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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Cultural and Religious Polarization in Modern Conflicts: Implications for Mediation
Abstract:
Cultural and religious diversity does not inherently produce violent conflict. It is rather when identities are weaponized and coupled with collective grievances that conflict is most likely to occur. This article asks what causes cultural and religious polarization in contemporary conflicts and how such polarization can be understood in relation to conflict mediation. It seeks to target the social identity, collective victimhood and political mobilization theories, sacred values, intergroup animosity and distrust, and the mediation theories adapted to peace processes, in order to understand how polarization and division of identity in conflict are created and nurtured. There are several factors that can contribute to polarization, including politicized identity, historical grievances, perceived threats, socio-economic injustices, as well as social and political belonging and victimhood. These can complicate the trust-building and compromise-based negotiating process and transform political interests into concerns of identity, dignity, and the collective safety. This article suggests that, in the case of mediation for polarized conflicts, one must resolve the core issues of the conflict and the fragmentation of the population. Therefore, mediation that is successful has to deal with the complex structural conditions of polarization. This can be achieved through the establishment of recognition, trust, and inclusivity through dialogue, and addressing various conditions of injustice.
Keywords: cultural polarization, social identity, intergroup conflict
Introduction:
Cultural and religious diversity has always been present among human societies. There have always been multiple communities living together with differing belief systems, traditions, and languages. However, the presence of religious diversity does not explain why some societies co-exist peacefully while others experience violent conflict (Köbrich & Hoffmann, 2023). Contemporary views on conflict and identity suggests that cultural and religious diversity becomes significant when it extends into the political sphere or collective grievances and is used to create divisions between the groups of people who are considered insiders and outsiders of a given society.
This transformation is best exemplified through increased social divisions. As social divisions deepen, differences that have the potential to peacefully coexist become increasingly perceived through lenses of “us” and “them”. In these cases, social conflict may indirectly take on cultural or religious dimensions, while grievances can be seen through the historical and lived narratives of the social group. These divisions and social conflicts may be articulated through politics and religion, which can provide meaningful frameworks within which people can articulate their grievances, social conflicts and concerns. Under these conditions, religions and ethnic identities may provide the boundaries and frameworks for articulating conflicts without necessarily constituting their underlying causes (Fox, 2000).
Conflicts that are culturally and religiously polarized cannot be understood as simply conflicts of competing material interests. When politically articulated cultural demands become intertwined with deeply embedded or sacred values, compromise may be understood not simply as a concession, but as a threat to principles central to the identity of the group (Atran & Ginges, 2012). Distrust of each other may severely limit dialogue, while leaders willing to negotiate may be subjected to intense internal pressure not to reach a compromise with the opposing group.
This article, therefore, seeks to answer the following: what causes the phenomenon of cultural and religious polarization in contemporary conflicts, and how can this polarization be understood in relation to conflict mediation? This article argues that cultural and religious polarization should not automatically be understood as a cause of violent conflict.
Main Corpus:
Varying ethnic and religious identities do not always lead to hostility. Research on ethnic polarization and civil conflict shows that diversity alone does not explain violence, as the political exclusion and mobilization of group identities are also important factors (Cederman et al., 2010). This is a meaningful distinction for considering cultural and religious polarization as diverse identities, beliefs, and traditions can coexist without necessarily creating divisions between groups. However, polarization happens when these diverse identities and beliefs increasingly and deeply structure social and political domains and organize opposing groups. As these distinctions sharpen, perceived threats between groups may produce greater social distance and more negative attitudes toward opposing groups (Renström et al., 2021). Political questions of space, social, and economic resources may correlate with cultural or religious affiliations, which means that the importance of identity is always changing. The political relevance of ethnic identities may therefore vary considerably depending on their relationship to state power and mobilization (Cederman et al., 2010).
Cultural and religious identities are especially tied to conflict when there is a noticeable shift in identities with political and social change. Concerns about inequality and discrimination and issues of political and social insecurity are no longer seen as issues against an individual. They are more and more seen as issues that threaten the entire group (Cederman et al., 2010).
Experiences of discrimination, political exclusion, and violence may also become incorporated into collective narratives of victimhood. These narratives can shape how communities interpret events and their relationships with other groups. When present developments appear to reinforce established memories of injustice or victimization, historical experiences can continue to influence intergroup relations and perceptions of the conflict (Lynch & Joyce, 2018).
Political mobilization can further intensify this process. Research on ethnic and religious identity demonstrates that group identities can provide powerful foundations for collective political action, but their effects depend substantially on context. Research has found, for example, that stronger religious identification can be associated with increased political participation among some communities while discouraging political participation among others (Kopko, 2012; Ocampo et al., 2018). Treating entire religious or cultural communities as politically uniform therefore risks overlooking divisions within them and the circumstances that determine when identity becomes politically salient.
More than dislike or friction, polarization manifests as a transformation of perception. When political, religious, or cultural preferences are increasingly organized around opposing group identities, the distinction between “us” and “them” becomes more prominent. Members of an opposing group may be viewed as less than individuals with different interests and more as representatives of a group whose intentions are viewed with suspicion (Iyengar et al., 2019). In this way polarization can reinforce factionalism and make distrust of the opposing group appear justified or natural (Iyengar et al., 2019).
In more severe conflicts, this distinction can develop into moral exclusion or dehumanization. When individuals perceive members of other groups as undeserving of the same degree of moral consideration as members of their own group, discrimination and harm against those groups may become easier to justify (Opotow, 1990).
In order to describe a situation, the way in which language is expressed matters. If there are ways to describe ethnic, cultural, or religious groups in a manner that makes them appear dangerous or as disloyal, uncooperative members of a fragmented society, this can widen existing societal fractures (Dangerous Speech Project, n.d.). Ultimately, the likelihood of peaceful coexistence becomes further diminished.
For many social groups, memory of past victimization or violence can also be a unifying feature of collective memory. It can shape relationships long after the actual victimization occurred (Schori-Eyal et al., 2014). Although memory of the past can help social groups understand and empathize with one another, it can also affect the way present events are perceived.
Historical injustices can also make it easier to understand why a group feels threatened. Depending on the history of different social groups, it is also possible that conflicting accounts of who is the victim, who is to blame, and whom the right to claim ownership truly belongs to shape the psyche of each social group. As a result, conflict is no longer understood solely through current events. Past and present become connected, and contemporary political disputes can acquire the symbolic weight of earlier injustices. This can make compromise particularly difficult when concessions are understood not only in terms of their immediate consequences but also through memories of previous losses (Schori-Eyal et al., 2014).
If cultural or religious identity divisions are exploited for political gain, international relations may become even more fractious. Political mobilization can intensify identity-based divisions when organizations compete to represent the interests of an ethnic or cultural group. Research suggests that competition within ethno-political movements can encourage organizations to make increasingly radical political demands in order to distinguish themselves from rivals and strengthen their position within the movement. Such radicalization can, in turn, increase the risk that political disputes escalate into armed conflict (Vogt et al., 2021).
Once attitudes become more fixated on this issue, the implications of the compromise also become more complex. The act of political compromise is interpreted within the group as abandoning a sacred value, a principle, or a part of collective identity. Under these conditions, conventional attempts to encourage compromise through material incentives may prove ineffective and can even increase opposition to an agreement (Ginges et al., 2007).
Because some level of separation can be understood in all conflicts, the more pronounced the separation, the more complex the problems related to mediation. Conflicts that touch on cultural or religious identity tend to make parties lose the perception of conflicts as just interest-based. Mediators must therefore work with an environment of distrust, historical grievances, and internal pressures within each group that can make compromise difficult.
The conflict in Northern Ireland offers an example of how cultural and religious identities can be intertwined with political and national divisions. The Catholic and Protestant identities were historically aligned to the larger political identities of nationalism and unionism, being further alienated by this conflict (Muldoon et al., 2007). This conflict can therefore not be explained as just a conflict between two religious communities. Religious identification was linked with national identity, political affiliation, constitutional status, and the notion of belonging. The conflict even pioneered the creation of opposing narratives of victimhood, where several communities perceived and conceptualized their positions, while also understanding the counter narrative, via the experiences and memories of violence and loss inflicted upon them (Lynch & Joyce, 2018). These narratives reinforced divisions by connecting political disagreements with the memories of past violence and injustices. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 illustrates how addressing such a conflict required more than an agreement on an immediate political dispute (Belfast Agreement, 1998). The case therefore illustrates that, in addressing a polarized conflict, both the polical demands of the warring parties and the relationships that are most important to them must be addressed.
When different communities have been highly polarized for years, particularly when violence forms part of their shared history, establishing mutual trust becomes considerably more difficult. Under such circumstances, the actions and intentions of the opposing group may increasingly be interpreted through existing perceptions of hostility and responsibility (Çelebi et al., 2014). Initiatives intended to reduce tensions may likewise struggle to achieve their purpose when the parties fundamentally distrust one another. The resulting lack of cooperation can reinforce existing distrust and restrict opportunities for meaningful dialogue and reconciliation (Kappmeier et al., 2021).
Parties to a polarized conflict may seek recognition alongside other meaningful outcomes. Following experiences of discrimination, displacement, violence, or exclusion, demands for the recognition of collective suffering and injustice may become particularly significant (Bar-Tal et al., 2009). This becomes more challenging when communities maintain conflicting historical narratives and competing claims to victimhood, particularly when each group perceives its own suffering as insufficiently recognized (De Guissmé & Licata, 2017). Mediation must consequently create opportunities for acknowledgment and recognition while allowing space for competing interpretations of the past (Ben-Josef Hirsch, 2021).
The last point is that mediation requires the parties to recognize both the mediator and the process as legitimate. The perceived impartiality and credibility of the mediator can therefore be particularly important to the acceptance and effectiveness of the mediation process (Smith, 1994). Formal impartiality, therefore, may not be enough. Mediators must establish credibility with the communities involved and demonstrate that the process provides meaningful recognition and participation to each side.
The challenges of polarization do not suggest eliminating identity from mediation. Cultural and religious identities may be significant to the parties involved and may create openings for dialogue and reconciliation. Therefore, mediation that recognizes the importance of identity and of cultural and religious plurality, and the fact that communities are not necessarily homogeneous and that divergent identities are not necessarily contradictory, is likely to be more effective.
Contextualization of conflict and its development is the starting point of sensitive mediation. Understanding historical grievances and their instigators as well as the inequitable distribution of political power, systemic discrimination, relations of power and the varying community articulations of the conflict is all important. Mediators should also identify relevant political, religious, and community actors while recognizing divisions within the groups themselves. A community described as “religious,” “ethnic,” or “cultural” rarely speaks with a single voice. Differences of generation, gender, political affiliation, social position, and interpretation may produce significant variation within apparently unified groups.
Summary:
The analysis demonstrates that cultural and religious diversity does not inherently produce violent conflict. The more notable and more likely source of conflict is the polarized fusion of cultural and/or religious pluralism with identity subsuming politics and the creation of oppositional politics. Historical complexities, perceived and real threats, inequalities and political friction can deepen social divisions to the point that competing claims to political, spatial and resource domination are seen as competing claims to dignity, safety, and survival.
Conclusion:
Mediation can attempt to solve these issues, but likely won’t be enough given the context of the situation. To address these issues, mediation must be on these two polarized levels. The first concerns the actual issues of the polarized conflict: the politics of representation, security, land, rights and resources, and the politics of institutional arrangement. The second concerns the relationship of the polarized communities and identities. Even if there are some actual and feasible compromises, these will not bring peace and resolution to the conflict if there is polarization sustained by an identity of distrust, competing and polarized perceptions of history, and a sustained, intractable fear of the other side. The mediation should occur within the polarized community as well as the structural components that reinforce the polarization. It is important to recognize differences between relationships and structures, because neither dimension can fully compensate for the absence of the other. With communities in which there is an absence of trust, institutional arrangements are read as confirming and working in line with fears and historical grievances. In addition, unequal or inadequate representation, discrimination, or unstable politics can sustain distrust that mediation seeks to address. The case of Northern Ireland is an example of the relevance of both dimensions. The Belfast Agreement combined constitutional and power-sharing arrangements with commitments to equality, mutual respect, and the recognition of British and Irish identities (Belfast Agreement, 1998). This does not mean that institutional arrangements alone resolve polarized relationships, nor that relationship-building alone resolves structural inequities. Rather, sustainable mediation calls for the consideration of the relationship between the two.
