Rethinking Sanctions Through Feminist Methodologies

Sanctions research remains dominated by positivist and quantitative approaches that privilege state behaviour, effectiveness, and policy outcomes. These approaches have produced valuable insights into international governance and coercive diplomacy, but they also reproduce blind spots. Chief among them is the absence of feminist methodological perspectives capable of illuminating how sanctions are lived, negotiated, and resisted in everyday contexts. This paper asks how feminist methodologies can contribute to the study of sanctions, methodologically, epistemologically, and ethically. Feminist methodologies challenge conventional assumptions about objectivity and neutrality in research. They foreground positionality: the situatedness of knowledge and the entanglement of researcher, subject, and context. In an age where data are politicised and narratives contested, acknowledging how researchers shape and are shaped by the research process becomes crucial. Feminist methodologies thus reframe research not as the extraction of information, but as a relational, reflexive, and ethical practice attentive to voice, care, and accountability. This paper argues that applying feminist methodologies to sanctions research can shift analytical focus from state-centred models toward the social and material worlds that sanctions reconfigure. It emphasizes the need to include the perspectives of those most affected, civilians navigating shortages, informal economies, and new dependencies rather than focusing solely on policymakers or elites. These methodological reflections are grounded in the case of Iran, where decades of sanctions have reshaped social relations, labour patterns, and care economies. Drawing on my qualitative fieldwork and interviews, I illustrate how feminist methodologies make visible the everyday negotiations, emotional labour, and adaptive strategies that sustain life under economic constraint. Understanding how people perceive the effect of sanctions offers valuable inside for the deeper understanding of their effects. By integrating feminist methodological insights into sanctions research, the paper contributes to broader efforts to pluralize epistemologies in international relations. It invites a reimagining of research as a political and ethical practice.