Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies

Abstract Objective: Barack Obama entered office, promising engagement with Tehran; by the end of his first term, his administration had assembled an exceptionally broad multilateral sanctions regime. This article explains that reversal; it uses the case of Iran’s nuclear program to extend the Copenhagen School's theory of securitization in two ways. First, it treats sanctions and institutional measures not just as consequences of a completed securitization but as part of the securitizing process itself: the UN Security Council Resolution 1929, the IAEA's November 2011 report on possible military dimensions, and the 2012 oil embargo each reset the discursive ground and enabled the next move, so discourse and material action co-produced one another. Second, it theorizes the target state's responses as a structural enabling condition of securitization rather than a factor external to it.
Method: Using explanatory-outcome process tracing, the analysis follows the campaign through four stages - discursive entrapment (2009), institutional coalescence around Resolution 1929 (2010), scientific validation through the November IAEA (2011), and the normalization of sanctions (2012) - and identifies the United States and its allies as the securitizing actors.
Results: Iran's legalism, its missed diplomatic openings, and the timing of its enrichment disclosures emerge as conditions that facilitated the campaign without being its cause.