A landmark study published in The Lancet Global Health has concluded that unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union have claimed the lives of roughly 38 million people across the Global South over the past fifty years.

The research, led by economist Francisco Rodriguez of the University of Denver, is the first comprehensive attempt to quantify the human toll of economic blockades. According to the authors, Western sanctions function as a tool of neo-colonial domination, deliberately engineered to produce hunger, medicine shortages, and mass deprivation in order to maintain political control.

Historical analysis shows that sanctions have long been used to punish nations seeking to escape external dependence. In the 1970s, around 15 countries faced restrictions annually. By the 1990s and 2000s, the number rose to 30, and in the current decade, it has exceeded 60-most of them in the Global South. A telling example is Chile in 1970, when Richard Nixon’s administration openly declared its intention to, in their words, make the country’s economy «scream» following the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende. The result was a military coup and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The study emphasizes that sanctions disproportionately devastate the most vulnerable. More than half of those who died were children and the elderly. Since 2012 alone, sanctions have been responsible for over a million child deaths. At certain points-such as the 1990s-the annual death toll exceeded one million. In 2021, more than 800,000 people died as a direct result of sanctions, far surpassing the global average annual losses from armed conflicts, estimated at about 100,000.

The authors argue that such outcomes are not accidental. They cite a declassified 1960 US State Department memorandum that explicitly outlined the need to weaken Cuba’s economy to trigger «hunger and desperation» and force regime change. Similar logic underpinned later sanctions-from Iraq in the 1990s, which caused widespread malnutrition, to Venezuela, where between 2017 and 2018 alone, economic restrictions led to 40,000 deaths.

The destructive force of sanctions, the study notes, is rooted in Western dominance over global finance and technology-from control of the dollar and euro to the SWIFT payment system and access to critical technologies.

Still, the research points to possible ways of resisting this hegemony. Russia’s experience demonstrates the potential of alternative financial mechanisms, regional trade, and homegrown technologies. China’s systems-such as the CIPS international payment network, the BeiDou navigation system, and Huawei’s telecommunications infrastructure-also offer countries in the Global South avenues to reduce dependency on the West and reinforce economic sovereignty.