DIPLOMACY ID

THE STATE AFTER THE EMPIRE

Viatcheslav Matuzov — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:43:21 +0000

Why the Middle East Cannot Be Rebuilt from the Outside

Viacheslav Matuzov
Arabist, former Soviet and Russian diplomat
President, Society of Friendship and Business Cooperation with Arab Countries

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER
International Order & Geopolitics

INTRODUCTION

I have been professionally involved with the Arab world for more than half a century. During that time I have seen governments rise and disappear, wars begin with one declared objective and end with another, alliances reverse themselves, revolutionary movements become governments and governments become exiles. I have watched the region from Beirut, Moscow and Washington, through diplomatic work, political contacts and direct relationships with people whose countries were repeatedly described from outside through concepts that often had very little to do with how those societies understood themselves.

This experience has convinced me of something that appears elementary but is repeatedly forgotten. The Middle East cannot be understood from the map alone. A state border tells us where jurisdiction formally ends. It does not tell us where historical memory ends, where religious authority ends, where tribal relationships end, where language ends, where economic dependence ends or where the consequences of an earlier empire end. The contemporary Arab state exists inside all of these systems simultaneously.

This is why so many external attempts to redesign the region have produced consequences different from those intended. The mistake has often begun before the intervention itself. It begins with the assumption that a state is essentially a political administration occupying a defined territory. Remove the wrong administration, introduce another constitutional arrangement, hold elections, reform institutions, and a different political order should emerge.

But a state is much more than its government.

It is an accumulated agreement, sometimes imperfect and sometimes coercive, among communities that have learned how to inhabit the same political space. Destroying the government can take days. Reconstructing that accumulated agreement may take generations.

The central lesson of the modern Middle East is therefore not simply that foreign intervention can fail. History has always contained successful and unsuccessful interventions. The deeper lesson is that political order cannot be engineered independently of the society from which it must derive its legitimacy.

THE BORDERS WERE NEW. THE SOCIETIES WERE NOT.

Much of the political geography of the contemporary Middle East emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the arrangements that followed the First World War. This fact is frequently repeated, sometimes so casually that it creates another misunderstanding: because many modern borders were comparatively recent, the societies inside them are imagined as artificial.

The reality is more complicated.

Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and the wider Arab East did not suddenly acquire history when modern borders appeared. Cities, religious communities, trading networks, families, linguistic traditions and systems of local authority existed long before the states that eventually incorporated them. The political map changed more quickly than society.

This distinction is fundamental.

A modern state can therefore be historically recent while containing extremely old social structures. When central authority weakens, these structures do not simply disappear with it. They can become more important.

A person whom an external observer identifies principally as an Iraqi or Syrian citizen may simultaneously understand himself through a city, tribe, religious community, family, profession and broader Arab or Islamic identity. Under normal conditions these affiliations can coexist. Under conditions of state collapse they can become alternative systems of security.

People do not become sectarian merely because analysts classify them by sect. They become politically dependent on sectarian, ethnic or tribal structures when the state ceases to perform functions that previously made those affiliations politically secondary.

This is why the destruction of state institutions can produce consequences that outsiders interpret incorrectly as the sudden return of “ancient hatreds.” The hatred may not be ancient at all. What has changed is the institutional environment.

When the state no longer protects you, you search for another structure that can.

THE STATE IS MORE THAN THE REGIME

One of the most consequential conceptual errors in Middle Eastern policy has been the failure to distinguish between regime and state.

A government can be authoritarian. Its leadership can be corrupt. Its security apparatus can commit abuses. Its political system can require reform. None of this means that the institutions through which millions of people conduct ordinary life have no value.

Ministries, municipalities, courts, schools, police, armed forces, public utilities and administrative systems contain accumulated relationships and professional knowledge. They also provide the population with predictable points of interaction.

When an external power decides that destroying a regime requires dismantling these institutions, it may discover that it has removed not only the political leadership but the infrastructure through which a replacement political order would have to operate.

Iraq provided one of the clearest demonstrations. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government removed a dictatorship. But the subsequent dismantling of important parts of the Iraqi state, including the military and administrative apparatus, helped create a political and security vacuum whose consequences extended far beyond the original war.

Libya demonstrated another version of the same problem. Muammar Gaddafi disappeared, but the disappearance of the ruler did not automatically create a stronger Libyan state. Once the center collapsed, competing armed and regional structures acquired political significance.

The lesson should not be that every existing government must therefore be preserved indefinitely.

It is that the removal of a government and the preservation of a state are two different strategic operations.

Confusing them can transform political intervention into state destruction.

SYRIA AND THE LIMITS OF EXTERNAL DESIGN

The Syrian conflict became one of the most dramatic examples of the collision between external political models and internal social reality. From the beginning, different external actors interpreted Syria through their own strategic priorities. For some it was a struggle against authoritarian government. For others it became part of the regional competition involving Iran, Turkey, the Gulf states, Israel, Russia and the United States. For still others it was connected to Kurdish autonomy, political Islam, terrorism or the broader transformation produced by the Arab uprisings.

All of these dimensions existed.

The mistake was believing that any one of them explained Syria completely.

Syria was also a society whose communities had lived together within a particular state structure for decades. Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Druze, Kurds and others did not simply constitute pieces on a geopolitical board. They had their own memories, fears and expectations about what the collapse of central authority could mean.

Once a conflict becomes existential for communities, the political logic changes. People no longer ask only which government they prefer. They ask who will protect them if the existing order disappears.

That question cannot be answered by constitutional theory alone.

This is one reason I have consistently regarded a purely military solution to the Syrian problem as insufficient. Military force can change the balance on the ground and can create conditions for negotiation. It cannot by itself reconstruct the political relationships required for different communities to inhabit one state after the fighting ends. My assessment during the Astana process was similarly that actors committed exclusively to a military outcome would have difficulty participating seriously in a settlement process.

A durable Syrian settlement therefore requires more than determining who controls Damascus.

It requires answering what Syria is as a political community.

PALESTINE IS NOT A REGIONAL DETAIL

For decades I have regarded the Palestinian question as one of the central political questions of the Middle East. This judgment does not mean that every conflict in the region is caused by Palestine. Clearly it is not. The Iran-Iraq War had its own causes. The Syrian conflict had its own causes. Conflicts in Yemen, Lebanon and Libya cannot simply be reduced to the Arab-Israeli confrontation.

The point is different.

The Palestinian question acquired a political and symbolic significance extending far beyond the territory directly involved. It became connected to the legitimacy of Arab governments, relations with the United States, political Islam, Arab nationalism, international law and the credibility of the international system itself.

During my professional life, the subject repeatedly appeared in Soviet and American contacts because both sides understood that it affected relationships throughout the region. I have described the Palestinian problem publicly as fundamentally political rather than religious. That distinction remains essential.

When a territorial and political conflict is transformed into an absolute religious confrontation, the space for compromise becomes dramatically smaller.

Territory can be divided.

Security arrangements can be negotiated.

Political recognition can be reciprocal.

Sacred truth cannot easily be partitioned.

Diplomacy should therefore resist every process that converts political conflicts into metaphysical ones.

RELIGION CANNOT BE REMOVED FROM POLITICS, BUT IT SHOULD NOT REPLACE IT

The Middle East cannot be understood without religion. Islam, Christianity and Judaism have shaped the region’s law, culture, historical memory and social organization for centuries. Any diplomatic analysis that treats religion merely as private belief will misunderstand political behavior.

But the opposite mistake is equally serious.

Religion should not become a universal explanation for political conflict.

Political movements use religious language. Governments use religious legitimacy. External powers build relationships with religious actors. Communities under threat can organize through religious institutions because those institutions survive when others fail.

The analyst must therefore ask a more precise question: when is religion producing political behavior, and when is political behavior using religion?

The difference can determine whether a conflict remains negotiable.

If two communities are fighting over security, territory or representation, institutional arrangements may be possible. If each becomes convinced that the other represents an existential theological enemy, ordinary diplomacy becomes substantially more difficult.

The professional responsibility of diplomacy is therefore to identify the material and political interests underneath ideological language whenever they exist.

THE OUTSIDE POWER ALWAYS SEES LESS

Every major power entering the Middle East arrives with intelligence services, diplomats, military specialists, economists and regional experts. Yet external powers repeatedly underestimate local consequences.

Why?

The problem is not simply insufficient information.

It is the difference between information and embedded knowledge.

A diplomatic report can explain which political party supports a government. It may not explain how a family in a particular town interprets that party through memories accumulated over three generations. Intelligence can identify the leadership of a religious organization. It may not fully capture the informal relationships through which authority actually operates inside a community.

Language matters enormously here.

To know Arabic is not simply to possess a technical instrument for translating words. Language reveals categories through which people describe dignity, obligation, humiliation, family, power and history. Translation can reproduce a sentence while losing the political meaning contained inside it.

This was one of the strengths of the older diplomatic school in which I was trained. Regional specialization was expected to be deep and long-term. A diplomat did not become an Arabist because he had spent two years in an embassy. The region became a professional field studied over decades.

Modern diplomacy increasingly values mobility, management and rapid rotation. These qualities have advantages. But they also carry a cost.

A diplomatic system that knows everything about today’s event and too little about the fifty years preceding it will repeatedly mistake symptoms for causes.

HUMILIATION IS A POLITICAL FACTOR

One of the least measurable variables in international relations is humiliation.

It does not appear easily in economic models or military balances. Yet it can determine political behavior for generations.

Societies remember occupations, lost wars, broken promises and unequal treatment. Whether every element of that memory corresponds perfectly to the archival record is politically secondary. Once humiliation becomes part of collective identity, political leaders must operate inside it.

This is particularly important in the Arab world, where the experience of European colonialism, the creation of the post-Ottoman order, Palestine, military interventions and unequal relationships with great powers have accumulated into a powerful historical narrative.

An external actor may believe it is proposing a rational arrangement.

The local society may experience the same proposal through the memory of previous domination.

Diplomacy that ignores this difference will repeatedly be surprised by resistance to solutions that appear materially advantageous.

Respect is therefore not diplomatic decoration.

It is a strategic resource.

NO REGION CAN BE GOVERNED PERMANENTLY FROM OUTSIDE

Great powers inevitably influence smaller states. This is a permanent reality of international politics. The Soviet Union did it. The United States did it. European powers did it before them. China, Russia, Turkey, Iran and the Gulf states all exercise influence today in different forms.

The relevant question is not whether external influence can be eliminated.

It cannot.

The question is whether external power attempts to substitute itself for internal political legitimacy.

That strategy eventually encounters a limit.

Military force can overthrow a government. Money can support an elite. Sanctions can damage an economy. Intelligence services can influence political actors. Diplomatic pressure can change calculations.

None of these instruments can indefinitely answer the fundamental question citizens ask of their own political order:

Why should we accept this system as ours?

Only societies themselves can ultimately answer that question.

THE REGION DOES NOT NEED ANOTHER MASTER PLAN

The history of the Middle East contains an extraordinary number of plans designed elsewhere: partitions, mandates, peace plans, regime-change strategies, democratization programmes, security architectures and proposals for a “new Middle East.”

Some produced useful results. Others failed catastrophically.

The recurring problem is the ambition to solve the region as though it were one strategic problem.

It is not.

There is no single Middle Eastern political system. Oman is not Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is not Syria. Egypt is not Iraq. Tunisia is not Yemen. Political Islam itself differs profoundly across societies. Even concepts such as tribe, sect and state have different meanings depending on local history.

External powers should therefore become more modest about architectural solutions.

Diplomacy should begin with political anthropology: who lives here, how do they understand themselves, what institutions do they trust, what do they fear, what historical experiences shape their behavior, and what arrangements have previously allowed them to coexist?

Only then should the geopolitical map be placed over the social one.

FIVE LESSONS FROM HALF A CENTURY OF THE MIDDLE EAST

First, preserve the state even when the government must change. Political reform and state destruction are fundamentally different processes. External policy should distinguish between institutions necessary for social continuity and institutions serving only the survival of a particular leadership.

Second, never reduce a society to one identity. Arab societies contain national, religious, local, tribal, professional and historical affiliations that overlap. Policies constructed around a single communal classification can strengthen divisions they claim merely to describe.

Third, keep political conflicts political wherever possible. Once territorial and security disputes become absolute religious or civilizational struggles, the space available to diplomacy contracts dramatically.

Fourth, regional knowledge must precede geopolitical design. Language, history and long professional experience are not secondary qualifications. They are instruments for preventing strategic error.

Fifth, no durable settlement can be imposed entirely from outside. External actors can mediate, guarantee, finance and sometimes compel. But the political order that survives must eventually become intelligible and legitimate to the society expected to live inside it.

CONCLUSION

After more than half a century of observing the Middle East, I am skeptical of explanations that promise one hidden key to the region. Oil does not explain everything. Religion does not explain everything. Colonial borders do not explain everything. American policy does not explain everything. Russian policy does not explain everything. Israel and Palestine do not explain everything.

But neither can any of these factors be understood in isolation.

The region is a historical system in which the consequences of empire, state formation, religion, external intervention, economic interests and collective memory continuously interact.

This complexity is sometimes treated as an obstacle to policy.

It should instead be the beginning of policy.

The greatest strategic mistakes occur when complexity is removed from analysis because it makes action inconvenient.

A map becomes easier to understand when we erase enough information from it. It also becomes less useful.

The Middle East does not require another external project promising to redesign it according to a perfect model. It requires diplomacy capable of recognizing that political order is accumulated historically and that societies cannot simply be reset.

Governments can be changed.

Borders can sometimes be changed.

Institutions can be reformed.

But societies carry their history with them.

The diplomat who forgets this may understand the balance of forces and still misunderstand the conflict.

The statesman who remembers it begins with a different question. He does not ask only:

What political order do we want to create?

He asks:

What political order can the people who must live inside it recognize as their own?

That is where diplomacy begins.

THE POLITICS OF CLOTH

Lana Barbaum — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:13:37 +0000

What the Life of a Garment Reveals About the Civilization That Made It

Lana Barbaum
Specialist in Materials Science, Garment Preservation and Textile Care

INTRODUCTION

A garment begins long before it becomes clothing. Before a coat, dress, uniform or ceremonial robe acquires a recognizable form, a society has already made a sequence of decisions about nature, technology and human labor. It has selected an animal, plant or synthetic material; developed methods for extracting and preparing fibers; learned how to spin, weave, knit, dye or otherwise construct a textile; determined how material should interact with the human body; established rules for cutting and assembly; created aesthetic conventions; and developed methods for cleaning, repairing, storing and eventually disposing of the finished object. What appears to us as a piece of clothing is therefore the final visible stage of an extraordinarily complex material process.

As a materials specialist, I am interested in this process because every stage leaves physical evidence. Fiber structure determines how a textile absorbs moisture, reacts to heat, reflects light and responds to mechanical stress. Construction determines where an object will deform. Dye chemistry determines how color changes with exposure to light and washing. Storage conditions determine whether a garment survives decades or disappears within a generation. Repair leaves traces of decisions made by people who considered the object sufficiently valuable to preserve. Material science allows us to reconstruct much of this history from the object itself.

But there is another layer. The material decisions surrounding clothing are never purely technical. They also reveal cultural assumptions. What deserves to last? What can be discarded? Which imperfections should remain visible and which should be concealed? How closely should clothing follow the body? Which materials signify dignity, purity, wealth, mourning, authority or rebellion? Who is permitted to wear particular colors or forms? Who makes clothing, who maintains it and who owns the knowledge required to preserve it?

A garment is therefore more than a material object. It is a compressed record of a society’s relationship with nature, labor, the body, time, hierarchy and identity. If we follow clothing through its complete life cycle, from raw material to preservation, we begin to see something larger than fashion. We begin to see how civilizations organize reality.