The presence of various communities and religious actors may help reconciliation efforts, but these should not substitute for or lessen the broader engagement and representation efforts. It is not the intention of mediation to remove cultural or religious differences, nor is it required that communities abandon identities that create a sense of belonging, purpose and continuity to successfully resolve conflict. The goal is to design the political and social framework within which those identities are perceived as non-threatening to one another. Having placed together recognition, dialogue, and trust-building alongside substantive negotiation and the kind of institutional reform that fits the context, mediation can help transform relationships where difference has been a cause of division into those in which difference can coexist with compromise and a resolution.
Potential solution:
Mediation can provide space for parties to articulate experiences of injustice, insecurity, and loss. Recognition does not require a mediator to determine which collective narrative is correct. Instead, it allows parties to understand why particular events, symbols, or demands carry significance for the other side. At the same time, mediators should avoid cultural essentialism. Treating individuals primarily as representatives of a fixed religion or culture risks reproducing precisely the rigid boundaries that polarization creates. Recognition should therefore acknowledge both collective identities and diversity within them.
However, dialogue is not sufficient for resolving conflicts supported by structural factors. The Northern Ireland case shows why recognition needs to accompany political and institutional arrangements. The Belfast Agreement did not require the communities involved to abandon their British, Irish, unionist, or nationalist identities. Instead, it implemented political arrangements through power-sharing and the principle of consent, while also recognizing the right of individuals to identify as British, Irish, or both (Belfast Agreement, 1998). This is relevant to the broader argument of this article because one of the aims of mediation is not necessarily to diminish the role of identity. Rather, it is possible to encourage the formation of political arrangements in which multiple identities do not require multiple and mutually exclusive political results. In a polarized conflict, this approach could enable parties to address some substantive issues, without a community feeling like it needs to compromise its identity.
If discrimination, polarized power relations, economic inequality, territorial disputes, or the lack of appropriate mechanisms for the protection of minority rights perpetuate polarization, then the addressing of these factors is also necessary for the settlement. For mediation to be sustainable, there must be a combination of building relationships and institutional changes. The Northern Ireland case demonstrates why these dimensions cannot easily be separated. Mediation is therefore most effective when these factors are understood as interrelated rather than treated as distinct issues.
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Building a Transborder Social Identity within BRICS+ and a Fragmented Multilateral World
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 chapter discusses the ongoing difficulties and future challenges that BRICS nations face on their way to a meaningful political impact and supplementary relevance on a global level. More often than not, stakeholders and decision-makers ignore crucial and fundamental necessities that societies request in order to enable and initiate a sustainable and lasting process of growth. Potentially, politicians in charge may be aware of the importance of such anthropological puzzle pieces and, accordingly, should put them on their agenda. Reality seems to prove that the general focus is widely placed on targeting and canvassing short-term financial turnovers and outcomes related to the balancing or unbalancing process of global impact only. Forecasting the failure of such progress, this chapter offers a more convenient strategy to find one’s position within the global community based on mutual respect, shared responsibility, and a holistic approach to peacebuilding.
KEYWORDS
Social identity, global alliance, political divergence, multilateral fragmentation, global stability, sustainable world order, holistic peacebuilding
INTRODUCTION
Starting off our journey through this chapter, I would like to create a common ground of understanding by having a brief look at the status quo of the BRICS community in the year 2026. Being initially a group of interest, Goldman Sachs researcher Jim O’Neill discussed the geopolitical relevance of Brazil, Russia, India, and China in 2001 (O’Neill 2001) and thereby potentially introduced the proper term and existence of BRIC (Mostafa 2013). It only makes sense to mention that South Africa was accepted as the first additional or joining member in 2010 (Harrison 2018). Based on this action, South Africa formed the fifth member of the alliance, made the name change to the common term of BRICS, and complemented the group in a meaningful geopolitical way (Erdmann 2024b).
By reviewing the economic history of the group’s members, we can see that all such states underwent crucial economic changes and faced challenging financial situations in the late 20th century (EFSAS 2023). The awareness of the members’ natural resources, the increasing level of global consumption, the improvement of price strategies, and the expanding worldwide interlinked trade established later overall economic stability within the above-listed states (EFSAS 2023). Nowadays, this group finds itself in an economically comfortable situation (Erdmann 2024a), controlling a meaningful quantity of worldwide natural resources and obtaining a key role in global trade (Iqbal 2021).
Being still a purely economic-oriented alliance, the group could not be more diverse in a multitude of aspects. Potentially, this and the complexity of the alliance per se are one reason why it took the group 25 years to grow from the initial four states to a more significant number of members (Glogowski 2024). Even though the number of states being interested in partnering with BRICS extends this number by far, we may still find a lack of a focused and determined agenda explaining what BRICS actually stands for.
The currently available communiqués look like lists of interests stated by the broad quantity of members and partners, while every country intends to get the individual points on. Especially the vague formulation of an agenda bears many uncertain aspects that can turn out to become an uncomfortable setting for countries that find themselves in this specific economic alliance. While being part of BRICS, many of these members strengthen their independence and stability by trading with potential opponents of the group (Erdmann 2024b). This inconformity and contradiction gives birth to an inner instability that prevents BRICS from building the solid and impactful global force that it might look for, namely to become an entity that strongly leads or manages the worldwide economy and politics at the same time, based on its all-embracing network and level of fundamental natural resources.
MAIN CORPUS
A hyper-diverse global alliance called BRICS
The subject of our analysis often presents itself as a fast-growing economic unity that stands up in order to challenge the potentially existing Western financial trade order and to reorganize such towards a much-needed balance or towards leading it into the opposite extreme. Even though such a balancing and unbalancing process, depending on one’s perspective, takes place continuously, we are now having a look at the uniqueness of the M.U.M. Model (Erdmann 2024b). This model relates to global politics and describes the ongoing shift between multipolarism and unipolarism and vice versa, as it presents itself specifically at the beginning of this millennium.
The nature of this phenomenon is based on the struggle between the often labelled and perceived Western and Eastern alliances, targeting economic dominance and impact on a global level. This process entails dynamics that describe a constant movement from multipolarism towards a potentially brief phase of balance, and a further development to the status of unipolarism, before setting the frame for a new epoch of multipolarism. This concept outlines the notion that terms and concepts repeat themselves over and over again. The process of improving repetition can be visualized by imagining a spiral staircase, showing that one constantly arrives at the same spot, but on a new level of escalation (Erdmann 2024b).
Putting this into practice and being aware of the scheduled picture of global dominance, we also want to paint a picture based on our own research and on our own understanding of this situation, being highly interlinked with the world community and with what is potentially needed by mankind and less by a few stakeholders. When we talk about BRICS, we exchange on a global alliance that stretches over four continents, currently counts nine full member countries, and recently accepted thirteen partner countries (Norton 2024). In order to identify even more complexity, we need to say that its members are spread over four continents, while some of them economically partner with and on all five continents. We also see that a common understanding of what BRICS stands for and what it targets is lacking in the portfolio of the alliance. As such a common ground is missing, it turns out to be highly difficult to create or even imagine a strategy that supports the achievement of such a goal, and a path that maintains such a status once it was achieved. Furthermore, it remains entirely unclear how full members derive greater benefits from their membership status compared to countries that are recognized solely as partners.
The fact that BRICS finds itself being completely decentralized turns out to be often communicated as an impactful selling point, while it could also materialize as being the weakest point in the portfolio. Sharing the mutual interest of common economic growth, the alliance includes a broad quantity of languages, cultures, political systems, diverse trade partners, and foremost a wide frame of economic competencies and capabilities of its members (Solomon 2022), while the last point may not match with all partners, as many of them suffer tremendously from their economic instability. This level of diversity turns this alliance into a highly heterogeneous group (BpB 2023) and maybe into the most diverse group that ever existed in modern history on a global scale. The ongoing strategic expansion of BRICS forms part of the alliance’s goal to raise its economic power and natural resources based on global relevance (Tseen Fu 2024). A closer and critical view may disclose that the potential goal of the alliance is simply to create a trade network of natural resource owners, producers and consumers, excluding what may be labelled as Western countries. A far too long potential exclusion from the so-called Western world order makes members of the alliance wish to strike back by continuously admitting new members, propagating inclusiveness (Tseen Fu 2024), and increasing the level of country-based diversity to a more extensive and questionable level. Obviously, the claimed inclusiveness turns out to be highly selective.
Based on such a diverse range of starting points, interests, and capabilities, setting up such an alliance turns out to be an extraordinary challenge, while the transcontinental and inter-political character of its members specifically reinforces the complexity of making such a construct grow in a sound and sustainable way (Erdmann 2024a), especially when potential authoritarian regimes and opposing economic relations are compressed into one group. Nonetheless, besides already being extraordinarily diverse, BRICS continues to extend the quantity of its members and partners and thereby raises the level of inner complexity. A brief look at some fundamental core members of BRICS, namely China and India, shows how two almost historic rivals find themselves put into one alliance, still being and remaining highly competitive opponents on a multitude of levels. Interestingly enough, Russia takes over the role of a mediator in order to bring such members closer together (Baunov 2024). Four of the recently admitted members are likewise involved in complex disputes. Saudi Arabia and Iran are trapped in a long-term dispute on regional predominance and political integrity (Desta 2011), while Egypt and Ethiopia find themselves involved in an ongoing contradiction on natural resources, namely the Nile’s water dispute (BpB 2023).
A baseless iceberg?
Considering the ambitious growth and overall potential target of BRICS, namely to be the rebalancing tool in world economics, we may wonder where this vision and motivation actually comes from. The worldwide economic playground offers a multitude of alliances for countries to join, to actively participate in, and to create overall lasting benefits. Forming part of or being a member of the G20 and BRICS at the same time is such an ambivalent example that it raises many questions. All founding members of BRICS, including South Africa, are members of the G20, while they identified the need not only to join a more likely Western-run alliance, but also to be part of an opposing alliance that challenges the economic stability of several member states from the previously mentioned compound. Such a contradiction does not support one’s credibility in having one clear vision but more likely creates uncertainty on a global scale, actually a feature that mankind currently does not need at all, and potentially turns out to be a very poor political strategy that supports fragmentation instead of unification.
When features like mutual exchange, respect, and understanding support socio-economic peace and balance, what does fragmentation and exclusion mean to global society? It can be stated that the process of fragmentation turns out to be an impactful strategic tool, especially when a group achieves and thereby defines a certain level of self-confidence and power within the global scale. Sufficient resources show that fragmenting groups strategically exclude broad parts of a community in order to destabilize it, and to create a specific image of an enemy (Erdmann 2024c). Hereby, the recently created splinter groups are subject to the aggressor in number and power. Such dynamics can also be found during prosecution and ethnic cleansing (Zartman 2010).
The more we challenge the peak of the iceberg, namely the image of BRICS that is communicated to the broad public, the more complex and confusing the setting of this potential alliance becomes. Step by step, we may discover that it looks like a bottomless construct that is lost in its own complexity. You may see that one can even challenge the term alliance, as such traditionally identifies a group of countries or parties that share one common goal or interest (Cambridge 2025). The previously mentioned communiqués and the global economic interlinkages of the group’s members show more likely interests in all possible political directions, while some look for economic growth, others target financial stability, still others try to enrich their global network, and finally some aim to look as challenging as possible towards potential Western opponents and to impress such in a meaningful way (Baunov 2024). This seems to be the new identity of BRICS in the present era, namely to focus on the number of members and potentially less on the realistic, productive impact new partners may provide. Hereby, it seems to be worth noting that potential natural resources that a partner or member may provide, in combination with an unstable political system, do not turn out automatically to be a supportive feature to such an alliance. Furthermore, members need to observe the overall political behaviour of member and partner countries. Forming part of a group also means that other stakeholders’ actions look to be supported or at least tolerated. Accordingly, admitting new members to BRICS while continuously battling Ukraine may also serve as a wider legitimation for the Russian leadership to proceed in this political direction.
