University of Tehran Published jointly with Iranian World Studies Association Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies 2588-3119 10 3 2026 07 01 Securitization of Iran's Nuclear Program During Obama’s First Administration 703 762 108322 10.22059/wsps.2026.410273.1573 EN Mohammad Javad Zarif Associate Professor of Transregional and Global Studies, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran 0000-0003-0712-405X Kasra Ghafouri MA in North American Studies, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran 0009-0004-3428-3261 Journal Article 2026 01 30 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. https://wsps.ut.ac.ir/article_108322_5d887511cde96ac19f80051f5cb3bf99.pdf