BEFORE CLOTHING: HOW A CULTURE SEES NATURE

The cultural history of a garment begins with raw material. Wool, flax, cotton, silk, hemp, leather and later regenerated and synthetic fibers represent very different relationships between human beings and their environments. Each requires particular landscapes, technologies, labor systems and forms of accumulated knowledge. Wool begins with an animal and therefore with breeding, grazing, seasonal cycles and knowledge of fleece. Linen begins with flax and requires cultivation followed by a complicated transformation in which useful fibers must be separated from the plant. Silk historically required the management of silkworms, mulberry cultivation and highly specialized knowledge. Cotton connected clothing to agriculture, water, trade and, in several historical contexts, systems of coerced labor. Synthetic fibers eventually connected garments to chemistry, petroleum, industrial standardization and global manufacturing.

Material choice therefore reflects more than availability. Over generations, societies learn to perceive the possibilities contained within their environments. A plant ceases to be merely a plant and becomes potential fiber. An animal’s coat becomes a material system whose properties can be manipulated through breeding, spinning and finishing. Minerals, insects and plants become sources of color. This represents an important human transformation: culture begins when matter acquires meaning through knowledge.

Two societies can inhabit comparable environments yet develop different material traditions because they classify and value the same natural world differently. Material culture is therefore partly a history of perception. It tells us not only what resources existed, but what people learned to see in them. Before a society can manufacture an object, it must first recognize a possibility within matter. Technology begins with perception.

MATERIALS ARE MEMORY

Every textile contains accumulated knowledge. A traditional weaving method may embody hundreds of years of experimentation without preserving a written record of that experimentation. The maker may not describe the molecular reasons why one treatment produces a particular result, yet generations of practice can encode an extraordinarily sophisticated empirical understanding of material behavior. Temperature is controlled by touch. Fiber quality is recognized visually and manually. Tension is judged through experience. The behavior of dyes is remembered through recipes. Seasonal conditions determine when materials should be harvested or processed. Techniques are transmitted through demonstration rather than theoretical explanation.

Traditional craft should therefore not be dismissed as primitive technology. It is frequently knowledge stored in procedure. The finished textile becomes an archive of knowledge that may never have existed as text. When a traditional textile technology disappears, humanity loses more than an aesthetic style. It can lose an entire experimental tradition concerning local materials and environments.

This distinction is important for preservation. To preserve only the finished object while losing the knowledge of how it was created is to preserve only half of the cultural record. A historical textile inside a museum case may survive physically while the technological culture that produced it has already disappeared. Material preservation should therefore increasingly include procedural preservation: documenting techniques, terminology, tools, sequences of work, methods of repair and the tacit knowledge carried by practitioners.

In this sense, preservation of materials is also preservation of ways of thinking.

THE BODY BECOMES CULTURAL

Clothing occupies an unusual position among human artifacts because it exists directly at the boundary between the body and society. Architecture surrounds the body. Tools extend it. Clothing continuously touches and modifies it. Every culture must therefore answer a series of questions, whether explicitly or implicitly. Which parts of the body should be visible? Which should be concealed? Should clothing emphasize the body’s natural shape or transform it? How much physical movement should it permit? How should age, gender, occupation and status become visible?

There is no culturally neutral answer. A garment can enlarge shoulders, compress the waist, lengthen the apparent body, conceal hair, expose skin, restrict movement or create visual distance between the wearer and others. Uniforms can suppress individual difference. Ceremonial clothing can transform an ordinary person into the visible bearer of an institution. Mourning clothes can make private grief publicly recognizable. Material and construction participate directly in this process. A rigid textile produces a different relationship between garment and body from a soft draping material. Heavy clothing changes movement. Multiple layers alter silhouette. Fine transparent fabrics negotiate visibility differently from dense opaque ones.

Fashion is therefore not simply decoration applied to the human body. It is one of the ways society interprets the body. The dressed body tells us where a culture places the boundary between private and public, acceptable and unacceptable, individual and collective. Changes in dress frequently accompany changes in these boundaries precisely because political and cultural transformation eventually reaches the body itself.

CLOTHING CREATES SOCIAL LEGIBILITY

Before modern identification systems, clothing was among the fastest ways to understand who another person might be. Occupation, wealth, religion, marital status, region, military affiliation and political authority could all become visible through dress. This function remains with us. A judge’s robe, military uniform, medical coat, business suit or religious garment transforms fabric into institutional information.

The interesting question is why societies need such information to become visible. Complex societies depend on rapid recognition of roles. Clothing creates social legibility. It tells people how to interpret one another before conversation begins. This gives garments political significance. Where clothing codes are rigid, society may be communicating a strong expectation that individuals occupy recognizable places within a hierarchy. Where dress becomes highly individualized, society may place greater symbolic value on personal differentiation. Neither relationship is absolute, but clothing provides evidence about how societies negotiate the boundary between individual and collective identity.

The history of dress can therefore be read partly as a history of who has the authority to define the visible person. Is it the ruler, religion, community, profession, family, market or individual? Political modernization repeatedly changes the answer, but never eliminates the question.

COLOR IS NEVER ONLY COLOR

From a materials perspective, color is produced by physical interaction between matter and light. From a cultural perspective, it is one of humanity’s most efficient systems of symbolic communication. The difference between these perspectives is revealing. Producing a color historically required access to particular materials and considerable technical knowledge. Some dyes were local and inexpensive. Others required long-distance trade, specialized production or enormous labor. The economic difficulty of producing a color could consequently become attached to its cultural meaning. Rarity became prestige. Prestige became authority. Authority could become regulation.

For centuries, societies controlled who was permitted to wear certain materials, colors and decorative forms. Sumptuary laws transformed material distinctions into legal distinctions. Clothing literally displayed hierarchy. Even when such laws disappeared, symbolic associations remained. Black can communicate authority, mourning, sophistication or rebellion depending on context. White can signify purity, mourning, luxury, simplicity or political symbolism in different cultures. Red can signify danger, fertility, revolution, celebration, wealth or sacrifice.

There is therefore no purely visual color. Human societies convert optical phenomena into systems of meaning. To understand the color of a historical garment, one must understand chemistry, trade, economics, symbolism and social hierarchy simultaneously.

THE POLITICS OF MAKING

Every garment also contains labor, although the finished object often hides it. Someone cultivated or extracted the raw material. Someone processed fiber. Someone spun yarn, produced fabric, dyed it, cut it, assembled it, finished it, transported it, sold it and maintained it. The visibility of this labor differs enormously among economic systems.

Traditional garments often preserve a relatively close relationship between maker, material and user. Industrialization progressively separated these roles. Globalization extended the distance further. A garment can now be designed in one country, manufactured from fiber originating in another, assembled in a third and sold in a fourth to a consumer who knows almost nothing about the people who produced it.

This distance has transformed our perception of clothing. When production becomes invisible, price can replace knowledge as the principal way the consumer evaluates an object. The garment ceases to communicate the amount of human knowledge and labor contained within it.

This is not merely an economic transformation. It is cultural. A society that does not see the making of its objects may gradually lose the ability to understand their value beyond monetary price. The seam remains visible. The person who made it disappears.

REPAIR REVEALS A PHILOSOPHY OF TIME

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the life of a garment occurs after it has been damaged. What happens next? Is it repaired, altered, reused, passed to another person, transformed into another object, stored or discarded? The answer tells us something fundamental about a society’s relationship with time.

Repair assumes that an object’s history adds rather than subtracts value. The object has already consumed material and labor. It has established a relationship with its owner. Damage does not necessarily terminate that relationship. Traditional clothing cultures often developed sophisticated systems of maintenance precisely because textiles were expensive in relation to income and labor. Garments could be altered between generations. Fabric could survive several transformations. Damaged sections could be reinforced. Valuable components could be removed and reused.

The object possessed a biography.

Modern mass production has progressively changed this calculation. When replacement becomes cheaper than skilled repair, maintenance begins to appear economically irrational. But something deeper changes with it. The temporal horizon of the object becomes shorter. A disposable garment belongs primarily to the present. A maintained garment connects past, present and future.

Repair is therefore not merely a technical operation. It is a judgment about whether continuity still possesses value.

CLEANING IS CULTURAL TECHNOLOGY

Garment care may appear to be among the least political subjects imaginable. Yet methods of cleaning reveal sophisticated relationships between hygiene, material knowledge, labor and social expectations. Different fibers respond differently to water, alkalinity, solvents, temperature, mechanical action and drying. Effective maintenance therefore requires understanding both contamination and material.

Traditional cleaning practices evolved around available water, climate, fuels, soaps and social organization. Industrialization introduced standardized detergents, mechanical washing and eventually professional dry cleaning. Synthetic fibers changed maintenance again. The modern consumer increasingly expects garments to survive standardized care procedures. This expectation influences how textiles themselves are engineered.

Thus maintenance does not simply follow manufacturing. It begins to shape manufacturing.

A culture demanding convenience produces different materials from one prepared to invest significant labor in preservation. The washing instruction hidden inside a garment therefore contains an entire industrial philosophy: how much responsibility belongs to the object, how much to the user, and how long the relationship between them is expected to last.

PRESERVATION IS A DECISION ABOUT THE FUTURE

As a preservation specialist, I encounter another fundamental distinction: not everything is preserved. Preservation is selective. Families preserve wedding dresses, military uniforms, children’s clothing and garments associated with important people. Museums preserve objects considered culturally significant. States preserve ceremonial dress and symbols of political authority.

The decision to preserve an object is therefore also a decision about memory. We are saying that somebody in the future should be able to encounter this material evidence.

Conservation attempts to slow the physical processes through which matter naturally changes. Light breaks chemical bonds. Oxygen contributes to degradation. Humidity affects fibers. Biological organisms consume organic materials. Mechanical stress accumulates. Preservation cannot stop time. It negotiates with time.

This is why conservation contains an implicit philosophy. We accept that the object will change, but we attempt to ensure that change occurs slowly enough for meaning to survive.

The same principle can be applied more broadly to culture. Tradition survives not by remaining physically unchanged but by maintaining continuity while adapting to new environments. A preserved object is therefore not simply something rescued from decay. It is a deliberate communication between generations.

A GARMENT CAN OUTLIVE A POLITICAL SYSTEM

One of the most extraordinary qualities of material culture is its ability to survive the institutions that produced it. States disappear. Borders move. Political ideologies collapse. Languages change. Yet garments remain in families, archaeological contexts and museum collections. A uniform can survive the army that issued it. A ceremonial robe can survive the dynasty it represented. A peasant garment can preserve techniques from a social system that no longer exists.

Material objects therefore allow the present to encounter political orders without relying entirely on the narratives those orders produced about themselves. Official documents tell us how institutions described society. Clothing can show us how society actually organized bodies, labor, hierarchy and daily life.

A political regime can rewrite a textbook. It cannot as easily rewrite the fiber, cut, wear, repair and material composition of an object already produced. The garment does not provide an objective account by itself, but it contains evidence independent of official narrative.

The object does not speak.

But it remembers.

FROM TEXTILE CULTURE TO POLITICAL CULTURE

The connection between textiles and politics becomes clearest when we stop thinking of politics only as government. Politics is also the organization of relationships: between individual and community, labor and ownership, authority and participation, memory and change.

Textile systems embody all of these relationships. Who controls raw materials? Who possesses technical knowledge? Who performs the labor? Who receives the finished product? Who is permitted to wear it? Who repairs it? Who inherits it? Who decides whether it is preserved?

These questions are simultaneously material, economic, cultural and political.

A highly centralized society may attempt to standardize clothing because standardization makes populations administratively legible. Revolutionary movements frequently change dress because the previous clothing system embodies an old hierarchy. National movements revive traditional garments because material culture can make imagined historical continuity visible. Political elites use clothing to communicate either distance from ordinary citizens or identification with them.

The garment becomes political because the body wearing it is already situated inside society.

WHEN POLITICS CHANGES CLOTHES

Political transformation repeatedly produces material transformation. Revolutions change uniforms, symbols and acceptable forms of public appearance. Modernizing governments sometimes attempt to reform dress because clothing makes social change immediately visible. Colonial encounters alter local textile production and introduce new materials while simultaneously turning traditional clothing into a marker of resistance or cultural continuity. Independence movements frequently rediscover garments, patterns or textiles as symbols of national identity.

The relationship also operates in reverse. Clothing can make political change socially imaginable before institutions have fully changed. A population dressing differently begins to see itself differently. The removal of one form of dress or adoption of another can communicate liberation to one group and cultural loss to another.

This is why disputes about clothing can become unexpectedly intense. They are rarely only about fabric. They concern who possesses authority over the visible body and which interpretation of society that body is required to represent.

Political conflict reaches extraordinary depth when it reaches clothing because it has moved from laws and institutions directly onto the person.

GLOBALIZATION HAS MADE CLOTHING LESS LOCAL AND MORE POLITICAL

The contemporary garment is perhaps the most geographically complex object most people encounter every day. Its raw material may originate on one continent, spinning occur on another, fabric production on another, assembly elsewhere and retail thousands of kilometers away. Energy, transport, finance, labor regulation, environmental policy and international trade are embedded in the final object.

A simple shirt can therefore contain a miniature map of globalization.

This creates extraordinary efficiency but also extraordinary distance between cause and consequence. The consumer sees the finished garment. The environmental cost may exist elsewhere. The labor conditions may exist elsewhere. The water consumed during production may belong to another community. Waste may eventually be exported somewhere else again.

Modern clothing therefore demonstrates one of the central political problems of globalization: benefit and responsibility can occur in different places.

Material literacy becomes politically important because it reconnects the object with the systems that produced it. Asking where a garment came from ultimately means asking who participated in its creation, under what conditions, using whose resources and leaving which consequences behind.

FAST FASHION AND THE CULTURE OF DISPOSABILITY

Fast fashion is frequently criticized for environmental reasons, but its cultural implications deserve equal attention. A civilization communicates its values through what it considers disposable. When extraordinary amounts of agricultural resources, chemistry, energy, transport and human labor are assembled into an object expected to remain useful for only a short period, the problem is not simply waste. It reveals a particular understanding of value.

Novelty becomes more valuable than continuity. Replacement becomes easier than maintenance. Price becomes more visible than labor. Consumption becomes detached from stewardship. This logic extends far beyond clothing. Electronics, furniture, architecture and even digital relationships increasingly operate through similar cycles of rapid replacement. The garment therefore becomes a diagnostic object through which we can examine a much broader civilization of disposability.

THE RETURN OF MATERIAL INTELLIGENCE

The future may require societies to recover forms of material intelligence that industrial abundance allowed them to forget. This does not mean returning romantically to pre-industrial production. Modern materials science offers capabilities earlier societies could not imagine. New fibers can use fewer resources, advanced coatings can extend product life, digital identification can record provenance and automated systems can improve sorting and recycling. But technology alone cannot answer the central question: what kind of relationship do we want with material things?

A circular economy cannot function if cultural expectations remain entirely disposable. Repair infrastructure cannot survive if maintenance carries no social value. Sustainable materials cannot solve overconsumption if objects are discarded before their physical usefulness ends. Material sustainability therefore requires cultural sustainability. People must again become capable of recognizing quality, understanding care and seeing preservation not as resistance to progress but as a sophisticated form of resource management.

FROM RAW MATERIAL TO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

If we follow a garment through its entire life, an unexpected picture emerges. At the beginning is nature: animal, plant, mineral or chemical feedstock. Then comes knowledge: how matter can be transformed. Then labor: the human activity required to perform that transformation. Then design: the interpretation of the body. Then social meaning: status, identity, gender, profession and belonging. Then maintenance: the relationship between value and time. Finally comes preservation or disposal: the decision about whether the object deserves a future.

Every stage contains a choice. And behind every choice stands an assumption about reality. This is why clothing can reveal something surprisingly deep about civilizations. A society’s material culture is not separate from its philosophy. It is philosophy made physical. Political systems tell people how society should be organized. Material systems show us how society actually organizes relationships with the world around it.

CONCLUSION

A garment is one of the closest material companions a human being possesses. It begins in the environment, passes through many hands, reaches the body and then gradually changes through use, care and time. Its apparent simplicity conceals agriculture, chemistry, engineering, labor, aesthetics, economics, social hierarchy and memory. To study clothing only as fashion is therefore to study only its most visible surface. The deeper subject is the relationship between human beings and matter.

