How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
This article contends that state centrism, as both a theoretical framework and a policy orientation, systematically produces outcomes that contradict the foundational commitments of international law, and that reorienting foreign policy around human security rather than state security yields fundamentally different, and more defensible, conclusions. Examining the ongoing conflict in Iran as a primary case study, the article develops three interlocking arguments: that military escalation weakens the civil society movements best positioned to produce durable political change; that media framing and the historical dehumanization of Muslim populations construct the moral conditions under which civilian harm becomes politically tolerable; and that the nuclear justification for the conflict is self defeating. These dynamics are situated within the broader structural crisis produced by great power competition, where the selective enforcement of international law has accelerated arms dynamics in the Indo Pacific and eroded global institutional trust. The article concludes that people centered alternatives, such as deliberative governance and track two diplomacy, are necessary and evidenced, and that the precondition for a more stable international order is a framework that treats human security as the measure of policy success.
KEYWORDS
Human security, state centrism, media framing, nuclear proliferation, security dilemma, great power politics, people centered governance, civil society, Iran conflict, international law
INTRODUCTION
When considering the state of the world and the actions available to us in addressing its most urgent challenges, we must first ask: what kind of world do we want to create through the choices we make now? The answer to that question depends entirely on who we believe international relations is for, states, or the people who live inside them.
This article argues for a fundamental reorientation: away from a state centered view of international relations and toward a people centered one. While international law has long operated through the framework of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, its deepest commitments, to self determination, human rights, and the prohibition of aggressive force, are grounded in the dignity and security of people, not governments. The question of what a state is for has never quite been settled. Still, U.S. founding father Thomas Paine offered one of its most enduring answers: governments derive their legitimacy from the people they govern, exist solely to protect natural rights, and forfeit their claim to authority the moment they cease to do so (Common Sense, 1776). A state without a population is a contradiction in terms, and a state that turns against its population has undermined the only basis on which its existence can be justified. When governments invoke their own “right to exist” to justify the destruction of other peoples, that claim to legitimacy has already collapsed.
To illustrate this argument, I focus primarily on the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war against Iran. The war’s vague justification, preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, contains a fundamental paradox: military aggression against a state is precisely what incentivizes that state to pursue nuclear deterrence as its only reliable protection (ICAN). If the metric of concern were genuinely the security of people rather than the security of states, this paradox would be disqualifying. War often entrenches the threat it claims to eliminate.
This article also examines the role of media in constructing the narratives that make such wars possible, the dehumanization of populations and the conflation of a people with their government. Finally, it argues that great power politics represents the single greatest structural threat to global security and human rights, and that shifting our frame from states to people is the precondition for a more just, multilateral, and stable international community.
MAIN CONTENT
I. The Framing Problem: States vs. People
Realism, Liberalism and Constructivism differ substantially in how they understand international actors, interests, and change. Yet each has, in different ways, retained the state as a central unit of analysis, subordinating civilian wellbeing to the strategic calculations of governments (Tauseef, 2024). Hegemony theory holds that a dominant power stabilizes the international system, yet in practice, that stability serves the hegemon’s interests first (Norrlof, 2019). Through a state centric lens, when the balance of power shifts, the security dilemma and the logic of the Thucydides Trap push even stabilizing powers toward destabilization. Constructivism offers a partial corrective: Alexander Wendt’s foundational argument that “anarchy is what states make of it” challenged the realist claim that competition between states is structurally inevitable, demonstrating instead that state identities and interests are socially constructed through interaction rather than fixed by the system (Wendt, 1992). Yet even constructivism, in centering the state as the primary actor whose identity is being constructed, stops short of the reorientation this article argues is necessary. The UDHR and constitutional frameworks worldwide were built against this logic, embedding protections for dissent, reform, and accountability because those involved understood that governments must remain answerable to those they govern (Bhardwaj, 2024). When a state pursues strategic interests at the direct expense of civilian welfare, it has violated that foundational purpose.
The Iran conflict illustrates this inversion. A March Ipsos survey found 58% of Americans disapprove of military strikes against Iran, 61% consider the conflict a mistake, and only 7% would support large scale troop deployment, levels of opposition that took years longer to materialize during Iraq and Vietnam (Blake, 2025). When asked about the financial burden on ordinary Americans, President Trump dismissed the concern entirely, instead reiterating concerns over Iran’s procurement of nuclear weapons. His latest 34% approval rating from the Pew Research Center captures the result: an administration prosecuting a war its own population has rejected.
When strikes hit the Minab School in February, 175 people were killed (Human Rights Watch, 2026). Bombs do not distinguish between a government and its people; they silence reformers alongside loyalists, creating martyrs where movements once existed. As military and economic pressure deepens, the Iranian government justifies domestic crackdowns as responses to foreign interference, systematically weakening the protest movements best positioned to demand accountability from within (Robert Lansing Institute, Amnesty International 2026). Those most capable of fostering change face added challenges as their dissent is recast, in the current climate, as alignment with the country bombing their neighbors. Civilian deaths strengthen the hardliners it was designed to weaken (Kahalzadeh, 2025). Any viable path forward requires incentivizing responsible governance through the approaching transition, not foreclosing it through militarism (CFR, 2026).
This is the structural contradiction of state centric international relations. The UNDP’s 1994 Human Development Report introduced human security as a framework precisely because state security and people’s security are not the same thing. The International Rescue Committee reports thousands dead and millions displaced, with ripple effects already spreading to conflict zones elsewhere. The breadth and speed of public opposition to this conflict reflect what dominant frameworks have long struggled to account for: the persistent insistence of people, across borders, to be centered in policy decisions.
II. Media and Dehumanization
Media shapes not only how conflict is covered but the perceptions that make conflict possible, constructing, long before the first strike, the moral environment that justifies one government’s killing of another people. Paliomi (2025) defines this as media framing, “the act of selecting and organizing information to make sense of events, deciding what to highlight or omit.” What makes this consequential in the context of war is dehumanization. Governments do not send people to war against other human beings, they send them against threats, regimes, and axes of evil.
Dehumanization works by placing the ‘other’ outside moral consideration. As Fischer (2023) documents, stripping victims of moral worthiness reduces the empathic and self condemning responses that normally constrain violence, enabling aggressors to act without moral self sanction. The effect extends beyond perpetrators: research on the Syrian civil war found that third party observers who dehumanized one side showed measurably higher support for retributive war crimes against that group (Landry, 2024). The imagery precedes the violence, conditioning populations to experience retributive killing as necessary.
Iranian society, one of the world’s oldest civilizations, young, urbanized, and in profound tension with its own government, is routinely reduced in western media to threatening stereotypes. The dehumanization of Muslim populations has a longer history than this conflict; Edward Said’s foundational analysis of Orientalism documented how western media has long constructed the Muslim world as threatening, irrational, and in need of civilizational correction (Said, 1978). That framing persists. “Regime,” “rogue state,” “axis of evil” does not describe a political situation neutrally, and it conditions audiences to receive Iranian casualties with less moral weight than casualties framed differently. Deffenbaugh (2024) of the ICRC observed that dehumanization raises the risk of conflict, increases the likelihood of abuses within it, and hardens the populations whose cooperation peace ultimately requires.
Press suppression has deepened the distortion. The Committee to Protect Journalists found Israel responsible for two thirds of all press killings in both 2024 and 2025; the UN Human Rights Commission has documented the Iranian government’s imprisonment and killing of journalists. Without independent reporting and demand for transparency, narratives default to official sources, the same sources that declared strikes had achieved “the total obliteration of Iran’s ability to create a nuclear weapon” (Donald Trump, June 2025). Anti American grievances, meanwhile, require little fabrication: the weaponization of sanctions, a documented history of intervention, and a political system perceived as serving concentrated wealth are not Iranian inventions (Chatham House, 2025).
Yet the decentralization of media has created genuine counter pressure. Pattanshetty’s research captures what drives this shift: Generation Z embodies a “glocal” identity, locally rooted yet globally connected, making them pivotal actors in shaping political accountability across borders. When Gen Z entered the U.S. midterm arena in 2018, youth voter turnout doubled relative to the previous thirty year average, with as much as 70% voting Democratic, a trend sustained across every cycle since (Harvard Gazette, 2023). A generation facing rising costs of living, environmental consequences of militarism, and the human toll of wars fought in their name is producing a politics that state centric frameworks cannot address. The question for peacemakers is how to cultivate what that generation has already demonstrated it can do: humanize the people on the other side of a conflict.
III. The Nuclear Paradox
The nuclear justification for the conflict contains a contradiction so fundamental it undermines the entire strategic rationale. Military aggression does not deter nuclear proliferation, it incentivizes it. The geopolitical lesson of the past three decades appears: states possessing nuclear weapons tend to have their sovereignty respected, while those without them are invaded, sanctioned into collapse, or bombed without congressional authorization or UN approval. Iran’s leadership is observing the same historical pattern and drawing what, from a realist perspective, is an entirely rational conclusion.
As Kelly Grieco from the Stimson Center notes, airpower can destroy hardened facilities and kill commanders, what it cannot do is reorder domestic politics. History repeatedly confirms this: governments fighting for survival rarely capitulate under external coercion. A study of thirty asymmetric interstate conflicts involving the United States between 1918 and 2003 found that coercive strategies most often failed when American demands threatened a weaker state’s survival, provoking resistance rather than surrender (Haun, 2015). Regime change represents the ultimate existential threat, one that Iranian leaders have every reason to perceive as credible. Under such conditions, Tehran has little incentive to exercise restraint and every incentive to pursue deterrence by any means available.
Before the strikes, there was scant evidence Iran was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, it had complied with NPT inspections and IAEA verification. The unraveling began with the withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018, after which Iran steadily expanded its uranium enrichment program (Arms Control Association, 2024). Iranian escalation thus appears to have followed American withdrawal, not the other way around. The war itself is unlikely to prevent a nuclear Iran, it arrived after policy had already dismantled the diplomatic architecture keeping one from emerging. Waltz’s structural realism and the security dilemma framework both predict exactly what is now unfolding: states that feel existentially threatened pursue the most credible deterrent available regardless of regional consequences. Notably, Waltz himself argued in his piece “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability,” that a nuclear armed Iran might paradoxically stabilize the Middle East through mutual deterrence, a position that underscores how poorly the military logic holds even within realist theory (Waltz, 2012).
If the genuine goal is a stable, non nuclear Iran that respects the rights of its people, the path runs through diplomacy and the support of civil society, not through strikes that hand the government a rally around the flag moment, accelerate the security dilemma, and suppress the internal reform movements that represent the most credible long term threat to its hold on power.
IV. The Legitimacy Crisis: Great Power Politics and International Law
State centrism glorifies a particular feature of the international system: the concentration of power in the hands of a few states whose interests are then naturalized as the interests of the world. Graham Allison identified sixteen cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one; twelve ended in war (Allison, 2017). This hegemonic dynamic, built on the accumulation and defense of power, has weak internal mechanisms for managing its own transitions peacefully.
Realist theory makes this flaw explicit. Kenneth Waltz argued that the anarchic structure of the international system compels governments to prioritize self help and relative power above all else, not because states are inherently aggressive, but because the system leaves them no other rational choice (Waltz, 1979). What follows is the security dilemma: when one state builds capacity to protect itself, neighboring states perceive a threat and respond in kind, generating cycles of militarization that no individual actor intended, and no individual actor can stop (Jervis, 1978). Mearsheimer’s offensive realism extends this further, arguing that great powers are structurally driven to maximize relative power whenever the opportunity arises, regardless of the human consequences (Mearsheimer, 2001). The logic is internally consistent, and that is precisely the problem. A framework that treats the accumulation of state power as both the means and the end of international relations has no entry point for human cost. Civilian casualties, displaced populations, and suppressed reform movements do not register as strategic failures within state centrism, they register as collateral, acceptable so long as relative power is maintained. The Iran conflict follows this realist logic.
Rather than adapting to a growing multipolar world, American foreign policy has doubled down on unilateralism as a strategy to maintain hegemony, which the Center for American Progress identifies as undermining its legitimacy on the global stage. The Iran war was initiated without congressional authorization, without UN approval, and without consultation with NATO partners bearing downstream economic consequences they had no voice in accepting. G. John Ikenberry has argued that the durability of American global leadership depended precisely on its willingness to operate within the rules based order it constructed, once that willingness is abandoned, the order loses its anchor (Ikenberry, 2011). What realism cannot account for is that legitimacy, once lost, does not respond to military pressure.
A 2023 Pew Research Center survey across twenty four countries found a median of 74% of people believe elected officials do not care what people like them think. The Democracy Perception Index, reported by Reuters in 2026, found global perception of the United States had fallen from plus 22% to minus 16% in just two years, placing it behind both Russia and China in global public opinion. These ratings are evidence that foreign policy organized around state power systematically disillusions the people it claims to represent. As Raquel Jesse (2026) argues in her People Centered Policymaking Handbook, “policymaking is failing to keep pace with complex realities or deliver outcomes aligned with public needs.” When multilateral institutions are undermined precisely when they are most needed, the populations caught between competing state interests have progressively less recourse to the protections international law was designed to provide. Realism predicts this outcome and offers no remedy for it, because within its own logic, there is none.
V. State Centrism Beyond the United States and Israel
State centrism creates incentives and conceptual structures that can subordinate people to state interests regardless of which government is acting. A people centered framework is therefore neither pro Western nor pro Eastern; it is opposed to the subordination of human security to state security wherever that subordination occurs. The argument is not that state power becomes problematic only when exercised by Western governments or their allies. The same analytical standard must be applied to all governments whose policies are otherwise outside the primary focus of this article.
Due to its strategic position and expertise in semiconductor technology, Taiwan is commonly interpreted through the strategic interests of Beijing, Washington, and Taipei. The Pentagon’s 2025 report to Congress documented a substantial increase in Chinese military activity around Taiwan, reflecting the intensification of a strategic contest involving Beijing, Washington, and Taipei (U.S. Department of Defense, 2025). Beijing’s insistence on sovereignty and reunification, Washington’s concern with credibility and regional balance, and Taipei’s calculations concerning deterrence and survival are all intelligible within a state security framework. Yet a state centered analysis can leave the people living within that strategic contest a merely derivative concern. It asks how military buildups affect the balance of power, but not with equal urgency how those buildups affect civilian populations, what mechanisms exist to prevent escalation, or how the political preferences and security of those most directly affected can be protected independently of the strategic calculations of competing states.
The Iranian government provides a parallel example. Under conditions of external threat, the preservation of national sovereignty and regime security can be conflated with the security of the Iranian people, allowing political dissent to be reframed as a threat to national survival. The National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition organization, argues “without the oxygen of war, an external enemy, and a permanent state of emergency, the regime’s domestic control disintegrates. Peace would allow deep seated, explosive social demands and grievances to rise to the surface” (2026). Whether or not one accepts the NCRI’s characterization of the regime’s motivations in full, the argument illustrates the conflation of regime security with human security at the heart of state centrism: when the survival of the state or governing regime is treated as synonymous with the security of its population, measures taken to preserve state security can simultaneously suppress the political agency and human security of those the state claims to protect.
SUMMARY
This article argues that the central weakness of state centric international relations is not simply that states sometimes make harmful decisions, but that the framework itself makes state security the primary measure through which international problems are understood. The Iran conflict demonstrates the consequences of this prioritization. Military escalation threatens the civil society movements most capable of producing domestic political change, while external pressure can strengthen the government’s ability to characterize dissent as foreign interference. Media framing and historical patterns of dehumanization further reduce the perceived human cost of civilian harm. Finally the nuclear rationale for military action produces a strategic paradox: external threats can increase rather than reduce the incentive to pursue nuclear deterrence.
The same mechanism extends beyond the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran. Increased Chinese pressure on Taiwan demonstrates how competing claims of sovereignty, deterrence, and national interest render the security of affected populations secondary to state calculations, while the Iranian government’s conflation of regime security with national security demonstrates the problem from within the state itself. Together, these cases support the article’s central contention that human security must become an independent measure of international policy rather than a consequence assumed to follow from state security.
The alternatives examined in this article, civil society participation, deliberative governance, track two diplomacy, and international norm development, suggest that political stability is more durable when the people affected by conflict possess meaningful agency in determining its resolution. A people centered framework therefore does not eliminate states from international relations; it repositions them as instruments to foster human security rather than being the point.
CONCLUSION
The Iran crisis remains politically blocked, not because alternatives are unavailable but because civil society dialogue and multilateral mediation have been sidelined in favor of military escalation. Jesse (2026) asks whether we might understand the public domain not as a fixed entity but as a collective activity, created and sustained in pursuit of shared values. Applied internationally, the question becomes whether foreign policy should be judged by state power or by whether it improves human security and freedom. By that measure, the conflict has failed comprehensively: civilians killed, reform movements weakened, nuclear proliferation incentivized, international law undermined.