Nobody can deny that joining BRICS as a member or partner in these times serves as a clear political message towards the global community. Such countries should be well aware of the meaning of this symbolic act, namely that they support what BRICS members commonly stand up for or what they tolerate. Here, a potential anti-Western perspective may serve as a common point of interest (Baunov 2024), while most members remain involved in trading with a multitude of such Western countries. Generally, we can observe that joining a group incorporates and requests two fundamental points, namely that each member supports the overall group target and supports what, more precisely, individual peer members stand up for. This simple fact perfectly underlines the level of contradiction that BRICS finds itself in, especially referring to handling dual memberships in pro and contra Western alliances. Whether it may be the potentially anti-Western course, the unclear overall target of BRICS, or the Russian dominance in constantly inviting new members (Baunov 2024), this uncertainty does not attract everyone. It is worth noting that Argentina and Kazakhstan resigned from joining, while the role of Saudi Arabia actually remains unclear as no official confirmation of a joining act can be identified (Baunov 2024). The fact that Russia, based on its activism, put itself apparently into the position of a presidency of BRICS made the group’s character change from an initially cooperative alliance that targets mutual development into some sort of a plaything of unpredictable anti-Western propaganda, losing itself in the baseless complexity of a self-focused worldview and biased global interests.
Even though such a global partnership has the potential to float solidly like an iceberg, its intransparency beneath the surface extends to such a crucial level that its baselessness starts creating a downforce instead of supporting the complete superstructure. The fundamental question may be what measures need to be taken to turn the currently existing construct into a globally responsible, well-respected alliance that supports peace, mutual respect, and socio-economic growth, if this is the goal at all.
An unfortunate coincidence?
The topic of the organization’s credibility is far more complex than only the issue of socio-economic transparency. Currently, there does not exist one single updated document that displays, in a transparent way, all members of this construct. Even though potential members are listed on websites, on platforms, and in media channels, the specific level of membership is not clear. Hereby, the public cannot easily identify which country is a full member, which one is a partner country, which one maintains friendly relations, which country is an applicant for membership, and which country delayed or cancelled the joining process and for what reason (Council on Foreign Relations 2025). Furthermore, no officially signed joining memoranda are accessible to the public. Such are circumstances that truly challenge a belief in an upright ambition to increase one’s membership numbers and global impact in a sound way. Far more confusing remains the fact that it is constantly highlighted how many countries participate in the annual summits, while it remains unclear which role they play in such events. The question is, what kind of countries are attracted by such a foggy environment?
Unfortunately, there is another critical topic that needs to be discussed, especially when talking about transparency and international standards. This context overshadows the current setting of the alliance but is seldom addressed. The reason therefore may be the unpopularity of the topic per se, but it absolutely needs to be brought to the table, especially by representing the perspectives and the interests of being heard by potential victims. Third party reports communicate that several member countries of this alliance show human rights violations within their territories (U.S. Department of State 2025).
In order to use an additional source and to be able to analyze, from another angle, how deep-rooted and complex the issue presents itself in the current era, the reports of Amnesty International may offer additional insights (Amnesty International 2026), in order to better comprehend the information shared by other reporting bodies. Based on these burdening reports, it may not be sufficient to proclaim a condemnation of war, as commonly done during annual summits, especially when the addressed conflicts solely take place between labelled Western countries and potential BRICS members (Lima 2025), while issues that take place within the members’ own territories are not addressed and are silenced. Here, a superficial polishing of the topic may not be sufficient. It is definitely needed to address the topic in a seriously critical way and to create a path of getting back on track, following what was agreed on in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN 1948), a document that was signed by a significant number of BRICS related countries.
Addressing this critical topic and initiating credible requested action, in order to counter the current circumstances, may generate a higher level of global acceptance of member countries or of the alliance at all, while the question remains why not all member countries signed this document and what this specifically means to the other associated countries that automatically stand in for or back up the other joining members’ political setting by attending one common alliance.
Ordo ab chao
Considering BRICS is currently more likely a rag rug of nations longing for sustainable economic growth and wealth management, we may commonly agree that there is no access to wealth without prior management. Such management needs to initiate a process that all members, partners, and joining applicants evaluate as useful and that all of them are willing to follow up on. This common understanding can be a cornerstone of an overall identity that supports a much needed ordo ab chao, order out of chaos. Obviously, such a process of change takes time and definitely starts by every one of such partners before possibly spreading from partner to partner or generating an overall code of conduct, or better said, a common identity that supports the respectful and peaceful growth of the global community. And of course, such an achievement may only be possible by leaving behind the constant labelling and setting up of Western and Eastern opposing countries, in order to finally understand all of us being global citizens.
Here, we need to face one specific reality, namely that the level of diversity that BRICS covers surpasses existing regional and continental alliances and unions by far. In this way, BRICS may not be compared to any other existing union, such as the European Union, the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or the Union of South American Nations. Its complexity of cultures, languages, religions, and economic necessities makes this construct face very unique challenges. Currently, we do not see indications that support the understanding that BRICS will grow from within in order to become sound (Erdmann 2024a), grow in a sustainable way, and build a lasting global value for mankind, as previously requested. This status might continue, while the focus remains on growing, promising new members credibility and legitimacy (Adams 2023).
Having such widespread diversity as a foundation, we may understand that what is needed looks like a common creed or a transborder identity that reconciles differences and harmonizes diversity in an all-embracing way. So, the term identity offers us a very complex nature and a rich scale of interpretations. As soon as the consciousness is sharpened and a human individual realizes their proper existence, the quest for an identity is born. Identity per se is a multilayered word that is of importance on an individual level, a group level, a regional level, a national level, a continental level, and may reach its climax on a global level, including ethnicities, languages, creeds, and cultures. Even though we may identify a multitude of different sorts of identities, they all seem to have one common denominator, namely the quest for a harmonic and organized aspect.
Accordingly, we may imagine that it is basically a very tricky and challenging project to create or build a truly transborder identity, while what is needed is something that people can believe in, that connects them, and that motivates them to start talking about themselves as a sound community. What we are looking for is the still missing central puzzle piece that completes the artwork and that gives a higher meaning to angles, visions, and perspectives. This puzzle piece could turn chaos into order and provide BRICS with the opportunity to stop being a potentially unpredictable underdog who challenges an existing global construct. BRICS could leave this image behind and start growing solidly within itself and within the global community in order to become a cornerstone for global balance, peace, and harmony. This missing link, or still transborder identity, can only be identified and developed by the community of BRICS itself (Yzerbyt 1997), and starts with the discernment that only merged puzzle pieces complete the picture, or that all countries are needed to build a lasting global community. The form, structure, and character of a puzzle piece is crucial when we identify its place within the overall artwork, while the piece itself merges perfectly with the bigger picture by not focusing on its proper borders any longer. Thus, the ultimate goal, on a global level, should be to leave proper personal interests behind, and to merge into a community of conscious and truly interdependent partners.
SUMMARY
The revision sharpens the argument at the point where it is most easily dismissed as abstract, by asking what can actually be established about the association. The finding is that no authoritative document sets out who belongs to it and in what capacity, that no accession instruments are published, and that the annual summits report attendance without specifying the standing of those attending. From this the author draws a conclusion that does not depend on any political position: an association whose membership cannot be ascertained cannot be held to anything, because there is no record of who undertook what. The second addition applies the same test to conduct rather than to form, observing that declarations condemning wars between others sit alongside silence about conditions within the members’ own territories, and that a group whose members are documented as violating undertakings they have signed acquires a collective problem of credibility whether or not it acknowledges one.
CONCLUSION
In order to be able to build a transborder identity that truly combines a high level of diverse members of a group, we need to understand the uniqueness of this common goal, and the specific challenges of the setting in question. Traditionally, a group identifies itself as such based on a common language, dialect, culture, history, or tradition (Akuche 2016). Obviously, not all members of the wider BRICS circle are completely different, but they are potentially diverse. Some of them share languages, but not dialects; others share religions, but not their traditions within them. Here, we can clearly see that diversity is unequal to fragmentation, which more likely is the counterpart of unity. This gives us a very crucial hint, namely that diversity can still be or become the starting point that has its peak in some level of unity. Having stated in the beginning that the high level of nations’ diversity may be the weak spot of BRICS, we find ourselves at the point of turning a fragile ornament into the truss of a superstructure. This means that if it turns out to be possible to build an identity of BRICS members, it should also be realistic to build an even stronger identity, namely the identity of a global community, incorporating all puzzle pieces, as previously mentioned and requested.
We may have learned so far that building a transborder identity is more likely an extensive task, especially as setting the foundation of a common understanding begins with each participant and targets the overall conformity of the sum of such diverse individuals, longing to label themselves members of a homogeneous group. Here, we may challenge the traditional concepts of strategic economic growth and the methods that accordingly are based on building inclusive and exclusive alliances, such as the G20, the G7, BRICS, and NATO, more often than not benefitting from this process of economic and political fragmentation. The question that we need to analyze for ourselves is whether such an exclusive mindset still meets today’s necessities, in a global and multilateral world, and if we can justify such a path in a dialogue with upcoming generations.
Reflections may unveil that exclusive behaviour often turns out to be a strong hint towards an advanced level of fear of loss, of disadvantage, and of being left behind in general. Based on the general global connectivity, referring to individuals, companies, organizations, and countries, one may strongly doubt that building economic borders supports global growth. Accordingly, and as previously stated, putting a name on everything and everyone supports exclusiveness, which per se is often a door opener for fragmentation and extremism (Erdmann 2024c). What mankind potentially needs in a time of economic and social insecurity is a common creed that binds all humans together at the bottom of their hearts. Namely a creed that is so fundamental that it touches and supports basic human necessities, namely stability, peace, and harmony. If we do not build harmony at the grassroots level of the individual and their family, we have no space to further develop a sound identity that surpasses borders and that embraces the wealth of mankind.
It may already be sensed where this will possibly take the global community. BRICS, but more likely mankind per se, needs to create a real consciousness of a global community and, more specifically, the awareness that today’s exclusiveness and fragmentation do not support real stability and global growth in the long term but always support that only very selective groups that initiate such processes benefit from those dynamics. In order to initiate such a change, we need politicians who act like responsible adults and who understand that owning the biggest piece of the cake does not automatically grant satisfaction, not in the long run, and potentially less to all of us. Based on what has been written so far, we all may imagine a world without the previously mentioned trade associations and unions. Mankind may envision that a common level of true responsibility towards the planet Earth and mankind is much needed, far beyond self-centred and ignorant behaviour that is based on and that supports chaotic circumstances in the human mindset and on the surface that we walk on.
Therefore, BRICS, and again mankind in general, needs an agenda that clearly communicates, in a reasonable and realistic way, shared values that offer tranquillity on a global level and enable mankind to develop a common identity, not as individuals but as a global community. Such a common identity could also be the true recognition of the Declaration of Human Rights, that would enable all countries to meet upon one level, to exchange and to treat each other based on righteousness. Hereby, it is crucial to discharge the importance of a labelling name and not to put an excluding acronym in the front row, such as BRICS, the G20 or the G7. Now, it is humankind that counts first, it is humankind that needs to turn into a global community of mutual respect and responsibility, it is humankind that needs to connect and grow from within, and it is humankind that does not need a name to differ, because it already got a name that binds all of them together, citizens of the world.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The transparency argument is the strongest thing in this revision and it is worth separating from the political assessment that surrounds it, because it stands on its own and is harder to answer.
An association that publishes no accession instruments, maintains no authoritative list of members and their status, and reports attendance at summits without specifying capacity, has no ascertainable membership. The consequence is not merely presentational. Commitments made in a communiqué bind whoever agreed to them, and where it cannot be established who agreed, nothing binds anyone. The comparison the author sets aside is instructive here rather than inapt: the European Union publishes its treaties, the African Union its Constitutive Act, and both maintain registers of ratification precisely because an institution that cannot demonstrate who is a member cannot enforce anything against anyone. This is an institutional design question rather than a political one, and it admits of a straightforward remedy that costs nothing and that no member could reasonably oppose.
Two observations on the human rights passage. The most difficult version of the argument is not that member states have poor records, which is true of members of every large grouping including those the author contrasts them with, but the one the text arrives at in its final paragraph: that association implies a degree of endorsement, and that a body which condemns conduct by non-members while remaining silent about equivalent conduct among its own acquires a selectivity problem that undermines the standing from which it speaks. That argument applies with equal force to every grouping, which is what makes it a general proposition about multilateral bodies rather than a criticism of one, and stating it that way makes it considerably harder to dismiss. Relatedly, the sourcing would be strengthened by drawing on bodies whose reports cannot be characterised as partisan by the states concerned: the treaty bodies of the United Nations, the special procedures of the Human Rights Council, and the universal periodic review examine every member state on the same criteria, including those whose governments commissioned the reports the author cites.