How carefully a society chooses material, how much knowledge it invests in making, how it constructs the visible body, how it treats the people who produce its clothing, how it repairs damaged objects and what it chooses to preserve all reveal something about how that society understands the world. Culture is present in the fiber. Economics is present in the seam. Hierarchy is present in the silhouette. Technology is present in the finish. Memory is present in the repair. Politics is present in deciding who may wear what, who produces it, who owns it and whose labor remains invisible. And time is present in every object we decide either to preserve or throw away.

This is why the complete life of a garment, from raw material to manufacture, use, maintenance, repair and preservation, deserves to be studied as more than a technological chain. It is a cultural sequence. At every stage, a society reveals what it considers valuable, beautiful, acceptable, durable and worthy of human effort. The material object becomes a record of decisions that were often never written down.

Seen in this way, materials science unexpectedly approaches anthropology, history and political philosophy. The physical properties of fiber tell us what could be made, but human choices tell us why it was made in a particular way. Methods of care tell us how long a relationship with an object was expected to continue. Methods of preservation tell us what one generation believed another generation should inherit.

Perhaps this is the deepest lesson contained in clothing. Human beings do not simply transform materials. In the way they transform, use and preserve materials, they reveal how they understand reality itself.

The distance between a thread and politics may therefore be much shorter than it appears. Both ultimately concern the same fundamental question: how do human beings organize their relationship with one another, with the material world they inhabit, and with the future to which they will eventually leave it?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lana Barbaum is a specialist in materials science, garment preservation and the complete technological cycle of textile products, from the properties and preparation of raw materials to manufacturing, use, professional care, restoration and long-term preservation of finished garments. Her work approaches clothing not only as a designed object but as a material system whose production, use and survival preserve evidence of technology, labor, cultural values and changing relationships between people and the material world.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are intended to contribute to professional discussion within the Diplomatic Studies community.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
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THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT IS 15,000 YEARS OLD

Oleg Shelyagov — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:37:48 +0000

Rochdale Did Not Invent Cooperation. It Gave Modern Rules to One of Humanity’s Oldest Institutions.

Oleg Shelyagov
President, Union of Cooperators

DISCUSSION PAPER | COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT

When the history of the cooperative movement is told, it usually begins in nineteenth-century Europe. Robert Owen appears as one of its intellectual precursors. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in England in 1844, provides the canonical institutional milestone. From Rochdale come the principles that would eventually shape the modern cooperative movement: voluntary participation, democratic control, economic participation by members, education, autonomy and cooperation among cooperatives. This history is correct, but it describes the history of the modern cooperative institution, not the history of cooperation as an organized human system. If we shift the question from “When was the first modern cooperative registered?” to “When did human communities begin organizing production, resources, risk and survival collectively?”, the chronology changes radically. The history no longer begins two centuries ago. It reaches back toward the first durable settlements created by human beings at the end of the Ice Age, roughly 12,000 to 15,000 years ago.

The proposition that the cooperative movement is 15,000 years old is therefore not a claim that prehistoric communities established consumer societies with membership cards, elected boards and annual accounts. That would be an obvious anachronism. It is a different and more consequential proposition: the institutional logic later formalized by cooperatives emerged when human beings first learned to organize survival through persistent systems of shared contribution, shared resources, reciprocal obligation and collective responsibility. Rochdale belongs to this history, but it stands near its modern end rather than at its beginning.

BEFORE THE CITY CAME THE GROUP

For most of the existence of Homo sapiens, human beings lived in relatively small mobile communities. Cooperation was already essential. Hunting, gathering, childcare, defense, food sharing and the transmission of knowledge all depended on collective behavior. Human beings were never economically autonomous individuals who later decided to cooperate. Cooperation preceded markets, states, corporations and almost every institution we now associate with organized society.

Something profound nevertheless occurred during the transition from the Late Pleistocene to the early Holocene. In parts of Southwest Asia, communities associated with the Natufian cultural horizon and related populations began living for longer periods in relatively stable settlements before fully developed agriculture had emerged. Sites such as ‘Ain Mallaha and other settlements in the Levant show that increasingly sedentary communities existed before the conventional agricultural package of the Neolithic was complete. Later sites including Jericho, and extraordinary ritual complexes such as Göbekli Tepe, demonstrate that large groups of people were capable of coordinating labor, food, construction and symbolic activity on a scale difficult to explain through isolated household behavior alone.

This transition matters because permanent or semi-permanent settlement changes the nature of cooperation. Mobile groups can rely extensively on interpersonal reciprocity and kinship. A settlement creates a different problem. People must repeatedly manage the same territory, water, food storage, construction, waste, defense, children, disputes and shared spaces. Cooperation becomes persistent. It acquires memory. Expectations develop about contribution and access. Rules emerge, whether formally stated or socially enforced. Collective labor creates assets that no individual could reasonably produce alone.

The first village was therefore more than a collection of houses. It was a new social technology.

It required human beings to solve a question that remains at the center of cooperative organization today: how can individuals contribute to something they cannot create alone and share the benefits without destroying the system through free riding, domination or conflict?

THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION WAS ALSO A COOPERATIVE REVOLUTION

The Neolithic transformation is usually described through agriculture. Humans domesticated plants and animals, food production increased, populations grew, permanent settlements expanded and eventually cities and states emerged. This account is materially correct but institutionally incomplete. Agriculture itself required forms of cooperation that became progressively more complex as settlement intensified.

Fields had to be prepared and harvested within seasonal windows. Water systems had to be maintained. Surpluses had to be stored and protected. Seed had to survive from one season to the next. Animals had to be managed. Knowledge about weather, soil, plants and breeding had to move between generations. Buildings required labor. Collective threats required collective responses. The larger the settlement became, the less plausible it was that every household could operate as a completely independent economic unit.

Agriculture therefore did not merely produce food. It produced interdependence.

Once people became dependent on shared systems, institutions capable of organizing those systems became necessary. Some were egalitarian, some hierarchical, many probably combined different forms of authority. Archaeology cannot reconstruct the constitution of every prehistoric community, and we should resist the temptation to project modern political ideals backward. Early villages were not necessarily democratic communes. Cooperation and hierarchy can coexist, and cooperative labor can also be organized coercively.

But the fundamental institutional development remains visible: human survival increasingly depended on collective systems extending beyond immediate biological kinship.

That is the point at which cooperation begins to become something more than behavior. It becomes infrastructure.

THE FIRST COMMON ASSET MAY HAVE BEEN THE SETTLEMENT ITSELF

Modern economics distinguishes between private goods, public goods and common-pool resources. Prehistoric communities did not use these categories, but they confronted the underlying problems directly. Water sources, grazing areas, pathways, defensive structures, ritual spaces, storage facilities and knowledge could possess characteristics that made purely individual ownership impractical or impossible.

A settlement itself can be understood as a common asset. Its value is produced by the presence and contributions of many people. A house may belong to a household, but the safety, knowledge, relationships and productive opportunities provided by the settlement emerge collectively. The community creates an environment whose value exceeds the sum of its private dwellings.

This observation has striking contemporary relevance. Modern societies often discuss cooperation as an alternative economic model existing beside a supposedly natural system of individual competition. Archaeological history suggests almost the reverse. Individual accumulation became possible because collective infrastructures already existed. Property requires recognition. Trade requires trust. Production requires knowledge. Markets require rules. Security requires collective organization. Even the most individualistic economic activity takes place inside systems maintained by others.

Cooperation is therefore not a correction applied to economic life after markets fail.

It is one of the conditions that make complex economic life possible in the first place.

THE FIRE AT THE CENTER

There is a powerful image at the beginning of settled human life: people gathered around a shared fire. We should be careful not to romanticize it. Prehistoric life was difficult, mortality was high and conflict certainly existed. Yet the fire represents something institutionally important. It concentrated people, food, communication, memory and ritual in a shared space. Around such spaces, knowledge could be transmitted, decisions discussed, relationships maintained and collective identity reproduced.

The significance is not the physical flame itself but the social structure around it. Human beings did not simply occupy the same territory. They repeatedly gathered. Repetition created expectation; expectation created norms; norms created institutions.

The earliest institutions were unlikely to have been written. They lived in practice: who shared food, who participated in collective labor, who cared for children, who mediated disputes, who remembered seasonal knowledge, who could use a resource, what obligations accompanied belonging and what happened when somebody violated accepted norms.

Modern legal systems tend to make us imagine institutions as written structures. But institutions are older than writing. A repeated social rule understood by a community is already institutional in an important sense.

Seen from this perspective, the cooperative principle begins not with a nineteenth-century statute but with an ancient social discovery: a group can create rules through which shared contribution generates shared continuity.

COOPERATION CREATED SURPLUS, AND SURPLUS CHANGED COOPERATION

The development of agricultural surplus introduced both opportunity and danger. Stored food allowed communities to survive seasonal scarcity, support specialized labor and sustain larger populations. But surplus also created the possibility of unequal control. Someone could administer storage. Someone could control distribution. Someone could convert responsibility into authority and authority into privilege.

Here we encounter one of the deepest tensions in the entire history of cooperation. Collective production does not automatically produce collective control.

The same social capacity that allows hundreds of people to build an irrigation system can allow rulers to command hundreds of people to build a palace. The same storage infrastructure that protects a community against famine can become an instrument through which elites control access to food. The same ability to coordinate labor voluntarily can be transformed into taxation, tribute or forced labor.

The rise of hierarchy therefore did not replace cooperation. It captured and reorganized cooperative capacity.

This distinction is essential. Empires, armies, temples and states are themselves impossible without cooperation. The relevant question is not whether people cooperate, but who controls the cooperative system, who receives its surplus and whether participation gives members a meaningful voice in the institutions their contribution sustains.

That question connects the Neolithic village to Rochdale far more directly than the conventional chronology suggests.

BETWEEN THE VILLAGE AND ROCHDALE

Across the thousands of years separating early settlements from industrial Britain, cooperative forms repeatedly appeared wherever communities needed to manage resources or risks collectively. Village commons, irrigation associations, mutual-aid societies, craft guilds, fishing communities, rotating credit arrangements, collective granaries, burial societies and many other institutions developed across civilizations without sharing a single origin or organizational model.

It would be misleading to label all of these organizations “cooperatives” in the modern legal sense. Their membership rules, governance, property structures and social environments differed enormously. Some were embedded in feudal systems. Others were religious or kinship-based. Some excluded outsiders. Some reproduced social hierarchies that modern cooperative principles explicitly reject.

Yet beneath this diversity appears a recurring institutional pattern: people pool resources or labor because a problem cannot be solved efficiently or securely by isolated individuals; they establish rules governing contribution and access; they create mechanisms for continuity; and they develop norms to prevent the shared system from being destroyed by individual extraction.

This pattern is not an ideological invention.

It is a recurrent solution to the problem of interdependence.

WHAT ROCHDALE ACTUALLY CHANGED

The Rochdale Pioneers deserve their central position in cooperative history precisely because their achievement was extraordinary. But we understand that achievement better when we stop asking them to carry the impossible burden of having invented cooperation.

They did something more specific.

They codified a modern institutional solution.

Industrial Britain had created new forms of economic dependence. Workers were separated from many traditional means of subsistence, urban markets became increasingly important and the relationship between labor, ownership and consumption was transformed. Earlier communal arrangements could not simply be transplanted into the industrial city.

Rochdale responded by constructing rules suitable for a modern market economy. Membership could be voluntary. Control could be democratic. Capital could serve the association rather than automatically control it. Economic benefits could be connected to participation. Education could strengthen the capacity of members to govern their own institution.

The genius of Rochdale was therefore not the discovery that people can cooperate.

Humanity had known that for millennia.

Its importance was the translation of ancient cooperative logic into a replicable institutional grammar for industrial society.

That grammar could travel. It could be written into statutes, reproduced in different communities, connected to other cooperatives and eventually recognized through national and international law.

Rochdale transformed cooperation from a recurrent social practice into a self-conscious modern movement.

The distinction is crucial.

FROM INSTINCT TO PRACTICE, FROM PRACTICE TO PRINCIPLE

We can therefore describe cooperative history through several layers. Biological cooperation is extremely old and predates Homo sapiens. Human social cooperation developed through hunter-gatherer societies over hundreds of thousands of years. Persistent communal cooperation acquired new institutional depth with sedentary settlements around the transition to the Neolithic. Agricultural societies developed increasingly complex systems of shared labor and resource management. Historical civilizations produced numerous mutual and communal institutions. Industrialization created the conditions for the modern cooperative movement. Rochdale helped codify principles that allowed this movement to become replicable and internationally recognizable.

There is no contradiction between these histories.

The mistake occurs only when the beginning of the modern legal form is confused with the beginning of the social institution.

We do not say democracy began when a contemporary constitution was registered. We distinguish democratic practices, democratic ideas, historical institutions and modern constitutional democracy. We do not say trade began when the modern corporation appeared. We distinguish exchange from the legal structures through which exchange is organized.

Cooperation deserves the same historical depth.

WHY “15,000 YEARS” MATTERS

The claim that the cooperative movement is 15,000 years old is deliberately provocative because it challenges the conceptual marginalization of cooperation. If cooperation is presented as a nineteenth-century social reform, it can easily be treated as one ideological alternative among many: something invented by reformers in response to capitalism and relevant primarily to particular sectors such as agriculture, retail, housing or credit.

If instead we recognize cooperative organization as part of the institutional foundation of settled civilization, the perspective changes.

Cooperation is no longer peripheral.

It becomes foundational.

The question is no longer, “Can cooperatives compete with normal economic organizations?” The question becomes, “Why did modern economics begin treating one of humanity’s oldest organizational technologies as an exception?”

Investor-owned corporations are historically recent. Modern capital markets are recent. Nation-states are recent. Central banks are recent. Limited-liability companies are recent. Digital platforms are extraordinarily recent.

Human cooperation is ancient.

This does not prove that cooperatives are automatically superior to corporations, states or markets. Historical age is not evidence of contemporary efficiency. But it does challenge the assumption that cooperation is somehow artificial while competitive individualism represents the natural condition of economic life.

The archaeological record points toward a more complex human reality.

We compete.

And we cooperate.

Civilization emerged from the interaction of both.

THE COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE IS LARGER THAN THE COOPERATIVE SECTOR

Modern statistical categories classify cooperatives as one part of the economy. This is necessary for legal and administrative purposes but can narrow our intellectual understanding. Cooperative logic exists wherever participants collectively create and govern a resource from which they mutually benefit.

The digital age makes this distinction particularly important. Knowledge networks, open-source software communities, scientific collaborations, shared data infrastructures, platform cooperatives, community energy systems and decentralized professional networks are creating forms of collective production that do not always resemble nineteenth-century consumer cooperatives.

The relevant question is not whether they reproduce Rochdale literally.

It is whether they preserve the deeper architecture: shared contribution, meaningful participation, distributed benefit and governance capable of protecting the common resource from capture.

This opens an extraordinary possibility. The cooperative movement need not understand itself only as a historical sector defending institutions created during industrialization. It can understand itself as the contemporary custodian of a much older organizational principle and therefore as one of the laboratories for designing institutions appropriate to the twenty-first century.

THE DIGITAL COMMONS MAY BE THE NEXT VILLAGE

The transition now underway contains an interesting historical echo. Fifteen thousand years ago, humans increasingly concentrated in durable physical settlements and had to invent ways of managing shared life. Today billions of people are entering persistent digital environments in which knowledge, reputation, identity, communication and economic activity are increasingly interconnected.

Again, the fundamental institutional question is appearing: who owns the infrastructure created by the participation of everyone?

Digital platforms derive enormous value from networks generated by their users. Artificial-intelligence systems are trained on vast accumulations of human knowledge. Professional communities create collective intellectual resources. Individuals continuously contribute data, attention, content and relationships to systems they rarely govern.

The technological environment is new.

The institutional problem is ancient.

Will common contribution produce common benefit, or will shared productive capacity be captured by increasingly concentrated forms of ownership?

