanctions, Aimed at Global Isolation, Generate Regional Connections

Theme: Global Governance

Published: 8 December 2025

Summary
In this SCAS Talks episode within our theme ”Global Governance”, anthropologist Emrah Yildiz discusses his research on economic sanctions. He argues that rather than achieving global isolation, sanctions often compel targeted countries to develop new regional connections and alternative economic strategies.

Emrah Yildiz provides compelling examples, including Russia's "shadow fleet" for oil transport and Iran's extensive cross-border trade with Turkey, where commodities like tobacco and gold become de facto currencies to circumvent financial restrictions. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's concept of "fictitious commodities," he illustrates how people creatively adapt, turning ordinary goods into mechanisms for bypassing economic controls. The discussion also explores tariffs as economic weapons, emphasizing the unexpected adaptations and resourcefulness that emerge when global governance systems are challenged.

Keywords
Global governance, economic sanctions, cross-border trade, tariffs, regional connections

Suggested Link/s
SCAS Page: Emrah Yildiz

Transcript of the Episode

Emrah Yildiz 00:00
And this is where my research comes in, because what I've found in my research is that these regimes of economic sanctions that often close off the financial pipelines of a global economy to a country does not isolate the country. But it actually compels that country and its administration to find different ways of connecting to different kinds of states.

Natalie von der Lehr 00:36
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode, I talk to Emrah Yildiz, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University in the USA, and a Global Horizons Junior fellow at SCAS during the academic year of 2024/2025. Emrah Yildiz is a sociocultural anthropologist of cross border mobility and region formation, and today we will, among other things, talk about his current book project with the working title "Outsmarting Smart Sanctions". And this is the fifth episode on our theme "Global Governance". Very welcome to SCAS Talks and the studio.

Emrah Yildiz 01:21
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:22
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Emrah Yildiz 01:26
I'm a sociocultural anthropologist interested in cross border, mobility and region formation, particularly between Iran, Turkey and Syria. I have researched and written about pilgrimage, saints and mobility in Islam, contraband, commerce, money and sanctions, as well as queer asylum, or sexuality based asylum and borders between Iran, Turkey and Germany.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:53
Very interesting topics, and we will talk about some of that today. Can you give us an overview of your current project, "Outsmarting smart sanctions"?

Emrah Yildiz 02:04
Sure. So this will be my second monograph, and it investigates the relationship between economic sanctions as a technology of global governance and cross border trade in a particular set of commodities as a method of their mitigation, if not circumvention. And the research is based on statistical analysis of publicly available data, archival sources, as well as field work across Iran and Turkey.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:34
Yes, if we take a little step back to sanctions in general, how do they work? Or at least, how are they supposed to work?

Emrah Yildiz 02:43
Sanctions are usually thought as a less costly technology of global governance compared to military intervention or to invoke an Americanism boots on the ground. And they're meant, at least in theory, as temporary measures to bring a country that's found to be in violation of international norms and global governance structures and compel that state to come back to the diplomatic negotiation table where the differences could be settled. Now there are two problems with, or there are two presuppositions behind this, right. One is that economic sanctions are available to each and every country in this global system of international norms, which is untrue, because, as we have seen also most recently, it's really the printer of global reserve currencies, who can sanction other states. In other words, if Iran were to sanction Turkey, that might not necessarily have the biggest impact. Whereas, when the US as the printer of the global reserve currency sanctions a country, it becomes increasingly difficult for that country to conduct business using conventional financial pipelines like Swift, for instance. So that's number one, and number two is that we don't necessarily talk a whole lot about how sanctions also function for domestic audiences as a feel good mechanism of having done or addressed immediately an injustice. What do I mean by this? One, I think recent and ongoing example, is European Union sanctions on Russia. In many ways, this ruled out the military intervention part, it created the image that the European Union was doing something in order to address Russia's war of aggression on Ukraine. And yet, precisely because Russia is not North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba or Iran, and these are the most sanctioned countries in the world, historically speaking, the sanctions didn't necessarily deliver the crippling effects. That the designers behind these sanctions had purported to hold in Russia's economy, there was a dip, just like in any sanction regime. And regime is key, because again, that second part about the temporariness of sanctions actually doesn't hold true. They tend to be prolonged episodes of trying to isolate a country, and this is where my research comes in, because what I've found in my research is that these regimes of economic sanctions that often close off the financial pipelines of a global economy to a country does not isolate the country, but it actually compels that country and its administration to find different ways of connecting to different kinds of states.