Two further points bear on the constructive proposal. A minimal standard of association is achievable in a way that a shared identity is not, and it is what comparable groupings have adopted: published criteria for admission, an accessible register, a code of conduct, and a procedure for suspension. None of these requires anyone to agree about values, and each would answer the specific defect the author identifies. And the concluding proposal that the Universal Declaration serve as the common ground is well chosen for a reason worth stating: it was adopted without a dissenting vote, its substance has been incorporated into instruments ratified by every state in the grouping, and it is therefore the one text on the table that no member can characterise as an external imposition. Where a shared identity must be built and cannot be invented, an existing common undertaking is the only available foundation.
Finally, the metaphor of the puzzle piece that ceases to attend to its own borders states, in the author’s own terms, the finding this journal has reached repeatedly from other directions. Identities are not dissolved by the discovery of a larger one; they are held within it, and the arrangements that work are those in which belonging to the whole does not require anyone to stop being what they were. That is the dual identity finding, and it is the mechanism by which the aspiration in the closing paragraph could become something other than an aspiration.
*Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
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Akuche, Andre Ben Moses (2016) Nation Building and the Impediments of Building the Nigerian Nation.
Amnesty International (2026) Country Reports. https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/
Baunov, Alexander (2024) New Identity of BRICS. Carnegie Endowment.
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2023) Erweiterung der BRICS Gruppe.
Cambridge Dictionary (2025) Alliance.
Council on Foreign Relations (2025) What Is the BRICS Group and Why Is It Expanding?
Desta, Teddy (2011) The Iran and Saudi Arabia Power Struggle.
EFSAS (2023) The BRICS: Origins, Evolution and 2023 Expansion.
Erdmann, Daniel (2024a) BRICS: Minus × Minus = Plus? About the Art and Challenges of Growing from Within. In: Kiyala, J. C. K., Tshikovhi, N., Ngwenya, D. M., and F. Netswera (eds) Expanded BRICS Nations. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.
Erdmann, Daniel (2024b) The Dynamics of Polarised Pluralism: On the Benefits, Challenges, and Threats of a Constantly Changing Fragmented World Order. In: Kiyala, J. C. K., Tshikovhi, N., Ngwenya, D. M., and F. Netswera (eds) Expanded BRICS Nations. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.
Erdmann, Daniel (2024c) Personal Identity and Peacebuilding: A Critical Reflection. In: Kiyala, J. C. K., and N. Chivasa (eds) Climate Change and Socio-political Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Anthropocene. Springer, Cham.
Glogowski, Aleksander (2024) India, Pakistan and BRICS after the 2024 Kazan Summit.
Harrison, Philip (2018) South Africa in the BRICS.
Iqbal, Badar Alam (2021) BRICS as a Driver of Global Economic Growth and Development.
Lima, Julia (2025) BRICS Leaders’ Declaration Condemns Wars and Calls for Reform of Global Governance.
Mostafa, Mahmood (2013) The Rise of the BRICS and Their Challenge to the G7.
Norton, Ben (2024) BRICS Keeps Growing in a Multipolar World.
O’Neill, Jim (2001) Building Better Global Economic BRICs. Goldman Sachs.
Solomon, Mussie (2022) BRICS Plus and Its Major Impacts on Poor Members.
Tseen Fu, Brice Lee (2024) Legitimacy through Diversity: China’s Leadership in the BRICS Plus Expansion for Global Balance.
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Yzerbyt, Vincent (1997) Building a European Identity.
Zartman, I. William (2010) Identity Conflicts. International Peace Institute.
Further reading added by the WMO Editorial Team
Agreement on the New Development Bank, Fortaleza, 15 July 2014, and the Treaty for the Establishment of a BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, 2014.
Kazan Declaration of the XVI BRICS Summit, 23 October 2024, and subsequent summit declarations.
Constitutive Act of the African Union, 2000, and the Treaty on European Union, consolidated version, on the publication of accession instruments and criteria for membership.
Universal Periodic Review, Human Rights Council, and the reports of the United Nations human rights treaty bodies.
Acharya, A. (2018). Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Stuenkel, O. (2020). The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (2nd edition). Lexington Books, Lanham.
Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Common Ingroup Identity Model. Psychology Press, Philadelphia.
Risse, T. (2010). A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
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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Ukraine and the Limits of Mediation
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 assesses an ongoing war and the conduct of the states and leaders involved, and its closing section sketches the terms of a possible settlement. Those assessments and proposals reflect the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral as between the parties. The article was written in 2025 and should be read with that date in mind.
ABSTRACT
This article examines the limited effectiveness of mediation in high-intensity interstate conflicts, using the war in Ukraine as a case study. While mediation has proved useful in intrastate and post-conflict settings, it faces distinct structural, strategic, and normative challenges in other contexts. The paper explores why third-party efforts have failed to de-escalate the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and considers whether a rethinking of mediation frameworks is needed for better results in future interstate conflicts.
KEYWORDS
Ukraine, Russia, mediation, conflict resolution, diplomacy, peace process, success, failure
INTRODUCTION
Mediation has long stood as one of the most important instruments in the diplomatic repertoire for managing and resolving armed conflict. From the Camp David Accords to the Dayton Agreement, its record suggests that even protracted disputes can, under the right conditions, be brought to the negotiating table. Yet not all wars are equally receptive to mediation. High-intensity conflicts, especially those involving major power rivalry, existential stakes, and geopolitical entanglement, pose challenges that often render traditional mediation ineffective. The war in Ukraine is a striking example.
Since the full-scale invasion of February 2022, the international community has launched a series of mediation efforts, both formal and informal. From the Minsk and Istanbul talks to more recent meetings in Saudi Arabia, and initiatives by the United Nations, Turkey, China, and the African Union, none has produced a sustainable outcome. Peace remains distant, while the military, political, and symbolic stakes continue to rise. Mediation, despite its normative appeal, has been displaced by a combination of irreconcilable war objectives, entrenched distrust, the perceived bias of potential mediators, and the absence of a mutually hurting stalemate.
The return of Donald Trump to the American presidency adds a revealing dimension to the broader difficulty. Promising a swift end to the war and invoking his personal rapport with Vladimir Putin, he has presented himself as a dealmaker uniquely capable of brokering peace. His administration has so far produced sharp deadlines, threats of expanded sanctions, and public disagreement with President Zelensky. His approach, personalistic, coercive, and transactional, serves less as a decisive change than as a mirror reflecting the deeper structural difficulties of international peacemaking today.
This article argues that the failure of mediation in Ukraine is not simply the result of diplomatic missteps or errors of timing, but a symptom of systemic constraints that afflict high-intensity interstate conflicts. These constraints include power asymmetry between the parties, imperfect information, incompatible war aims, the framing of the conflict as existential, the collapse of credible neutrality among mediators, and the geopolitical instrumentalisation of peace efforts themselves. By situating Ukraine within a broader theoretical and comparative context, the paper offers a critical assessment of whether current mediation frameworks are fit for purpose in the contemporary security environment.
MAIN CORPUS
Identifying success and failure
Mediation is broadly defined as a form of third-party intervention aimed at facilitating negotiation between two or more parties in conflict. Unlike arbitration or adjudication, mediation is non-binding, voluntary, and heavily dependent on the perceived legitimacy and strategic utility of the mediator. Its flexibility makes it attractive in both intrastate and interstate disputes, but this same characteristic reveals its limitations, particularly when applied to wars between sovereign states with high stakes, high casualties, and deeply entrenched geopolitical dynamics.
When is mediation successful? Research, particularly the work of Bercovitch and Jackson (2009), has identified four primary variables that shape the success or failure of international mediation: the identity and characteristics of the conflict parties; the nature of the dispute itself; the identity and credibility of the mediator; and the broader political and international context. All these elements are crucial, determining the nature, quality, and effectiveness of the mediation and indicating why some efforts succeed while others fail (Bercovitch and Jackson 2009: 34). Where any of these is unfavourable, the prospects for successful mediation diminish considerably.
The parties in conflict
Bercovitch and Jackson emphasise that effective mediation is highly contingent on the legitimacy and internal cohesion of the conflicting parties. Mediation requires that each party be represented by actors with clear authority, unified political backing, and international recognition. Mediation has a better chance of success where the adversaries are recognised as the legitimate spokesmen for their parties. This insight helps to explain why mediation has historically struggled in settings such as Lebanon, Sudan, or Cyprus, where internal disunity or competing claims to authority undermined the credibility of negotiation.
While Ukraine and Russia both possess clearly defined state leadership, the question of legitimacy nonetheless re-emerges here through Russia’s repeated denial of Ukrainian sovereignty, its support for separatist proxies, and its characterisation of the Ukrainian government as illegitimate (BBC News 2023; Treisman 2022; EUvsDisinfo 2025). Earlier this year, the American presidency also used the language of dictatorship in reference to the Ukrainian government (Howard 2025; Sauer and Harding 2025). Such narratives, coming not only from one of the belligerents but also from one of the principal potential mediators, obscure the basic premise of mediation, namely that two recognised sovereign parties negotiate as equals, guided by an impartial third party.
The dispute
While the structure and identity of the actors involved are critical, a second and perhaps more decisive factor is the nature of the dispute itself. Where a conflict centres on issues perceived as existential, such as sovereignty, territorial integrity, or regime survival, mediation efforts are significantly less likely to succeed. These are what Zartman (2008) refers to as intractable issues and what others, including Ott (1972) and Randle (1973), have framed as non-negotiable interests. The war in Ukraine presents precisely the kind of high-stakes, zero-sum conflict that renders traditional mediation structurally ineffective. For Ukraine the war is not merely a geopolitical dispute but an existential struggle for national survival, political independence, and democratic self-determination. For Russia it is framed as a civilisational confrontation with the West and a strategic campaign to reassert dominance within a perceived sphere of influence.
Kleiboer (1996), in her work on understanding success and failure in international mediation, sets out the main elements of a dispute that determine outcomes. First, she identifies the problem of ripeness, the idea that conflicts pass through a life cycle and that mediation is more or less likely to be effective at particular phases. Some scholars suggest that mediation is more effective in later stages, when the costs of war have escalated, battlefield optimism has faded, and the parties reassess their goals. In Ukraine this threshold has arguably not been reached. Russia continues to perceive strategic value in prolonging the conflict, believing that Western unity may fray, that fatigue may increase, and that further territorial gains remain possible. Ukraine has benefited considerably from Western support and maintains hopes of reversing Russian advances.
Others argue that mediation is best pursued in the early stages, before violence escalates and positions harden. But this window never truly existed. The war of 2022 began with a full-scale invasion predicated on regime change, under the assumption of a rapid fall of Kyiv. Early maximalist objectives foreclosed early diplomatic options. Still others suggest that ripeness is not a matter of time but of key events, such as a mutually hurting stalemate or a radical shift in the balance of power that forces a strategic rethink. Neither has yet occurred. While Ukraine has mounted successful counteroffensives and even operated on Russian territory, and Russia has endured significant attrition and sanctions, neither side perceives itself as losing outright.
Second, Kleiboer draws attention to conflict intensity and its divergent logics. Contrary to simple assumptions, intensity can push parties towards or away from negotiation depending on their position. For Russia, as the stronger party, high intensity may reinforce optimism and a form of victory thinking, particularly where losing may mean not only the loss of the conflict but a threat to the leadership itself. For Ukraine the same intensity might encourage negotiation, especially as civilian costs and social exhaustion mount. But this assumes that negotiation offers a meaningful path forward. For Ukraine the prospect of territorial concession, neutrality, and the legitimation of annexation is not only politically unacceptable but strategically hazardous. Both logics therefore work against mediation.
Third, the intensity of violence cannot be separated from the substance of the dispute. The war concerns issues that are deeply divisive and difficult to settle: sovereignty, with incompatible territorial aims; ideological questions about the nature of political systems and core values; security questions concerning borders and territory; and questions of self-determination and nationhood. All of these make the war a paradigmatic case of a structurally resistant conflict, in which mediation is not merely difficult but may be fundamentally misaligned with the logic of the conflict itself.
The mediator
A third determinant is the identity and attributes of the mediator. While it is tempting to assume that any well-intentioned third party can play a constructive role, the literature shows that effective mediation depends on the interplay of three core factors: impartiality, leverage, and status (Kleiboer 1996).
