Editor’s Note: Maryam Rezaei Zadeh is a public policy researcher and practitioner focused on gender, security, and Middle Eastern affairs. She serves as a Faculty Assistant and Mentor with the University of Maryland’s Persian Flagship Program. Her research examines the intersection of international security, foreign policy, digital activism, and women’s political agency, with a particular emphasis on the experiences of women and marginalized communities in conflict-affected and authoritarian settings across the Middle East.

By Barbara Slavin, Distinguished Fellow, Middle East Perspectives Project

This paper is shaped by two moments — one personal, the other analytical — that together underline a critical blind spot in much policy discourse about the U.S. war with Iran.

After several weeks without contact because of the war, I finally spoke with my mother in Tehran. She did not address geopolitics or military developments but instead described the hardships of daily life. Prices were rising rapidly, purchasing power was collapsing, and basic survival had become increasingly difficult.

She told me about a childhood friend, a mother of twins whose husband is unemployed. She had been supporting her family by sewing cotton bags for a factory, preparing homemade food, and selling it online. After the war started, however, she lost her online job due to the government’s prolonged internet shutdown. Although access has recently been partially restored in large part to begin to deal with the immense economic losses, connectivity remains uneven, and many digital livelihoods continue to face severe disruptions.

Shared livelihoods are increasingly common in Iran as formal employment opportunities contract. Families are moving in together, pooling resources, and relying on one another to survive. “Everyone is helping each other,” my mother said, “until this craziness reaches some [end] point.”

Some reports from Iran document how ordinary people are navigating worsening economic conditions. However, Iranians’ daily travails are often marginalized in Western media, where the focus remains on Iran’s nuclear program, control over the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions regimes, energy markets, and industrial capacity. The everyday realities of ordinary people are largely absent, as if society were peripheral to the story. This paper argues that in the contexts of sanctions and war, the care economy — largely informal, gendered, and household-based — constitutes the true infrastructure of survival. Recognizing this “silent infrastructure” is essential not only for analytical accuracy but also for more effective policy design.

The Care Economy as a Survival System

Traditional policy frameworks conceptualize infrastructure primarily as physical systems, including energy, transportation, and industrial production. Yet feminist political economy scholarship has shown that many economies depend on unpaid and underpaid care labor. In times of crisis, this hidden foundation becomes more visible. When sanctions disrupt markets and war weakens institutions, households assume functions previously performed by the state and the formal economy. Care work absorbs shocks, redistributes resources, and maintains social continuity under extreme pressure.

Iran’s current predicament reflects the convergence of long-term sanctions and escalating conflict-related pressures, producing deep and uneven economic strains. Disruptions to industrial production and supply chains, compounded by instability and declining demand, have collapsed Iran’s currency, intensified inflation to nearly 70% annually and eroded household purchasing power.

Ground-level reports describe the loss of livelihoods, the closure of small businesses, and the growing difficulty of securing a stable income. They also highlight the adaptive strategies households employ, including reducing consumption, substituting cheaper goods, engaging in informal work, and relying heavily on family and social networks for survival.

Recent analysis estimates that 10 to 12 million jobs — roughly half of Iran’s workforce — are now at risk due to war-related disruptions to industrial production, supply chains, and declining demand. However, informal economic activity has expanded significantly, with individuals — particularly women — engaging in home-based production, small-scale trade, and digital commerce when possible. At the macroeconomic level, this appears as contraction and disruption, but at the household level, it is experienced as intensified labor, greater uncertainty, and constant adaptation.

At the same time, families are increasingly pooling resources and consolidating their living arrangements. Multi-generational households are more common, and informal systems of mutual aid are increasingly important.

The Gendered Burden of Survival

The care economy is deeply gendered. A UN forecast in 2025 shows that women in low- and middle-income countries spend 3.4 more hours per day on unpaid care than men. Women also disproportionately absorb the economic and social shocks of sanctions and war. Research from civil society reporting indicates that women are increasingly engaged in informal and digital livelihoods, even as their unpaid care responsibilities expand.

The simultaneous expansion of women’s income-generating activities and unpaid care responsibilities creates a dual burden. Women contribute to household income while maintaining the social infrastructure for survival: caregiving, food provisioning, health management, and emotional support. Many women are simultaneously acting as income earners, caregivers, household managers, and emotional anchors for extended families coping with economic instability and conflict-related uncertainty.

In many households, women have become the primary organizers of everyday crisis management: monitoring food prices, rationing household consumption, preserving medicine and essential goods, coordinating extended family support, and shielding children and elderly relatives from the psychological effects of instability. Amid fluctuating internet access, inflation, shortages, and recurring fears of escalation, daily life becomes increasingly organized around anticipation, improvisation, and constant adjustment. This emotional and logistical labor is difficult to quantify, yet it is a critical dimension of survival under sanctions and war. In practice, women are not only sustaining household economies; they are sustaining social continuity amid prolonged uncertainty. Informal survival networks carry broader political consequences that shape how states, societies, and communities respond to prolonged crises.

The Political Ambiguity of Resilience

These survival mechanisms also carry significant political implications. On the one hand, household adaptation and informal care systems bolster regime resilience by absorbing economic shocks that might otherwise trigger broader social collapse. In this sense, households’ ability to adapt can ease immediate pressure on the state by shifting the costs of survival onto society. Research on Iran’s sanctions-era “resistance economy” suggests that informal economic networks and social adaptation have played an important role in helping the country — and the regime — withstand prolonged external pressure.

At the same time, these dynamics do not necessarily translate into political legitimacy. The expansion of household burdens, declining purchasing power, internet disruptions, and prolonged uncertainty can deepen public frustration and erode trust in governing institutions as amply demonstrated by anti-regime protests which were brutally suppressed in January before the war. Resilience should not be confused with consent. The ability of society to survive does not necessarily indicate support for the conditions that necessitate such survival strategies.

Policymakers’ disproportionate focus on state capacity and macroeconomic performance pay insufficient attention to household-level systems that sustain everyday survival. Sanctions are evaluated primarily by their impact on state behavior and macroeconomic performance. Humanitarian frameworks prioritize material inputs while neglecting the labor systems that enable survival. As a result, policies risk misdiagnosing resilience by focusing on visible systems and overlooking the underlying structures that sustain them.

Iran’s experience aligns with patterns observed in other conflicts, including in the Gaza Strip, Iraq, and Syria. Across these cases, economic disruption leads to the expansion of informal economies and the intensification of household-based care systems. In Gaza, for example, women have increasingly relied on informal food production, caregiving networks, and improvised household economies amid Israeli blockades, institutional collapse and displacement. Similar dynamics emerged during civil strife in Syria and Iraq, where prolonged instability transferred survival responsibilities from weakened institutions to households and informal social networks.

Recognizing the care economy as infrastructure has significant policy implications. First, sanctions design needs to incorporate household-level impact assessments, including effects on unpaid labor and informal economic activity. Second, humanitarian and stabilization strategies should prioritize protecting household coping capacities by preserving access to communication technologies, supporting small-scale informal livelihoods, and minimizing disruptions that disproportionately affect home-based and digitally mediated work. Third, recovery frameworks should invest not only in physical infrastructure but also in social systems that sustain human capital amid shocks. Finally, policymakers should develop metrics that capture unpaid care work and household coping strategies to better understand economic resilience. Reframing care work as a central pillar of human security restores society to the center of policy discourse and offers a more accurate understanding of the costs of war and of resilience in crisis.