The first villages faced this question around land, water, storage and collective labor. Industrial workers faced it around capital, consumption and employment. Digital societies now face it around data, algorithms, networks and knowledge.

The cooperative principle may therefore be not a historical remnant but a technology awaiting another reinvention.

ROCHDALE AS A CHAPTER, NOT A GENESIS

None of this diminishes Rochdale. It places Rochdale inside a larger human history.

The Pioneers of 1844 accomplished something that prehistoric communities obviously could not: they consciously articulated organizational rules suitable for replication within a modern legal and market environment. Their contribution helped turn cooperation into an international movement capable of building banks, agricultural enterprises, retailers, insurers, housing organizations and major industrial groups.

But 1844 should be understood as a moment of codification, not creation.

The printing press did not invent language. The constitution did not invent collective decision-making. Modern medicine did not invent healing.

And Rochdale did not invent cooperation.

It gave a particular historical form to something humanity had been practicing since long before written history.

A 15,000-YEAR MOVEMENT TOWARD THE FUTURE

Calling the cooperative movement 15,000 years old is ultimately not an archaeological slogan. It is an invitation to reconsider the history of institutions.

Civilization did not begin when one individual accumulated enough resources to survive independently of everyone else. It began when human beings became capable of living together at scales requiring durable systems of contribution, obligation, memory and trust.

The settlement came before the corporation.

The common task came before the employment contract.

Shared knowledge came before intellectual property.

Collective survival came before economic theory.

Rochdale’s achievement was to recognize, in the conditions of industrial modernity, that economic institutions could again be constructed around people who were simultaneously participants, contributors and beneficiaries rather than merely customers, workers or providers of capital.

The twenty-first century now confronts a similar institutional moment. Climate adaptation, artificial intelligence, knowledge production, urban infrastructure, energy transition and global supply systems create forms of interdependence that neither isolated individuals nor individual states can manage alone. Humanity is again discovering that its most important problems are common problems.

Perhaps the cooperative movement should therefore stop presenting itself principally as an alternative economic sector born in nineteenth-century England.

Its history is much larger.

Its earliest institutional ancestors can be found around the first durable human settlements, when communities began discovering that survival itself could be organized through shared responsibility.

Rochdale gave that ancient principle modern rules.

Our task is to give it rules for the future.

The cooperative movement did not begin in 1844. In a deeper institutional sense, it began when human beings first learned to build a world together. That history may be approximately 15,000 years old, and it is still being written.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Oleg Shelyagov is a Russian entrepreneur and senior executive whose professional career spans military service, banking, strategic management, public affairs and the cooperative movement. A graduate of the Frunze Higher Naval School, he served as a naval officer before receiving further education in law and public administration. He subsequently held senior management positions at Globexbank, KIT Finance and TransCreditBank, later headed the Military Memorial Company and became Chairman of the Board of Ritual.ru. Today, Shelyagov is actively engaged in the development of the cooperative movement, promoting cooperation not simply as a particular form of business organization, but as a social and economic institution based on participation, mutual responsibility and shared benefit.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are intended to contribute to professional discussion within the Diplomatic Studies community.

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THE POLITICS OF BELONGING

Naila Qalqili — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:18:27 +0000

Why Identity Has Become a Strategic Variable in International Affairs

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER No. 007
Society, Identity & Political Systems

INTRODUCTION

International relations were traditionally explained through states, interests, resources, institutions and power. Identity was often treated as a domestic or cultural variable: important for understanding societies, but secondary to the material forces shaping foreign policy. That distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Questions of belonging, historical memory, language, religion, ethnicity, citizenship and political identity now influence international behavior directly. Governments appeal to communities beyond their borders. Diasporas participate in political conflicts involving their countries of origin. Historical narratives support territorial claims. Migration transforms domestic politics and relations between states. Digital networks create communities whose political identities are no longer confined to geography. Conflicts that appear strategic or territorial frequently contain unresolved disputes about who belongs, who represents whom and which political community has the right to define the state.

Identity has consequently become a strategic variable in international affairs. This does not mean that material interests have disappeared or that every conflict should be reduced to culture. States continue to compete for territory, security, resources and influence. But these interests increasingly operate through societies whose understanding of themselves affects what governments can concede, what populations will accept and what forms of political settlement can survive. A border can be negotiated on a map more easily than belonging can be negotiated in the minds of the people living around it.

The challenge for diplomacy is therefore substantial. International institutions were largely designed to manage relations among states. Many contemporary crises, however, originate from tensions within and across political communities. Managing them requires understanding not only what governments want, but how societies construct the identities from which political interests themselves emerge.

IDENTITY IS NOT A FIXED OBJECT

Political debates often speak about identity as though every society possesses a stable historical essence. Nations, civilizations, religious communities and ethnic groups are presented as coherent entities moving through history with recognizable boundaries.

Reality is considerably more complex.

Identity is inherited, but it is also constructed. It emerges through language, family, education, institutions, religion, historical experience, political narratives and collective memory. Individuals can possess several identities simultaneously. A person can belong to a city, a nation, a religious tradition, a linguistic community, a profession and a transnational culture without experiencing these affiliations as contradictory.

Political systems determine which of these identities become most important.

Under stable conditions, multiple affiliations can coexist. During political crisis, particular identities may become dominant. Economic insecurity can strengthen nationalist identification. Conflict can transform linguistic differences into political boundaries. Discrimination can turn a cultural community into a mobilized political group. External intervention can reinforce identities that previously carried limited political significance.

Identity should therefore not be understood simply as something societies possess.

It is also something politics continuously activates, reorganizes and interprets.

This distinction matters because policies based on the assumption of fixed identities can unintentionally make those identities more rigid.

THE STATE AND THE NATION ARE NOT THE SAME THING

The modern international system is formally organized around sovereign states. Political identity, however, rarely fits perfectly inside state borders.

Some states contain several linguistic, ethnic, religious or historical communities. Some nations are divided among several states. Some citizens identify strongly with political communities outside the country in which they live. Migration creates societies in which citizenship, ancestry and cultural identity increasingly overlap without becoming identical.

The nation-state therefore remains one of the most powerful political institutions ever created, but the assumption that every state naturally corresponds to one homogeneous national community is historically exceptional rather than universal.

Attempts to force political and cultural boundaries into complete alignment can be extraordinarily destructive.

Population transfers, forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing and territorial conflict have frequently emerged from the belief that political stability requires every territory to possess one dominant identity.

A more resilient political system may depend on the opposite principle: the ability of several forms of belonging to coexist within the same political framework.

This is not simply a domestic constitutional issue. When states fail to accommodate internal diversity, identity disputes can cross borders, attract external patrons and become international security problems.

IDENTITY CAN BECOME A GEOPOLITICAL RESOURCE

States increasingly interact not only with foreign governments but with communities inside other societies.

Language, religion, historical memory and cultural affiliation can create networks of influence extending beyond borders. Governments support cultural institutes, media platforms, educational programmes, religious institutions and diaspora organizations. Citizenship policies can maintain relationships with populations abroad. Historical narratives can strengthen claims of responsibility toward communities living in neighboring states.

These practices are not inherently destabilizing. Cultural diplomacy and diaspora engagement can create valuable connections among societies.

The risk emerges when cultural affiliation becomes a justification for political control.

A state claiming responsibility for people with whom it shares language, religion or ancestry can blur the distinction between cultural relationship and political sovereignty. Domestic identity disputes then acquire geopolitical significance.

This creates a difficult diplomatic problem. International law recognizes states and borders more clearly than it recognizes overlapping historical identities. Yet political reality contains precisely such overlaps.

The objective should therefore not be to eliminate transnational identities. That is neither possible nor desirable. It should be to prevent them from becoming automatic instruments for challenging political sovereignty.

THE RETURN OF HISTORICAL MEMORY

Identity is constructed not only through perceptions of the present but through interpretations of the past.

Governments and societies continuously select historical events through which contemporary identity is explained. Victories become national myths. Defeats become collective trauma. Former empires become sources of pride or resentment. Historical injustice can remain politically active generations after the individuals who experienced it have disappeared.

This gives memory a strategic function.

Political leaders can mobilize historical grievance to justify present action. International disputes can be framed as continuations of centuries-old struggles. Compromise becomes more difficult when contemporary negotiation is interpreted through narratives of ancestral sacrifice or historical betrayal.

The past then stops functioning simply as history.

It becomes political territory.

Diplomacy traditionally concentrates on reconciling contemporary interests. Increasingly it must also understand the historical narratives through which those interests are interpreted.

A technically rational agreement may fail if one society experiences it as repetition of an earlier humiliation. Conversely, symbolic recognition of historical experience can sometimes unlock negotiations whose material components appeared impossible to resolve.

Memory should therefore be treated as part of the political environment in which diplomacy operates.

MIGRATION IS CHANGING THE MEANING OF POLITICAL COMMUNITY

Large-scale migration creates another transformation. Millions of people now live outside the societies in which they or their families originated while remaining connected through communication, travel, remittances and digital networks.

This weakens the assumption that political community is contained entirely inside national territory.

Diasporas can influence politics in both countries simultaneously. They can finance development, support political movements, transmit ideas and maintain cultural relationships across generations. Governments increasingly recognize their diasporas as strategic communities rather than populations permanently lost through emigration.

Host societies face a parallel challenge: how to incorporate populations with multiple cultural affiliations without requiring them to erase previous identities.

The debate is frequently framed as a choice between assimilation and multiculturalism. Both concepts can become overly rigid. The deeper question concerns whether political systems can create shared civic belonging strong enough to accommodate cultural plurality.

Citizens do not necessarily need identical histories, religions or cultural practices.

They do need sufficient confidence that they belong to the same political community.

Where that confidence weakens, identity politics can fragment democratic institutions and foreign policy simultaneously.

DIGITAL NETWORKS HAVE CREATED IDENTITY WITHOUT TERRITORY

For most of history, collective identity depended heavily on physical proximity. Communities shared villages, cities, religious institutions, schools, workplaces and media environments.

Digital communication has changed this relationship.

People can now participate continuously in communities whose members live across the world. Political movements can develop without a territorial center. Diasporas can remain integrated into daily debates in their countries of origin. Ideological communities can become more important to individuals than relationships with geographically proximate citizens.

The result is the emergence of identity without territory.

This has positive consequences. Marginalized communities can find support. Professional and cultural networks can transcend borders. People can maintain relationships across migration and conflict.

But digital identity also creates vulnerabilities. Algorithms can reinforce political polarization. False narratives can spread rapidly inside emotionally cohesive communities. Foreign actors can intervene directly in domestic identity debates without controlling territory or traditional media.

Information security therefore increasingly becomes identity security.

The central issue is not simply whether information is true or false. It is whether political systems retain enough shared informational space for citizens with different identities to recognize one another as members of the same society.

IDENTITY CONFLICTS CANNOT BE SOLVED ONLY BY ECONOMICS

Governments frequently respond to political instability by emphasizing economic development. Poverty, unemployment and inequality clearly contribute to conflict, and improving material conditions can reduce many sources of instability.

But identity conflicts cannot always be purchased away.

A community seeking recognition, political representation, linguistic rights or historical acknowledgement may not consider infrastructure investment an adequate substitute. Economic concessions can even fail when they are interpreted as attempts to avoid addressing the underlying political issue.

The opposite mistake is equally dangerous. Identity should not be treated as completely independent from material conditions. Competition over jobs, land, housing and public resources can become expressed through ethnic or religious categories.

Identity and material interests interact.

Effective conflict prevention therefore requires identifying which dimension is actually driving political mobilization. Is the dispute primarily about resources? Representation? Security? Recognition? Historical memory? Language? Territorial control?

Different problems require different institutional responses.

POLITICAL SYSTEMS NEED CAPACITY FOR PLURAL BELONGING

The long-term stability of diverse societies may increasingly depend on their ability to support several layers of identity without requiring citizens to choose permanently among them.

Federalism, decentralization, local autonomy, language rights, power-sharing, proportional representation and civic constitutional identities represent different attempts to address this problem. None provides a universal solution. Arrangements successful in one society may fail in another because history, geography and political institutions differ.

But the underlying principle deserves greater attention.

A political system becomes vulnerable when recognition of one identity requires denial of another.

Resilient systems create institutional space in which a person can be simultaneously local and national, culturally distinct and politically equal, historically connected to one community while sharing citizenship with others.

Plural belonging should therefore not automatically be interpreted as weak loyalty.

Under the right institutional conditions, it can become a source of political stability.

FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR IDENTITY-SENSITIVE DIPLOMACY

◆◆ Distinguish identity from political claims made in its name. Cultural, religious or linguistic affiliation does not automatically produce a particular territorial or constitutional entitlement. Diplomacy should avoid treating political leaders as permanent representatives of entire identities.

◆◆ Map communities as well as governments. Understanding a state requires knowledge of the social and historical relationships inside it. Diplomatic analysis should include demographic change, regional identity, language, religious institutions, diaspora networks and collective memory.

◆◆ Treat recognition as a political resource. Not every dispute can be solved materially. Symbolic recognition, language rights, historical acknowledgement and political representation can sometimes reduce conflict at relatively low material cost.

◆◆ Protect plural belonging. International mediation should be cautious about solutions that require populations to choose one exclusive identity where several affiliations have historically coexisted.

◆◆ Address identity disputes before they become territorial conflicts. Once identity becomes mapped onto territory and armed organizations, compromise becomes substantially more difficult. Early political accommodation is therefore a form of conflict prevention.

FROM IDENTITY POLITICS TO IDENTITY ARCHITECTURE

Identity politics is often discussed as a problem to be reduced. A more productive question may be how political systems can architect relationships among identities.

Every state already does this, explicitly or implicitly. Constitutions define citizenship. Schools teach historical narratives. Language laws determine which identities receive institutional recognition. Electoral systems structure political representation. Administrative borders can reinforce or weaken regional identities. National symbols define who appears inside the official story of the state.

There is therefore no identity-neutral political system.

The relevant distinction is between systems that manage identity consciously and systems that allow unresolved identity tensions to accumulate until they become crises.

Identity architecture does not mean engineering people’s beliefs. It means designing institutions capable of accommodating the identities that already exist.

This should become a more explicit field connecting constitutional design, diplomacy, conflict prevention and political psychology.

CONCLUSION

The politics of the twenty-first century cannot be understood through material power alone.

People do not experience states only as administrative systems. They experience them through belonging, memory, recognition, language, history and identity. These forces influence what societies fear, what they consider legitimate and what political compromises they are prepared to accept.

Identity therefore belongs inside strategic analysis.

But recognizing its importance should not lead to another mistake: assuming identities are permanent, homogeneous or destined to conflict. Human beings have always possessed multiple affiliations. Political systems determine whether those affiliations become complementary or adversarial.

The central challenge is consequently not how to remove identity from politics.

It is how to prevent political competition from turning identity into an absolute boundary between people.

For diplomacy, this requires a broader understanding of the societies behind states. Negotiations cannot succeed indefinitely if they reconcile governments while leaving the communities affected by their decisions politically unreconciled.

The future international order will depend not only on how power is distributed among states.

It will also depend on whether political systems can answer one of the oldest and most consequential human questions:

Who belongs?

The most stable answer may ultimately be the one that allows people to answer that question in more than one way.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
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Backgrounder No. 007 | Society, Identity & Political Systems

This paper is intended to initiate professional discussion. Its propositions are open to evidence, critique and revision through the Diplomatic Studies working-group process.

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THE END OF REGIONS AS WE KNEW THEM

Andres Modikas — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:14:01 +0000

Why Geography Alone Can No Longer Explain International Politics

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER No. 006
Regional Studies

INTRODUCTION

Regional studies were built on geography. The Middle East, Europe, Central Asia, East Asia, Latin America and Africa were treated as relatively coherent analytical spaces with their own political histories, security systems, institutions, cultural patterns and economic structures. This approach remains indispensable. Geography still shapes identity, trade, security, migration, language and political behavior. Yet the international environment is changing in ways that make geographic regions increasingly insufficient as self-contained units of analysis.