Conventional wisdom holds that a mediator’s success depends on perceived impartiality, following a logic in which impartiality breeds confidence, confidence fosters acceptability, and acceptability increases the likelihood of success. Impartiality is less a matter of objective neutrality than of perception: the parties must believe that the mediator has no hidden agenda and is equally invested in a fair resolution. In Ukraine, very few mediators have met this threshold. The United States and the European Union are widely seen from the Russian side as partisan players rather than neutral brokers. Ukraine is equally suspicious of actors perceived as close to its adversary, such as China, which has maintained careful rhetorical neutrality while deepening economic ties with Moscow.
On the other hand, a degree of bias can be useful. A mediator with strong ties to one party, particularly the more powerful one, may be better able to persuade that actor to make concessions. This suggests that while the most consequential mediators, the United States and the European Union, have the capacity to influence Ukraine, they lack access to or trust with Moscow, rendering any influence over Russia practically non-existent.
A further key factor is leverage, understood as the mediator’s ability to shape the parties’ behaviour through incentive or pressure. Without leverage, even the most neutral mediator is little more than a facilitator; with it, a mediator can shift calculations and create meaningful costs and benefits attached to a settlement. The conflict in Ukraine reveals a dual paradox. The United States and the European Union possess considerable leverage, particularly over Ukraine, given that they provide the bulk of its military and economic support, but this leverage has proved politically fraught: any signal that the West is pressing Ukraine towards negotiation can be interpreted as abandonment, may embolden Russia, and may fracture Western unity.
On the Russian side, those same actors have very little leverage, since sanctions, isolation, and warrants issued by the International Criminal Court have closed off diplomatic channels and hardened resistance. Middle powers such as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa have attempted to fill the gap, seeing it as an opportunity to increase their standing in a changing world order (Friedrich 2025). But their lack of military, economic, or institutional weight has made their proposals appear more symbolic than strategic.
Lastly, a mediator’s status shapes the ability to convene talks and to drive outcomes. High-status mediators have struggled with credibility, while low-status actors have struggled with access. The United Nations has repeatedly called for peace, but its credibility has been undermined by internal division and by paralysis in the Security Council. Religious and humanitarian actors such as the Holy See or the International Committee of the Red Cross enjoy moral authority but have not been entrusted with a political mandate. Middle powers such as Saudi Arabia or Turkey have hosted talks, but their standing is too ambiguous to convert diplomacy into firm commitments.
International context
Mediation efforts do not unfold in a vacuum; they are embedded in a broader international context. This includes the involvement of third parties and the effect of other global conflicts. As to the former, the war in Ukraine has been internationalised to a very high degree, with each involved actor pursuing its own interests and strategic calculations; these actors do not simply support or oppose mediation but often seek to steer its outcomes. The United States and the European Union have rhetorically endorsed peace while simultaneously intensifying military aid and deepening sanctions. Moscow, for its part, has used mediation initiatives from states of the Global South to advance a narrative of Western hypocrisy and to legitimise its own account of the conflict.
As to the latter, the war in Gaza that began in 2023 has affected mediation elsewhere by diverting international attention, political capital, and diplomatic capacity (Fischer 2023). It has hardened divisions between Western and non-Western states, exposed the selective application of international norms, and weakened the moral authority of the same actors who are prominent in Ukraine.
Prospects for constructive mediation
The failure of mediation in Ukraine does not imply that peace efforts should be abandoned, but rather that they must be rethought. Any future initiative must reckon with the structural constraints of the conflict. There is no quick remedy, but some strategic adjustments may improve the prospects for meaningful mediation.
Mediation cannot be forced where no basic readiness exists. At present neither party appears to regard the situation as unsustainable enough to warrant real concession. Ukraine, sustained by external support and by resistance morale, continues to prioritise territorial integrity; Russia, although facing attrition, shows no sign of internal collapse or strategic retreat. Yet this state of affairs will not persist indefinitely. Mediating actors must prepare now for a future moment of ripeness, through discreet channels of communication, unofficial diplomacy, and the careful cultivation of relationships with intermediaries who are perceived as neither partisan nor lacking in weight.
No single state or institution holds both the legitimacy and the leverage required to mediate this war effectively. One possible response is a multilateral mediation group, a consortium including regional powers from both camps, such as Turkey, India, Brazil, and China, paired with neutral international organisations such as the OSCE or an envoy appointed by the United Nations. This hybrid format would help to offset perceived bias while allowing each actor to bring a different form of influence, whether diplomatic, symbolic, or economic. While past attempts at such inclusive formats have faltered, a renewed attempt could succeed if accompanied by real confidence-building measures. The goal cannot be a comprehensive settlement overnight, but rather incremental progress, such as humanitarian agreements, local ceasefires, or mechanisms for the exchange of prisoners of war.
Rather than aiming immediately at a comprehensive peace agreement, mediation should for the present pursue limited but strategic goals that are easier to achieve and politically less costly for the parties. These might include demilitarised humanitarian corridors, nuclear safety arrangements, grain export frameworks, and monitoring mechanisms for violations of the law of armed conflict. Such issue-based mediation offers two advantages. First, it creates channels for communication and cooperation even amid continuing violence. Second, it can build the trust and the institutional scaffolding needed for more substantive negotiation. Small steps, if consistently successful, can shift the logic of the conflict away from zero-sum calculation.
SUMMARY *
The article’s analytical achievement is to show that the failure here is overdetermined rather than accidental. Applying an established framework, it finds that every one of the four conditions for successful mediation is absent at once: one party disputes the other’s standing to negotiate at all, the issues are of the kind that parties do not divide, no actor combines access to both sides with the capacity to impose a cost, and the wider system in which any process would sit is itself divided. The consequence the author draws is not despair but a reallocation of effort. If the conditions for a settlement cannot presently be produced, the useful work is to build the channels and relationships that a later moment will require, and meanwhile to pursue the humanitarian and technical arrangements that do not depend on those conditions.
CONCLUSION
The war in Ukraine has exposed the limits of international mediation in the face of entrenched geopolitical interests, high-stakes territorial disputes, and a global order marked by fragmentation and normative inconsistency. This article has sought, through theoretical insight, to clarify why mediation has struggled to gain traction. Ukraine is not merely a war between two states but one deeply embedded in the ideological and strategic rift between the West and a bloc of non-Western actors; mediation in such a context is not only about stopping bullets or drawing borders but about fundamental questions of global power, legitimacy, and security.
This should not lead to fatalism. The war should serve rather as a stress test for the theory and practice of mediation. It calls for more flexible, plural, and long-term approaches that recognise the complexity of modern conflicts. Ripeness cannot be imposed, but it can be anticipated and prepared for. Mediators may not be impartial, but they can still be effective if they bring influence, coordination, and creativity. The challenge is not to revive old models but to rethink diplomacy itself, so that it is more adaptive, more plural, and better equipped to navigate the fractured realities of contemporary war.
While a comprehensive and just peace may remain a distant prospect, serious diplomatic thinking must begin to consider what a minimally viable settlement could look like, one that does not reward aggression but recognises the strategic realities on the ground and the need to prevent prolonged devastation. Given the effective occupation of parts of eastern Ukraine, one scenario that has been discussed is a negotiated arrangement addressing the status of the occupied territories. This would require significant concessions from Ukraine, which, to be politically and strategically acceptable, would demand powerful counterbalancing guarantees from the international community.
For Kyiv, any territorial compromise, however limited, would be viable only if paired with long-term security and integration guarantees. Chief among these would be membership of the European Union, providing institutional, financial, and political anchoring for Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy. Membership of the Atlantic alliance, while more contentious, might be considered as a long-term objective, or at least a structured bilateral security guarantee negotiated with allies. Such arrangements would signal resolve, provide tangible deterrence against future incursion, and avoid the risk of a mere pause in hostilities of the kind that followed 2014.
The role of the international community is therefore not to impose a blueprint but to cultivate the political conditions under which compromise becomes possible. That entails a shift from reactive, fragmented diplomacy to sustained multilateral engagement that includes emerging actors who may lack leverage but offer legitimacy. Since mediators have found it difficult to reach ideal solutions, it is necessary to begin building a security architecture that can contain conflict, institutionalise restraint, and allow diplomacy to take root.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The analytical framework is applied carefully and its most important implication deserves to be separated from the article’s closing proposals, because the two rest on different footings.
The framework establishes that the conditions for a negotiated settlement are absent. The proposals for issue-based mediation follow from this directly and are supported by what has actually worked: the grain initiative moved cargo out of Ukrainian ports for a year, prisoner exchanges have continued throughout, the agency responsible for nuclear safety has maintained a presence at Zaporizhzhia, and children have been returned through the mediation of a small number of states. None of these required either party to accept anything about the other’s claims, and each was negotiated by intermediaries whose usefulness lay precisely in having no position on the war. That is the model the author’s analysis supports, and it is being executed now.
The territorial proposals in the closing section stand differently, and one distinction would strengthen them considerably. There is a difference between recognising a territorial change in law and accepting it in fact while withholding recognition, and the second has a long history. The Baltic states were occupied for fifty years without Western recognition of the annexation, and the non-recognition preserved a claim that was eventually realised. Applied here, an arrangement that fixes a line of control without conceding sovereignty offers Ukraine something a recognised cession does not, namely the preservation of the claim, and offers Russia the practical control it holds, while requiring neither to say what its own politics forbid. The constitutional position reinforces this: the Ukrainian constitution reserves any alteration of territory to a national referendum, which means a cession is not within the gift of any negotiator, and a formula that avoids the question is not merely diplomatic tact but a legal necessity.
The security guarantee question is the harder one and the article is right to make everything turn on it. Ukraine has been given guarantees before, in the Budapest Memorandum, and the experience is precisely why assurances are now insufficient. The distinction that matters is between a guarantee that requires a decision at the moment of crisis and one that is automatic, and only the second deters, which is why membership of the alliance and the presence of forces on the ground are the forms that have been pressed for. Any arrangement that leaves the guarantor a choice will be read by both parties as leaving the guarantor a choice.
Two additions on the mediation analysis itself. The article treats leverage over Russia as absent, and the more precise statement is that it is held by parties who have not chosen to exercise it: the states purchasing Russian energy and supplying the components that sustain the war have influence that the sanctioning states do not, which is the strongest argument for the plural format the author proposes and also the reason it has not yet materialised. And the Istanbul discussions of spring 2022 deserve more weight than the article gives them, since they came closer to terms than anything since and are the clearest available evidence about what each side would accept when it believed it had to; whatever one concludes about why they ended, they establish that the positions are not fixed by nature.
Finally, one observation from this field. The article’s proposal that mediators prepare for a ripeness that has not yet arrived is the most practical thing in it and the hardest to fund, because it produces nothing visible. Channels are maintained by people who meet for years without result, and the value of that work becomes apparent only at the moment when someone needs to make a call and finds that a line exists. Every settlement examined in this journal has depended on such channels having been kept open by someone during the period when keeping them open looked pointless.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
BBC News (2023) Ukraine War: President Putin Speech Fact-Checked. 21 February 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/64718139
Bercovitch, J., and R. Jackson (2009) Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-First Century: Principles, Methods, and Approaches. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
EUvsDisinfo (2025) The Kremlin’s Misuse of Nazism as a Weapon of Information Manipulation. 27 January 2025. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/the-kremlins-misuse-of-nazism-as-a-weapon-of-information-manipulation/
Fischer, S. (2023) Diplomacy in the Context of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Continuation of War by Other Means. German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin.
Friedrich, J. (2025) Outcome Neutral? The Limits of Third-Party Mediation in Ending the War Against Ukraine. Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin.
Howard, J. (2025) Trump Calls Zelensky a Dictator as He Hits Back at Disinformation Criticism. BBC News, 18 February 2025.
Kleiboer, M. (1996) Understanding Success and Failure of International Mediation. Journal of Conflict Resolution 40(2), 360 to 389.
Ott, M. (1972) Mediation as a Method of Conflict Resolution: Two Cases. International Organization 26(4), 595 to 618.
Randle, R. (1973) The Origins of Peace: A Study of Peacemaking and the Structure of Peace Settlements. Free Press, New York.
Sauer, P., and L. Harding (2025) Trump Calls Zelenskyy a Dictator amid Fears of Irreconcilable Rift. The Guardian, 20 February 2025.
Treisman, R. (2022) Putin’s Claim of Fighting against Ukraine Neo-Nazis Distorts History, Scholars Say. NPR, 1 March 2022.
Zartman, I. W. (2008) Negotiation and Conflict Management: Essays on Theory and Practice. Routledge, Abingdon.
Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team
Initiative on the Safe Transportation of Grain and Foodstuffs from Ukrainian Ports, Istanbul, 22 July 2022.
Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, 5 December 1994.
Constitution of Ukraine, 1996, Article 73 on the alteration of territory.
Minsk Protocol, 5 September 2014, and the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements, 12 February 2015.
International Atomic Energy Agency, reports on nuclear safety and security in Ukraine, Vienna.
Fearon, J. D. (1995). Rationalist Explanations for War. International Organization, 49(3), 379 to 414.
Zartman, I. W. (2001). The Timing of Peace Initiatives: Hurting Stalemates and Ripe Moments. Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 1(1), 8 to 18.
Centre of Competence on Humanitarian Negotiation, professional standards and field manuals, Geneva.
Building a Transborder Social Identity within BRICS+ and a Fragmented Multilateral World
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 editorial discusses the ongoing difficulties and future challenges that BRICS nations face on their way to a meaningful political impact and supplementary relevance on a global level. More often than not, stakeholders and decision-makers ignore crucial and fundamental necessities that societies require in order to enable and initiate a sustainable and lasting process of growth. Potentially, politicians in charge may be aware of the importance of such anthropological pieces of the puzzle and should accordingly put them on their agenda. Reality seems to prove that the general focus is widely placed on targeting and canvassing short-term financial turnovers and outcomes related to the balancing or unbalancing of global impact only. Forecasting the failure of such progress, this text offers a more convenient strategy for finding one’s position within the global community, based on mutual respect, shared responsibility, and a holistic approach to peacebuilding.
KEYWORDS
Social identity, global alliance, political divergence, multilateral fragmentation, global stability, sustainable world order, holistic peacebuilding
INTRODUCTION
Starting off our journey, I would like to create a common ground of understanding by having a brief look at the status quo of the BRICS community in the year 2025. Being initially a group of interest, the geopolitical relevance of Brazil, Russia, India, and China was discussed by the Goldman Sachs researcher Jim O’Neill in 2001 (O’Neill 2001), thereby introducing the term and the notion of the BRIC states (Mostafa 2013). It makes sense to mention that South Africa was accepted as the first additional member in 2010 (Harrison 2018). South Africa thereby formed the fifth member of the alliance, occasioned the name change to the common term BRICS, and complemented the group in a meaningful geopolitical way (Erdmann 2024b).
By reviewing the economic history of the group’s members, we can see that all these states underwent crucial economic changes and faced challenging financial situations in the late twentieth century (EFSAS 2023). Awareness of the members’ natural resources, the increasing level of global consumption, the improvement of pricing strategies, and the expanding interlinkage of world trade later established overall economic stability (EFSAS 2023) within these states. Nowadays this group finds itself in an economically comfortable situation (Erdmann 2024a), controlling a meaningful quantity of the world’s natural resources and holding a key role in global trade (Iqbal 2021).
Being still a purely economically oriented alliance, the group could not be more diverse in a multitude of aspects. Potentially this, and the complexity of the alliance in itself, is one reason why it took the group 24 years to grow from the initial four states to a more significant number of members (Glogowski 2024). Even though the number of states interested in partnering with BRICS extends this number by far, we may still find a lack of a focused and determined agenda explaining what BRICS actually stands for. The currently available communiqués look like lists of interests stated by the broad quantity of members and partners, while every country intends to get its individual points onto the paper. In particular, the vague formulation of an agenda bears many uncertain aspects that can turn out to be uncomfortable for countries finding themselves in this specific economic alliance. While being part of BRICS, many of these members strengthen their independence and stability by trading with potential opponents of the group (Erdmann 2024b). This inconsistency and contradiction give birth to an inner instability that prevents BRICS from building the solid and impactful global force that it might be looking for, namely an entity that strongly leads or manages the world economy and world politics at the same time, based on its all-embracing network and its holdings of fundamental natural resources.
MAIN CORPUS
A hyper-diverse global alliance called BRICS
The subject of our analysis often presents itself as a fast-growing economic unity that stands up in order to challenge the potentially existing Western financial and trade order, and to reorganise it towards a much-needed balance, or towards leading it into the opposite extreme. Even though such a balancing and unbalancing process, depending on one’s perspective, takes place continuously, we are now having a look at the uniqueness of the M.U.M. model (Erdmann 2024b). This model describes the ongoing shift between multipolarism and unipolarism and back again, as it presents itself at the beginning of this millennium. In my previous article on the dynamics of polarized pluralism, I already explained and outlined the nature of this phenomenon, while the present text extends the previous dynamics in global reach and impact.
Being aware of the picture that potentially underlies a specific strategic plan, and that is therefore projected towards the public, we also want to paint a picture based on our own research and our own understanding of this situation, which is highly interlinked with the world community. Basically, we are talking about a global alliance that stretches over four continents, currently counts nine full member countries, and has recently accepted thirteen partner countries (Norton 2024). In order to identify even more complexity, we need to say that its members are spread over four continents, while economic partnership with selected members of BRICS spans all five.
The fact that BRICS finds itself completely decentralised often turns out to be an impactful selling point, while it could also materialise as the weakest point in the portfolio. Sharing a mutual interest in common economic growth, the alliance includes a broad quantity of languages, cultures, political systems, and diverse trade partners, and above all a wide range of economic competencies and capabilities (Solomon 2022) among its members, although this last point may not apply to all partners, as many of them suffer considerable economic instability. This level of diversity turns the alliance into a highly heterogeneous group (BpB 2023), and perhaps into the most diverse group that has ever existed in modern history on a global scale. The ongoing strategic expansion of BRICS forms part of the alliance’s goal of raising its economic power and its global relevance based on natural resources (Tseen Fu 2024). A closer but unreflected view may suggest that the goal of the alliance is simply to create a trade network of producers and consumers excluding what may be labelled as Western countries. A protracted exclusion from the so-called Western world order makes members of the alliance strike back by continuously admitting new members, propagating inclusiveness (Tseen Fu 2024), and increasing the level of country-based diversity to a more extensive and questionable degree.
My article on BRICS and the art of growing from within already discussed the extraordinary challenge for a transcontinental and inter-political alliance to grow in a sound and sustainable way (Erdmann 2024a), especially when potentially authoritarian regimes and opposing economic relations are compressed into one group. Nonetheless, besides already being extraordinarily diverse, BRICS continues to extend the number of its members and partners and thereby raises the level of internal complexity. A brief look at some of the core members of BRICS, namely China and India, shows how two almost historic rivals find themselves placed in one alliance while remaining highly competitive opponents on a multitude of levels. Interestingly enough, Russia takes over the role of a mediator in order to bring such members closer together (Baunov 2024). Four of the recently admitted members are likewise involved in complex disputes. Saudi Arabia and Iran are engaged in a long-term dispute over regional predominance and political integrity (Desta 2011), while Egypt and Ethiopia find themselves in an ongoing contention over natural resources, namely the dispute over the waters of the Nile (BpB 2023).
A baseless iceberg?
Considering the ambitious growth and the overall target of BRICS, namely to be the rebalancing tool in world economics, we may wonder where this vision and motivation actually come from. The worldwide economic playing field offers a multitude of alliances for countries to join, to participate in actively, and through which to create lasting benefits. Forming part of the G20 and BRICS at the same time is such an ambivalent example that it raises many questions. All founding members of BRICS, including South Africa, are members of the G20, while they identified the need not only to join a more Western-run alliance but also to be part of an opposing one that challenges the economic stability of several member states of the former. Such a contradiction does not support one’s credibility in having a clear vision, but more likely creates uncertainty on a global scale, a feature that mankind currently does not need at all, and potentially turns out to be a very poor political strategy that supports fragmentation instead of unification.
The more we examine the peak of the iceberg, namely the image of BRICS that is communicated to the broad public, the more complex and confusing the setting of this potential alliance becomes. Step by step, we may discover what looks like a bottomless construct that is lost in its own complexity. You may see that I even challenge the term alliance as such, which traditionally identifies a group of countries or parties that share one common goal or interest (Cambridge 2025). The previously mentioned communiqués and the global economic interlinkages of the group’s members suggest interests pointing in all possible political directions, while some look for economic growth, others target financial stability, still others try to enrich their global network, and finally some aim to appear as challenging as possible towards potential Western opponents (Baunov 2024). This seems to be the new identity of a Russian-led BRICS, namely a focus on the number of members and potentially less on the realistic, productive impact that new partners may provide. Adding new members to BRICS while continuing to fight in Ukraine may also serve as a wider legitimation for the Russian leadership to proceed in this political direction.
Nobody can deny that joining BRICS as a member or partner in these times serves as a political message towards the global community. Such countries should be well aware of the meaning of this symbolic act, namely that they support what BRICS members commonly stand for. Here, a potentially anti-Western perspective (Baunov 2024) may serve as a common point of interest, while most members remain involved in trading with a multitude of Western countries. Generally, we can observe that joining a group incorporates or requires two fundamental points, namely that each member supports the overall group target and supports what individual peer members stand for. This simple fact perfectly underlines the level of contradiction in which BRICS finds itself, especially with reference to dual memberships in alliances that are for and against the Western order. Whether it be the potentially anti-Western course, the unclear overall target of BRICS, or the Russian prominence in constantly inviting new members (Baunov 2024), this uncertainty does not attract everyone. It is worth noting that Argentina declined to join and that the position of Saudi Arabia remains unclear, as no official confirmation of accession can be identified (Baunov 2024). The fact that Russia, on the basis of its activism, placed itself in a leading position within BRICS made the character of the group change from an initially cooperative alliance targeting mutual development into something closer to an instrument of unpredictable anti-Western messaging, losing itself in the baseless complexity of a self-focused worldview and partial global interests.
Even though such a global partnership has the potential to float solidly like an iceberg, its opacity beneath the surface extends to such a degree that its baselessness starts creating downforce instead of supporting the whole superstructure. The fundamental question may be what measures need to be taken to turn the currently existing construct into a globally responsible, well-respected alliance that supports peace, mutual respect, and socio-economic growth, if this is the goal at all.
Ordo ab chao
Considering that BRICS is currently more a rag rug of nations longing for sustainable economic growth and wealth management, we may commonly agree that there is no access to wealth without prior management. Such management needs to initiate or create the path towards wealth that may be taken by all members, partners, and applicants in the same way. In order to begin building such a path, we need to understand how to build a supportive order that enables the individual, whether a single person or a nation, to understand how it defines itself and where this conceptual structure comes from.
Here we need to face one specific reality, namely that the level of diversity that BRICS covers surpasses that of existing regional or continental alliances and unions by far. In this way BRICS may not be compared, on the basis of its complexity of cultures, languages, religions, and economic necessities, to any other existing union, such as the European Union, the African Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or the Union of South American Nations. Currently we do not see indications supporting the understanding that BRICS needs to grow from within (Erdmann 2024a) in order to become sound, to grow in a sustainable way, and to build a lasting global value for mankind. In the meantime, the focus may be placed on growing by number, on the basis that more and more members and partners are accepted, promising them credibility and legitimacy (Adams 2023).
Having such widespread diversity as a foundation, we may understand that what is needed is a common creed or a transborder identity that reconciles differences and harmonises diversity in an all-embracing way. The term identity offers us a very complex nature and a rich scale of interpretations. As soon as consciousness is sharpened and the individual realises their own existence, the quest for an identity is born. Identity is a multilayered word that is of importance on an individual level, a group level, a regional level, a national level, a continental level, and that may reach its climax on a global level, including ethnicities, languages, creeds, and cultures. Even though we may identify a multitude of different sorts of identity, they all seem to have one common denominator, namely the quest for a harmonic and organised aspect.
Accordingly, we may imagine that it is a very tricky project to create or build a truly transborder identity, since what is needed is something that people can believe in, that connects them, and that motivates them to start speaking of themselves as a sound community. What we are looking for is the still missing central piece of the puzzle that completes the artwork and that gives a higher meaning to angles, visions, and perspectives. This piece could turn chaos into order and provide BRICS with the opportunity to stop being a potentially unpredictable challenger to the existing global construct. BRICS could leave this image behind and start growing solidly within itself and within the global community, in order to become a cornerstone for global balance, peace, and harmony. This missing link, or transborder identity, can only be identified and developed by the community of BRICS itself (Yzerbyt 1997), and starts with the discernment that only merged pieces complete the picture, or that all countries are needed to build a lasting global community.
