The European Parliament cannot impose sanctions – within the EU architecture, such power lies with the Council. Yet for over a decade the Parliament has done something arguably more powerful in the case of women’s rights in Iran: It has made sanctions feel unavoidable. Abdollah Baei Lashaki, Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, uses a systematic reading of 25 EP resolutions on Iran – spanning 2011 to 2025 – as a case study on how parliamentary language performs coercive pressure without coercive authority. In doing that, he introduces Discursive Sanction Diplomacy, a theoretical framework tracing how moral anchoring, emotional diplomacy, and escalating demands have gradually shifted the Parliament's audience from Tehran to Brussels, turning human rights violations into political obligations for European decision-makers.
In your research, you argue that women’s suffering gradually became the discursive mechanism and moral warrant for the European Parliament’s coercive demands on Iran. Why that issue, in particular?
Over time, the Parliament found itself returning again and again to stories of women whose bodies had become sites of political control. That was not accidental. Violence against women in Iran carries an immediacy that cuts through diplomatic language. It exposes repression in its most unfiltered form.
When the Parliament speaks about women being detained, beaten, or killed simply for appearing in public, the usual geopolitical arguments lose their force. There is no technical vocabulary that can neutralise the moral clarity of these cases. They do not require specialised knowledge of Iran – anyone can recognise the injustice.
That clarity is exactly what allows women’s suffering to become the hinge on which the Parliament’s discourse turns. It gives MEPs a shared emotional and ethical ground. It allows them to escalate their language, moving from concern to condemnation, and eventually to calls for sanctions, without fracturing politically.
And because the Parliament lacks the power to sanction, it relies on discourse to create pressure. Gendered harm gives that discourse its strongest foundation. It becomes the point where moral urgency and political demand meet.
Why were the cases of Nasrin Sotoudeh, Mahsa Jina Amini, and the 2023 poisoning of schoolgirls so impactful, in your analysis?
These cases were impactful because they distilled a system of repression into moments that were impossible to ignore. Nasrin Sotoudeh represents the criminalisation of dignity itself. She is a lawyer, someone whose profession is built on defending rights, and the state punished her for doing exactly that. Her imprisonment gave the Parliament a face, a name, and a story that exposed the violence behind Iran’s legal system.
Mahsa Jina Amini’s death was a rupture. It was not just another human-rights violation; it became a symbol of the everyday fear Iranian women live with. Her story travelled across Europe with extraordinary speed because it was both heartbreaking and unambiguous. A young woman arrested for her appearance, dead days later. That image made it almost impossible for the Parliament to maintain a purely descriptive tone.
The poisoning of schoolgirls pushed the narrative even further. It suggested that the state, or actors operating with its tolerance, was willing to target children to silence the next generation of women. For many in the Parliament, this felt like a direct attack on the most basic moral boundaries. It transformed outrage into something closer to a sense of obligation. Together, these moments punctured abstraction. They personalised repression and made escalation feel not only justified but necessary.
Your research demonstrates that the European Parliament shifted its language over time, from describing these violations as assaults on universal values to framing them as injuries to European values. What is behind that shift?
That shift absolutely happens, and it is crucial. In the beginning, the Parliament talks about Iran violating universal principles, human rights, dignity, equality. But universal values alone do not compel action. They create moral awareness, not political obligation.
Over time, something changes. As the Parliament repeatedly returns to cases involving women and girls, the violations begin to be understood not just as breaches of international norms, but as affronts to values Europe claims as part of its own identity. Gender equality, bodily autonomy, protection of children: These are pillars of how Europe imagines itself.
Once the discourse moves into that space, inaction becomes problematic. It is no longer just ‘Iran is violating universal norms’; it becomes ‘Iran is violating the values that define who we are’. That shift allows the Parliament to increase its demands on the Council and the External Action Service. It transforms a political choice into something closer to a responsibility. That is the moment when sanctions move from being one policy option among many to appearing as the only response consistent with Europe’s self-understanding.
Did your experience as an Iranian scholar in Europe shape how you developed the Discursive Sanction Diplomacy framework?
I think it shaped the way I listened to the Parliament. Growing up in Iran, you become very aware of how power speaks about itself. You hear the language of denial, justification, and control long before you learn the theory. Living in Europe added another layer: I became attentive to how Western institutions narrate repression abroad, how they balance empathy, principle, and political caution.
That dual perspective made me sensitive to the gap between moral language and political action. I noticed that the Parliament’s discourse was doing more than expressing concern. It was layering pressure, slowly at first, then very deliberately. I recognised patterns: how certain stories resonate immediately, how emotional vocabulary enters formal resolutions, how responsibility subtly shifts from Iran to European institutions themselves.
The framework did not come from autobiography; it came from methodically coding the resolutions. But biography shaped the questions I asked, the silences I noticed, and the sense that something meaningful was happening in the Parliament’s language.
In a way, Discursive Sanction Diplomacy grew out of paying attention to that in-between space: where moral outrage meets institutional constraint, and where discourse becomes the only available tool to push Europe toward action.
Abdollah Baei Lashaki is a Research Fellow at the European Governance and Policy Programme at Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute, where he leads the work package on voting, organisational, and network analysis within the ERC-funded GLOBAL project. His research investigates the cleavages shaping world politics, focusing on the dimensionality of conflict through roll-call vote analysis and employing advanced quantitative and network methods.