Natalie von der Lehr 05:53
So could you give us an example?

Emrah Yildiz 05:56
One recent example would be the shadow fleet that moves Russian oil that is under US and EU sanctions. An investigative journalism collectives report recently published, and for those of us in the audience who might be interested, it's called "Follow the money journalism collective", there were 273 I think, vessels that were reserved for scrap in European headquartered logistical farms, primarily in Greece, Denmark, Germany and Great Britain, that were sold to Russia in order to transport their oil. So what do we have now, after almost two and a half years of sanctions on Russia? We have a completely parallel maritime infrastructure of moving oil and natural gas with absolutely no qualms or constraints that would otherwise be in place by international governance. And these pertain not only to how states interact in a global governance framework, but how these maritime vessels, too old and meant to be destroyed and recycled, cause a liability issue as far as climate change is concerned. So we had a few accidents already with oil leaks in the Black Sea. This is all to say, when sanctions say we're going to isolate a country, but cannot isolate the country, what's put at stake is not necessarily only the targeted country's populations, but the very norms of global governance that make our world global. In other words, when that oil leak happens in Black Sea, that leak is going to travel through the Marmara straits into the Aegean and the Mediterranean. And we know this from previous experiences like the Chernobyl disaster. We don't need, I think, more disasters in that particular region to see how connected we are.

Natalie von der Lehr 08:04
Exactly, in the end of the day, it's one world. As you say, it's a global, we are a global community, so what affects one part of the world will also affect the rest.

Emrah Yildiz 08:13
Absolutely.

Natalie von der Lehr 08:14
Just to remind our listeners, you mentioned the sanctions against Iran that have been ongoing since 2012. What was that about? Or what is that about?

Emrah Yildiz 08:23
So there was a breakthrough in 2012 where, so called five plus one, so multiple European Union actors, as well as United Nations Security Council members, as well as the US, sat on the table and negotiated with Iran on their nuclear enrichment program. So in exchange for halting their nuclear enrichment program, these Western powers said that some of the sanctions on Iran, not the sectoral ones, say on military equipment, but the economic and financialized sanctions, would be lifted. And it was a breakthrough, because for a second there, we thought sanctions actually did deliver what they were supposed to deliver, namely pulling a country found to be in violation of norms to the diplomatic negotiation table. And yet, while the agreement was in place and people were trying to, starting to see the first effects of sanctions relief trickling down, under the first Trump administration in 2018 Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal as it was known, and introduced secondary and tertiary sanctions. So in other words, the sanctions regime got even harsher. But what was really interesting about the 2012 sanctions and the built up towards the diplomatic negotiation was that the US, which levied all kinds of sanctions on Iran since Iran nationalized its oil fields, so this is actually prior to the Iranian Revolution, and we tend to think that sanctions come kind of coeval with the 1979 revolution, and yet the first prompt for the US sanctions is actually when Iranian government, under Mossadegh decides to kick British Petroleum out of its fields and says, as of now, our oil, our most important resource, is nationalized, and this is when the US sanctions are introduced. Now let's go forward to 2012, what was specific about them was that UN resolutions of the Security Council backed the US sanctions. So the sanctions regime became not only unilateral, but multi dimensional, multilateral and Swift, the Brussels headquartered, essentially financial pipeline of our banking system, globally speaking, where we need an IBAN number to forward money or receive money. Swift signed on to this last push to bring Iran to the negotiating table, and said we were not going to process any transactions out of Iran, which essentially unplugged Iran from global economy. So this was really the part that was quite significant in 2012 before the Trump administration pulled out of the negotiations.