SUMMARY
The argument advanced here moves from a diagnosis to a proposal that is deliberately larger than its subject. The diagnosis is that BRICS has grown by addition rather than from within, that its members hold interests which point in incompatible directions, and that an association defined chiefly by what it is not cannot supply the coherence that its stated ambitions require. The proposal is that what such a grouping lacks is not a better communiqué but a shared identity, and that identity cannot be manufactured from above because it forms among people rather than between governments. The final turn is the one that distinguishes this text from a policy assessment: if the difficulty is that alliances define themselves by exclusion, then the remedy cannot be a better alliance, and the author accordingly declines to offer BRICS a strategy and offers instead the observation that the only membership large enough to solve the problem is one that no one has to be admitted to.
CONCLUSION
In order to be able to build a transborder identity that truly combines a highly diverse membership, we need to understand the uniqueness of the common goal and the specific challenges of the setting in question. Traditionally a group identifies itself as such on the basis of a common language, dialect, culture, history, or tradition (Akuche 2016). Obviously, not all members of the wider BRICS circle are different, but they are potentially diverse. Some of them share languages but not dialects; others share religions but not their traditions within them. Here we can clearly see that diversity is not the same as fragmentation, which is more likely the counterpart of unity. Having stated at the beginning that the high level of diversity among the nations involved may be the weak spot of BRICS, we find ourselves at the point of turning a fragile ornament into the truss of a superstructure. This means that if it proves possible to build an identity among BRICS members, it should also be realistic to build an even stronger one, namely the identity of a global community, incorporating those previously mentioned.
We may have learned so far that building a transborder identity is an extensive task, especially as setting a foundation of common understanding begins with each person and targets the overall conformity of the sum of diverse individuals wishing to label themselves as members of the group. Here we may challenge the traditional concepts of strategic economic growth, and the methods accordingly based on building inclusive and exclusive alliances such as the G20, the G7, BRICS, and NATO. The question that we need to analyse for ourselves is whether such an exclusive mindset still meets the necessities of today’s global and multilateral world.
My reflection and analysis reveal to me that exclusive behaviour often turns out to be a strong indication of an advanced level of fear of loss or disadvantage. On the basis of our general global connectivity, referring to individuals, companies, organisations, and countries, I strongly doubt that building, separating, and fragmenting economic borders supports global growth. Accordingly, such labelling supports exclusiveness, which in itself is often a door opener for fragmentation and extremism (Erdmann 2024c). What mankind potentially needs in a time of economic and social insecurity is a common creed that binds all humans together at the bottom of their hearts, a creed that is so fundamental that it touches and supports basic human necessities, namely stability, peace, and harmony. If we do not build harmony at the grassroots level of the individual and their family, we have no space in which to develop a sound identity that surpasses borders and embraces the wealth of mankind.
You may already sense where this will possibly take us. BRICS, but more likely mankind itself, needs to create the consciousness of a global community, and more specifically the awareness that exclusiveness and fragmentation do not support real stability and global growth in the long term. In order to initiate such a process we need politicians who act like responsible adults and who understand that owning the biggest piece of the cake does not automatically grant satisfaction. On the basis of what has been written so far, we may all imagine a world without the trade associations and unions mentioned above, and we may envision that what we more likely need is a common level of true responsibility towards the planet Earth and towards mankind, far beyond self-centred and ignorant behaviour that rests on and reproduces chaotic circumstances in the human mindset and on the surface that we walk on.
Therefore BRICS, and again mankind in general, needs an agenda that clearly communicates, in a reasonable and realistic way, shared values that offer tranquillity on a global level and enable mankind to develop a common identity, not as individuals but as a global community. It is crucial here to emphasise the importance of a name, and not to place an excluding name in the front row, such as BRICS, the G20, or the G7. Now it is humankind that counts first, it is humankind that needs to turn into a global community of mutual respect and responsibility, it is humankind that needs to connect and grow from within, and it is humankind that does not need a name in order to differ, because it already has a name that binds all of us together, namely citizens of the world.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The central claim here, that an association without a shared identity cannot become more than the sum of its transactions, is well made and can be tested against what the group has actually built, which strengthens the argument in one direction and qualifies it in another.
The qualification first. Some of what BRICS has produced does not depend on shared identity at all. The New Development Bank lends, the contingent reserve arrangement exists, and the arrangements for settlement in national currencies have expanded, in each case because the members had a convergent interest in reducing dependence on a single financial system rather than because they agreed about anything else. This is the pattern the functionalist literature describes: cooperation in narrow technical domains proceeds among parties who share nothing else, and it sometimes generates the trust that broader cooperation requires. Judged as a coalition of convenience with limited objectives, the record is more substantial than the framing of an incoherent alliance suggests.
The support comes at the point where the ambition exceeds that. A common currency, a coordinated political position, or collective action against a third party each require members to accept costs for the group, and that is precisely what identity supplies and what interest alone does not. The author’s diagnosis therefore holds for everything BRICS says it wants to become, and the internal disputes he lists, between two members over a border, between two over regional primacy, and between two over a river, are the concrete form of the difficulty.
Two additions belong here. The observation that members trade extensively with those the group defines itself against is accurate and it points somewhere the text does not go: it is evidence that the anti-Western framing is a rhetorical register rather than an operating principle, and the states concerned have been explicit that they seek additional options rather than an alternative bloc. Read that way, the incoherence the author identifies is less a failure of the alliance than an accurate representation of what its members want, which is not to choose. And the difficulty of building identity in a heterogeneous grouping has been studied in the case the text sets aside as incomparable: the European experience suggests that shared identity followed decades of functional integration rather than preceding it, that it remains contested, and that the institutions which produced it were courts, parliaments, exchange programmes and a common market rather than declarations.
Finally, the closing turn deserves to be taken as seriously as it is meant. The argument that exclusive groupings reproduce the fragmentation they are formed to protect against is the same argument this journal makes about identity at every other scale, and its consistency is the point. It also carries the difficulty that every universalist proposal carries: an identity that excludes no one motivates no one, and the practical work therefore lies not in replacing particular loyalties but in nesting them, so that a person can be a citizen of a place and of the world without the first requiring the second to be false. That is the dual identity finding from the intergroup literature, and it is the mechanism by which the aspiration in the final paragraph could become something other than an aspiration.
*Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
Adams, Mubarak (2023) BRICS and the New World Order: Implications for the Existing World Order. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371804604_BRICS_AND_THE_NEW_WORLD_ORDER_IMPLICATIONS_FOR_THE_EXISTING_WORLD_ORDER
Akuche, Andre Ben Moses (2016) Nation Building and the Impediments of Building the Nigerian Nation. https://www.academia.edu/31350929/Nation_Building_and_the_Impediments_of_Building_the_Nigerian_Nation
Baunov, Alexander (2024) New Identity of BRICS. Carnegie Endowment. https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/10/brics-russia-global-power-opposition?lang=en
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (2023) Erweiterung der BRICS Gruppe. https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/hintergrund-aktuell/540816/erweiterung-der-brics-gruppe/
Cambridge Dictionary (2025) Alliance. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/alliance
Desta, Teddy (2011) The Iran Saudi Arabia Power Struggle. https://www.academia.edu/42105879/The_Iran_Saudi_Arabia_Power_Struggle
EFSAS (2023) The BRICS: Origins, Evolution and 2023 Expansion. https://www.efsas.org/publications/study-papers/the-brics-origins-evolution-and-expansion/
Erdmann, Daniel (2024a) BRICS: Minus x Minus = Plus? About the Art and Challenges of Growing from Within. WMO Conflict Insight. ISSN 2628 6998. https://worldmediation.org/brics-minus-x-minus-plus-about-the-art-and-challenges-of-growing-from-within/
Erdmann, Daniel (2024b) The Dynamics of Polarized Pluralism: On the Benefits, Challenges, and Threats of a Constantly Changing Fragmented World Order. WMO Conflict Insight. ISSN 2628 6998. https://worldmediation.org/the-dynamics-of-polarized-pluralism-on-the-benefits-challenges-and-threats-of-a-constantly-changing-fragmented-world-order/
Erdmann, Daniel (2024c) Personal Identity and Peacebuilding: A Critical Reflection. WMO Conflict Insight. ISSN 2628 6998. https://worldmediation.org/personal-identity-and-peace-building/
Glogowski, Aleksander (2024) India, Pakistan and BRICS after the 2024 Kazan Summit. https://www.academia.edu/125302884/India_Pakistan_and_BRICS_after_the_2024_Kazan_summit
Harrison, Philip (2018) South Africa in the BRICS. https://www.academia.edu/116590774/South_Africa_in_the_BRICS
Iqbal, Badar Alam (2021) BRICS as a Driver of Global Economic Growth and Development. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09749101211067096
Mostafa, Mahmood (2013) The Rise of the BRICS and Their Challenge to the G7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271724885_The_rise_of_the_BRICS_and_their_challenge_to_the_G7
Norton, Ben (2024) BRICS Keeps Growing in a Multipolar World. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/10/26/brics-13-partner-countries-summit-kazan-russia/
O’Neill, Jim (2001) Building Better Global Economic BRICs. Goldman Sachs. https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/goldman-sachs-research/building-better
Solomon, Mussie (2022) BRICS Plus and Its Major Impacts on Poor Members. https://www.academia.edu/124839172/BRICS_and_its_Major_Impacts_on_Poor_Members
Tseen Fu, Brice Lee (2024) Legitimacy through Diversity: China’s Leadership in the BRICS Plus Expansion for Global Balance. https://www.academia.edu/122725632/Legitimacy_through_Diversity_Chinas_Leadership_in_the_BRICS_Expansion_for_Global_Balance
Yzerbyt, Vincent (1997) Building a European Identity. https://www.academia.edu/84255502/Building_a_European_identity
Further reading added by the WMO Editorial Team
Agreement on the New Development Bank, Fortaleza, 15 July 2014, and the Treaty for the Establishment of a BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, 2014.
Kazan Declaration of the XVI BRICS Summit, 23 October 2024.
Haas, E. B. (1958). The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces 1950 to 1957. Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Acharya, A. (2018). Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Stuenkel, O. (2020). The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (2nd edition). Lexington Books, Lanham.
Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Common Ingroup Identity Model. Psychology Press, Philadelphia.
Risse, T. (2010). A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres. Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
Tariff Diplomacy? When Bridge Building turns into Bridge Burning
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 assesses the trade policy of a serving government and reaches critical conclusions about it. The assessment reflects the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral on contested questions of national policy. The article was written in spring 2025 and its account of current measures should be read with that date in mind.
ABSTRACT
The modern application of tariffs by the United States, once intended as a regulatory mechanism to protect domestic industries, has increasingly evolved into a coercive diplomatic tool, weaponized to influence international behaviour and policy. While historically used with mixed results, recent tariff escalations have demonstrated a destabilizing effect on both the US and the global economy, as evidenced by declining growth projections from the International Monetary Fund and retaliatory actions by major trade partners. Rather than achieving strategic policy reforms, these tariffs have often triggered cycles of protectionism, eroded trust among allies, and inadvertently incentivized adversarial nations to deepen partnerships, as seen in shifting alignments across Asia, South America, and Europe. The imposition of tariffs, particularly those lacking coherent long-term objectives, has proven to be a blunt instrument, one that disproportionately burdens domestic consumers and weakens the credibility of the United States as a stable trading partner.
KEYWORDS *
Tariffs, economic coercion, trade war, protectionism, retaliation, soft power, Smoot Hawley, sugar quotas, Cobden Chevalier Treaty, supply chains, alliances, leverage
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the United States has increasingly utilized tariffs as instruments of economic coercion, particularly under the current administration. Tariffs, typically utilized strategically to level the economic playing field on the international stage, have been broadened to unprecedented levels, leading to significant disruptions in both domestic and global trade. The International Monetary Fund reports that these trade policies have elevated US import duties to levels not seen in a century, adversely affecting global supply chains and increasing the likelihood of a US recession. The Fund projects global economic growth of only 2.8 per cent in 2025, as against an average of 3.7 per cent, while the US economy is expected to grow by only 1.8 per cent (Rugaber 2025). This use of tariffs not only strains international trade relations, but also increases costs for US consumers and businesses, as the burden of tariffs is largely borne domestically (Fajgelbaum and Khandelwal 2021).
