[TEASER] Iran Pt. 2: The Impacts of Economic Strangulation w/ Elina Xenophontos

Upstream

Politics, News, Society & Culture

4.9 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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In Part 2 of our ongoing series on Iran, Elina Xenophontos joins us to discuss the history and impacts of sanctions on Iran—including the impacts on the current crisis in the country. Elina Xenophontos is an international law and economic globalisation specialist. She produces much of her own material on her Substack and is also featured regularly on the Colonial Outcasts podcast.

Our conversation begins with a very deep dive into the history of the sanctions imposed on Iran from the 1979 Islamic Revolution to the present, providing a detailed understanding of exactly how the sanctions have impacted the Islamic Republic's economic and political spheres for the past half decade. We then situate the unrest in Iran in the context of the sanctions, urging those in the West to understand what's happening in Iran from a dialectical and historical materialist analysis which understands Iranian agency and grievances as a direct result of imperialist strangulation.

Elina then gives us a 101 on the Islamic Republic's internal political forces and factions, outlining their tensions, dynamics, and ideological orientations. We then discuss Iran's political economy, discussing how the sanctions have shaped Iran's class dynamics and its society more broadly and how the sanctions are a barrier to working class organization and revolution in Iran because they engender a rentier economy not rooted in production but in survival and perpetual crisis.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode, thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers
0:06.2	for making upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to
0:12.9	create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so we can continue to offer
0:18.6	political education media for the public and help to build our
0:22.1	movement. Thank you, comrades. as a response to a specific political crisis, you know, a very defining feature of Iran's relationship with the West for more than four decades.
0:55.0	You know, what began as a response to a specific political crisis in 1979,
1:00.0	gradually vaulted into one of the most extensive, a long-lasting sanctions regimes in modern history.
1:06.8	And, yeah, over time, sanctions shifted from narrow punitive measures into structural force,
1:13.1	shaping Iran's economy, its internal class dynamics, and its political trajectory,
1:18.7	which is why we cannot have a legitimate conversation about Iran,
1:21.9	nor even about the internal repression of the IRGC,
1:25.9	without understanding how imperialist violence in the former sanctions
1:29.4	generated the current material realities on the ground. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.
1:36.8	Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn
1:42.0	everything you thought you knew about the world around you.
1:45.6	I'm Della Duncan.
1:46.9	And I'm Robert Raymond.
1:48.6	It's impossible to understand Iran without understanding the sanctions imposed upon it.
1:55.0	Not just merely acknowledging that sanctions are hurting people, they very much obviously are,
2:00.1	but that sanctions have shaped Iranian society
2:03.2	in the most fundamental ways, not just its inflationary crisis,
2:07.9	but the orientation of the state towards its citizens,
	...

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