Natalie von der Lehr 11:20
And what's the status now of these sanctions, and what has happened?

Emrah Yildiz 11:26
With the second Trump administration, we have gotten another layer of sanctions levied on Iran. And if the goal was to halt the nuclear enrichment program in the country, it had the opposite effect again. And that now Iran has more enriched uranium than ever before. While the administration does maintain that this is for peaceful purposes, and yet this enriched uranium is very close to be that grade of nuclear material that's used for weapon making.

Natalie von der Lehr 12:02
So still, quite an intricate situation there.

Emrah Yildiz 12:05
Yeah, absolutely.

Natalie von der Lehr 12:07
You mentioned this alternative fleet that sort of lives its own life almost. Do you have any other examples of how to circumvent these kind of sanctions?

Emrah Yildiz 12:19
So when I look at this relationship between economic sanctions as a technology of governance and cross border trade as its method of mitigation. One of the things that I see is, one of the takeaways is, as these economic sanctions got more and more financialized over the years, targeting more abstract levels of say, a value ladder. People responded by not trying to find ways up in that ladder of, say, financialized transactions, but they scaled down their methods of mitigating these effects by investing in cross border commodity trade. And in that framework, two states became really central for cross class segments of Iranian society to mitigate the effects of sanctions. One was Turkey and the other one was the United Arab Emirates. Both places were very well connected to global financial hubs, particularly Dubai and Istanbul. In addition, Turkey in particular, was exempted from following the sanctions in 2012 alongside six other countries citing that they were too reliant on Iranian natural gas and oil to unplug that supply chain that quickly. We had similar arguments made against following sanctions on Russia in Europe by states like Slovakia, Serbia and Czech Republic, where they said, we're too reliant on this resource and we can't really switch things around that quickly. In the case of Turkey, this created this not exempted status, and this adjacency to Iran, because it's a neighboring country where there are no visas for travel, which is a rarity for Iranian passport holders. When these two things came together, we ended up with almost a sanction specific economy. It created this zone of exchange, and the tokens of exchange, precisely because the national currency was under so much pressure, became these different commodities. And here I'm going to get a little technical, if I may. There's a wonderful social theorist called Karl Polanyi, and he makes a distinction between two sets of commodities, one genuine commodities produced, circulated and consumed in terms of a sale network, and then those commodities that he calls fictitious, namely, money, land and labor that are not meant for sale, but we act as if they were. And the book tries to make an argument in showing that it's the fictitious commodities that people are experimenting with, precisely because even under, say, quote unquote, normal economic parameters, they're the ones that are most fabricated in terms of their value. Just to give one example, there is abundant land in the world. There should be enough land for everyone, unless we uphold the concept of private property. Once we get into that, we create a market for something that's actually really abundant in the world. It's called nature. So in that sense, it is this fiction that we have written and then forgotten about, that land, labor and money are not only abundant, but they're not produced for sale. Money is not produced at all, right. Labor, one could say it's just another word that we give to things that are meaningful to us, that we do in the world. So these are all kinds of different examples that Polanyi gives to essentially tell us a very compelling history of economic liberalism, and he describes the evolution of economic liberalism through a double movement. He says, essentially, the way we understand capitalism, how it developed, sits on a double movement. The first is the expansion of market logics of genuine commodities, and the second is the restriction of fictitious commodities. To make it a little bit more palpable, in the first axis of movement, we want everyone to have iPhones. We want everyone to have BMWs and Volvos, right? So you push, push, push for making people consume as many genuine commodities as one produces. Whereas, in the case of