The repercussions of these scorched-earth tariff policies extend beyond economic metrics, influencing diplomatic relations and geopolitical stability. US trade policies reach every country, and in a globalized world economy everyone is at risk when these policies endanger financial interests. Nations affected most by US tariffs have implemented retaliatory measures, leading to a cycle of protectionism that undermines international cooperation, not only in trade but in areas such as energy and security as well. For instance, China’s retaliatory tariffs on US goods, in response to the tariffs placed on that country, have escalated tensions, affecting not only bilateral trade but also global markets (Fong, Berman and Siripurapu 2025). These tensions extend to other nations in terms of shifting partnerships, as states seek to diversify and reassess their relationship with the United States as its reputation as a reliable partner wavers. Such actions have prompted concerns among economists and policymakers about the long-term implications of using tariffs as a foreign policy tool, suggesting that they may lead to a fragmented global economy marked by slower growth and chronic instability (Krueger 2025).
MAIN CORPUS
A brief history of US tariffs
Historically, tariffs have been employed by nations as mechanisms to protect domestic industries and influence international policy. In the United States, tariffs were a primary source of federal revenue from 1798 to 1913, accounting for between 50 and 90 per cent of government income over that period (Kennedy, Wolf and Downie 2025). The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which raised US tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods, aimed to protect American farmers and manufacturers during the Great Depression. However, it led to retaliatory tariffs from other countries, resulting in a significant decline in international trade and exacerbating the global downturn (Office of the Historian 2016). The prices of many goods rose, including eggs, which was and still is one of the benchmarks used by economists and, more importantly, by everyday Americans as a measure of the country’s economic health.
An example in which tariffs were largely successful was their use to protect domestic sugar production. In the 1930s, under the Jones-Costigan Act, sugar import policy shifted dramatically to favour domestic producers, setting quotas on imports and, in the 1980s, allowing additional imports but at high tariff rates (Krueger 1988). The United States had once relied on its Caribbean and Central American neighbours for most of its sugar imports, but through these controls it developed a self-sufficient domestic industry, a result which has its own shortcomings and criticisms beyond the scope of this paper.
Internationally, tariffs have also been used to exert political pressure. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922 increased US tariffs to protect domestic industries but inadvertently strained relations with European nations, making it more difficult for them to repay debts accrued during the First World War (Office of the Historian 2016). Similarly, in the 1980s the United States imposed tariffs on a wide variety of Japanese products to address the growing trade deficit between the two countries, though these failed to achieve their goals, as the tariffs never addressed the underlying trade relationship that US businesses and consumers had developed with Japan (Branstetter 2017). These historical instances illustrate how tariffs, while intended to protect national interests, can have unintended diplomatic consequences.
Moreover, the use of tariffs has often been a double-edged sword. While they can provide short-term protection for domestic industries, they may also invite retaliation and reduce the competitiveness of domestic products abroad. The European Union’s response to US steel and aluminium tariffs in 2018, which included tariffs on American products such as motorcycles and whiskey, exemplifies how such measures can escalate into broader trade disputes, affecting diplomatic relations and economic stability. A similar pattern has emerged with the current round of tariffs from the European Union and Canada (European Commission 2025).
Tariffs as tools for fostering cooperation
Despite their contentious nature, tariffs have occasionally been used to foster international cooperation, though it is typically the removal or reduction of tariffs that results in cooperation, the adversarial pressure of tariffs being intended to force dialogue in the first place. The Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 between the United Kingdom and France is a notable example, in which both nations agreed to reduce tariffs, leading to increased trade and improved diplomatic relations. This treaty set a precedent for future trade agreements and demonstrated how mutual tariff reductions could serve as a foundation for cooperation (Timini 2022).
In the modern era, preferential trade agreements among developing countries have used tariff reductions to strengthen economic ties. The Global System of Trade Preferences among Developing Countries, established in 1989, aims to promote trade in the Global South by offering tariff concessions among member states. This initiative has facilitated increased trade and economic collaboration among participating countries, highlighting how the easing of tariffs can enhance diplomatic relations and economic security (UN Trade and Development 2022). In another example, the European Union’s tariffs on electric vehicles made in China, intended to protect domestic manufacturers from being undersold, have recently led to negotiations between the two blocs aimed at settling on prices that allow European vehicles to compete (Blenkinsop, Martinez and Waldersee 2025).
In terms of the recent tariffs imposed by the United States, there are examples of successful leverage in bilateral negotiations addressing broader diplomatic concerns. For instance, recent meetings between US and Indonesian officials have included discussions on increased military cooperation, particularly regarding tensions in the South China Sea. This followed only weeks after China and Indonesia held their own high-profile talks. These arrangements not only affect trade but also strengthen defence and security cooperation, though it remains to be seen whether this strategy can lead to lasting guarantees. Similar examples can be seen in the Philippines and Japan, where military cooperation appears to be at the forefront of some discussions. In cases such as these, tariffs are leveraged to open doors to other concerns which may have been more challenging to engage with otherwise (Shakil 2025). These examples underscore the potential of tariffs, when used judiciously, to serve as instruments for fostering international cooperation and addressing multifaceted diplomatic objectives, though they appear to be the exception rather than the rule.
Tariffs are a gamble
The use of tariffs as a means to compel cooperation has often led to adverse outcomes. The trade war between the United States and China initiated in 2018 serves as a prominent example. The imposition of tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods by both nations led to increased costs for consumers and businesses, disrupted global supply chains, and failed to achieve the intended policy reforms, such as addressing intellectual property theft. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that over 90 per cent of the cost of US-imposed tariffs on China during the trade war of 2018 to 2019 was passed on to American firms and consumers, with no significant change in Chinese policy behaviour (Fajgelbaum and Khandelwal 2021).
Similarly, the US tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods in 2025, intended to renegotiate trade terms under the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, resulted in retaliatory measures and strained diplomatic relations. These actions not only affected economic exchange but also undermined trust among US partners, highlighting the limitations of using tariffs as leverage in diplomatic negotiation as those partners pivot to others to fill the economic gaps (Putzier and Lahart 2025). It is no secret that tariffs largely fail when it comes to imposing policy change, a lesson available from the McKinley tariff of 1890, which imposed levies of roughly 50 per cent on most imports and was framed to pressure other countries into economic difficulty, with many economists of the time predicting that Canada would join the United States as a result (Brown 2025).
The weakening of US soft power has also been widely observed. Arguably one of the greatest assets of the United States is the extensive network of partnerships cultivated over the last century, and these are souring as protectionist policies push nations to diversify and divest. China has taken the opportunity to strengthen its economic relationships in Southeast Asia, where states are themselves leveraging the instability to gain concessions from China, potentially fostering stronger partnerships amid the economic burdens imposed by the United States that threaten to destabilise a regional economy heavily reliant on global trade (Ewe, Marsh and Ajengrastri 2025). As noted above, China has also pivoted towards South Korea and Indonesia in terms of military cooperation, and has been joined by Japan in applying pressure in response to the recent tariffs (Tang 2025). Additionally, Brazil engaged in joint military exercises with China for the first time during this period, indicating that trade policies pose risks to military alignments as well. Furthermore, tariffs reverberate not only at the national level but also in communities, as people in the European Union and Canada have widely boycotted US products in response, and this contributed in part to political outcomes such as the result of the Canadian election of 2025, though of course other policy factors were also at play (Harb et al. 2025).
It is important to remember that regardless of the success or failure of any one instance of bilateral relations in regard to tariffs, there is an underlying pattern in response to the instability imposed by these policies. Trade tensions initiated through tariffs are far less likely to result in successful diplomatic outcomes; rather, nations are prompted to seek economic alliances elsewhere (Tran 2025). Goodwill fostered between long-standing partners can be soured quickly, meaning that even if a beneficial resolution regarding tariffs or military cooperation comes to fruition, future partnerships might be avoided in favour of more reliable partners who do not pose such a risk. It is these unseen partnerships that never come to fruition that are most at risk. Furthermore, the broad application of tariffs without clear strategic objectives can and has led to global economic instability that hurts everyone, including the United States.
Limitations of tariffs as diplomatic instruments
While tariffs are often framed as strategic tools for leveraging diplomatic negotiations, their inherent limitations frequently undermine their utility. Unlike multilateral agreements or targeted sanctions, tariffs are typically blunt instruments that affect entire sectors indiscriminately, impacting not just the targeted nation but also domestic producers, consumers, and international supply chains. Peer-reviewed economic studies have shown that in most instances the costs of tariffs are disproportionately absorbed by the imposing nation’s own economy. Moreover, tariffs often invite retaliatory measures, entrenching adversarial dynamics and escalating trade disputes into broader diplomatic rifts. While tariffs may open diplomatic doors in some instances, evidence shows that far more doors tend to close.
Additionally, unpredictable implementation of tariff policy can erode long-term trust and stability in diplomatic relations. Because tariffs can be imposed unilaterally with little warning, they introduce volatility that deters international investment and cooperation. Countries on the receiving end often perceive tariffs not as invitations to negotiate but as coercive acts of economic warfare, which hardens their negotiating stance rather than incentivizing compromise. Furthermore, as geopolitical alignments become more multipolar, unilateral tariffs may push targeted states into closer partnerships with rival blocs, reducing the influence of the imposing state and undermining its long-term strategic goals. In sum, while tariffs may offer short-term leverage, their long-term diplomatic costs often outweigh their utility.
SUMMARY *
The article’s argument turns on a distinction that the historical material makes visible. Tariffs used as protection, with a defined domestic objective and a stable rule, have sometimes achieved what they were designed to achieve; the sugar programme is the author’s own example. Tariffs used as leverage, to compel another state to change a policy, have a markedly poorer record, and the reason is structural rather than incidental: the cost falls on the importing economy, the target retaliates in the sectors where the imposing state is politically most exposed, and the concession demanded is usually one the target’s own domestic politics will not permit. The author’s most valuable observation concerns what cannot be measured, namely the partnerships that are never formed because a state has become an unreliable counterparty, and the point that a resumption of trade does not restore the assumption of reliability on which long-term arrangements depend.
CONCLUSION
The evidence assembled here suggests that tariffs function poorly as instruments of diplomacy and reasonably well, in specific circumstances, as instruments of industrial policy. Where they have contributed to cooperation, it has generally been through their reduction rather than their imposition. Where they have been applied broadly and without clear strategic objectives, they have raised costs at home, invited retaliation abroad, and accelerated the search among partners and adversaries alike for arrangements that do not depend on the imposing state.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The article’s central finding is well supported and the mechanism behind it deserves to be named, because it is the same mechanism that this journal encounters in every coercive process.
Economic coercion works, when it works at all, where the demand is specific, the relief is credible, and the target can comply without unacceptable domestic cost. Broad tariffs fail all three tests. The demand is frequently unstated or shifting, so the target does not know what compliance would consist of. The relief is not credible, because a measure imposed by executive action can be reimposed the same way, which means a concession purchases nothing durable. And the concession demanded is often precisely what the target’s own politics forbid, since retaliation is selected to hurt the imposing state’s most politically sensitive sectors and the target’s leadership acquires a stake in visible resistance. Sanctions research has established each of these points, and the tariff literature is converging on the same conclusions.
That analysis identifies what would make such measures more likely to succeed, and the conditions are demanding. A defined and achievable demand, stated publicly. A path to relief that survives a change of administration, which in practice means legislation or a treaty. Targeting narrow enough that the pain falls on those who can influence the decision rather than on the general population. And a face-saving formula, since no government concedes to an ultimatum in terms that describe it as conceding. Each of these is a mediation design question rather than an economic one, which is why this material belongs in a journal of this kind.
Two additions would strengthen the article. The rules-based alternative deserves mention, since the dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization exists precisely to handle the grievances that tariffs are now used to press, and its appellate body has been inoperative since 2019 because appointments were blocked. States that would once have litigated now retaliate, and the interim arrangement adopted by a subset of members is a partial substitute. The decline of that forum is part of the explanation for the pattern the author describes. And the article’s treatment of the sugar programme as a success invites the qualification the author gestures at: it protected an industry at a cost to consumers estimated in billions annually and displaced Caribbean producers whose economies had depended on that trade, which is a reminder that protection has victims who are not represented in the domestic debate.
Finally, the article’s most original point concerns what it calls the unseen partnerships, and it is worth stating as a general proposition about reputational damage. Trust is asymmetric: it is built slowly through repeated performance and lost quickly through a single reversal, and it does not return simply because the reversal is undone. States that have been surprised once will price that possibility into every subsequent arrangement, through hedging, diversification and shorter commitments. This is the standard finding on reputation in negotiation, and it applies to states as it does to parties in any other dispute. The cost is invisible in trade statistics and it is the most consequential thing the author identifies.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
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