Economic Sanctions, Mental Effects and Political Action: Case Study of University of Tehran's Students

Economic sanctions and the scale on which they affect citizens and government of the target state, have always been one of the most interesting, yet controversial topics in International Relations and Foreign Policy studies. In spite of all the various scientific hypotheses available, the impact scale of such sanctions is not yet fully manifested. Nevertheless, the majority of the research carried out in this area considers the legal and economical aspects of sanctions. In this research, however, a new aspect of sanction impacts on citizens of the target country is to be studied. Therefore, the mental and psychical impacts of sanctions imposed by the United States of America on Iranian citizens’ political demands and the level of their political participation will be the research’s subject matter. Since a statistical and quantitative method is used in this research and also considering the fact that analyzing the mental impacts of sanctions on all Iranian citizens is improbable, the students of Tehran University are considered as the statistical population in this case study. The identification of the factors in order to evaluate the hypothesis’ variables has been done through literature review studies in this field. According to the research hypothesis; effective sanctions on citizens, result in higher levels of political behavior and their demands would incline toward more economical matters. However, the results prove the early hypothesis somehow inaccurate: although the level of political behavior is high in those individuals who considered sanctions “effective”, their claims are more of a meaningful civil and political matter. Such traits seem to be related to peculiar characteristics of the statistical population: the students of Tehran University. Reevaluating the early hypothesis is possible in case the statistical population grows larger. It is noteworthy to mention that the data is obtained from surveys distributed among students of Tehran University and statistically analyzed by means of SPSS software.