Sanctions as Siege: A Forum on the Impacts of Sanctions on Gender and Women's Lives in the SWANA Region

When one of us, Tamar Shirinian, joined the other, Lucia Sorbera, as coeditors of "Third Space" in June 2023, we started thinking of a thematic focus for this section of the journal. The effects of economic sanctions in the countries of the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa) came to mind as a theme that could allow for a broad interdisciplinary discussion and a necessary one. While scholarship on this issue emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there has been less attention to the theme in recent years.We believe that if a lot has been said, a lot remains to be explored, and the unfolding tragedy in Gaza, lamentably, proves it. In November 2023, as we were putting the final touches on the piece that opens this dossier (written by a Palestinian scholar who discusses the effects of sanctions on Gaza), it became glaringly obvious that feminist scholarship still has a lot to contribute to the discussion of the long-term and devastating effects of a tool of warfare used far too commonly by contemporary imperial powers.

Since World War II the United States has established and maintained global cultural, political, economic, and military hegemony. More recently, although it has frequently made use of military power, the United States has begun to rely more on economic imperatives, especially through the application of economic sanctions. This strategy is not new; its history dates back to the League of Nations' 1935 imposition of sanctions against Italy in the wake of the fascist attack on Ethiopia. Their purpose today, however, presents stark differences to this early use. While sanctions have most often been justified as punishment for human rights violations, harboring terrorists, and possessing weapons of mass destruction, they have also frequently targeted entire populations and not just the organizations or state actors seen as responsible. In many cases, sanctions—no matter how they have been justified—have been used to punish countries that have challenged the US capitalist and neoliberal order. The Middle East region has been a central target of this technology of war and domination. Countries that challenge the cultural, economic, political, and military hegemony of the United States and its allies face dire consequences: economic sanctions that devastate possibilities of trade, destabilize local currencies, and create mass shortages of necessary goods like food, fuel, and medicine. Thus sanctions have a profound impact on those who are already vulnerable—women and others marginalized by patriarchal structures.

Over the next few issues, "Third Space" will be hosting a forum on sanctions, women, gender, and sexuality in which contributors discuss how these policies affect everyday life in the SWANA region. As always, we will be open to contributions not only from academics but also from activists and artists, primarily but not only those who experience the effects of sanctions in their own scholarly, intellectual, artistic, and personal lives. We are interested in discussing not only how sanctions have affected the lives of women, and gendered relations more generally, but also—and especially—how women across the region have organized to face the economic and sociocultural consequences of these policies. In other words, although it is undeniable that sanctions have pernicious effects on women, gender minorities, and other vulnerable segments of society, we believe that it is important to shed light on the capacity of these segments of society to make of their everyday politics of survival not just a form of resistance, but a site of imagining a future that will be free from coloniality. Free, that is, from both nationalist patriarchal and authoritarian regimes and the (post)colonial international order, in which the hegemony of the United States and its allies constitutes a threat to any project aiming to achieve socioeconomic, gender, and environmental justice not only in the SWANA region but in the world at large.