Supply chains cross several continents before reaching a final market. Energy networks connect producers, transit states and consumers located thousands of kilometers apart. Migration links distant labor markets and political systems. Digital platforms create shared information spaces across national and regional boundaries. Climate change connects water systems, food markets and population movements across territories traditionally studied separately. Chinese infrastructure investment can affect political choices in Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe simultaneously. Gulf capital is reshaping economies from South Asia to the Mediterranean. European regulation influences companies far beyond Europe. American monetary policy affects governments with limited direct political relationship to Washington.

The result is not the disappearance of regions. It is the emergence of regions embedded in systems that exceed them. Regional analysis therefore needs to evolve from a primarily territorial discipline into a method capable of understanding how geography interacts with networks of finance, technology, infrastructure, migration, energy and political influence.

REGIONS WERE NEVER COMPLETELY CLOSED

The idea of a region is analytically useful because neighboring societies often share historical experiences, political problems and patterns of interaction. Yet regions have always been partly constructed by the observers who study them.

The “Middle East,” for example, is not a natural geographic category with universally agreed boundaries. Depending on the institutional context, it may include North Africa, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf, the Levant and sometimes parts of Central or South Asia. “Europe” can be defined geographically, politically, culturally or institutionally. “Asia-Pacific” increasingly competes with “Indo-Pacific” as both an analytical and geopolitical concept. Central Asia has been interpreted at different moments through Russian, Chinese, Islamic, Turkic and Eurasian frameworks.

Regions are therefore not merely places. They are ways of organizing knowledge.

This becomes important when those categories begin shaping policy. Ministries create regional departments. Universities establish regional studies centers. International organizations build programmes around geographic classifications. Intelligence and diplomatic services organize expertise by country and region.

These structures create deep knowledge, but they can also create blind spots. A problem crossing several administrative regions may be fragmented among institutions that rarely analyze it as a single system.

The analytical map can begin to distort the political reality.

THE MIDDLE EAST IS ALSO AN ASIAN SYSTEM

The changing position of the Middle East illustrates the problem. For much of the twentieth century, regional analysis often interpreted the area primarily through its relationships with Europe, the United States and neighboring Arab or Islamic states.

Today its external geography is changing.

China is one of the largest trading partners for many states in the region. India is deeply connected to Gulf economies through energy, trade and millions of migrant workers. Asian states are major consumers of Gulf hydrocarbons. Sovereign wealth funds from the region invest globally. Infrastructure initiatives link ports, railways, digital networks and logistics systems across Eurasia.

A Gulf state can therefore be simultaneously part of the Middle East, the Indian Ocean economy, Asian energy security, global financial networks and emerging Eurasian transport corridors.

No single regional category captures all of these relationships.

This does not mean Middle Eastern expertise becomes less important. It means that expertise must increasingly be connected to other fields.

A specialist who understands the internal politics of Saudi Arabia but not Asian energy demand may miss one part of Saudi strategic behavior. A specialist on Iran who ignores Eurasian transport systems or Chinese economic relations may similarly analyze only one dimension of the country’s choices.

Regional knowledge remains essential, but it must become relational rather than isolated.

EUROPE CAN NO LONGER BE STUDIED ONLY FROM EUROPE

Europe provides another example. The European Union is one of the world’s most sophisticated regional institutional systems, yet many of the forces reshaping Europe originate outside its geographic boundaries.

Energy security depends on relationships with Russia, the United States, North Africa, the Gulf and increasingly global LNG markets. Migration patterns are affected by political and economic conditions across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. European manufacturing depends on supply chains extending deeply into Asia. Technology policy interacts with American and Chinese companies. Climate regulation affects exporters around the world.

The European economy may therefore be institutionally regional while materially global.

The same is true of security. European defense is inseparable from the transatlantic relationship. Developments in the Indo-Pacific increasingly affect European strategic planning. Conflict in the Middle East can immediately influence European domestic politics, migration and energy prices.

The traditional distinction between “European affairs” and “external affairs” therefore becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

Europe is not simply a region interacting with the outside world.

It is a node within several systems whose geography extends far beyond Europe.

CONNECTIVITY IS BECOMING GEOPOLITICAL

Transport routes were once treated largely as economic infrastructure. Increasingly they are viewed as strategic assets.

Ports, railways, pipelines, fiber-optic cables, electricity grids and logistics corridors determine how states are connected to markets and to one another. They can create dependence, resilience or vulnerability.

The geopolitical significance of connectivity means that regions can no longer be analyzed independently from the networks that connect them.

A railway across Central Asia can influence trade between China and Europe. A port in the Arabian Sea can affect energy and maritime strategy. A submarine cable in the Mediterranean may become part of digital security. A pipeline running through several countries can alter political relationships among producers, transit states and consumers.

These systems create functional regions that do not necessarily correspond to traditional geographic ones.

An energy region may connect the Gulf with East Asia. A logistics region may connect Central Asia with China, Russia, Turkey and Europe. A digital region may be organized around technological standards rather than physical proximity.

The politics of connectivity therefore produces new maps layered on top of conventional geography.

MIGRATION CREATES TRANSNATIONAL POLITICAL SPACES

Migration is another force reshaping regional analysis. Millions of people live and work outside their country of citizenship while maintaining economic, cultural and political relationships with their societies of origin.

Remittances can become major components of national economies. Diasporas influence elections, lobbying, investment and foreign policy. Migrant communities create social links between states that may otherwise have limited political interaction.

The result is the emergence of transnational social spaces.

A political development in one country can generate demonstrations, financial flows or political pressure thousands of kilometers away. Domestic politics and foreign policy become increasingly interconnected.

For regional studies, this creates a methodological challenge. Populations can no longer always be analyzed primarily inside territorial borders.

The political geography of a community may extend across several states.

CLIMATE DOES NOT RESPECT REGIONAL DEPARTMENTS

Climate change may create the strongest argument for a different analytical model because environmental systems routinely cross political and regional boundaries.

River basins connect upstream and downstream countries. Desertification influences migration. Extreme temperatures alter agricultural productivity. Food markets transmit environmental shocks globally. Water scarcity can affect cities, industries and political stability across several states.

A drought in one region can raise food prices in another. Changes in river management can influence relations among several countries. Rising sea levels can affect migration and urban planning far from the location of the original environmental change.

These issues cannot be adequately understood through conventional geographic compartments.

Regional specialists will need to work increasingly with climatologists, hydrologists, agricultural economists, migration experts and infrastructure planners.

Regional studies thus becomes not only interdisciplinary but interregional.

DIGITAL SPACE CREATES GEOGRAPHIES OF ITS OWN

The digital environment introduces another form of geography. Information flows do not follow physical borders in the same way as populations or goods.

A political narrative produced in one country can influence communities across several continents. Social media creates shared linguistic and ideological spaces. Cyber operations can originate from locations unrelated to their targets. Digital platforms can become more important channels of communication than traditional national media.

States are responding by attempting to create digital boundaries through regulation, data localization, platform restrictions and technological standards.

This produces a new strategic geography.

Countries can belong to different digital ecosystems even when they are geographic neighbors. Infrastructure, software, payment systems and information platforms can increasingly determine political orientation.

Regional studies therefore needs to understand digital affiliation alongside territorial proximity.

The political neighborhood of a state may no longer be composed only of the countries sharing its borders.

THE DANGER OF REGIONAL EXCEPTIONALISM

Another problem arises when regional expertise becomes regional exceptionalism: the assumption that one region operates according to rules fundamentally different from those applying elsewhere.

Deep contextual knowledge is essential. Political systems cannot simply be compared without understanding their histories and cultures.

Yet excessive exceptionalism prevents comparative learning.

Patterns of urbanization, demographic pressure, institutional fragility, nationalism, technological disruption and political polarization appear in multiple regions. Conflict mediation experiences in Africa may offer lessons for Asia. Municipal governance innovations in Latin America may have relevance in the Middle East. Federal arrangements in Europe may provide analytical tools for other divided societies, even if they cannot be copied directly.

Comparative regional studies therefore should not search for universal templates. It should identify transferable questions.

What institutional problem was being solved? Under what conditions did the solution work? Which elements depended on local history? Which might be adapted elsewhere?

This form of comparison preserves context without imprisoning knowledge within geography.

FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF REGIONAL STUDIES

◆◆ Preserve deep geographic expertise but connect it systematically across regions. Language, history and local knowledge remain irreplaceable. The objective is not to weaken area studies but to prevent them from becoming isolated analytical silos.

◆◆ Study flows as seriously as territories. Capital, energy, migration, information, infrastructure and technology increasingly shape political behavior. Regional analysis should map where these flows originate, where they pass and where dependence is created.

◆◆ Build thematic networks across regional departments. Specialists working on water, migration, artificial intelligence, energy, cities or logistics should collaborate across geographic boundaries rather than repeatedly addressing similar problems independently.

◆◆ Treat regional categories as analytical tools, not fixed realities. The boundaries of a region should depend partly on the question being asked. Energy geography, security geography, cultural geography and digital geography may each produce different regional maps.

◆◆ Increase structured comparison between regions. Comparative work should identify mechanisms and conditions rather than assuming either universal similarity or complete regional uniqueness.

THE FUTURE REGIONAL SPECIALIST

The regional specialist of the future will still need the traditional foundations of the discipline: language, history, politics, culture, institutions and sustained engagement with local societies.

But that expertise will increasingly need a second dimension.

The specialist must understand how the region is connected to systems beyond itself.

A Central Asia expert may need to understand Chinese infrastructure, Russian security policy, Turkish cultural networks, European trade routes and global commodity markets. A Middle East specialist may need expertise in Asian energy demand, African migration routes, digital finance and climate systems. An African specialist may need to understand Gulf investment, Chinese infrastructure, European regulation and global critical-mineral supply chains.

No individual can master all of these fields.

The solution is therefore not to create impossible super-specialists.

It is to create better networks among specialists.

Regional studies should evolve from a model of individual expertise toward an architecture of connected expertise.

FROM AREA STUDIES TO SYSTEM STUDIES

The deeper transformation may ultimately concern the basic unit of analysis.

Traditional area studies asks: what is happening in this region?

A systems approach asks: what system is producing this outcome, and through which territories does that system operate?

Sometimes the answer will still be regional. A conflict may be driven primarily by local political dynamics. But another issue may be produced by a supply chain extending across continents, a financial system centered elsewhere, a migration network, a technological platform or an environmental process.

The question determines the geography rather than geography determining the question.

This approach does not replace area studies.

It gives regional expertise a larger analytical environment in which to operate.

CONCLUSION

Geography remains one of the most durable realities of international politics. States cannot move. Borders matter. Neighbors matter. Historical relationships created by proximity continue to shape security, identity and economic life.

But geography no longer explains enough.

The contemporary world is organized simultaneously through territory and through networks. A country belongs to a region, but it also belongs to energy systems, financial systems, supply chains, digital ecosystems, migration networks, security structures and cultural spaces whose boundaries are different.

The analytical challenge is therefore not to abandon regions.

It is to stop treating them as closed containers.

Regional studies can become more important precisely by becoming more connected. Deep local knowledge is urgently needed in an international environment increasingly vulnerable to superficial generalization. But that knowledge must be capable of interacting with expertise from other regions and other disciplines.

The next generation of regional analysis should therefore preserve what area studies has always done best while correcting its principal structural limitation.

It should know the place deeply.

And it should understand everything that passes through it.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
The Living Journal of International Affairs

Backgrounder No. 006 | Regional Studies

This paper is intended to initiate professional discussion. Its propositions are open to evidence, critique and revision through the Diplomatic Studies working-group process.

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DETERRENCE WITHOUT TRUST

Hazem Hijazi — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 20:40:48 +0000

Why Arms Control Cannot Survive Without New Mechanisms of Verification and Dialogue

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER No. 005
Peace, Security & Disarmament

INTRODUCTION

Arms control was never built on trust. It was built on the recognition that adversaries who did not trust one another nevertheless shared an interest in preventing catastrophic miscalculation. The most consequential agreements of the Cold War were negotiated not because strategic competitors suddenly believed in one another’s peaceful intentions, but because both understood that unconstrained military competition could produce outcomes neither side wanted. Verification, inspections, notifications, communication channels and negotiated limits were therefore not expressions of political friendship. They were technologies for managing distrust.

That distinction is becoming important again. The international security environment is entering a period in which political trust between major powers is exceptionally weak while the technologies capable of producing strategic instability are multiplying. Nuclear arsenals remain central, but they now coexist with precision conventional weapons, hypersonic systems, missile defense, cyber capabilities, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, anti-satellite weapons, dual-use space infrastructure and increasingly sophisticated unmanned platforms. At the same time, several of the agreements and habits that once constrained strategic competition have weakened, disappeared or become politically difficult to reproduce. The problem is therefore larger than the erosion of a particular treaty architecture. The international system is losing mechanisms through which adversaries could make one another’s behavior more predictable.

The central question for arms control should consequently change. Instead of asking how political trust can first be restored so that arms control can resume, governments should ask what minimum mechanisms of predictability can function precisely when trust does not exist. Arms control should not be treated as the reward for improved political relations. In a dangerous strategic environment, it is one of the instruments through which catastrophic deterioration of those relations can be prevented.

THE MYTH THAT ARMS CONTROL REQUIRES TRUST

The language of international politics frequently treats trust as a prerequisite for cooperation. The proposition sounds reasonable but can become strategically dangerous. If governments conclude that agreements are impossible until political relations improve, the periods in which arms control is most necessary become precisely the periods in which it is least likely to occur.

Strategic stability requires something less ambitious than trust. It requires sufficient confidence that certain actions will be observable, certain commitments can be verified and certain signals will be understood. Two governments can believe profoundly negative things about one another’s intentions while still agreeing that an accidental nuclear exchange, uncontrolled escalation or misinterpretation of a military exercise would be disastrous.

This was one of the essential insights of Cold War arms control. Verification was designed precisely because declarations of goodwill were insufficient. Notifications existed because military activity could be misinterpreted. Hotlines existed because normal diplomatic channels might prove too slow during a crisis. Inspection regimes existed because adversaries were not expected simply to accept each other’s claims.

The architecture was therefore based on a realistic proposition: cooperation can be constructed around shared risks even when political narratives remain irreconcilable.

The erosion of this principle has serious consequences. When arms control becomes politically associated with friendship, concession or normalization, governments may avoid it for fear of appearing weak toward an adversary. Yet refusing mechanisms of predictability does not punish the adversary alone. It increases uncertainty for everyone.

FROM ARMS RACES TO UNCERTAINTY RACES

Traditional arms races were largely understood through quantities: how many warheads, missiles, bombers, submarines or conventional forces each side possessed. Those quantities remain important, but contemporary strategic competition increasingly involves uncertainty about capabilities that are difficult to count, classify or verify.

Cyber weapons may exist without being observable before use. Artificial-intelligence systems can alter decision-making without appearing in traditional force structures. Commercial satellites may perform functions with military significance. Autonomous systems can change the speed at which tactical events unfold. Conventional precision weapons may threaten targets previously vulnerable only to nuclear systems. Hypersonic delivery systems can compress warning times. Software updates can change the capabilities of an existing platform without producing a new physical weapon to inspect.

This means that the strategic problem is no longer merely an arms race. It is also an uncertainty race.

Each side must increasingly estimate what the other side may be capable of doing, how quickly it could do it and whether a system described as defensive today could acquire offensive functions tomorrow. Under conditions of deteriorating political relations, analysts naturally plan around worst-case assumptions. Those assumptions then influence procurement and deployment decisions, which are observed by the other side and interpreted through its own worst-case assumptions.

A self-reinforcing cycle emerges: uncertainty generates capability, capability generates further uncertainty, and both sides can describe their actions as responses to the other.

Arms control for the twenty-first century must therefore address not only the number of weapons but the production of uncertainty itself.

THE SPEED PROBLEM

Strategic stability historically depended partly on time. Leaders needed enough time to receive information, evaluate whether it was reliable, consult advisers, communicate with adversaries and make decisions. New technologies increasingly compress this interval.

