IT is estimated that during 2012-21, wars and conflicts caused half a million deaths a year, with civilians being most of the casualties. However, an important study has concluded that during the same period almost the same number, or perhaps slightly more, deaths were caused by sanctions annually. These unilateral sanctions were imposed for the most part by the United States and secondly by Europe, while the impact of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations did not result in as many deaths probably because of the care taken in the context of most (but not all) of its sanctions to avoid causing much harm to civilians.
The study titled ‘Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality, a cross-national panel data analysis’, authored by Prof Francisco Rodrigues, Dr Silvio Rendon and Dr Mark Weisbrot, was published in 2025 in The Lancet Global Health journal.
The study concluded that during 2012-2021 the average annual number of deaths caused by unilateral sanctions was 564,258 (the toll taken by all sanctions was somewhat higher). The age-group most affected was children below five years of age and the elderly people from 60 to 80 years. Nearly half of the deaths are likely to have been those of small children. This comes out more clearly if earlier years are also examined and the data base of this study goes back to 1971.
While the UN has also imposed some sanctions, these have not resulted for the most part in noticeably high mortality. The reason for this is likely to be that in such cases special care is taken to reduce any serious harm to civilians. On the other hand, the study points out, US sanctions “often aim to create conditions conducive to regime change or shifts in political behaviour, with the deterioration in living conditions in target countries in some cases being acknowledged by policy makers as part of the intended mechanism through which objectives are to be attained.
“The US — and to a lesser extent Europe —also has important mechanisms at its disposal that serve to amplify the economic and human effects of sanctions including those linked to the widespread use of the US dollar and the euro in international banking transactions and as global reserve currencies, and the extraterritorial application of sanctions, particularly by the USA.”
The reach of sanctions has been increasing, and so have the adverse impacts. While during the 1960s about 8% of countries experienced sanctioned, the percentage in 2012-21 had increased to 25.
Woodrow Wilson, US President from 1913 to 1921, had stated that sanctions were “more tremendous than war.” This study supports this view, adding that “it is hard to think of other policy interventions with such adverse effects on human life that continue to be pervasively used.”
While this study covers the situation up to 2021, it can be clearly seen today that the situation has aggravated further, resulting in mass distress, stress and discontent in several countries.
Depending on local conditions, sanctions can lead to disruption of trade, imports, exports, currency, availability of goods and utilities of daily need and their price, massive loss of livelihoods, serious harm to health and food systems, breakdown of supply chains, shortages of goods and materials of critical importance, stress and uncertainty, all of which can harm tens of millions of people, resulting in adverse health impacts and even death.
Serious questions need to be raised regarding the ethics of achieving (questionable) foreign policy objectives by causing the untimely death of several hundred thousand people, a majority of them likely to be children, year after year.
What is more, the fact that sanctions have been used very widely and frequently has not meant that open warfare and attacks as well as proxy wars have been given up by the richest and most powerful countries. These have also been highly destructive, as is evident from the so-called war on terror that has continued for the most part of this century.
When the US-based Brown University’s Costs of War project had estimated the direct deaths resulting from violence (actual fighting, bombing etc.) caused by the US’s post 9/11 war on terror at about 920,000 (a little less than a million, or 0.9 million) then many people were shocked. However, even at that time the researchers had cautioned that this was merely the number of deaths which were directly caused by the wars. They had added that if all the indirect deaths related to the war on terror are also counted (for example deaths caused later by diseases resulting from destruction of sanitation and health facilities in the bombings), then the number of casualties may turn out to be much higher; in fact, several times more.
Later this project also released its estimates of the indirect deaths caused in the war on terror. These indirectly caused deaths have been estimated at 3.6 to 3.7 million. If these are added to the direct deaths caused earlier, the total number goes up to 4.5 million to 4.6 million. So, the total deaths are about five times the number of direct deaths.
The details of reaching this estimate have been provided in a thoroughly researched and thickly referenced paper meaningfully titled ‘How Death Outlives War—the Reverberating Impact of the Post 9/11 Wars on Human Health’. This important paper written by Stephanie Savell is on the one hand a confirmation of past trends (such as in the Korean War) that indirect death continue long after the actual war and can be much higher than the immediate war deaths, and on the other hand this is also very important from the point of view of an assessment of the costs of war which is close to reality in the context of recent wars. Hence this study is of great importance for peace activists and movements all over the world for taking their message of promoting peace and opposing wars among more and more people.
While this study states clearly that the total death toll in the post 9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen could be at least 4.5 million to 4.6 million, it also says that so many aspects of life are affected by war that very precise estimates may not be possible to obtain and even these estimates are presented in a situation of still counting. As the number of serious malnourished children affected by ‘wasting’ is reported to be very high in these countries, hunger and deprivation are widespread, the tragedy is still continuing.
While the main estimate appears to be concentrated on the five countries mentioned above, the tragic situation in some other countries like Somalia and Libya has also been discussed in this report. In the context of Somalia in particular it is also mentioned that in view of the serious famine-like conditions prevailing there, the counter-terrorism laws could also have adversely affected the relief efforts badly needed by the starving people.
An important point in the study is that while war-devastated countries may lose much of the attention of the world and ‘the international community’ once the actual fighting ends, in many contexts the longer-term effects of war continue to cause more and more deaths, disabilities and distress. What is more, these deaths may even increase with the passage of time. In the case of Iraq, the number of children facing birth defects and disabilities may be very high, although this has been denied by others. There are several such examples of the longer-term health hazards of several extremely dangerous weapons, bombs and ammunitions.
In the contexts of several victim countries but perhaps most clearly in the context of Iraq, there appears to be a very strong case of a very large number of entirely avoidable deaths of entirely innocent people having been exposed to very painful injuries, disabilities and diseases. Hence there is a very strong justice-based case for damages being paid by the main perpetrators of violence to the victims. This reasoning should also be extended to paying compensatory payments for the adverse impacts of sanctions.
Many of those who have suffered in these wars have also suffered from sanctions. There should also be estimates of the number of people who die or suffer very serious harm because of the joint impact of wars, conflicts and one-sided attacks (direct as well as indirect impacts) and of various kinds of sanctions. Countries like Iraq, for example, have suffered a lot from unjust invasions as well as very severe, extended and wide sanctions which resulted in the deaths of several hundred thousand people, particularly children.
The impact of all this continues for a long time. Nearly 239 million people today are faced with a very serious humanitarian crisis. Most of them have suffered at some recent time from unjust invasions, wars and sanctions. The world needs to give highest priority to reducing the distress of these people, instead of adding to their numbers by imposing increasingly arbitrary and unjustified sanctions and waging dangerous, unjust wars.
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Bharat Dogra writes extensively on environment, development and welfare issues. The views expressed here are the writer’s own, and Clarion India does not necessarily subscribe to them. He can be reached at: bharatdogra1956@gmail.com