land, labor and money, there are restrictions. Not everyone can have this. In fact, they're rendered scarce, right? So what do economic sanctions do to a national economy that is supposed to be based on this double movement of advanced capitalism? What I've found in my research is that it inverts that relationship, so it renders scares genuine commodities to a market, whereas it proliferates, really opens up for rewriting that fictitious commodities jar that we had left on the side and forgotten that we built it. What do I mean by this? So once the genuine commodities are restricted under sanctions, the oil industry or the aviation industry in Iran have no spare parts. Just one very immediate effect, there are more airplane accidents in Iran than anywhere else in the world. Why is that? Because their planes are extremely old and they cannot be repaired because they have no formal access to spare parts, right. What's an example on the fictitious commodities side, these highly financialized economic sanctions that were levied on Iran in 2012 pushed the Iranian Rial to its lowest relative value against the US dollar. About three months in, particularly after the European Union also signed on alongside Swift, the Iranian rial lost 80% of its value. Now to zoom back for a second again, the way we understand modern money should deliver certain functions to its users. We tend to think of it as a method of payment, or unit of account, a medium of exchange, and yet, there is one particular element that's really, really key, and it's asymmetrically distributed across different currencies, and that is being able to store wealth or hold value over time. Only a few currencies in our global monetary system, called reserve currencies, can hold value over time. Most other currencies understood as soft or exchange currencies can't hold value over time. When you put a soft currency under the pressures of economic sanctions, not only does it lose value, these different functions also disintegrate. When the very value of the token of equivalence that are supposed to create equivalences between commodities keeps shifting, then one doesn't really know what a kilogram of tomatoes would cost, right. Because the money value that latter is not stable. That is moving. So as you can imagine, this is a lot of chaotic movement out of which people then have to experiment. And just as a reminder to our listeners, there is no credit in Iran, the way we understand credit, there are no credit cards because the banking system is internally regulated, and most of our credit card companies are US companies like Visa, MasterCard, etc. So in that sense, people start experimenting with things and cross border trade with Turkey, in particular, where there are no visas in place, where Turkey is exempted from following the sanctions, become one viable route of mitigating. So what is one example of this? Tobacco becomes an important token of storing this value that otherwise would be trapped in the Iranian rial for the purposes of just crossing the border to Turkey, and due to Turkey's taxation regimes, there's a seven fold price difference between a pack of cigarettes in Iran and one in Turkey. This might sound very similar to how in Europe itself, people would cross borders to buy commodities on the other side of the border. In fact, it creates all these really interesting, what I found fascinating, chains of people from Sweden going to Finland to buy alcohol, and people from Finland going to Estonia to buy alcohol, and then people from Estonia going to Poland to buy alcohol. This is just one example. So in that sense, what Iranians are experimenting with is not radically different from how we mitigate these artificial price differences for the same commodities that are buttressed on borders, but it's an intensification or amplification of the same type of issues in part because at least in this part of the world, currencies are taken to be fairly stable, so people don't necessarily need to find another store of wealth. And that chain idea that I've just described is pertinent here as well, because it only starts with tobacco. It doesn't end with tobacco. After people cross with copious amounts of tobacco, and increasingly, this is of more recent vintage, with gold, they tend to use the money that they've acquired in Turkish Liras to buy Euros or Dollars, which are in scarce supply in Iran. So in many ways, it's these genuine commodities that are facilitating a trade in money which is a fictitious commodity. And this is the part that I find most fascinating from the research that I've conducted so far.