Faster delivery systems reduce warning times. Cyber operations can affect command networks before political leaders fully understand what has occurred. Artificial intelligence can process information more rapidly than human decision-makers and may create pressure to automate parts of military response. Autonomous systems can interact at machine speed. Disinformation can spread during a crisis before governments establish the facts.

The danger is not simply that machines will independently start wars. A more immediate risk is that human beings will be forced to make increasingly consequential decisions inside increasingly compressed information environments.

This changes the meaning of arms control. Strategic stability cannot be measured solely by the balance of destructive capabilities. It must also consider the amount of decision time available during a crisis.

A system that gives both sides more time to understand an event may contribute to security even if it eliminates no weapons at all.

Notifications, incident-prevention agreements, protected communication channels, rules governing military encounters and mechanisms for clarifying ambiguous events should therefore be understood as forms of arms control in their own right.

VERIFICATION MUST EVOLVE

Traditional verification relied heavily on observable physical objects: launchers, silos, missiles, aircraft, ships and test sites. Satellites, inspections, telemetry and other national technical means could provide information about whether treaty obligations were being followed.

Many emerging technologies do not fit comfortably into this model. An algorithm cannot be counted like a missile. A cyber capability may remain hidden until deployed. An autonomous function can be embedded in software. A commercial system can acquire strategic importance without being designed as a weapon.

Attempting to negotiate comprehensive prohibitions before reliable verification mechanisms exist may therefore produce agreements that appear ambitious but remain difficult to enforce. The alternative is not to abandon regulation. It is to build it incrementally.

Governments can begin with observable behavior rather than attempting immediately to regulate every underlying capability. They can agree on where certain systems should not be deployed, what activities require notification, which targets should remain outside particular forms of interference, how incidents should be reported and what forms of human control should remain mandatory for specified decisions.

The objective should be to create verification ladders: beginning with relatively simple and observable commitments and expanding them as technical confidence and political experience develop.

Perfect verification is rarely available. The relevant question is whether verification is sufficient to make cheating risky, significant violations detectable and uncertainty manageable.

THE COMMUNICATION DEFICIT

Modern governments possess unprecedented technological capacity to communicate, yet strategic competitors may have fewer reliable political channels than their predecessors did during some of the most dangerous periods of the Cold War. Diplomatic missions can be reduced, military contacts suspended, institutional dialogues cancelled and political communication restricted precisely when confrontation intensifies.

This creates a dangerous contradiction.

The more hostile the relationship becomes, the more governments need accurate information about each other’s intentions. Yet hostility itself often destroys the channels capable of providing that information.

Communication should therefore be separated conceptually from political normalization. A military hotline does not signify friendship. A nuclear-risk dialogue does not legitimize another government’s policies. An agreement for advance notification of exercises does not imply acceptance of the strategic status quo.

Communication is a safety mechanism.

Major powers should maintain several redundant channels because no single channel can be assumed to function during a severe crisis. Political leaders, foreign ministries, defense establishments and specialized strategic commands should possess established mechanisms for emergency contact. Neutral intermediaries can provide an additional layer where direct communication becomes impossible.

The objective is not continuous negotiation. It is to ensure that silence never becomes the default mechanism for interpreting potentially catastrophic events.

ARMS CONTROL MUST BECOME MULTILATERAL WITHOUT BECOMING IMPOSSIBLE

Much of the traditional strategic arms-control architecture was constructed around a bilateral relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and later Russia. That reflected the concentration of nuclear capabilities and the strategic structure of the period. The contemporary environment is more complex. China is a major nuclear power. India and Pakistan maintain nuclear arsenals within their own security relationship. Britain and France remain nuclear states. North Korea has developed nuclear capabilities. Regional missile systems and missile defense increasingly interact with global strategic calculations.

A future arms-control system cannot ignore this multipolar reality. Yet demanding that every negotiation immediately include every relevant state could make progress impossible.

The solution should be layered multilateralism.

Some issues can remain bilateral because they concern specific strategic relationships. Others can involve three or several major powers. Certain norms can be negotiated globally. Regional confidence-building measures can address particular theaters. Technical expert groups can develop verification mechanisms without waiting for comprehensive political agreements.

There is no reason why the entire architecture must have one membership, one treaty and one negotiating table.

A fragmented security environment may require a modular arms-control system.

DISARMAMENT AND DETERRENCE SHOULD NOT BE TREATED AS OPPOSITES

Political debates frequently divide into two camps. One emphasizes deterrence and argues that credible military capability prevents aggression. The other emphasizes disarmament and argues that reducing weapons reduces the possibility of catastrophic conflict. In practice, sustainable security has often required elements of both.

Deterrence seeks to influence an adversary’s calculation by making aggression too costly. Arms control seeks to make the operation of deterrence more predictable and reduce the probability that it fails accidentally. Disarmament seeks, where possible, to reduce the destructive capabilities around which deterrence operates.

These objectives can conflict, but they are not inherently incompatible.

The most realistic near-term objective may not be comprehensive disarmament. It may be managed deterrence with progressively lower levels of uncertainty, vulnerability and catastrophic risk.

That formulation avoids two equally dangerous illusions: that weapons alone can guarantee security, and that declarations against weapons can eliminate the security dilemmas that caused states to acquire them.

FIVE PRIORITIES FOR ARMS CONTROL WITHOUT TRUST

◆◆ Restore permanent strategic communication among adversaries. Emergency political and military channels should operate regardless of the condition of broader diplomatic relations. Suspending communication should never be treated as an ordinary instrument of political pressure where strategic weapons are involved.

◆◆ Negotiate predictability before attempting comprehensive reductions. Notifications, exercise transparency, incident-prevention mechanisms, deployment restrictions and data exchanges can reduce immediate risks even when major disarmament agreements remain politically impossible.

◆◆ Protect decision time. Strategic-stability discussions should evaluate technologies partly according to whether they compress leaders’ ability to verify information and make deliberate decisions during crises.

◆◆ Build new verification mechanisms for software-defined capabilities. Governments, scientists and independent technical institutions should develop methods for verifying behavior, deployment and human-control requirements where traditional counting methods cannot function.

◆◆ Develop a layered arms-control architecture. Bilateral, regional, plurilateral and global arrangements should coexist rather than waiting for a single universal agreement capable of addressing every strategic relationship simultaneously.

A NEW ROLE FOR SCIENCE AND PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS

The next generation of arms control cannot be designed by diplomats and military officials alone. Many of the technologies creating strategic instability are too technically complex and evolve too quickly for conventional treaty processes to address without continuous scientific input.

Physicists played an important role in earlier nuclear discussions. The emerging environment requires a much wider community: computer scientists, artificial-intelligence researchers, cybersecurity specialists, space engineers, telecommunications experts, behavioral scientists and specialists in verification technologies.

This creates an opportunity for professional diplomacy below the level of formal negotiation.

Scientists from politically hostile states may be able to discuss technical definitions before governments can agree on political commitments. Universities can test verification methods. Independent experts can identify areas in which both sides misunderstand the other’s technology. Professional communities can develop vocabulary for capabilities that diplomats will later need to regulate.

Such networks should not be romanticized. Technical cooperation cannot resolve fundamental geopolitical conflicts. But it can reduce one of their most dangerous characteristics: disagreement about the basic facts upon which strategic decisions are made.

Arms control has always depended on the ability to transform political fear into technically manageable questions.

That capability must now be rebuilt for a new technological era.

FROM TREATIES TO CONTINUOUS RISK MANAGEMENT

The traditional image of arms control is a treaty: years of negotiation culminating in signatures, ratification and a formal verification regime. Treaties remain important, particularly where long-term constraints require legal durability. But technological change is increasingly faster than treaty negotiation.

A new architecture should therefore combine treaties with continuous strategic-risk management.

Permanent expert groups could assess emerging technologies. Governments could exchange notifications about new categories of deployment. Technical protocols could be updated without renegotiating entire agreements. Incident databases could identify recurring patterns of dangerous military interaction. Simulation exercises could test communication mechanisms before real crises occur.

Arms control would then become less episodic.

Instead of negotiating only after strategic relationships deteriorate dangerously, states would maintain a continuous infrastructure for identifying and reducing emerging risks.

This may ultimately be more important than producing another generation of large symbolic agreements.

CONCLUSION

The central lesson of successful arms control is frequently misunderstood. Adversaries did not control weapons because they trusted one another. They controlled weapons because they understood the consequences of unmanaged distrust.

That insight is urgently relevant again.

The international system is entering an era of intensified geopolitical competition at the same moment that technological change is making military capabilities faster, more complex and more difficult to interpret. The resulting combination of political hostility and technical uncertainty creates conditions in which miscalculation can become as dangerous as deliberate aggression.

Waiting for trust to return is therefore not a strategy.

Trust may eventually improve. It may not. Strategic stability must function under both conditions.

The immediate task is more modest and more practical: preserve communication, increase predictability, create verifiable constraints where possible, protect human decision time and ensure that adversaries possess mechanisms for determining what is actually happening before they are forced to decide how to respond.

Disarmament remains an important long-term objective. Deterrence remains a reality of contemporary security. Between them lies an enormous field of practical work concerned with preventing weapons from being used because of misunderstanding, accident, technological interaction or uncontrolled escalation.

That field should become one of the central projects of twenty-first-century diplomacy.

The international system does not need to trust in order to begin.

It needs to recognize that distrust itself must be managed.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
The Living Journal of International Affairs

Backgrounder No. 005 | Peace, Security & Disarmament

This paper is intended to initiate professional discussion. Its propositions are open to evidence, critique and revision through the Diplomatic Studies working-group process.

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THE WORLD AFTER THE UNIPOLAR MOMENT

PEACE HINMIKAIYE — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 20:37:07 +0000

Why the Next International Order Will Be Built Through Overlapping Systems

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER No. 004
International Order & Geopolitics

INTRODUCTION

Much of the contemporary debate about international order is organized around a deceptively simple question: what will replace the unipolar world? The most common answers are multipolarity, a renewed bipolar competition between the United States and China, fragmentation into regional blocs, or the gradual emergence of a post-Western order. Each captures part of the transformation underway, but all retain an assumption inherited from earlier geopolitical eras: that the international system must ultimately possess one dominant organizing structure.

The emerging reality may be considerably more complicated. The world is not simply moving from one international order to another. It is developing multiple overlapping systems of power, rules, institutions and interdependence that do not necessarily share the same centers. A country may depend on the United States for security, China for trade, the European Union for regulatory access, Gulf states for investment, international financial institutions for capital and regional organizations for political coordination. It may participate simultaneously in institutions created during the Western-led postwar order and newer organizations designed partly to reduce dependence on that order. These relationships are not necessarily transitional. They may constitute the structure of the emerging system itself.

The central geopolitical challenge is therefore not simply managing multipolarity. It is learning to operate in a world in which power itself has become multidimensional. Military power, financial power, technological power, demographic power, energy power, regulatory power, informational power and cultural influence increasingly produce different maps of the international system. No single map adequately describes the whole.

THE END OF A SINGLE HIERARCHY

The unipolar moment following the Cold War created an unusual concentration of capabilities. The United States possessed unmatched military reach, enormous economic influence, leadership within the principal international institutions, technological dominance and a network of alliances without historical precedent. Western political and economic institutions appeared capable of expanding progressively outward, while globalization created expectations that economic integration would eventually produce greater political convergence.

That expectation has weakened. Economic integration continued, but political convergence did not. China entered the global economy without becoming a Western political system. Russia became deeply connected to European markets while simultaneously developing an increasingly adversarial security relationship with the West. India integrated into the global economy while preserving strategic autonomy. Gulf monarchies developed close security relationships with Western states while expanding economic and political relations with China, Russia and the Global South. Middle powers increasingly discovered that they could maintain relationships across competing geopolitical centers rather than permanently align with one.

This does not mean that the United States has ceased to be the world’s most consequential power or that the institutions created after 1945 have disappeared. It means something more subtle: international hierarchy is no longer consistent across different fields of power.

The country that dominates one system may not dominate another.

ONE WORLD, SEVERAL MAPS

Military geography still places the United States and its alliance network at the center of much of the global security architecture. Economic geography produces a different picture in which China is the largest trading partner for a large number of countries and an essential component of global manufacturing. Energy geography places Gulf producers, Russia, the United States and increasingly renewable-energy supply chains in different strategic positions. Financial geography remains heavily centered on the dollar and Western financial institutions. Demographic geography shifts weight toward Africa and South Asia. Technological geography is increasingly organized around competing semiconductor, artificial-intelligence, telecommunications and digital ecosystems.

None of these maps can simply be superimposed upon another.

This explains behavior that can appear contradictory when viewed through the older logic of geopolitical blocs. A state can conduct military exercises with one power while expanding trade with another. It can purchase weapons from several competing suppliers, accept infrastructure investment from China, maintain dollar reserves, negotiate with the European Union and participate in BRICS without considering these relationships mutually exclusive.

What looks like inconsistency may actually be rational adaptation to a multidimensional international system.

THE RISE OF MULTI-ALIGNMENT

During the Cold War, the concept of non-alignment described states seeking distance from the two dominant blocs. The emerging environment is producing something different: multi-alignment.

Multi-aligned states do not necessarily attempt to remain outside competing systems. They participate in several of them simultaneously.

India provides an obvious example. It cooperates strategically with the United States, Japan and Australia through the Quad, maintains longstanding defense relationships with Russia, participates in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, competes directly with China along its border and simultaneously maintains extensive economic relations with it. Similar patterns, though in different forms, can be observed across Southeast Asia, the Gulf, Africa and Latin America.

This is not merely opportunistic hedging. For many states it reflects a deeper strategic principle: dependence on any single external power creates vulnerability.

Diversification therefore becomes a form of sovereignty.

The emerging international order may consequently be shaped not only by the ambitions of great powers but by the determination of middle and smaller states to prevent those powers from forcing exclusive choices upon them.

INSTITUTIONS ARE MULTIPLYING, NOT SIMPLY BEING REPLACED

The postwar international architecture is often described as being challenged by alternative institutions. This is true, but the language of replacement can be misleading. BRICS does not simply replace the G7. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation does not replace NATO. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank does not replace the World Bank. Regional organizations do not eliminate the United Nations.

Instead, institutional layers accumulate.

States use different institutions for different purposes. An organization that appears politically weak may remain valuable for technical coordination. An institution dominated by one group of powers may coexist with another created partly to counterbalance it. Countries can participate in both.

The future international order may therefore resemble an institutional ecosystem rather than a single constitutional architecture.

This has an important consequence. The legitimacy of an institution will increasingly depend not merely on universal membership or historical authority but on whether states consider it useful for solving particular problems.

Institutions unable to deliver practical outcomes may survive formally while losing political relevance. Conversely, relatively informal organizations may acquire influence because they provide states with something existing institutions do not.

GEOPOLITICS WITHOUT COMPLETE BLOCS

The return of geopolitical competition has generated widespread discussion about a new Cold War. The analogy is understandable but incomplete. The Cold War involved two relatively coherent political, military and economic blocs with limited economic interdependence between them. Today’s principal competitors remain deeply embedded in the same global economy.

China and the United States compete strategically while remaining economically connected. European economies seek to reduce strategic dependencies without completely separating from China. Countries imposing sanctions continue to depend on global commodity markets affected by the sanctioned states. Technology supply chains cross political boundaries even as governments attempt to secure them.

Complete decoupling would therefore impose enormous costs not only on adversaries but on the states attempting it.

The emerging competition is more likely to involve selective separation inside continued interdependence.

Certain technologies will be securitized. Particular supply chains will be relocated. Financial systems may diversify. Data regimes may fragment. Military alliances may strengthen. Yet trade and investment will continue across many of the same political divisions.

This produces a geopolitical environment in which states simultaneously compete and cooperate.

Traditional categories of friend and enemy become less capable of describing the full relationship.

INTERDEPENDENCE HAS BECOME STRATEGIC

For several decades, economic interdependence was widely treated as a stabilizing force. The assumption was straightforward: countries with extensive trade and investment relationships would have more to lose from conflict and therefore stronger incentives to preserve peace.

