On 22 February 2024, the ACRPS Iranian Studies Unit (ISU) hosted a public lecture by Maryam Alemzadeh, Associate Professor in History and Politics of Iran at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and a Middle East Centre Fellow. The lecture, titled “Iran’s Military Presence in the Middle East: Do Sanctions and Terrorist Designations Work?,” was moderated by Aicha Elbasri, Researcher at the Arab Center. Alemzadeh’s lecture focused on why sanctions have persisted despite their failure to alter the trajectory of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) extraterritorial activities.

Alemzadeh began by discussing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) role in Iran and the sanctions imposed on the organization and Iran more broadly. She stated that the IRGC is an expansive security, economic, financial, and cultural production that has a significant influence on Iranian politics. The extraterritorial branch of the IRGC, the Quds Force, pursues Iranian regional interests. She briefly mentioned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and how its implementation from 2015 to 2018 provided temporary relief since most of the sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program were lifted. However, the JCPOA had no lasting impact on Iran’s economy.

Following Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, the US further reinstated sanctions against Iran and the Trump administration added the IRGC to the US Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list in 2019. The primary goal of the FTO designation was to restrict Quds Force operations in the region against US forces. Alemzadeh then provided a history of international sanctions against Iran and the IRGC. She argued that terrorism-related sanctions against the IRGC have failed to curb its extraterritorial activities because “the terrorist label provided a strong deterrent factor, but it did not change the mechanism for pressuring Iran”. Alemzadeh further added that sanctions do not have the means to monitor potential extralegal transactions.

To explain why sanctions have failed to limit the extraterritorial activities of the IRGC, Alemzadeh discussed its institutional history and how it became a major power today. The IRGC started as a non-professional revolutionary force that depended on informal setups, local resources, and personal relationships of trust. According to Alemzadeh, “the IRGC preserved some of its reliance on informal and spontaneous action, and its participation in the repression of resilient ethnic uprisings weeks after its formation and its contribution to the government’s relative success of the violent crackdown consolidated the informality and spontaneity as an acceptable mode of operation”. Between 1998 and 2000, the IRGC underwent structural changes, maintaining some of its “revolutionary” traits but growing in terms of security and policing, as well as its “mercantilization” and entrance into financial and infrastructural businesses. The researcher mentioned that the IRGC recruits low-skill combatants and exports drones and ballistic missiles, military and engineering skills, asymmetric warfare advice and potential training. She maintained that “the IRGC has become the expert in operating in a limited area of expertise over the years and as a result remained a largely undetectable force”.

Alemzadeh concluded by discussing why counterterrorism sanctions continued as a strategy and have remained popular despite their ineffectiveness in curbing the IRGC’s extraterritorial activities. She acknowledged that sanctions have further limited Iran’s economy due to the significant role played by the IRGC in the economic sector, and highlighted how sanctions also hampered the IRGC’s domestic gains. She presented a counterargument, stressing that the IRGC not only evades sanctions but also benefits from them. According to Alemzadeh, “sanctions have enabled the IRGC businessmen and their political patrons to engage in even more corruption and extralegal monetary gains in Iran”, and these benefits are more likely to be personal rather than benefiting the IRGC as a corporation at large.