For years, sociologists and political scientists have warned that sanctions do not work. They do not topple targeted governments; instead, they hurt their citizens. And yet, the use of sanctions has only expanded, with the US leading the charge. As a result, there is now increasing evidence that this over-reliance on such punitive measures has led to their growing ineffectiveness. The US-Israel war on Iran has made that all the more obvious.The conflict carries the potential to push further the process of weakening the effect of US sanctions, which had already been ongoing, and reshape the preferences of both regional and global actors through different mechanisms, including de-dollarisation, alternative trading methods such as barter, and informal transfer networks like hawala.The US relies on the dominance of its currency in global trade to leverage the sanctions it imposes. Sanctioned states are unable to carry out sanctioned trade because buyers and sellers process payments in dollars.The spread of cryptocurrency as an alternative payment method across the world has provided a way to circumvent this problem. Over the past few years, Iran has come to heavily rely on cryptocurrency for financial transactions.A report by blockchain data platform Chainanalysis shows that cryptocurrency flows to sanctioned entities went up rem …