Interdependence does create costs for conflict. But recent experience has demonstrated another characteristic: networks of dependence can also become instruments of coercion.

Financial systems can impose sanctions. Energy dependence can create political leverage. Semiconductor supply chains can restrict technological development. Access to markets can influence government behavior. Control of infrastructure, logistics, digital platforms and critical minerals can acquire strategic significance.

The result is not the end of globalization but its politicization.

Governments increasingly ask not simply whether economic integration creates efficiency, but who depends on whom, for what, and what happens if the relationship is interrupted.

Resilience, redundancy and strategic autonomy therefore become economic as well as security objectives.

THE GLOBAL SOUTH IS BECOMING AN ACTOR, NOT A CATEGORY

The term “Global South” contains countries with profoundly different political systems, interests, histories and levels of development. It should not be mistaken for a coherent geopolitical bloc. Yet its increasing prominence reflects a genuine structural change.

A growing number of states outside the traditional Western core reject the assumption that major geopolitical disputes require them automatically to adopt the position of one great-power coalition. Their choices are increasingly based on combinations of national interest, development priorities, historical experience and strategic autonomy.

This matters because the international order will not be determined solely in Washington, Beijing, Brussels or Moscow.

It will also be shaped in New Delhi, Riyadh, Ankara, Jakarta, Brasília, Pretoria, Abu Dhabi and dozens of other capitals whose governments possess growing capacity to negotiate among competing centers of power.

The ability to attract these states may become more important than the ability to discipline them.

Great powers accustomed to demanding alignment may consequently discover that influence increasingly depends on offering useful relationships rather than enforcing political loyalty.

FROM RULE-TAKING TO RULE-MAKING

The struggle over international order is often described as a struggle over whether the existing “rules-based order” will survive. But this formulation obscures a fundamental dispute: who participates in making the rules?

Many institutions governing contemporary international affairs were created when the distribution of global economic and demographic power was very different. States that have grown dramatically in influence increasingly demand greater participation in institutional decision-making.

This does not necessarily imply rejection of international rules. On the contrary, rising powers often seek more rules in areas where uncertainty threatens their interests. What they increasingly resist is an arrangement in which rules are presented as universal while their authorship remains concentrated.

The next international order will therefore require negotiation not only about the content of rules but about the legitimacy of the process through which they are created.

An international system cannot remain stable indefinitely if a growing proportion of its participants believe they are expected to follow rules they had insufficient role in designing.

FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR AN OVERLAPPING INTERNATIONAL ORDER

◆◆ Stop treating multipolarity as a simple redistribution of great-power rank. The emerging system contains different distributions of power in security, finance, technology, energy, demography and culture. International analysis should distinguish these dimensions rather than compress them into a single hierarchy.

◆◆ Recognize multi-alignment as a durable strategy. States maintaining relationships with competing powers should not automatically be interpreted as indecisive or unreliable. For many countries diversification is becoming a central instrument of sovereignty.

◆◆ Build interoperability between institutions rather than demanding institutional exclusivity. The multiplication of organizations does not have to produce complete fragmentation. Mechanisms allowing different institutions to coordinate around specific problems will become increasingly important.

◆◆ Preserve interdependence while reducing catastrophic dependencies. Complete economic separation between major powers would be extraordinarily costly. Governments should distinguish legitimate resilience from attempts to divide the entire world economy into politically exclusive blocs.

◆◆ Expand participation in rule-making. International institutions will retain legitimacy only if changing distributions of power are reflected in meaningful participation rather than symbolic representation.

THE DIPLOMATIC CONSEQUENCE

An overlapping international order requires a different diplomatic mentality. Traditional alliance diplomacy often asks states to demonstrate loyalty through alignment. The emerging environment requires greater comfort with ambiguity.

A partner may disagree on one strategic issue and cooperate on another. A country may belong to institutions associated with competing geopolitical projects. A government may refuse to join sanctions while simultaneously expanding security cooperation. None of these positions necessarily indicates a permanent geopolitical orientation.

Diplomacy will increasingly require issue-specific coalitions.

Climate negotiations may produce one coalition. Maritime security another. Artificial-intelligence governance another. Trade another. Conflict mediation yet another.

The international system therefore becomes less like a chessboard divided into opposing sides and more like a continuously changing network.

This makes diplomacy more difficult, but potentially also more flexible.

When states are not locked permanently into complete blocs, political relationships contain more points of contact through which crises can be managed.

CONCLUSION

The unipolar moment is ending, but what follows may not resemble the multipolar orders of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The emerging system is more interconnected, more technologically integrated and institutionally denser than previous great-power systems.

The world is unlikely to divide cleanly into several self-contained geopolitical poles.

Instead, different systems will overlap.

Security may be organized one way, trade another, technology another, finance another and cultural interaction another. States will move among these systems according to their interests, vulnerabilities and capabilities. Great powers will remain extraordinarily important, but they will find it increasingly difficult to organize the entire international environment around exclusive spheres of loyalty.

This does not guarantee a more peaceful world. Overlapping systems can create uncertainty, miscalculation and competition. But they can also create resilience. A relationship broken in one field does not necessarily require every other relationship to collapse with it.

The objective of diplomacy should therefore not be to construct another perfectly ordered geopolitical architecture.

Such an architecture may no longer be possible.

The more realistic task is to create rules, institutions and habits of cooperation that allow different systems to coexist without forcing every disagreement into a struggle over the entire international order.

The future may not belong to one order replacing another.

It may belong to our ability to manage several orders at once.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
The Living Journal of International Affairs

Backgrounder No. 004 | International Order & Geopolitics

This paper is intended to initiate professional discussion. Its propositions are open to evidence, critique and revision through the Diplomatic Studies working-group process.

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DIPLOMACY AFTER DIPLOMACY

Andrey Matuzov — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 20:33:01 +0000

Why States Are Losing Their Monopoly on International Relations

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER No. 003
Diplomacy & Foreign Policy

INTRODUCTION

Diplomacy was built for a world in which states communicated primarily with other states. Foreign ministries managed external relations, ambassadors represented sovereign governments, negotiations took place through recognized diplomatic channels, and international agreements were concluded by political authorities capable of committing the institutions they represented. That architecture remains indispensable. States still control borders, recognize governments, conclude treaties, maintain armed forces and possess the legal authority upon which the international system is formally constructed. But the environment in which diplomacy operates has changed more rapidly than many of its institutions.

International relations are now shaped by actors that neither fit comfortably inside traditional diplomatic categories nor wait for foreign ministries to organize their interaction. Cities cooperate directly across borders. Universities create international research networks. Corporations negotiate with governments and influence technological standards. Foundations finance transnational programmes. Diasporas connect societies that may have difficult official relations. Religious communities operate across political boundaries. Scientists coordinate around problems no state can solve independently. Digital platforms create spaces in which millions of people encounter foreign societies without diplomatic mediation. Former officials, experts, entrepreneurs and civil-society organizations participate in informal negotiations and Track II processes. Artificial intelligence will further accelerate this transformation by reducing the cost of translation, research, coordination and cross-border professional interaction.

The consequence is not the disappearance of diplomacy. It is the emergence of a much larger diplomatic environment. The critical question is therefore no longer whether states will retain their diplomatic role. They will. The question is whether diplomacy can adapt from a system based predominantly on representation between governments into a system capable of organizing relationships among increasingly complex societies.

THE STATE IS STILL CENTRAL, BUT NO LONGER ALONE

Predictions about the decline of the state have repeatedly proved premature. Governments remain the most powerful political institutions in international affairs. They possess coercive authority, taxation, legal sovereignty and the ability to make binding international commitments. When wars begin, borders close, sanctions are imposed or treaties are negotiated, state power quickly becomes visible.

But centrality is not the same as monopoly.

A multinational company deciding where to locate a semiconductor facility can affect relations between states. A university laboratory can establish scientific cooperation where formal political relations are frozen. A municipality can maintain climate partnerships with foreign cities despite disagreements between national governments. A diaspora can influence elections, investment and bilateral relations simultaneously. A technology platform can shape information flows across dozens of countries. A private foundation can finance programmes larger than the development budgets of some governments.

These actors do not replace states. They create additional layers of international interaction around them.

Traditional diplomatic architecture often struggles to represent this complexity because it continues to organize the external world primarily through geography and sovereignty: one country, one embassy, one bilateral relationship. Contemporary international relations increasingly operate through overlapping networks organized around technologies, professions, industries, cities, universities, supply chains, environmental systems and communities.

The map of diplomacy and the map of international interaction are therefore no longer identical.

FROM REPRESENTING STATES TO CONNECTING SOCIETIES

The classical ambassador represented one sovereign authority before another. The function remains essential, but the contemporary ambassador increasingly represents an entire national ecosystem. A serious bilateral relationship may involve ministries, companies, universities, cultural institutions, municipalities, investors, researchers, journalists, foundations and citizens simultaneously.

This requires a change in diplomatic practice. Embassies cannot merely report political developments and transmit official positions. Increasingly they must identify networks, create relationships, connect institutions and understand forms of influence that do not pass through government.

Diplomatic effectiveness should consequently be measured not only by access to a foreign ministry or presidential administration but by the density and quality of relationships created across the host society.

This does not mean turning diplomacy into public relations. The distinction is important. Public diplomacy frequently seeks to communicate a country’s position to foreign audiences. Network diplomacy has a different purpose: it seeks to establish durable relationships through which information, trust, expertise and cooperation can move in both directions.

The first asks: How do we explain ourselves to them?

The second asks: What can we build together?

THE RISE OF FUNCTIONAL DIPLOMACY

Many of the most important international problems no longer correspond neatly to territorial boundaries. Climate systems, pandemics, financial flows, artificial intelligence, cyber security, migration, energy networks, supply chains, space infrastructure and transnational crime operate across jurisdictions.

This creates demand for what can be described as functional diplomacy.

A negotiation about artificial-intelligence standards may require diplomats, engineers, lawyers, companies and researchers. A water dispute requires hydrologists and regional specialists alongside foreign ministries. Pandemic preparedness requires scientists, pharmaceutical companies, health agencies and international institutions. Cyber negotiations require technical expertise that traditional diplomatic training may not provide.

Diplomacy therefore increasingly becomes an interface between specialized systems of knowledge.

The diplomat does not need to become a scientist, engineer, economist or programmer. But diplomacy must become capable of finding, organizing and translating specialized knowledge into political cooperation.

This represents a significant institutional challenge. Foreign ministries were traditionally structured primarily by geography and political function. The emerging international environment requires them to operate simultaneously through geographic and thematic networks.

The future diplomatic service may therefore resemble a network organization more than a classical hierarchy.

DIPLOMACY BEYOND FORMAL RECOGNITION

One of the strengths of diplomacy has always been its ability to communicate when political relations are difficult. Yet formal diplomatic structures can become constrained precisely when communication is most necessary. Governments may withdraw ambassadors, close missions, impose sanctions or refuse direct negotiations for domestic political reasons.

Other channels then become important.

Track II diplomacy, academic exchanges, business contacts, humanitarian organizations, former officials, professional associations, religious institutions and neutral intermediaries can preserve communication between societies when official channels narrow.

Such activity is sometimes dismissed as secondary diplomacy because participants cannot make binding commitments. This misunderstands its function. Informal diplomacy does not necessarily replace formal negotiations. It can prepare the environment in which formal negotiations later become possible.

Participants can test proposals without committing governments. They can identify misunderstandings. They can maintain personal relationships during periods of political hostility. They can explore compromise formulations that officials cannot publicly discuss. They can transmit information across otherwise disconnected political systems.

The distinction should therefore not be between “real diplomacy” and “unofficial diplomacy.” A more useful distinction is between different levels of diplomatic authority operating within the same diplomatic ecosystem.

THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM

Diplomacy faces another structural challenge: much of its most valuable knowledge disappears.

A diplomat may spend thirty years working with a particular region. An ambassador may participate in negotiations that fundamentally change his or her understanding of another political culture. A mediator may learn why several apparently rational peace proposals failed. A trade negotiator may understand informal institutional constraints that never appear in official documents.

When these individuals leave office, much of that knowledge leaves with them.

Some write memoirs. Some teach. Some join think tanks. Most accumulated diplomatic knowledge, however, remains fragmented across personal memories, confidential archives and informal professional networks.

Academic publishing captures only part of it because diplomatic practitioners do not necessarily write academic papers. Traditional media captures another part but tends to prioritize current events rather than accumulated professional experience.

The international system therefore suffers from a paradox: it continuously produces diplomatic experience while possessing weak mechanisms for preserving and transferring it.

A professional knowledge infrastructure for diplomacy should treat experience itself as a valuable form of evidence, while clearly distinguishing personal testimony, interpretation, documentary evidence and academic research.

The diplomat should not disappear from the knowledge system when the diplomatic posting ends.

FROM PUBLICATION TO PARTICIPATION

Traditional professional journals organize knowledge primarily around publications. An author submits a text, an editor or peer-review system evaluates it, and the resulting article enters an archive. This architecture has produced enormous intellectual value, but digital environments make a different model possible.

A publication can become the beginning rather than the end of a process.

An article on water diplomacy could connect its author with hydrologists, diplomats, regional specialists and institutions working on related disputes. A historical analysis could lead to a working group. A policy proposal could accumulate evidence and criticism over time. A diplomatic case could be updated as new documents become available. Practitioners who disagree with a conclusion could contribute alternative interpretations rather than merely publishing another disconnected article elsewhere.

The fundamental unit of professional knowledge would then shift from the document to the relationship among people, evidence, ideas and projects.

This is particularly important for diplomacy because diplomacy itself is relational. Knowledge about international affairs is most valuable when it can be connected to people capable of using it.

DIPLOMACY AS INFRASTRUCTURE

The traditional image of diplomacy emphasizes negotiation. Yet negotiation is only one visible moment within a much longer process. Successful negotiations usually depend on relationships established beforehand, information accumulated over years, credibility built through previous interactions and channels that remain functional during crises.

Diplomacy should therefore be understood increasingly as infrastructure.

Roads allow physical movement. Financial systems allow capital to move. Telecommunications networks allow information to move. Diplomatic infrastructure allows trust, intentions, proposals and political signals to move between societies.

Like other infrastructure, it is most valuable when built before an emergency.

This perspective changes the evaluation of diplomatic activity. A meeting that produces no agreement may still strengthen a relationship. An academic exchange may create a communication channel useful ten years later. A city partnership may preserve contact during an interstate crisis. A professional network may identify intermediaries when official institutions cannot communicate directly.

Not every interaction produces an immediate political outcome. But together these interactions create diplomatic resilience.

FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR THE NEXT DIPLOMATIC SYSTEM

◆◆ States should retain authority without demanding exclusivity. Governments remain the only actors capable of making many binding international decisions, but they should increasingly recognize universities, cities, businesses, experts and civil society as complementary components of diplomatic capacity.

◆◆ Foreign ministries should map networks as seriously as they map governments. Understanding another country increasingly requires understanding its institutions, professional communities, companies, universities, digital networks and informal centers of influence.

◆◆ Professional expertise should become part of diplomatic infrastructure. Scientists, engineers, economists, historians, technologists and regional specialists should be connected to diplomatic processes through permanent networks rather than recruited only after crises occur.

◆◆ Informal diplomatic channels should be preserved during political confrontation. Track II and professional networks should not be regarded as substitutes for official diplomacy but as strategic reserves of communication.

◆◆ Diplomatic knowledge should accumulate rather than disappear. Professional experience, cases, negotiations, evidence and lessons should be organized into living knowledge systems capable of connecting generations of practitioners.

THE DIPLOMAT OF THE FUTURE

The diplomat of the future will still require many of the qualities that defined the profession for centuries: judgment, discretion, knowledge of history, political analysis, languages, cultural intelligence and the ability to understand another side’s interests.

But another capability will become increasingly important: network orchestration.