Natalie von der Lehr 22:45
When I hear you talking, I'm thinking it all makes sense, of course, when you explain it, but also I'm thinking that we as humans, we are very creative, and if somebody tells us not to do something, then we will find a way around it, right? I mean, just think about teenagers not being allowed to go out, they might find a way.

Emrah Yildiz 23:05
Absolutely

Natalie von der Lehr 23:06
And I think in the same way when you put these sanctions and then you put it on a whole country, to me, it seems, of course, it's easy to say, it's logic, after listening to you, that both leaders and the normal citizens, so to say, will find ways to make it anyway.

Emrah Yildiz 23:22
Exactly. And not only are we creative, we're also incredibly resourceful creatures. So to go back to the tobacco example, thanks to a colleague here at SCAS, I learned quite a bit about how tobacco functions as money in prisons where the space is by law demonetized unless one gets remittances from visitors. So in an environment where the token of equivalence or the medium of payment or the unit of account is removed, people are resourceful in their creative rewriting of these fictions. And in many ways, that's why I think of what people have to do under sanctions as another form of experimentation that is very intensified and amplified, but not exceptional to how we deal with fluctuations of purchasing power, inflation and of more recent vintage tariffs in our lives.

Natalie von der Lehr 24:27
And mentioning tariffs, we are recording this in the beginning of April 2025, we should maybe say to the listeners, there are a lot of tariffs right now. The European Union has put tariffs on American import and vice versa. What are your thoughts on these tariffs that we see right now?

Emrah Yildiz 24:44
That's an excellent question, and it's very much a moving target. We're not exactly sure what the effects or how intensive the effects will be. But from my point of view, I see tariffs and sanctions coming from the same source, namely, the weaponization of reserve currencies, and in this particular case, the weaponization of the US dollar. If I were to make a rather broad stroke distinction, it seems like tariffs are being levied against former allies, and sanctions are being levied against what these states have found as belligerent, non compliant rogue states as far as global governance norms are concerned. But they point to the same thing, right? And that sanctions or tariffs are weapons. One could call that of destruction or of persuasion. That's, let's say, up for a little bit more debate. But what that points to is that we don't forge war in contemporary times, only with boots on the ground, but by manipulating economic parameters, rules and regulations. And what are some of the immediate effects of both economic sanctions and tariffs? The costs associated with them will be passed on to the consumers. So in other words, yes, state officials will complain about how, for instance, in the case of tariffs, these are against our expectations of a free market economy, it's in violation of long standing political and economic allegiances, and yet their effects cannot be mitigated, besides making them trickle down to consumers. So what will be the end effect? You know, wonderful Swedish meatballs will cost, instead of nine euros, it will cost 13, 14, euros. Or a wonderful French wine in the US, if Trump does follow through with his 200% tariff on alcohol coming out of Europe, will be almost unattainable for people to enjoy with dinner. And these are the parts that are most intriguing to me as an anthropologist, because I think precisely because people are so creative and resourceful and yet are also embedded in particular cultures, places and histories, they respond to these things differently. So one very silly example, you would remember maybe, of the US changing the name of French fries to freedom fries. For a lot of people, this was incomprehensible, and people didn't understand what that meant. But if the last example of changing the name of Gulf Mexico to Gulf of America serves as an indication this seems to be a cultural practice of rewriting things again as a method of positioning one higher precisely because that particular person, that country, perhaps, is feeling a lot more fragile than ever before. So I see tariffs as an indication of that fragility, but I don't necessarily see them bringing us to a good place.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:15
So you're a fellow here at SCAS during this academic year, 2024/2025. What is your experience of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment so far?

Emrah Yildiz 28:25
It has been an absolute delight to be here on every single front. I have had wonderful, thought provoking, sometimes book defining conversations with my fellow fellows. But beyond the wonderful friendships, the collegiality that I've experienced, what Swedish Collegium has built here, is quite exceptional in providing us the resources, the time, the space to think together, write together, eat together, and my God, that food that is delicious, delicious food so it gives us, literally and figuratively, food for thought.

Natalie von der Lehr 29:14
Thank you very much for joining me here in the studio and our listeners.

Emrah Yildiz 29:18
Thank you for having me.

Natalie von der Lehr 29:26
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, I have talked to Emrah Yildiz, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University in the US. Emrah Yildiz was a Global Horizons Junior fellow at SCAS during the academic year of 2024/2025. We have talked about sanctions and their circumventions, and also touched upon tariffs. This episode was recorded in April 2025 and is the fifth episode in our theme "Global Governance". The previous episodes within this theme have featured Bruce Carruthers, who told us more about "Trust credit and credit ratings as the basis of a modern economy", David Ciepley on "Constitutional democracy and the corporation", Jenny Andersson, who talked about "Neoliberalism in the Nordic countries" and Valbona Muzaka on "The financialization of the covid-19 vaccine and governance of global health". And these are episodes 10, 11, 15, and 47 if you want to listen. SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the Collegium. We are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we are very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. SCAS Talks is available on podbean, Apple podcast, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Emrah Yildiz once again for talking to me, and of course, thanks to you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai