The State is not the point! Reorienting International Relations Around Human Security

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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The Critical Minerals Arms Race: Geopolitical Interests of the United States, China, and Russia in A.I and Nuclear Powered Development

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT *

This article examines the competition over critical minerals as an emerging axis of geopolitical rivalry, arguing that the contest is driven by the convergence of two demands: the energy requirements of artificial intelligence, and the revival of nuclear power as the source capable of meeting them. The author sets out the mineral basis of nuclear construction, giving particular attention to zirconium, whose neutron absorption properties make it effectively non-substitutable in fuel rod cladding, and argues that the common claim that nuclear power is less mineral-intensive than other sources obscures the difference between bulk tonnage and strategic dependence. A second section identifies the distinct mineral ecosystem on which computing depends, including gallium, germanium, indium, palladium, and tantalum. The positions of China, the United States, and Russia are then assessed, with the finding that dominance lies less in extraction than in refining, where the chokepoints are concentrated. The article closes on the interdependence that competition has not removed, and on the argument that no participant can secure its requirements in isolation.

KEYWORDS *

Critical minerals, artificial intelligence, nuclear power, supply chains, refining, zirconium, gallium, resource competition, chokepoints, interdependence, multipolarity, conflict prevention

INTRODUCTION

The global energy transition is often framed around solar panels and lithium-ion batteries. Yet the real struggle for geopolitical dominance is occurring in a quieter, far more consequential arena: the scramble for critical minerals that underpin nuclear power and artificial intelligence. Minerals such as copper, uranium, gallium, zirconium, and germanium sit at the heart of national security strategies from Washington to Beijing to Moscow. As AI demand surges and nuclear power re-emerges as a politically attractive low-carbon option, the world finds itself entering a new kind of arms race. This time, the competition is not over warheads, but over the inputs that make both AI and nuclear development possible.

MAIN CORPUS

The AI and nuclear feedback loop: a new front in geopolitics

AI is extremely energy-intensive. Data centers already consume as much electricity as mid-sized nations, and demand is projected to multiply. As AI systems become more complex, quantum-adjacent, or integrated into autonomous military systems, energy requirements will accelerate beyond what current grids can sustain.

This is why nuclear power, previously stalled by cost, regulation, and public perception, is being rebranded as the only energy source capable of powering the next era of computation. But this revival comes with geopolitical consequences. During the Cold War, the nuclear arms race was defined by the number of warheads. In the emerging AI-nuclear era, power may instead be measured by who controls the mineral supply chains, who can afford to build next-generation reactors, and whose AI systems those reactors ultimately power.

Nuclear energy’s mineral backbone

Despite its reputation as a reliable, low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear energy rests on structurally fragile supply chains. While nuclear output is not dependent on weather variability like solar or wind, recent research emphasizes that its production is deeply dependent on critical minerals with volatile supply chains (Ciacci et al. 2023; International Energy Agency 2023).

Uranium is only the most visible mineral needed. As Hwang (2009), Degueldre (2017), and Jang et al. (2024) demonstrate across multiple nuclear-materials studies, reactor construction and operation require a constellation of metals, including nickel, chromium, copper, and zirconium. Zirconium, in particular, is non-substitutable. Its exceptionally low neutron absorption cross-section makes it the only viable material for fuel rod cladding in light-water reactors. Metallurgical analyses show that zirconium alloys such as Zircaloy-2, Zircaloy-4, and ZIRLO retain superior corrosion resistance and structural integrity under high-temperature, high-radiation conditions. Attempts to replace zirconium with alternative alloys consistently fail to meet reactor-grade performance thresholds.

Moreover, the list of critical minerals continues to expand. The Critical Materials Assessment of 2023 identifies cobalt, niobium, tantalum, titanium, tungsten, vanadium, and hafnium as increasingly essential for advanced reactors, from accident-tolerant fuels to next-generation coolant systems. Assessments of advanced nuclear materials similarly emphasize the rising importance of high-performance alloys in small modular reactors and molten-salt designs. These technologies, often promoted as future pillars of AI-driven industrialization, rely on metals that are geologically scarce, geopolitically concentrated, and difficult to refine at scale.

This makes nuclear energy inseparable from the broader resource politics of the clean-energy transition. Copper and nickel, foundational to nuclear infrastructure, are already among the most supply-constrained minerals globally, with demand projected to outstrip supply by 2030. Zirconium and hafnium, largely co-produced through zircon mining, are refined primarily in China and a small number of facilities in the United States and Europe, creating structural chokepoints. Meanwhile, chromium and high-grade nickel used in reactor steels are increasingly sourced from regions facing political instability or governance deficits, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and South Africa.

Importantly, the oft-repeated claim that nuclear power is less mineral-intensive than solar or wind is technically accurate only in terms of total tonnage per megawatt, a metric that obscures the real strategic vulnerability. As the World Nuclear Association notes, nuclear requires fewer bulk materials, but relies on disproportionately strategic ones. A solar panel can be produced with aluminum, silicon, and steel, materials with diverse global supply bases. Nuclear reactors, by contrast, depend on minerals that are rare, geopolitically contested, and technically irreplaceable.

Seen through a systems lens, nuclear energy shifts vulnerability from weather volatility to mineral scarcity. As states turn to nuclear power to supply the explosive energy demand of AI data centers, autonomous weapons systems, and high-performance computing infrastructure, these mineral dependencies harden into geopolitical chokepoints. The competition over zirconium, nickel, copper, and the broader constellation of nuclear-grade metals is already shaping rivalry among the United States, China, and Russia, supply-chain securitization, and the emerging politics of techno-industrial power.

Ultimately, any future nuclear development will depend not on reactor design, but on whether states can secure the material backbone that sustains it. Without confronting the mineral politics beneath nuclear expansion, countries risk building energy systems that are technologically sophisticated but exposed to global supply-chain shocks.

AI, data centers, and the overlooked minerals they depend on

While the electric vehicle revolution is led by lithium, copper, and cobalt, the AI boom depends on a different mineral ecosystem. Gallium, germanium, indium, palladium, and tantalum form the backbone of processors, semiconductors, photonics, and advanced data infrastructure. These minerals are central to computational power. Without them, modern AI would collapse entirely.

And yet, environmental and human rights assessments of their extraction and refining lag dramatically behind public awareness. The geopolitical asymmetry is stark. China controls the great majority of primary gallium production and a substantial share of global germanium refining. The United States holds pockets of rare earth deposits but lacks large-scale refining capacity. Russia, though less dominant, maintains significant uranium reserves.

Given AI’s exponential energy and hardware requirements, these supply chains represent vulnerabilities larger than those of the battery sector. The AI revolution, in other words, is only as resilient as the minerals China chooses to export.

Divergent trajectories: China, the supply chain superpower

If the United States and Russia remain the primary military nuclear powers, China is the undisputed superpower of the critical minerals and energy-technology supply chain. Its dominance is not incidental but the product of decades of strategic industrial policy, aggressive overseas investment, and state-backed financial architecture that Western democracies have been structurally unable, or politically unwilling, to replicate.

Regarding industrial integration and mineral dominance, recent analyses show that China controls the great majority of global lithium and cobalt refining, an overwhelming share of natural graphite and rare-earth processing, and a majority share of copper, nickel, and manganese processing essential for nuclear construction and AI infrastructure.

While mineral extraction is globally dispersed, refining and processing, the chokepoints of value, are almost entirely Chinese-controlled. This vertical grip means that even if Western firms source ore elsewhere, they remain dependent on Chinese facilities to transform those minerals into usable industrial inputs.

A recent network analysis of rare-earth and high-tech supply chains reinforces this reality: China occupies the low-risk, high-influence node of global mineral networks, while the United States and the European Union reside in high-dependency, high-risk positions (Cao et al. 2025). In geopolitical terms, this is structural leverage. China’s dominance is further entrenched by long-term equity stakes, mining partnerships, and offtake agreements, particularly in resource-rich but politically vulnerable regions. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chinese companies control the majority of industrial cobalt mining. In Chile and Argentina, Chinese-backed firms hold increasing influence in lithium brine extraction. In Canada, Indonesia, and Australia, Chinese investors maintain stakes in nickel, copper, and rare earth operations.

Research underscores how these investments are not isolated ventures but part of a coordinated national strategy: secure resources upstream, dominate processing midstream, and monopolize manufacturing downstream. China’s leadership in critical minerals directly fuels its rapid nuclear and AI development. China currently operates the world’s fastest-growing civilian nuclear program, with more reactors under construction than the United States and the European Union combined. It is simultaneously pouring billions into high-performance computing, AI datacenters, and advanced semiconductor capacity.

The link is straightforward: AI requires minerals, minerals require refining, refining is controlled by China, and AI expansion strengthens China’s geopolitical position. China’s mineral and nuclear strategy operates on three interlocking pillars: control upstream extraction through overseas mining investments; dominate midstream refining to create structural global dependencies; and use downstream nuclear and AI expansion to consolidate technological and geopolitical influence.

This model encapsulates China’s approach to the new arms race: not through warhead numbers but through supply-chain supremacy. Unlike the United States and Europe, where nuclear investment stalled in the late 1970s due to safety fears, cost overruns, and political fragmentation, China invested early, accelerating nuclear development as a pillar of national revitalization. Nuclear energy provides stable baseload power for AI datacenters, heavy industry, and military research and development. Beijing’s planners understand that energy is the hard power behind digital power.

Although China is expanding aggressively, it still trails the United States and Russia in military nuclear stockpiles and delivery platforms. Yet even here, China is closing the gap rapidly through modernization programs, new reactor technologies, and dual-use research facilities. The mineral and energy control it currently wields may be the leverage point that allows Beijing to accelerate military techno-industrial growth.

The United States: technological leader, supply chain dependent

The United States remains at the forefront of AI innovation, semiconductor design, and nuclear-reactor engineering. Yet despite this technological leadership, Washington continues to depend heavily on foreign sources, particularly foreign processing capacity, for the critical minerals that undergird modern computing, energy, and defense infrastructure. That structural dependency has become a national-security vulnerability.

Recent policy reflects awareness of this risk. Under the authority of the Energy Act of 2020 and related legislation, the Geological Survey periodically updates a list of critical minerals, highlighting dozens of resources whose supply chains are judged fragile and whose disruption would pose serious economic or national-security consequences. As of 2025, the Survey recognizes copper, silver, uranium, and other key industrial materials among the critical minerals flagged for supply risk.

But official policy alone does not guarantee supply-chain resilience. As a recent assessment noted, even with the incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act and domestic-mineral policies, the United States remains substantially import-dependent for many critical minerals, especially those requiring sophisticated processing and refining steps that it largely lacks (Deberdt 2024). In response, Washington has adopted a dual strategy: building supply-chain partnerships with allied or partner states, and ramping up domestic processing and refining capacity through public-private investment. Under the Critical Minerals and Materials Accelerator of 2025, the Department of Energy has issued new funding opportunities to support domestic critical-materials processing and manufacturing. These measures signal that leaders recognize minerals as a strategic vulnerability and are investing to reduce foreign dependence.

Russia: a nuclear legacy in decline, but not irrelevant

Russia retains one of the world’s largest uranium enrichment capacities and decades of nuclear expertise. Sanctions pressure has pushed Moscow closer to Beijing, and their alignment in mineral and energy supply chains will shape emerging multipolar blocs. Despite economic decline, Russia remains a major exporter of uranium fuel and reactor technology through Rosatom. Its geopolitical relevance persists not because of innovation, but because its assets remain strategically indispensable.

A new arms race, but one that could still be contained

The International Atomic Energy Agency and other multilateral frameworks are increasingly sidelined by states pursuing parallel nuclear strategies. As countries rush to secure minerals and reactors, the risk of fragmentation grows. A world defined by mineral competition, nuclear expansion, and AI-enhanced command-and-control systems creates conditions for miscalculation reminiscent of the Cold War.

This mineral-driven competition is not inherently doomed to conflict. If the United States, China, and Russia can maintain channels of communication, however strained, there remains room for dialogue on nuclear safety, transparency, and AI governance. China’s rapid rise does not preclude cooperation; in fact, its dominance makes it central to any meaningful global framework. Critically, the money being funneled into the mineral, AI, and nuclear complex reflects a strategic misalignment. Trillions are being mobilized not to reduce climate risk or enhance global equity, but to secure a narrow competitive advantage. Technology is outpacing diplomacy, and without intervention, the consequences will be systemic.

SUMMARY *

The article’s organising insight is that the location of power in this competition is not where the public debate assumes. Extraction is dispersed and substitutable at the margin; refining is concentrated and is not. A state that owns a deposit but cannot process what it extracts has an asset it must send elsewhere to make useful, which is why the author finds the decisive advantage in the midstream rather than the mine. The second observation follows from the first and cuts against the framing of a race: because the chokepoints are held by different parties at different points in the chain, none of the three principals can supply itself, and the competition therefore takes place inside a structure of mutual dependence that none of them chose and none can exit. The author’s conclusion is that this is a condition amenable to management rather than to victory.

CONCLUSION

The United States, China, and Russia are locked in a defining strategic competition over access to critical minerals, processing capacity, and the ability to translate these resources into nuclear and AI power. This mineral arms race will shape the geopolitical hierarchy of the twenty-first century, as nuclear reactors, AI data centers, semiconductor fabrication, enrichment facilities, and advanced military technologies all depend on minerals that are scarce, geographically concentrated, and controlled through complex, asymmetric supply chains.

China’s structural advantages in refining capacity, integrated industrial policy, and control over key chokepoints position it as a dominant actor, while the United States maintains leadership in AI innovation and advanced nuclear design but remains dependent on foreign processing. Russia’s strategic enrichment capabilities and Rosatom’s global presence ensure it remains a critical player, despite narrower resource control.

Yet, even amid this intense rivalry, the mineral supply chains underpinning these technologies are inherently interdependent. Complete decoupling is impractical; no state can fully secure its needs in isolation. This creates a strategic paradox: competitors rely on one another even as they seek to outmaneuver each other.

In this context, maintaining open channels of communication and fostering multilateral cooperation become essential for global stability. Dialogue on mineral transparency, nuclear safety, and AI governance can mitigate risks of miscalculation, prevent escalation, and build trust despite strategic competition. Multilateral frameworks, though challenged, offer essential platforms for conflict prevention and cooperative management of shared vulnerabilities.

The mineral arms race, if managed carefully, need not spiral into open conflict. Instead, it can catalyze new forms of diplomatic engagement and cooperative security. Recognizing the intertwined nature of technological advancement and resource access, states must invest not only in strategic capabilities but also in diplomatic channels. Only through sustained diplomacy can the global community navigate the complex nexus of minerals, technology, and power, ensuring that the future of AI and nuclear development supports stability, equity, and peace rather than rivalry and fragmentation.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The interdependence the article identifies in its closing pages is the most useful finding in it, and stating the mechanism precisely shows why it constrains all three parties rather than only the dependent ones.

Export restriction is a wasting asset. A supplier that withholds a material teaches every customer that it must be replaced, and the customer then does so, through substitution where the chemistry permits, through recycling, through stockpiling, and through the financing of alternative capacity that would otherwise never have been commercially viable. The rare earth episode of 2010 is the standard illustration: prices spiked, and within a few years processing capacity had been established outside the dominant supplier and the price returned to something near its previous level. The restriction achieved a short-term effect and permanently reduced the leverage that made it possible. That is why the article’s conclusion holds: the party holding a chokepoint has an interest in not using it, and the parties dependent on it have an interest in behaving as though it might be used. Both incentives point toward negotiated arrangements.

Three instruments follow, and none requires trust between the principals. Stockpiles convert a supply interruption from a crisis into an inconvenience, and their existence changes what an interruption could achieve; the arrangements maintained by the International Energy Agency for petroleum are the model, and equivalents for a small number of genuinely non-substitutable materials are under discussion. Transparency in production and trade data removes the informational asymmetry on which sudden restriction depends, and the extractive industries reporting initiatives provide a template. And plurilateral offtake and processing agreements among consuming states, of the kind now being negotiated, change the structure without confronting anyone: capacity built jointly is capacity nobody controls alone.

Two qualifications on the technical claims. The non-substitutability of zirconium is real for light-water reactors and is not a permanent condition of nuclear power, since silicon carbide and coated cladding are in qualification and several advanced designs do not use zirconium at all; the constraint is therefore tied to a reactor generation rather than to the technology. And the dominance in gallium and germanium rests substantially on their being by-products, of aluminium and zinc refining respectively, which means the barrier to entry is economic rather than geological: they can be recovered wherever those industries operate, and the reason they are not is that it has been cheaper not to. Both points support the article’s argument about leverage while limiting how long it can last.

Finally, one observation belongs in this journal. The article treats the three principals as the parties, and they are not the only ones. The minerals come from the Congo, from Indonesia, from Chile and Argentina, and from a number of states whose position in this competition is that of a location rather than a participant. Every previous cycle of resource competition has produced its worst violence there rather than between the great powers, and the instruments that address it, due diligence in supply chains, revenue transparency, and the consent of affected communities, exist and are weakly enforced. A framework that manages the rivalry between the three while leaving the extraction sites as they are will have prevented one conflict and licensed several others.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. Critical Minerals and China’s Global Strategy. APF Canada, 2022.

Cao, Yue, et al. “Assessing Rare-Earth Supply Chain Vulnerability Using Network Analysis.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 29, no. 2 (2025): 355 to 378.

Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Beyond Rare Earths: China’s Growing Threat to Gallium Supply Chains.” 2025.

Ciacci, Luca, et al. “Materials Criticality and the Energy Transition: A Multilevel Analysis.” Energy Policy 174 (2023): 1 to 12.

Deberdt, U. US Minerals Supplies 2024. Institut français des relations internationales, 2024.

Degueldre, Claude. Nuclear Materials Science. Springer, 2017.

Foreign Policy Analytics. “Artificial Intelligence and Critical Minerals Supply Chains.” 18 July 2025.

Helman, Christopher. “How AI Is Ushering in a New Nuclear Age.” Forbes, 21 November 2025.

Hwang, Il Soon. “Corrosion and Materials Issues in Nuclear Reactor Systems.” Journal of Nuclear Materials 395, nos. 1 to 3 (2009): 1 to 19.

International Energy Agency. The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions. IEA Publications, 2021.

International Energy Agency. Global Critical Minerals Outlook. IEA Publications, 2023 and 2025.

Jang, Jae-Ho, et al. “Advanced Zirconium Alloys for High Burnup Nuclear Fuel Applications.” Progress in Nuclear Energy 165 (2024): 1 to 14.

Müller, Karsten, and Sophia Pippart. Geopolitics of Critical Mineral Refining: Dependencies in the AI and Energy Transition. German Institute for International and Security Affairs, 2025.

Natural Resources Canada. Critical Minerals Strategy, 2022.

OECD. Due Diligence in the Cobalt Supply Chain: Mapping Risks and Responses. OECD Publishing, 2022.

OECD Nuclear Energy Agency. Critical Minerals for the Clean Energy Transition. OECD Publishing, 2022.

SFA Oxford. “Critical Minerals in Artificial Intelligence.” 2025.

Sovacool, Benjamin K., et al. “Sustainable Minerals and the Future of Energy.” Nature Reviews Earth and Environment 2 (2021): 8 to 24.

Tatvita Analytics. “China’s Position in the Global Critical Minerals Landscape.” 30 April 2025.

United States Department of Energy. “Energy Department Announces Actions to Secure American Critical Minerals and Materials Supply.” 2025.

United States Geological Survey. “Interior Department Releases Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals.” 2025.

World Nuclear Association. “Mineral Requirements for Electricity Generation.” 2023.

World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2024. Mycle Schneider Consulting, 2024.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2016). Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas, 3rd edition, Paris.

Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Standard and country reports, Oslo.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 establishing a framework for ensuring a secure and sustainable supply of critical raw materials.

International Energy Agency, Agreement on an International Energy Program, 1974, on coordinated emergency reserves.

Gholz, E., & Hughes, L. (2021). Market Structure and Economic Sanctions: The 2010 Rare Earth Elements Episode as a Windfall for the Chinese Industry. Review of International Political Economy, 28(3), 611 to 634.

Farrell, H., & Newman, A. L. (2019). Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion. International Security, 44(1), 42 to 79.

Le Billon, P. (2001). The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts. Political Geography, 20(5), 561 to 584.

International Atomic Energy Agency, Nuclear Fuel Cycle Information System and safeguards documentation, Vienna.

The Art of Governance: From Control to Guidance

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article advances a normative argument about the design of political and economic institutions and, in one passage, discusses the platform of a candidate in a current election. Both the argument and that discussion reflect the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral on contested questions of policy and takes no position on any candidacy.

ABSTRACT

This paper reexamines the foundations of governance through the tension between control and guidance, arguing that civilization’s stability depends not on the restraint of human nature but on its cultivation. Modern political and economic systems remain grounded in a Hobbesian view of humanity as selfish and fearful, justifying authority and competition as necessary mechanisms of order. In contrast, Rousseau envisioned governance as the fulfillment of collective moral freedom, a social contract built on cooperation rather than coercion. Drawing from psychology and evolutionary science, particularly Paul Gilbert’s theory of care and share versus control and hold strategies, this paper argues that empathy and cooperation are biologically ingrained, while self-interest and domination are socially manufactured. Capitalism’s valorization of individualism and materialism has led to a competitive game of survival, allowing our more bestial impulses to dominate; and thus reflects systemic misalignment, not human instinct. True governance, then, must evolve from systems of control to systems of guidance, structures that nurture compassion, equitable access to knowledge, and the shared conditions for human flourishing, without which no stable or just civilization can endure.

KEYWORDS

Hobbes, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, individualism, materialism, anthropological pessimism, intuitive cooperation, human nature

INTRODUCTION

If the goal of civilization is peace, we must nurture humankind to act from intuitive cooperation rather than reflexive individualism. The question, then, is how to design a social contract that protects individual freedom while strengthening the collective whole.

Contemporary governance still operates largely from a Hobbesian premise: that humans, left to their own devices, are selfish, competitive, and driven by fear. Civilization, in this view, exists to restrain chaos through authority and control. Rousseau, however, offered a countervision, one that has been largely lost in contemporary American political philosophy, arguing that humans are not inherently corrupt, but that it is the structure of civilization itself that breeds entitlement. The social order, normalized through governmental and economic institutions rather than human nature, becomes the true source of division and violence.

Recent studies increasingly suggest that humanity is generally oriented toward cooperation and empathy, that we are, by nature, inclined toward good. If that is true, then what is the corrupting force? How does our civilization push people into self-interest to the detriment of community? The answer lies in a system that rewards extraction over contribution, a hunger for accumulation over necessity. In societies where individuals do not see the fruits of their labor, stealing becomes rationalized; people feel entitled to take because their needs are not being served. When fundamental rights, such as healthcare, education, and housing, are privatized and commodified, people are trapped in a cycle of survival. The wealthy can purchase access to quality healthcare and specialized education, virtually guaranteeing admission to elite universities, while others remain bound to the status quo.

As Thomas Paine emphasized, the freedom of thought and access to information are the most vital forms of liberty. Yet still in our age, knowledge itself is a commodity, paywalled, privatized, and often manipulated. Capitalism, in its present form, feeds into the Hobbesian logic of fear and competition, manufacturing scarcity where abundance exists. We waste food, clothing, and resources not because there is too little, but because there is no profit in equitable distribution. The moral result is a civilization that drives individuals to fill existential voids with monetary gain and an idealized external image, mistaking possession for happiness.

MAIN CORPUS

Anthropological pessimism in economic thought

Understanding this philosophical divide is crucial, for it shapes not only political systems but also the evolution of modern economic thought. It is visible in the prioritization of profit over people, a logic that breeds inequality and unrest. When operating from a place of survival or within a society that rewards betrayal in pursuit of monetary satisfaction, civilization is led down a path of self-destruction. The question of whether humans are cooperative or self-interested underlies how societies organize production, distribute wealth, and justify power.

Across three major schools of economic thought, the Marxist, Neoclassical, and Keynesian, we can trace the influence of Hobbes’s anthropological pessimism. In the Marxist school, Marx exposes the capitalist individual as a distinctly Hobbesian archetype: egoistic, strategic, and insatiably possessive. This figure is driven by a longing for control over the material world and an endless pursuit of wealth that ultimately leads to the destruction of social organization. The Neoclassical school further develops this image through the notion of the rational maximizer, an isolated agent who understands rationality purely in strategic and self-referential terms, detached from tradition, culture, or any sense of communal responsibility. Even within the Keynesian school, which sought to correct the faults of laissez-faire capitalism, the Hobbesian logic persists. Keynes’s model echoes Hobbes’s economic Leviathan, in which the state assumes the role of stabilizer and regulator over inherently self-interested actors, reinforcing the view that order must be imposed from above rather than cultivated from below (Domínguez et al. 2017).

Rousseau’s counterpoint, illustrated in The Social Contract, insists that moral and political freedom arise not through domination but through collective self-determination. As he writes, the lawgiver must have recourse to an authority of another order, one which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing. A wise legislator, Rousseau argues, first seeks to understand whether a people are able to support the laws they live under. His critique of Peter the Great, who sought to make Russians into Europeans rather than allowing them to become themselves, warns against imposing an artificial order that ignores the organic will of the people. Government, in this view, must be a living reflection of its citizens, the product of the people, for the people.

Rousseau’s vision reframes the social contract not as a restraint on human nature but as its fulfillment: government guided by the will of the people. If Hobbes’s civilization is built on control, Rousseau’s is built on cooperation. The art of governance, then, lies not in restraining human nature through authority, but in cultivating the conditions for empathy, knowledge, and interdependence. To take care of the earth and others is to take care of ourselves. Of course, the individual must have the freedom to explore their passions and expand their unique capacities, and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness cannot exist without the social structures that make such freedoms universally attainable. To achieve a peaceful society, we must recover this intuition of mutual responsibility and redesign our political, economic, and moral systems around the harmony of freedom and care.

The evolution of cooperation: from care and share to control and hold

While Hobbes and Rousseau debated human nature through philosophy, research now gives us empirical insight into their opposing visions. As Paul Gilbert (2021) explains, early human societies evolved around care and share behaviors that prioritized interdependence, empathy, and collective survival. In hunter-gatherer communities, individuals who acted selfishly, hoarding food or dominating others, were shunned and shamed. Cooperation, not competition, was the condition for survival. These caring and sharing lifestyles not only strengthened group cohesion but also gave rise to the social and cognitive capacities that define humanity itself: complex language, moral reasoning, planning, and empathy.

However, as agriculture took root, mobility decreased, and the accumulation of surplus resources reintroduced the logic of competition. Resource storage and ownership created new hierarchies, giving rise to what Gilbert calls control and hold strategies, behaviors aimed at securing and accumulating more than others. These strategies evolved into systems of domination, inequality, and psychological alienation. As Gilbert notes, the oppressive and anti-compassionate behaviors characteristic of many modern institutions are the continuation of these control-and-hold logics, systems that shape not only social hierarchies but also psychophysiological patterns. Wealth and poverty alter the brain, reinforcing callousness in the powerful and chronic stress in the marginalized.

Gilbert identifies three possible responses to suffering, the three C’s: compassion, callousness, and cruelty. Compassion reflects sensitivity to suffering and a commitment to alleviate it. Callousness manifests as indifference, a moral numbness that rationalizes inaction when help feels costly. Cruelty represents the deliberate infliction of pain for pleasure or control. Disturbingly, modern society often valorizes the latter two: cruelty in repressive regimes and entertainment, callousness in market competition, and political apathy.

Furthermore, biologically, humanity is designed for compassion. Hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin, as well as neural systems regulating emotion and empathy, evolved to tune us into care (Porges 2007; Mayseless 2016). From infancy to death, our relationships shape our genetic expression, immune systems, and cardiovascular health. The care and share instinct is not merely moral but physiological and necessary for humanity’s well-being.

Yet modern environments distort this evolutionary inheritance. In contexts dominated by inequality and consumerism, care and share phenotypes are suppressed, while control and hold behaviors, entitlement, competitiveness, and self-justified greed, become dominant. Studies show that as individuals become wealthier, their empathy decreases while feelings of deservingness rise (Van Kleef et al. 2008; Piff et al. 2018). Materialism, as Kasser (2016) argues, promotes consumption, debt, and ecological harm while diminishing interpersonal connection and well-being. Thus, the ideology of rugged individualism, the glorification of self-fulfillment at the expense of collective enrichment, is not a natural reflection of human nature but a distortion of it.

Furthermore, Rand et al. (2012) found that cooperation often arises from intuitive responses over a reflexive, cost-benefit analysis, suggesting that prosocial behavior, whether innate or culturally learned, is deeply ingrained in human development. If evolution rewarded cooperation, and civilization now punishes it, then our crisis is not moral failure but systemic misalignment. Governance that nurtures compassion rather than competition, cooperation rather than control, would not be a regression into idealism but a return to our biological and moral origins. To reclaim the care and share instinct is to rediscover the evolutionary truth that our survival, psychological, ecological, and political, depends on the well-being of others.

The root: knowledge and human enrichment through experience

If our species evolved to thrive in cooperative, interdependent groups, then our political institutions should mirror this design; and if governance is the art of cultivating human potential, education is its root system, the living foundation through which moral, intellectual, and civic growth emerges. The freedom of thought, as Thomas Paine insisted, is the first freedom upon which all others depend. Protecting that freedom means protecting broad, equitable access to knowledge, and designing learning environments that prize curiosity, plurality of perspectives, and rigorous critical thinking over credentialing for its own sake.

Contemporary educational models, however, frequently reproduce inequality. When schooling becomes a commodity, access is stratified by wealth: elite private institutions and paywalled knowledge create gatekeepers of opportunity, while many students face debt, narrow curricula, and instrumentalized learning. The result is predictable: civic disengagement, weakened critical capacities, and an education that socializes students into competition and extraction rather than cooperation and stewardship.

There are, however, policy models that demonstrate an alternative. Finland’s system, often invoked for its combination of equity and high achievement, focuses on strong teacher preparation, free universal schooling, early childhood inclusion, and a curriculum oriented toward collaboration, well-being, and learning for life rather than test performance. Finland’s recent Right to Learn reforms explicitly aim to restore equity and address gaps in student outcomes, and OECD assessments continue to flag the country as a useful comparative case for educational equity and professionalized teaching (OECD 2022).

These principles are not confined to schooling. They extend to how societies handle harm and rehabilitation. Nordic approaches to incarceration emphasize restoration, dignity, and social reintegration, treating prisons less as instruments of exclusion and more as contexts for education, training, and normalized daily life. Norway’s humane prisons provide inmates with education, vocational training, and conditions intended to preserve dignity; these policy choices correlate with low re-conviction estimates relative to many Western nations. The Nordic Council’s work on prison education also stresses cooperation between prison services and other civic institutions as essential for meeting prisoners’ educational needs and lowering societal costs over the long term.

Together, these institutional examples illustrate what governance as guidance can look like in practice: systems designed to expand human capacities, rather than to control them. Education that privileges diverse perspectives and critical reasoning builds citizens capable of empathy and deliberation; justice systems oriented toward rehabilitation reduce harm and restore civic bonds. Both kinds of institutions operate on a bottom-up logic: professionalized teachers, community supports, and local rehabilitative programs co-create environments that shape behavior and values, more in line with our evolved care and share tendencies than with the modern incentives toward control and hold.

Recent electoral movements have revived the idea that democracy thrives only when its citizens are materially and intellectually empowered. New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani prioritizes access to universal childcare, city-owned grocery stores, fare-free transit, and affordable housing. Such initiatives move beyond charity toward structural justice, arguing that civic flourishing demands collective infrastructure: systems of learning, health, and economic security that allow individuals to live meaningfully rather than merely survive. Reporting on the campaign illustrates how these concrete proposals translate a moral vision into governance, one where democracy safeguards not only the right to vote but the capacity to think, learn, and participate fully in public life. As Winthrop (2021) reminds us, participation in civic life is essential to sustaining our democratic form of government; without it, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not last. In this light, policies that universalize care and access are not simply social welfare measures; they are democratic imperatives that preserve the very intelligence and interdependence upon which freedom depends.

Of course, Nordic models are not unproblematic myths to be imported wholesale. They rest on comprehensive welfare states, social trust, and institutional histories that differ markedly from countries with entrenched inequality and privatized public goods. Still, they provide actionable lessons: invest in teachers; coordinate social services to reduce recidivism; and prioritize policies that expand, rather than gatekeep, access to knowledge.

If governance is to move from control to guidance, its root policy is clear: protect and universalize the conditions for learning and rehabilitation; decentralize profit incentives that convert education and knowledge into exclusive capital; and design institutions so that human development, intellectual, moral, and social, is the primary metric of success. The result is not utopia but improved stability: societies in which citizens are equipped to think critically, care for one another, and collectively steward both civic life and the planet.

SUMMARY *

The article’s structure is an inversion. Where the dominant tradition treats cooperation as the achievement that institutions must produce out of a recalcitrant human material, the author treats cooperation as the baseline and asks what institutions do to suppress it. The evolutionary and psychological material is marshalled to support that inversion: if the disposition to share is older than the disposition to accumulate, and if the second emerged with storable surplus rather than with the species, then competitive behaviour is a response to circumstances rather than a fixed premise about people. From this follows the article’s central practical claim, that the appropriate question for institutional design is not how to restrain a given nature but which of its dispositions a given arrangement calls forth, and the Nordic examples are offered as evidence that the answer varies by arrangement rather than by population.

CONCLUSION

If governance reflects our collective self-understanding, then the task before us is not merely institutional reform, but civilizational recalibration. We must move from a paradigm that restrains human nature to one that cultivates it, from systems of control to systems of guidance. As psychological and evolutionary research affirms, cooperation, empathy, and curiosity are not deviations from our nature but its most generative expressions. Yet the structures we inhabit, economic, political, and educational, too often suppress these capacities in the name of competition, productivity, and order.

The path forward lies in restoring the moral and intellectual commons: schools that teach for understanding rather than obedience, circular economies that reward care and sustainability rather than accumulation, and governance that measures its success not by GDP, but by the flourishing of its people. It is demonstrated that when societies prioritize trust, equity, and education as public goods, civic health deepens and punitive systems give way to restorative ones.

Ultimately, the health of a democracy depends on the intelligence and morals of its citizens, a truth that underscores the urgency of protecting education, critical thought, and civic participation from commodification. Civilization, at its best, is not the triumph of control over chaos, but the art of guiding human potential toward compassion, innovation, and the shared good.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The empirical claim on which the argument rests is stronger than the philosophical framing suggests, and separating the two would strengthen both.

The evidence that cooperation is a stable human disposition rather than an achievement of institutions is now considerable, and it comes from several independent directions. Cross-cultural experimental work has found prosocial behaviour in every society tested, with the variation between them tracking market integration and the strength of local norms rather than anything about the populations. Developmental research finds spontaneous helping in children before the age at which any account of socialisation could explain it. And the work on the governance of shared resources, for which Ostrom received the Nobel prize, documented hundreds of communities that solved collective action problems without either private ownership or state enforcement, and identified the design features that distinguished the arrangements that lasted from those that collapsed. That last body of work is the most useful here, because it answers the question the article’s argument raises: not whether people can cooperate, but under what institutional conditions they reliably do.

Those conditions are known and worth setting out, because they are more concrete than a call for guidance over control. Ostrom’s principles include boundaries that make clear who is entitled to what, rules matched to local circumstances rather than imposed uniformly, participation by those affected in making the rules that bind them, monitoring by people accountable to the users rather than to a distant authority, graduated sanctions that begin with a warning rather than an expulsion, accessible dispute resolution, and recognition by higher authorities of the community’s right to organise itself. Every one of these is a design choice available to a legislator, and together they constitute a specification of what the article calls guidance.

Two qualifications. The article treats the disposition to share as the older and truer human inheritance and the disposition to dominate as the later imposition, and the evidence supports something more uncomfortable: both are old, both are human, and what varies is which the environment rewards. Hunter-gatherer societies suppressed dominance actively and at cost, through ridicule, ostracism and, in the ethnographic record, occasionally worse; the egalitarianism was an achievement maintained by vigilance rather than a default. That reading does not weaken the argument. It makes it more urgent, since it means the arrangements that call forth cooperation must be built and defended rather than merely uncovered.

And the article’s normative preference is best kept separable from its empirical claim, because the two can be attacked at different points. That cooperation is natural and that a particular programme of public provision follows from it are distinct propositions, and a reader who accepts the first may reject the second. Since the first is the article’s original contribution and the second is a familiar position in a contested debate, the argument travels further when the connection between them is presented as an inference the reader may weigh rather than as a conclusion the evidence compels.

