Research Topic Title: A feminist international political economy of sanctions: social reproduction, labour and survival in Iran
My ESRC research project is structured around two interlocking questions: first, how to make feminist sense of economic sanctions as economic tools of imperial and geopolitical power; and second, how sanctions-induced crises have reconfigured gendered regimes of labour, survival, and social reproduction in Iran.
Since the post–Cold War era, economic and financial sanctions have become routinised technologies of global governance, occupying a central place within the global political economy. Yet they remain strikingly under-theorised within critical feminist scholarship. My research draws on insights from feminist Marxist, feminist political economy, and feminist post/decolonial scholarship to develop a decolonial feminist account of sanctions as a constitutive—yet neglected—dimension of the global political economy, often imposed on the countries in the South. I pursue this analysis through the case of Iran under the intensified sanctions regime imposed since 2012.
Mobilising the analytic lens of social reproduction, I develop a novel qualitative feminist framework that traces the gendered effects of sanctions across the everyday and state policy. Engaging feminist IPE debates on the state, crisis, and social reproduction, I demonstrate how sanctions have entrenched and reworked gendered structures of inequality and violence in Iran. In particular, my work maps shifting gendered regimes of labour, social reproduction, and survival across multiple sites—from state economic and social policy, to households, and into informal economies. In doing so, my work also advances a feminist political economy of gendered violence by foregrounding the often-overlooked role of material conditions in producing gendered insecurity in Iran.
This ESRC project builds on my doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Warwick in 2024, and makes original theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to debates on sanctions, gendered violence, and social reproduction. My research has been recognised with several awards, including the 2025 Elizabeth Wiskemann Prize from the Political Studies Association for the best PhD dissertation on (In)Equality and Social Justice, and the 2025 Leigh Douglas Memorial Prize for the best PhD dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic.
Publications
A Feminist International Political Economy of Sanctions: Crises and the Shifting Gendered Regimes of Labor and Survival in Iran. International Feminist Journal of Politics (2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2025.2454462
Economic Warfare, War Economy, and Gendered Circuits of Violence in Iran (2025), in War Economy: Gendered Circuits of Violence and Capital. Editted by Aida Hozic and Jacqui True. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/War-Economy-Gendered-Circuits-of-Violence-and-Capital/Hozic-True/p/book/9781032935591
Locations of Depletion, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society (2025), https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxaf047
Mentor: Prof Adam Hanieh
Email: A.Abdi@exeter.ac.uk
My bluesky: @drasmaabdi.bsky.social