From a mediation perspective, the objective is therefore not to resolve Iran’s political conflict by imposing an outcome, but to foster the conditions under which Iranian actors can negotiate their own political future. Mediation becomes not simply a mechanism for settling disputes between existing power holders, but a means of protecting the political agency necessary for sustainable peacebuilding. A world organized around the security of states will continue sacrificing people to preserve power. A world organized around the security of people makes that sacrifice far harder to justify.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION: WHAT A PEOPLE CENTERED WORLD CAN LOOK LIKE
If state centrism produces these outcomes, a people centered framework must change not only what international actors protect, but how they understand political change. Constructivism offers a way to understand how such systems change: Finnemore and Sikkink’s norm cascade theory holds that international norms shift when civil society organizations, advocacy networks, and reform movements establish new standards of behavior that become embedded in institutional practice (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). The abolition of slavery and the codification of human rights law each followed this pattern, driven not by states but by the people states had failed. Human security requires not merely protecting people from harm but preserving their capacity to act politically.
Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with FARC incorporated civil society and women’s organizations into negotiations after public pressure demanded broader representation, ultimately creating the first Gender Subcommission in a peace process. Research by Joshi (2025) found that implementing these gender provisions correlated directly with the agreement’s durability, demonstrating the value of including those most affected by conflict. Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly similarly produced constitutional change on issues that elite driven systems had struggled to resolve, succeeding precisely because deliberative democratic models are less constrained by entrenched political interests (Courant, 2021). Track two diplomacy follows the same logic: Paffenholz (2014) found that civil society actors strengthen negotiations precisely because they remain accountable to communities rather than states. In Iran, any lasting resolution will require the participation of women’s rights activists, labor organizers, and student movements, the same groups whose capacity to organize has been weakened by the conflict.
Decapitation, the military strategy utilized by the U.S. and Israel, is unlikely to produce durable political change because it treats leadership removal as a substitute for political transformation and fails to preserve the agency of the people who must ultimately determine Iran’s future. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies observes, the “great man” theory of history overlooks the systems and patronage networks through which leaders exercise power. Removing individuals without addressing those underlying structures risks destabilization rather than meaningful political change.
This is particularly consequential in Iran, where substantial opposition to the Islamic Republic exists alongside a fragmented opposition movement. A 2024 survey by the Netherlands based institute, Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GMAAN), found that 71% of Iranians oppose continuation of the Islamic Republic, while 89% support democracy. Yet, the Madrid based think tank Elcano argues that despite the Iranian people having challenged the regime myriad times, protests lack a “unified ideological frame, leadership structure or clear objectives,” producing political stasis rather than rupture. The challenge, then, is not simply generating opposition to the existing regime, but creating the conditions in which that opposition can develop into a shared political vision.
Such an approach should operate through multilateral rather than unilateral institutions. The United Nations and other international actors can provide diplomatic platforms for Iranian civil society representatives, support track two dialogue, and establish mechanisms through which competing political and social groups can participate in discussions about Iran’s political future without requiring immediate agreement on its final form. The objective would not be to manufacture a unified opposition from outside, but to create the conditions under which a unified political platform can emerge organically from within Iranian society. Deliberative mechanisms modeled on Citizens Assemblies could provide one possible institutional framework for this process, encouraging diverse constituencies to articulate shared priorities rather than having political structures imposed upon them.
The greatest obstacle to this approach is the instability that makes it necessary. Corruption, repression, internet shutdowns, economic insecurity, and the government’s hostility toward transparency restrict the ability of civil society to organize. External military pressure compounds each of these problems by forcing both citizens and governments into survival oriented mindsets, giving the state further justification for suppressing dissent as foreign interference. The result is a self reinforcing cycle: external threats strengthen regime security, strengthened regime security constrains civil society, and weakened civil society makes political transition more difficult.
Breaking that cycle requires time and mediation rather than escalation. A people centered strategy would therefore measure success not by whether an external power has removed a particular leader, but by whether citizens possess greater capacity to participate in determining their own political future. Relevant indicators include expanded civic space, the ability of independent organizations to communicate and organize, the inclusion of women and other historically marginalized groups in political deliberation, and the emergence of a political framework capable of translating disparate grievances into shared democratic objectives. These outcomes cannot be imposed through airpower; they must be fostered through participation.
This is the fundamental distinction between regime change and political change. The former treats the state as the object to be managed; the latter treats people as the political agents capable of determining what comes next. If the central problem is that state security has been prioritized over human security, the solution cannot simply be a different state exercising power. It must be a political process in which the security, agency, and preferences of the people themselves become the priority.
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