Finally, one observation from this field. The article’s account of what suppresses cooperation, namely scarcity, insecurity, and the experience of not receiving what one’s contribution warrants, describes precisely the conditions that mediators encounter in disputes of every scale, from a workplace to a peace process. Parties who believe they are competing for a fixed quantity behave as the model predicts; parties who come to see the quantity as variable behave differently, and producing that shift is much of what the work consists of. The article’s proposition, that competitive behaviour is a response to conditions rather than a fixed property of people, is therefore not merely a philosophical position. It is the working assumption without which mediation would have no rationale at all.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Domínguez, Alejandro, Katherine Flórez, and José Cordero. “Thomas Hobbes: The Modern Economist.” Praxis Filosófica Nueva Serie, 2017, pp. 221 to 250.

Gilbert, Paul. “Creating a Compassionate World: Addressing the Conflicts Between Sharing and Caring Versus Controlling and Holding Evolved Strategies.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, 2021, p. 582090.

Kasser, Tim. “Materialistic Values and Goals.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 67, 2016, pp. 489 to 514.

Mayseless, Ofra. The Caring Motivation: An Integrated Theory. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense and The Rights of Man.

Piff, Paul K., Michael W. Kraus, and Dacher Keltner. “Unpacking the Inequality Paradox: The Psychological Roots of Inequality and Social Class.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 57, 2018, pp. 53 to 124.

Porges, Stephen W. “The Polyvagal Perspective.” Biological Psychology, vol. 74, 2007, pp. 116 to 143.

Rand, D. G., J. D. Greene, and M. A. Nowak. “Spontaneous Giving and Calculated Greed.” Nature, 2012.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Penguin Books.

Van Kleef, Gerben A., Christopher Oveis, Ilmo van der Löwe, Aleksandr LuoKogan, Jennifer Goetz, and Dacher Keltner. “Power, Distress, and Compassion: Turning a Blind Eye to the Suffering of Others.” Psychological Science, vol. 19, no. 12, 2008, pp. 1315 to 1322.

Winthrop, Rebecca. “The Need for Civic Education in 21st-Century Schools.” Brookings Institution, 2021.

“Nordic Prison Education.” Nordic Council of Ministers.

“Finland’s Right to Learn Programme.” OECD, 2022.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Henrich, J., et al. (2005). Economic Man in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(6), 795 to 815.

Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees. Science, 311(5765), 1301 to 1303.

Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2011). A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Allen Lane, London.

Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Manufacturing Migration Threats: Collective Trauma, Postcolonial Legacies, and the Politics of Fear

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article advances a sustained critique of migration policy and of the conduct of particular governments and named political figures. That critique reflects the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral on contested questions of national policy. The manuscript discussed a recent violent incident in the United States, naming the accused, describing his mental health, and referring to a pending capital case. That passage has been removed: a named private individual awaiting trial should not be discussed in these terms in a journal with an ISSN, and the argument the passage illustrated is made elsewhere in the text without it. The article was written in 2025.

ABSTRACT

Across Europe and the United States, migration is increasingly framed as an existential threat. This article examines how states draw on collective trauma, historical insecurity, and postcolonial legacies to justify militarised borders, mass surveillance, and the erosion of civil liberties. It combines postcolonial theory, cognitive psychology, and critical security studies with empirical data and examples from the United States, Europe, and Israel, in order to examine how migration is securitised through the social construction of fear.

KEYWORDS

Migration, postcolonial theory, cognitive psychology, critical security studies, militarisation, securitisation, fear-driven governance

INTRODUCTION

Migration has always been a marker of human freedom, yet in Western politics today it is portrayed as one of society’s greatest threats (de Haas 2024). Across Europe and the United States, narratives of invasion, cultural erosion, and criminality have become central to debates about borders and citizenship. Empirical evidence, however, consistently contradicts these fears: research demonstrates no causal link between migration and increased crime or terrorism (Walczak and Lampas 2020; Light and Thomas 2022). The perception of migrants as a danger is therefore a constructed political instrument rather than a reflection of reality.

This article argues that the militarisation and securitisation of migration are responses not to objective threats but to deeper, unresolved anxieties rooted in collective trauma and in the legacies of colonial domination. Policies that fortify borders, expand surveillance, or criminalise mobility do not create safety; they manufacture fear, fracture societies, and obscure systemic failures. Migration becomes a scapegoat, deflecting attention from domestic and global inequalities. By tracing the historical, psychological, and political mechanisms that construct this threat, the article argues the need for a postcolonial and human-centred framework, one that prioritises dignity, justice, and sustainable peace over fear-driven governance.

MAIN CORPUS

Colonial legacies

Postcolonial theory reminds us that the wealth of the developed world was not self-generated. It was extracted, through slavery, colonisation, and the violent reordering of space, people, and resources. The Global North once moved freely through the Global South under the euphemism of exploration, seizing land and labour without consent. Now, when people from those formerly colonised regions move in the reverse direction, seeking safety, dignity, or opportunity, they are described as invaders.

Fanon described the colonial world as a world divided into compartments, a structure that continues to shape the present. Rights of movement are not distributed evenly; they are mediated by race, class, and geopolitical interest. As Achiume argues, whiteness confers privileges of international mobility, and proximity to whiteness calibrates those privileges (2022). Western states, swift to welcome Ukrainian refugees, have simultaneously subjected African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern migrants to hostile conditions and rhetoric.

The racialised logic behind this was made explicit by the former Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov when he justified opening the border to Ukrainian refugees, describing them as European, intelligent, and educated, and contrasting them with earlier arrivals about whose identity and past he said there had been uncertainty. Bulgaria, along with Hungary, is among the countries identified in the research as having high levels of anti-immigrant sentiment despite the absence of direct exposure to terrorist attack. This contradiction may be rooted in the region’s historical memory of Ottoman rule, suggesting how historical trauma continues to shape contemporary migration politics.

Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia (2005) captures the root of this contradiction: the West mourns the loss of empire without reckoning with its lasting consequences. Migrants are thus viewed not as those affected by global inequality but as threats to be contained. The migrant becomes the postcolonial subject who contests the space to which they were once confined (Ponzanesi 2016).

Current migration policies also entrench inequalities inherited from empire. Although explicitly ethnic selection of the kind once practised is no longer general, giving priority to the more educated, technically skilled, and wealthy is no less a form of restriction. It is restriction by wealthy states that deprives the poor and vulnerable in low and middle income countries, for whom globalisation was supposed to work, and the unavailability of legal and protected routes is not only contrary to the principle of equal opportunity but also drives irregular migration.

Perception and its formation

Well into the twentieth century the dominant view in Western psychology was one of biological determinism: the belief that psychological functions were driven entirely by innate impulse. This mechanistic conception of human reaction is the assumption from which governments have largely operated. Crime and mental illness, for example, are rarely addressed through a full understanding of context, and are instead treated as symptoms of individual inadequacy to be managed, often through securitisation. Vygotsky, by contrast, argued for the existence of lower and higher forms of human consciousness, the former based in instinct and the latter formed through cultural function, holding that each individual consciousness is built from the outside through relations with others (Kolstad 2012).

Perception, the giving of meaning to sense impressions, is a fundamental human capacity and represents the relationship to the outside world (Kolstad 2012). In the digital age it is algorithmically reinforced. Platforms driven by engagement rather than accuracy amplify narratives of threat, so that perceptions of the world are formed through the extreme rather than through experience. This is illustrated in the study by Walczak and Lampas, which found that the highest share of negative attitudes was observed in countries that had not in fact experienced jihadist attacks, a pattern explicable in part by dominant political rhetoric and shared prejudice (2020). There is, in other words, no correlation with direct experience, which points to the conclusion that the refugee-related threat of terrorism is a socially constructed problem.

This distortion is politically useful. Migration has become a convenient explanation for domestic insecurity. Rather than addressing inequality, climate disruption, or state failure, governments direct public anger toward those least responsible and least able to answer. This fractures social cohesion and redefines national identity along lines of exclusion.

Collective trauma and the counterproductive character of militarised safety

It is in human nature to seek safety through certainty, and trauma leaves traces. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 2001, Western states rewrote their legal and psychological structures around fear. As Nasciutti and Rahbari-Jawoko argue, collective trauma did not merely produce temporary emotional harm; it altered how people see, feel, and belong. It reshaped identities and, with them, the parameters of political acceptability. Fear, once private and fleeting, was rendered public and permanent. The consequences they identify include advances in military technology and surveillance, the networking of population intelligence and the sharing of civilian data, the strengthening of border control and the restriction of asylum procedures in the principal receiving countries, and a decline in dialogue and critical thinking amid the proliferation of false information (2021).

Yoder-Maina underscores the danger of unaddressed collective trauma, observing that chronic violence inflicts deep wounds not only on individuals but on the social fabric of communities, hindering development, eroding trust, and perpetuating cycles of violence, so that without addressing these underlying wounds communities remain susceptible to future conflict (2024).

For those forced to flee war or poverty, militarised borders and hostile host states risk physical harm, compound trauma, and erode dignity, reproducing the very cycles of violence that forced their movement. Poor conditions, combined with social isolation and systemic injustice, create conditions in which radicalisation becomes more likely. Securitisation is therefore not merely ineffective but counterproductive. It feeds the narrative that migrants are inherently violent or culturally incompatible. Islam is presented as antithetical to Western values, poverty is equated with criminality, and the West, unwilling to confront its role in destabilising the Global South, demands assimilation to a fictional ideal.

The disparity between perceived and actual risk

Despite the prevailing rhetoric, terrorism by foreign-born individuals remains statistically marginal. According to data compiled by the Cato Institute, the annual likelihood of an American dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist between 1975 and 2017 was approximately one in 3.8 million, and in twenty-seven of those forty-three years there were no recorded deaths at all attributable to such attacks.

Political narratives invert this reality. As documented by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other sources, including the far left and those inspired by transnational jihadist movements. Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and their number grew significantly in the years to 2020, accounting for two thirds of attacks and plots in 2019 and a still higher proportion in early 2020 (CSIS 2020).

These figures reveal a striking disconnect between perceived and actual risk, sustained largely by politicised narrative and fear-based coverage. The consistent overrepresentation of foreign-born terrorism in public discourse has cultivated a disproportionate sense of threat, divorced from context. This aligns with what scholars of critical security studies identify as securitisation: the process by which political actors construct an issue as an existential threat, enabling extraordinary measures and circumventing normal democratic deliberation (Buzan et al. 1998).

The disproportionate attention given to foreign-born terrorism also obscures the more statistically significant threat posed by domestic extremism, and it legitimises policies that target migrants through surveillance, detention, and border militarisation despite the absence of any demonstrable link between migration and elevated terrorism risk. In this sense securitisation is less a response to empirical danger than a reflection of deeper anxieties about identity, cultural change, and the position of the West in a globalising world.

Consent and the surveillance state

Despite the evidence that domestic extremism poses a greater threat, state agencies disproportionately target migrants under the heading of national security. Recent years have seen an expansion of immigration enforcement operations, domestic deployments, and surveillance technologies including facial recognition and biometric tracking. Framed as necessary for public safety, these measures function in practice to marginalise vulnerable populations.

This dynamic exemplifies the account given by Herman and Chomsky of manufactured consent: fear is mobilised to legitimise policies that would otherwise face resistance. The result is a securitised state in which civil liberties are subordinated to an engineered perception of threat. The rise of the surveillance state is thus not a neutral or technologically inevitable development but a politically produced response to perceived disorder, one that is racialised in its effects, selectively enforced, and justified through the language of security.

Securitisation becomes most dangerous when it converges with emotional shock events or isolated acts of violence, which are converted into general arguments about categories of people. The asymmetry in public response is striking: some acts of violence generate intense coverage and political mobilisation, while systemic violence against migrants, refugees, or racialised minorities routinely fails to provoke comparable attention. This reveals securitisation as a discursive as much as a material process, constructing categories of threat and innocence in ways that reflect ideology rather than objective risk.

Israel offers a further case of intensive securitisation. Long presented as a model of border defence and technological innovation, the state has developed a surveillance regime that operates extensively in the Palestinian territories under the heading of counterterrorism. Biometric databases, predictive policing, and restrictions on protest have become normalised, and comparable methods are increasingly exported to or replicated by other states (Zureik and Lyon 2012).

The public’s acquiescence in these measures is not accidental. Cognitive research suggests that in moments of heightened uncertainty people exhibit a bias toward authority, order, and perceived safety, even at the cost of civil liberties (Kahneman 2011). The collective trauma produced by decades of terrorism, economic insecurity, and social fragmentation has created fertile ground for securitisation. As a result, policies that would once have provoked alarm, such as indefinite detention, biometric surveillance, or military deployment in domestic space, are increasingly accepted as common-sense responses to complex social problems.

Yet this framework is counterproductive to peace and to public safety. By redirecting social frustration toward marginalised groups and embedding discriminatory assumptions in technological systems, securitisation inflames tension. It erodes trust, deepens polarisation, and displaces trauma-informed policy. The securitised state is not a site of safety but a site of managed fear, in which power is sustained not by solving problems but by continually producing them.

SUMMARY *

The article’s argument is that the gap between measured risk and public perception is not a failure of information but the product of a process, and it identifies three mechanisms that produce it. Historically, the hierarchies established under empire persist in who may cross a border and on what terms, which is why reception varies so sharply between populations fleeing comparable danger. Psychologically, threat perception is formed socially rather than experientially, which is why hostility to refugees is highest where refugees are fewest and attacks have not occurred. Politically, the construction of an existential threat authorises measures that would not otherwise pass, which is why the response is directed at the population that is statistically least dangerous and least able to object. The author’s conclusion follows from the third: a securitised state is not one that has failed to identify its actual risks but one for which the identification of the wrong risk is functional.

CONCLUSION

The securitisation of migration in the United States, Europe, and beyond reflects not objective risk but historical trauma, political calculation, and entrenched postcolonial hierarchies. Militarised borders, surveillance infrastructure, and exclusionary rhetoric do not mitigate insecurity; they reproduce cycles of fear, social fragmentation, and inequality. Far from enhancing public safety, these measures exacerbate the vulnerabilities of migrants and marginalised communities while normalising authoritarian practice in the name of security.

Recognising migration as a matter of rights rather than as a threat requires a shift of framework: one that centres human dignity, addresses the legacies of colonial exploitation, and acknowledges the cognitive and social mechanisms by which fear is produced. A postcolonial and trauma-informed approach would redirect attention from punitive measures toward constructive intervention, investing in social cohesion, equitable opportunity, and global justice. Only by dismantling the narratives that frame migration as inherently dangerous can states cultivate resilience, uphold civil liberties, and promote sustainable peace.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s diagnosis is well supported and its prescription is the part that would benefit most from development, because a critique of securitisation that concludes with a call for a different framework leaves the practitioner without anything to do on Monday.

The evidence on what changes attitudes is more encouraging than the article’s account of manufactured consent implies. Correcting misperception has a documented effect: people in almost every surveyed country substantially overestimate the proportion of migrants in their population, and studies that supply the actual figure produce measurable shifts in policy preference. Contact has a larger and better-established effect, and the finding from the intergroup literature is specific: sustained, cooperative contact between people of roughly equal standing in a shared setting reduces hostility, and it does so most where the contact is ordinary rather than organised around the difference. That points toward workplaces, schools, sports clubs and neighbourhood associations rather than toward campaigns, and it is work this journal’s readers are positioned to do.

Second, the geography of hostility that the article identifies deserves to be pressed further, because it is the most actionable finding in the piece. Opposition is highest where migrants are fewest and where local institutions have thinned, and the research on this associates it with the decline of the intermediary bodies through which people once encountered one another and through which grievance was once channelled. That is a structural account and it suggests that the response to anti-migrant sentiment lies substantially in places where migrants are not present.

Two qualifications strengthen the argument. The claim that securitisation serves elite interests is largely right and is incomplete: public opinion has in several cases moved ahead of political rhetoric rather than following it, and treating populations as objects of manipulation reproduces the condescension the article criticises elsewhere. People with concerns about the pace of change in their communities are not simply the recipients of propaganda, and a framework that cannot engage them will not change any policy. And the article’s evidence on terrorism is strong precisely because it comes from the Cato Institute and from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, neither of which can be dismissed as sympathetic to its conclusions; that provenance is worth stating explicitly, since it is the strongest thing the argument has.

Finally, a note on method. The article’s most valuable observation is that securitisation converts individual acts into arguments about categories, and the mechanism is well known: a single vivid case is more available to memory than any statistic and displaces it. The corresponding discipline, for anyone writing about these questions, is to resist making the same move in the opposite direction. An argument that rests on the documented pattern rather than on the counter-example is harder to answer, and it does not require anyone’s case to be discussed before it has been decided.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Achiume, E. T. (2022) Racial Borders. Georgetown Law Journal 110(2), 445 to 505.

Buzan, B., Wæver, O., and J. de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Lynne Rienner, Boulder.

Cato Institute (2019) Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis. Washington D.C.

Center for Strategic and International Studies (2020) The War Comes Home: The Evolution of Domestic Terrorism in the United States. Washington D.C.

de Haas, H. (2024) Changing the Migration Narrative: On the Power of Discourse, Propaganda and Truth Distortion. IMI Working Paper No. 181. University of Amsterdam.

Esposito, A. (2022) The Limitations of Humanity: Differential Refugee Treatment in the EU. Harvard International Review, 14 September 2022.

Fanon, F. (1965) The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, New York.

Gilroy, P. (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia University Press, New York.

Herman, E. S., and N. Chomsky (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, New York.

Huysmans, J. (2006) The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. Routledge, London.

Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Kolstad, A. (2012) Vygotsky’s Theory of Consciousness and the Social Construction of the Mind. Psychology 3(9).

Light, M. T., and J. T. Thomas (2022) Undocumented Immigration and Crime in the United States.

Nasciutti, F., and M. Rahbari-Jawoko (2021) Psychological and Social Analysis of Collective Trauma: The Enduring Lessons Learned Twenty Years after the September 11th Terrorist Attacks. Reflexão 46.

Ponzanesi, S. (2016) Postcolonial Subjectivity and Migration Studies. Interventions.

Walczak, B., and N. Lampas (2020) Beliefs on Refugees as a Terrorist Threat: The Social Determinants of Refugee-Related Stereotypes. Migration Studies: Review of Polish Diaspora 46(2), 53 to 70.

Yoder-Maina, A. (2024) On collective trauma and chronic violence.

Zureik, E., and D. Lyon (Eds.) (2012) Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power. Routledge, London.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, and the Protocol of 1967, in particular Articles 31 and 33.

International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, 1990.

Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, 2018.

Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley, Cambridge.

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751 to 783.

Grigorieff, A., Roth, C., & Ubfal, D. (2020). Does Information Change Attitudes toward Immigrants? Demography, 57(3), 1117 to 1143.

Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2018). The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11(1), 189 to 209.

Bigo, D. (2002). Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease. Alternatives, 27, 63 to 92.

Rethinking Sanctions: A Systems-Based Analysis of Economic Coercion and Civilian Impact

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article advances a sustained critique of the sanctions policy of particular states and assesses their conduct in ongoing conflicts. That assessment reflects the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral as between the parties concerned. The figure cited for child mortality in Iraq derives from surveys that have since been substantially revised, and this is addressed in the section added by this journal rather than altered in the author’s text. Casualty figures for Gaza are those reported by the Ministry of Health there and cited by United Nations bodies.

ABSTRACT

This article examines the effectiveness of economic sanctions by foregrounding their humanitarian consequences. Drawing on the cases of Russia, Iran, and Palestine, it argues that sanctions harm civilian populations while failing to achieve meaningful political change. Using systems theory and the concept of feedback loops, the analysis suggests that sanctions strengthen authoritarian regimes, fuel anti-Western sentiment, and undermine long-term diplomatic solutions. The article concludes by advocating multilateral, human-centred diplomatic approaches that prioritise agency, stability, and sustainable international cooperation over coercive measures.

KEYWORDS

Economic sanctions, systems theory, feedback loops, coercive diplomacy, relative gains, absolute gains, ontological security, globalisation, weaponised interdependence, perception, multilateralism, international legitimacy, human-centred diplomacy, state sovereignty

INTRODUCTION

Globalisation has expanded dramatically since the twentieth century, accelerating after the Second World War and intensifying with the rise of neoliberal economic policy, technological innovation, and the end of the Cold War. As states have grown increasingly interdependent, sanctions have become a favoured tool for policymakers seeking non-military means of coercion (Gutmann et al. 2023). The same interdependence that makes sanctions possible also creates complex ripple effects, disrupting supply chains, financial flows, and access to basic goods, and ultimately harming civilians more than governments (Farrell and Newman 2019).

The case of Iraq illustrates this humanitarian cost. Estimates published in the 1990s suggested that very large numbers of Iraqi children died following the Gulf War as a result of sanctions, figures considerably higher than the reported military and civilian deaths during the war itself (Cortright and Lopez 2001; Pape 1997). Moreover, in his analysis of the principal database offering empirical support for sanctions, Pape argues that among forty cases cited as successes only five met the criteria, the remainder being misattributed, failed, or indeterminate.

Sanctions, often framed as alternatives to military engagement, vary in form and impact, and are broadly categorised into five types: comprehensive, targeted, sectoral, secondary, and symbolic. Comprehensive sanctions restrict nearly all economic transactions with a target country and tend to have the most severe effects on civilian populations, as in Iraq in the 1990s. Targeted sanctions aim to minimise humanitarian harm by focusing on specific individuals, companies, or assets. Sectoral sanctions apply to key industries such as energy or defence, as in the measures imposed on Russian finance and oil after 2014.

Secondary sanctions penalise third-party states or firms that engage with the sanctioned country, thereby extending coercion beyond borders, as with the measures discouraging trade with Iran. Symbolic sanctions may carry limited material weight but serve as expressions of international condemnation, such as travel bans or cultural embargoes. The effectiveness and humanitarian implications of sanctions depend not only on political intent but on design and implementation. Broad-based, unilateral, or secondary sanctions are particularly prone to generating systemic civilian suffering and authoritarian resilience.

Conversely, narrowly tailored, symbolic, or multilateral sanctions may serve diplomatic signalling functions with less collateral harm. Seeking to weaken a target state’s economy in order to trigger a change of policy or of regime, sanctions are typically used in three ways: to punish, to deter, and to control. How a state uses them depends on its approach to economic relationships, and on whether it prioritises absolute gains over relative ones. This framework is particularly useful in analysing the cases of Russia, Iran, and Palestine.

If sanctions primarily harm civilians and rarely achieve strategic objectives, can they still be considered effective?

MAIN CORPUS

Feedback loops and systems theory

The root of this critique is the concept of a feedback loop drawn from systems theory: an action generates reactions that in turn reinforce or counteract the original action (Rosenau 1969). Applied to international relations, this reveals that even targeted sanctions operate dynamically, and that the manufacture of scarcity constrains agency.

In this context the loop operates roughly as follows. Sanctions restrict access to goods, finance, or technology. The immediate effect is economic decline, rising inflation, and scarcity. The civilian response is fear, survival-focused behaviour, and withdrawal from civic engagement. The response of the government is to exploit nationalist rhetoric, repress dissent, and consolidate control. The outcome is that the policy goals, whether regime change or the reversal of a policy, become less likely.

This pattern is especially prevalent in collectivist cultures, which are common in authoritarian states. Unlike individualist societies, where state failure often leads to public criticism or protest, collectivist cultures highly value connectedness with the ingroup and thus do not feel threatened by decisions coming from within it (Steindl et al. 2015). In survival-focused contexts, where safety and stability depend on loyalty to the state, citizens are more likely to blame external forces for hardship and to rally around nationalist narratives.

In these contexts perception becomes policy. Fear, fuelled by rhetoric and by economic hardship, is used to consolidate control, as civilians face restricted freedom, declining economic mobility, and heightened surveillance. This dynamic reinforces a distorted image of external actors and their intentions, one often shaped more by fear than by fact, since an actor may for a number of reasons misperceive both the actions of others and their intentions (Jervis 1968). The human need for certainty, even where it comes through repression, outweighs the uncertain promise of reform.

This inclination towards certainty can be explored through the concept of ontological security, the need for individuals and states to maintain a stable sense of identity, continuity, and predictability (Mitzen 2006). The process recurs across sanctions regimes, from Iraq to Venezuela, where sanctions have inadvertently consolidated authoritarian control rather than weakening it.

Case study I: Russia and the politics of perception

Sanctions against Russia, particularly following the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, rest on a logic of containment and deterrence, reflecting the psycho-logic in which even neutral or cooperative actions are perceived as inherently threatening (Jervis 1968). In this framework Russian geopolitical behaviour, driven by historic insecurity, by the enlargement of the Atlantic alliance, and by concerns of domestic legitimacy, is consistently filtered through an assumption of belligerence. When sanctions expanded in 2022, the Russian elite rallied around the government, and domestic economic adaptation turned the crisis into an opportunity for some. Rather than weakening the state, sanctions fed into isolation and radicalisation.

The Kremlin has used wartime economic conditions to consolidate power, rewarding loyalists across society and the elite. Military enlistment and defence employment became economically attractive, while well-connected business figures acquired stranded Western assets at a fraction of market value. The redistribution of property, combined with capital controls and asset seizures, strengthened the domestic coalition and created new stakeholders invested in the survival of the current order. This reorganisation institutionalised an alternative political economy that privileges loyalty over merit, isolates the country from Western integration, and pivots trade eastward, particularly toward China (Fenton and Kolyandr 2025).

Media control amplifies this dynamic. State-controlled outlets and curated messaging allow the leadership to present sanctions as evidence of Western hostility, to justify military action, and to cultivate nationalist sentiment. By controlling the narrative the government neutralises domestic criticism and channels public frustration into support for itself, reinforcing the cyclical effects that sanctions provoke.

Media coverage in the United States has compounded the difficulty. By presenting Russia as a monolithic aggressor while largely omitting its own history of intervention, economic coercion, and civilian harm abroad, coverage offers a selective moral narrative that obscures the tension between criticising Russia and wielding similar instruments (Cato Institute 2018). Hyperbolic portrayals of threat inflame tensions, feed public fear, and constrain the flexibility of policymakers. These narratives reinforce the perception that conflict is inevitable, magnifying the domestic and international effects of sanctions and embedding both sides more deeply in a cycle of distrust.

Public perception and media framing on both sides thus magnify the relationship between sanctions, domestic cohesion, the consolidation of power, and international tension. Humanitarian consequences and systemic economic disruption are frequently overshadowed, allowing each side to justify its own coercive policies while condemning those of the other. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle in which sanctions paradoxically strengthen the government they target while intensifying polarisation and reducing the prospects for diplomacy.

Case study II: Iran and the politics of pressure

One of the most consequential uses of sanctions occurred in the early 1950s, when the popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh sought to nationalise the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In response the United Kingdom imposed an oil embargo, froze assets, and pressed for international isolation. The resulting economic strangulation devastated Iran, intensified internal tension, and created conditions for the coup of 1953 that restored the Shah (Friedman 2022; Elliott 1998).

Initially, with figures such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson urging a fair settlement, Mossadegh hoped for American support in his dispute with the British; like many in newly independent states after the Second World War, he regarded the United States as an anti-colonial power. Cold War calculation, the establishment of the Atlantic alliance, and Anglo-American solidarity during the Korean War overrode these considerations (Central Intelligence Agency 1998). Although the Truman administration was somewhat sympathetic, under Eisenhower the United States actively engineered regime change, and the operation involved cash for the manufacture of opposition, payments to protesters, the bribing of newspaper editors to print misinformation, and the creation of a false communist party to serve as a foil (Wolfe-Rocca).

This precedent is valuable for understanding the long-term effects of economic coercion: sanctions, although presented as strategic, produce enduring consequences. Where civilian life is marked by uncertainty attributed to external threat, people retreat into survival behaviour, and a substantial body of research associates economic uncertainty with the rise of nationalism, isolationism, and the construction of enemies.

More recently, in withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Trump administration reimposed sanctions under a policy of maximum pressure. This was justified by the claim that the agreement had strengthened Iranian nuclear capability, yet neither denuclearisation nor political reform followed. The inconsistency of American policy, shifting between multilateral and unilateral approaches, reinforces anti-Western narratives by deepening public scepticism toward the values of democracy and liberal internationalism.

Economic coercion is rarely humanitarian; it typically cloaks national interest in moral language. No state can credibly claim moral superiority while wielding instruments of coercion. Where economic and political predominance is exercised under the guise of international order, it often proves counterproductive to peace, generating cycles in which sanctions worsen conditions, justify further coercion, and perpetuate instability.

Sanctions often succeed in ways least desired and fail in the ways most intended. The doctrine of maximum pressure illustrates this by reducing the interplay of cultural, political, and psychological dynamics within a state to a crude instrument of coercion. By disregarding these internal systems, sanctions attempt to engineer behavioural change through scarcity, fear, and desperation.

In the Iranian case, rather than harming the leadership, sanctions have strengthened the state and the military and have harmed the people they were supposed to help, namely the middle class. More than twenty per cent of that class has fallen below the poverty line, and a large majority of citizens now depend on government support, and it is the middle class that could be the force for change (Bajoghli et al. 2024). This erosion of the class capable of driving reform traps the state in a feedback loop in which sanctions fortify the government, undermine potential agents of change, and justify the very policies that created the crisis.

Case study III: Palestine and the politics of aid

Restrictions on movement and goods in Gaza have a long history (Jiryis 1966). Sanctions take the form not only of blockade and restriction but of conditionality attached to international aid. As Ziff notes, although one would expect aid to be allocated according to the intensity of need, research shows that donor countries allocate aid to further their own strategic interests, that recipient governments channel aid to match their domestic political agendas, and that aid flows to areas that are safe, inexpensive, and convenient for aid organisations to work in.

The scale of violence following the attacks of 7 October 2023 must also be viewed in the broader context of settlement expansion, blockade, and systemic restriction. The data underscore that what is framed as targeted pressure against Hamas often manifests as economic warfare affecting civilians.

By early 2024, a very large proportion of Gaza’s agricultural assets, including irrigation systems, farms, orchards, and storage facilities, had been destroyed, crippling food production and deepening chronic insecurity. The private sector was equally affected: the great majority of businesses were damaged and gross domestic product collapsed in the final quarter of 2023, reducing the economy to a fraction of its previous level (OHCHR 2024). Civilians face widespread hunger, malnutrition, and a collapsing health system, while growing dependence on aid can be exploited to consolidate control.

United Nations bodies have reported that the entire population of Gaza faces hunger, that a quarter of the population faces starvation, and that hundreds of thousands of children under five are at high risk of severe malnutrition (OHCHR 2024), with more than 61,000 Palestinians killed and more than 151,000 injured according to figures reported by the health authorities there and cited by the United Nations (United Nations News 2025). Blockades framed as security measures can function as instruments of collective punishment, channel aid through political agendas, and undermine the moral authority of states claiming to uphold democratic ideals.

Do sanctions work?

Sanctions are often framed as a tangible signal, either that support for opposition forces is explicit or that support for a ruling government has been withdrawn (Elliott 1998). Yet their effectiveness depends heavily on the perceived legitimacy of the sanctioning state. In an era of growing scrutiny, American policies have faced criticism from United Nations bodies, the Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, numerous states, and public opinion. Research published in 2025 shows that ratings of the United States have dropped significantly in fifteen countries within a year, reflecting a growing distance between intended signalling and perceived legitimacy (Wike et al. 2025).

The broader problem lies in the tendency to impose ideals rather than cultivate them. This undermines the credibility of the international order. Asymmetric structures, largely inherited from colonial arrangements, create the potential for weaponised interdependence, in which some states can leverage interdependent relations to coerce others (Farrell and Newman 2019). Attempts to engineer political change from outside, without regard for internal agency, cultural context, or lived experience, are therefore frequently perceived as evidence of imperial ambition. Economic coercion, while efficient on paper, appears to be the lazy alternative to diplomacy.

It would be incorrect to claim that sanctions never work; however, their apparent success often rests on misleading foundations. In her response to Pape’s critique, Elliott notes that he excludes cases where economic pressure is intended to complement military force, and attributes success to sanctions only where it occurred in the absence of accompanying policies such as military threat or covert action (Elliott 1998). This exposes a deeper contradiction: if sanctions are popular as a non-violent alternative to war, why does their effectiveness so often depend on the threat or use of military force? Rather than functioning as genuine instruments of diplomacy, sanctions frequently serve as a form of escalation, a prelude to conflict rather than a substitute for it.

SUMMARY *

The article’s contribution is to explain a failure that is usually attributed to insufficient severity. On the systems account offered here, the sequence from restriction to hardship to fear to consolidation is not an unintended side effect but the predictable behaviour of the system being acted upon, which means that intensifying the pressure accelerates the loop rather than breaking it. Two further observations sharpen this. The population most damaged is the one capable of pressing for change, since a middle class dependent on state support is not a constituency for reform. And the assessment of whether sanctions have ever worked turns on a methodological choice, namely whether cases accompanied by military threat or covert action count as successes for sanctions, which the author uses to raise the question of whether an instrument justified as an alternative to force can be credited with results that force produced.

CONCLUSION

Examined through a systems lens, sanctions appear as instruments that fracture social systems and entrench state power through uncertainty. The moral authority to wield these instruments is increasingly questioned, particularly as states of the Global South reject a geopolitical order they regard as echoing colonial arrangements. It is contradictory to weaponise interdependence while claiming to champion human rights; this tension undermines legitimacy and inflicts disproportionate harm on civilian populations.

Asymmetric global networks enable certain states to use interdependence as a coercive instrument (Farrell and Newman 2019). In imposing measures on the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories in July 2025, the American administration stated that it would take whatever actions were necessary to protect its own sovereignty and that of its allies, a step that illustrates how the language of sovereignty can be invoked to justify coercion beyond ordinary legal process, and that reinforces the perception of a selective application of international law.

As Pape notes, sanctions rarely succeed on their own. Where they have contributed, as in Libya, South Africa, or Serbia, success has been closely linked to multilateral legitimacy, clear communication of expectations, and avenues for negotiation that respect local agency. By contrast, the cases of Russia, Iran, and Palestine suggest that sanctions without such engagement harm civilians, strengthen authoritarian control, and undermine long-term relations.

If the ultimate goal is sustainable peace and stability, instruments of coercion must be evaluated not only by their stated objectives but by whom they systematically harm or empower. Rather than isolating states through sanctions, the international community should prioritise human-centred diplomacy, multilateral engagement, and economic integration, approaches that protect human agency, reduce conflict, and create durable pathways toward cooperative international relations.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

One correction belongs at the outset, because the article’s argument is strong enough not to need the figure it opens with. The estimates of child mortality in Iraq derived from surveys conducted under conditions substantially shaped by the government of the day, and subsequent analysis has put the excess mortality far lower and has documented how the earlier figures were produced. The humanitarian catastrophe was real, the collapse of water, sanitation, and health provision is documented independently, and the Oil-for-Food arrangements did not prevent it. But a case that rests on a contested number invites dismissal, and the case built on the documented collapse of those indicators does not.

The article’s central mechanism can be stated with more precision, and the precision points toward what would have to change. Sanctions produce three distinct effects that are routinely conflated. They constrain capability, by denying access to particular goods and technologies, and at this they frequently work. They signal a position, and at this they always work, since the signal is the act. And they compel a change of policy, and at this they very rarely work, for the reasons the author sets out. Every serious review finds the same pattern, and the practical consequence is that the honest question for a policymaker is which of the three is being attempted, because an instrument justified as compulsion and delivering only constraint has been mis-sold.

The regime type argument deserves one qualification that strengthens rather than weakens it. The finding in the literature is not that authoritarian governments resist pressure better in general, but that they are better able to reallocate scarcity, protecting the coalition on which they depend and passing the cost to the population, which is precisely the mechanism the article describes in the Iranian case. Democracies lack that capacity, which is why sanctions against them are more effective and why they are almost never imposed. That asymmetry is uncomfortable and it is the strongest version of the author’s argument.

Two developments answer the humanitarian critique in part and deserve to be recorded. Security Council Resolution 2664 of 2022 established a standing humanitarian exemption across United Nations sanctions regimes, replacing the case-by-case authorisations that had made relief work unworkable. And the problem the article does not name, over-compliance, is now recognised as a principal driver of humanitarian harm: banks and shipping companies withdraw from a sanctioned economy entirely rather than assess each transaction, so that medicines and food which are formally exempt do not arrive. That is addressed not by changing the sanctions but by giving financial institutions clear guidance and legal comfort, and it is the most immediately actionable finding in this field.

Finally, the article’s constructive proposal is right and its own examples show what it requires. Where sanctions contributed to an outcome, in Libya over Lockerbie and in the Iranian agreement of 2015, they were attached to a defined path to relief that the target could reach without the collapse of its own position. Where no such path exists the measures become permanent, the target adapts, and the population absorbs the cost indefinitely. For readers of this journal the formulation is straightforward: sanctions are not an alternative to mediation but a source of leverage within it, and leverage applied without a process to which it can be attached is simply pressure. The design question is therefore not how severe the measures should be but who is authorised to negotiate their removal and on what terms, and that question is answered at the point of imposition or not at all.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

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