The diplomat will need to identify who possesses relevant knowledge, who can communicate with whom, which institution has credibility, where an informal relationship exists, which professional community can solve a technical problem and how these separate resources can be assembled around a political objective.

Authority will remain important, but connectivity will become a form of diplomatic power.

A diplomat with excellent access to government but little understanding of the surrounding society may increasingly possess an incomplete map of the country in which he or she serves. Conversely, a diplomatic mission capable of connecting government, business, universities, cities, cultural institutions and professional networks can generate influence disproportionate to its formal size.

The future of diplomacy may therefore depend less on expanding diplomatic bureaucracies than on improving their ability to activate relationships outside themselves.

CONCLUSION

States are not losing diplomacy. They are losing their monopoly over the relationships from which diplomacy is constructed.

This should not be regarded primarily as a threat. It is an opportunity to expand diplomatic capacity.

The twentieth-century diplomatic system was designed principally to connect governments. The twenty-first century requires an architecture capable of connecting societies without removing governments from their central political role.

That architecture already exists in fragments. It can be seen in Track II negotiations, scientific cooperation, city networks, international universities, professional associations, business diplomacy, cultural exchange and informal mediation. What remains missing is an institutional framework capable of connecting these activities into a coherent diplomatic ecosystem.

The next transformation of diplomacy may therefore not occur inside the negotiating room.

It may occur in the infrastructure surrounding it.

Diplomacy will remain the management of relationships across political boundaries. But the number of actors capable of creating those relationships has multiplied dramatically.

The strategic task is no longer to prevent this transformation.

It is to learn how to organize it.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
The Living Journal of International Affairs

Backgrounder No. 003 | Diplomacy & Foreign Policy

This paper is intended to initiate professional discussion. Its propositions are open to evidence, critique and revision through the Diplomatic Studies working-group process.

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WHEN VICTORY NO LONGER ENDS A WAR

Stephan Belaiche — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 20:30:36 +0000

Why Military Superiority Is Losing Its Ability to Produce Political Settlements

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER No. 002
War, Peace & International Security

INTRODUCTION

For much of modern strategic thought, war was understood as an instrument for producing a political result. Armies fought to destroy an adversary’s military capacity, occupy territory, compel surrender or impose terms that could subsequently be translated into a new political settlement. Victory did not guarantee peace, but the relationship between battlefield success and political outcome appeared sufficiently strong to shape military doctrines, alliance systems and theories of deterrence. That relationship is becoming increasingly unreliable. States can achieve overwhelming tactical superiority and still fail to create a stable political order. Governments can lose territory without accepting political defeat. Armed organizations can survive the destruction of their conventional forces. Populations can continue conflicts after formal armies have collapsed. External powers can remove governments yet discover that they have destroyed the very institutions required to negotiate and implement the peace that was supposed to follow.

The central security problem of the contemporary era may therefore be changing. The question is no longer simply who can win a war? It is increasingly who can convert military advantage into an acceptable and durable political settlement? Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza and a wider range of prolonged conflicts differ radically in origins, actors, legality and scale. They should not be collapsed into a single historical analogy. Yet taken together they expose a recurring structural problem: the capacity to inflict military damage has developed faster than the international system’s capacity to transform the consequences of violence into legitimate and sustainable political arrangements. Military power remains decisive, but military victory and political victory are no longer synonymous.

THE DISAPPEARING ENDPOINT OF WAR

Traditional war possessed recognizable political endpoints. An army surrendered. A government accepted terms. Territory changed hands. A treaty was signed. A defeated political authority remained sufficiently intact to enforce the agreement upon its population and institutions. Even extraordinarily destructive wars could therefore end with identifiable transitions from combat to negotiation, occupation, reconstruction or a new balance of power.

Contemporary conflicts increasingly resist this sequence. Military defeat can fragment rather than terminate resistance. Destroying centralized command can produce multiple decentralized adversaries. Removing a government can eliminate the negotiating counterpart required for a settlement. Territorial control can change without resolving the political identity of the population living on that territory. Armed groups can move between conventional warfare, insurgency, terrorism, political participation and information operations. External patrons can sustain actors that would otherwise be unable to continue fighting. Digital communication allows political mobilization to survive territorial defeat, while diasporas can provide financial, organizational and narrative resources far beyond the battlefield.

The result is a strategic paradox. The stronger a military power becomes at destroying the physical capabilities of an adversary, the more tempting it becomes to define victory in measurable military terms: territory captured, command structures destroyed, weapons eliminated, leaders removed or enemy forces degraded. Yet none of these indicators necessarily answers the political question that caused the conflict. A military campaign can therefore succeed according to almost every operational metric while leaving the strategic problem unresolved.

MILITARY DEFEAT IS NOT POLITICAL DEFEAT

Political defeat is fundamentally psychological and institutional. It occurs when an actor concludes that continuing the struggle can no longer produce an outcome preferable to settlement. Destroying military capabilities can contribute to that conclusion, but it does not automatically produce it. An adversary may accept enormous losses if it believes time is on its side, external support will arrive, domestic politics in the opposing coalition will change, or continued resistance itself has political value.

This distinction becomes particularly important in asymmetric conflicts. The stronger actor often seeks a finite result. It wants security restored, a threat removed, a government changed, a territory controlled or an adversary deterred. The weaker actor may require only survival. If it remains politically organized after the stronger actor has exhausted its willingness to continue, survival itself can be presented as victory.

Time consequently becomes a strategic resource. A weaker actor may not need to defeat the stronger actor’s military. It may need to defeat its timetable.

This changes the meaning of endurance. Democratic governments face elections, changing public opinion and competition for fiscal resources. Coalitions can fracture. International crises elsewhere redirect attention. Economic costs accumulate. Military casualties change domestic calculations. An adversary able to survive these cycles can transform military inferiority into political leverage.

The strategic equation is therefore no longer simply force against force. It is increasingly force × time × political cohesion × legitimacy.

THE PROBLEM OF HUMILIATION

Classical theories of coercion often assume that increasing the cost imposed upon an adversary increases its willingness to compromise. Up to a point, this can be true. Beyond that point, however, punishment can produce the opposite effect. When defeat threatens not merely political interests but collective identity, regime survival, physical security or national dignity, the cost of surrender itself increases.

A settlement perceived as humiliation may therefore create the conditions for the next conflict.

History repeatedly demonstrates the danger of political orders constructed around the permanent degradation of the defeated. Yet contemporary political communication makes humiliation even more consequential. Images of destruction, prisoners, civilian suffering and triumphant rhetoric circulate globally within minutes. Political leaders increasingly negotiate not only with adversaries across a table but with domestic audiences observing every concession in real time. Compromise can consequently be framed as betrayal before negotiators have had an opportunity to explain its strategic value.

A viable settlement must therefore answer two different questions simultaneously: what must the adversary concede, and what must the adversary be able to tell its own society about why it stopped fighting?

This is not moral indulgence. It is strategic engineering. A peace agreement that cannot be politically explained by one side may be signed but will remain structurally unstable.

WAR TERMINATION SHOULD BEGIN BEFORE WAR

Most governments maintain detailed military plans for the opening phases of conflict. Considerably less institutional attention is often given to the political architecture required to terminate one. This imbalance is dangerous. Decisions taken during the first days of war can eliminate options that may later prove necessary for peace. Political leaders may publicly define maximal objectives that become impossible to abandon without appearing defeated. Communication channels may be destroyed. Potential intermediaries may be treated as hostile. Institutions necessary for postwar governance may be dismantled. Opposing populations may be rhetorically fused with opposing regimes, making later reconciliation far more difficult.

War termination should therefore not be treated as a final stage of military planning. It should be incorporated into strategic planning from the beginning.

Before entering a conflict, policymakers should be able to answer several questions. What political condition would constitute sufficient success? Which adversary institutions must survive in order to implement an agreement? Who could credibly negotiate on behalf of the opposing side? Which third parties could transmit messages if direct communication becomes politically impossible? What concessions could be offered without undermining the original security objective? What outcome could the opposing leadership present domestically without immediate political collapse? And, most importantly, what happens the day after the declared military objective is achieved?

If these questions have no plausible answers, the state may possess a war plan without possessing a strategy.

THE DANGER OF MAXIMAL OBJECTIVES

Modern conflicts frequently begin with limited objectives and expand as casualties, political rhetoric and expectations accumulate. A government seeking deterrence may begin demanding regime change. A territorial dispute may become a struggle over national identity. Punitive action may evolve into a demand for unconditional political transformation. Each escalation narrows the settlement space.

Maximal objectives possess an obvious political appeal. They demonstrate resolve and avoid accusations of weakness. Yet they can also extend wars by making negotiation irrational for the adversary. If defeat means political extinction, prosecution, permanent exclusion from power or destruction of the state itself, continued resistance becomes logical even when military prospects are poor.

This does not mean that regime change, prosecution or unconditional surrender can never be legitimate or necessary. Some political orders and crimes may leave few acceptable alternatives. The lesson is narrower but strategically important: every additional war aim changes the adversary’s calculation of the cost of surrender.

Political leaders should therefore distinguish between what is desirable, what is achievable and what is necessary for security. Failure to make this distinction can turn military advantage into strategic overextension.

PEACE REQUIRES AN INTERLOCUTOR

One of the most persistent mistakes in contemporary conflict is the assumption that refusing dialogue deprives an adversary of legitimacy. Sometimes it does. But legitimacy and communication are different questions. Governments communicate with actors they do not recognize, trust or consider legitimate because conflict itself creates practical requirements for communication.

Without communication there can be no reliable signaling of red lines, no clarification of intentions, no exchange of prisoners, no local ceasefires, no humanitarian arrangements, no management of escalation and ultimately no negotiated termination.

This creates another paradox: the actor a state most strongly wishes to destroy may eventually be the actor whose cooperation is required to stop the fighting.

Diplomatic channels should therefore be treated as strategic infrastructure. Closing an embassy, suspending formal relations or publicly refusing negotiations need not eliminate every communication mechanism. Backchannels, intelligence contacts, intermediaries, neutral governments, international organizations and Track II networks can preserve minimal connectivity between adversaries.

The existence of a channel is not a concession. It is an instrument.

THE RETURN OF THE MEDIATOR

As direct diplomacy becomes politically more difficult, mediation becomes more important. Yet contemporary mediation often begins too late, after the parties have already invested enormous political capital in maximal positions. Effective mediation should begin earlier and operate continuously, including during periods when neither side is prepared for formal negotiations.

The mediator’s task is not simply to bring leaders into the same room. It is to map the settlement space that the parties themselves may be politically unable to discuss publicly. What outcomes are genuinely unacceptable? Which declared red lines are negotiable? Which concessions require reciprocity? What sequence could allow both sides to move without appearing to capitulate? What guarantees would make implementation credible? Which issues can be postponed rather than solved immediately?

This requires a different conception of diplomatic success. A mediator may work for months without producing a summit, communiqué or ceasefire. Yet preserving communication, identifying possible trade-offs and preventing misperception can itself be strategically valuable.

International security therefore requires stronger permanent mediation capacity rather than improvised diplomacy assembled only after crises become catastrophic.

FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR TERMINATING CONTEMPORARY WARS

◆◆ Military objectives should always be connected to explicit political objectives. Destroying an adversary’s capabilities is not itself a political settlement. Governments should define the political condition military action is intended to produce and continuously test whether operations are moving toward or away from that condition.

◆◆ A settlement space should be preserved even during intense conflict. Political rhetoric should avoid unnecessarily eliminating options that may later become essential. Communication channels should remain available even when formal diplomacy has collapsed.

◆◆ The adversary must retain some pathway from resistance to settlement. If every possible outcome is perceived as existential defeat, continued fighting becomes rational. Coercive strategies should therefore consider not only how to increase the cost of resistance but how to make termination politically possible.

◆◆ Postwar political architecture must be planned before decisive military action. Governments should identify institutions, interlocutors and administrative capacities that will be necessary after combat ends. Destroying them without replacement can convert military victory into political disorder.

◆◆ War termination should become a permanent diplomatic specialization. Foreign ministries, international organizations and security institutions should develop professional expertise specifically in ceasefire design, sequencing, guarantees, transitional arrangements, mediation and post-conflict political settlements.

FROM DETERRENCE TO SETTLEMENT CAPACITY

The international security system invests enormous intellectual and financial resources in deterrence. Governments study how to prevent adversaries from attacking by convincing them that the costs will exceed the benefits. Yet considerably less attention is devoted to what might be called settlement capacity: the ability to create an acceptable political exit once deterrence has failed.

Settlement capacity includes diplomatic channels, trusted intermediaries, knowledge of the adversary’s political system, institutional memory, regional expertise, ceasefire mechanisms, verification capabilities, economic incentives, reconstruction instruments and the ability to provide credible guarantees.

These capacities cannot be improvised in the final week of a war.

They must exist beforehand.

A state possessing advanced weapons but weak settlement capacity may be extraordinarily capable of changing battlefield conditions while remaining surprisingly incapable of converting those changes into durable political outcomes.

That imbalance is becoming one of the central vulnerabilities of modern power.

CONCLUSION

Military power has not become irrelevant. The ability to defend territory, deter aggression and impose costs remains fundamental to international security. There are conflicts in which force cannot be avoided and adversaries that cannot be persuaded by diplomacy alone. But military superiority should not be confused with strategic success.

The decisive question is what political reality exists when the weapons eventually fall silent.

A destroyed army can be rebuilt. An occupied territory can remain politically contested. A removed government can be replaced by disorder. A defeated movement can become an insurgency. A humiliated society can transfer unresolved conflict to the next generation. Conversely, an imperfect settlement may sometimes produce greater long-term security than an apparently complete military victory that leaves no viable political order behind it.

The strategic challenge of the twenty-first century is therefore not simply to improve the ability to win wars. States already possess extraordinary capabilities for doing that.

They must improve their ability to end them.

The international system has developed sophisticated institutions for deterrence, alliance management, military planning and the conduct of war. It now requires comparable intellectual and institutional investment in war termination.

Victory should no longer be measured only by what an adversary loses.

It should ultimately be measured by what political order becomes possible after the fighting stops.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
The Living Journal of International Affairs

Backgrounder No. 002 | War, Peace & International Security

This paper is intended to initiate professional discussion. Its propositions are open to evidence, critique and revision through the Diplomatic Studies working-group process.

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WHO OWNS THE PAST?

Alex Schlesinger — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 20:27:21 +0000

Shared Heritage as an Instrument of Diplomacy Rather Than Geopolitical Competition

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES — BACKGROUNDER No. 001
History, Civilizations & Shared Heritage

INTRODUCTION

The past has become an increasingly active field of international competition. States seek recognition for historical figures, archaeological sites, religious traditions, languages, inventions and cultural practices as elements of national heritage. Museums face demands for restitution. Governments dispute the origins of cultural symbols. Archaeological discoveries become matters of national prestige. Historical narratives are incorporated into territorial claims, foreign-policy arguments and competing concepts of civilizational identity. None of this is inherently illegitimate. Communities have a right to preserve their memory, protect their heritage and maintain continuity with previous generations. The problem begins when historical association is transformed into exclusive historical ownership.

Human civilization did not develop within the political borders that exist today. Trade routes crossed continents, empires incorporated multiple peoples, religions migrated between languages and cultures, technologies travelled, populations mixed, stories were borrowed and retold, and political institutions were copied and transformed. Even apparently distinctive national traditions frequently contain layers inherited from much older systems of cultural exchange. Modern states therefore face a paradox: they may be legitimate custodians of particular historical traditions without necessarily being their exclusive historical owners. The distinction matters because disputes about the past increasingly influence relations in the present. Shared heritage should therefore be understood not as another territory to be divided, but as a potential infrastructure of international cooperation.

THE NEW COMPETITION FOR THE PAST

Geopolitical competition is usually understood as competition for territory, resources, technology, markets and military power. Yet another field of competition has become increasingly important: historical legitimacy. Control over historical narratives can provide states and political movements with symbolic authority. A claim to antiquity can reinforce territorial claims. Association with an ancient civilization can strengthen national identity. Religious heritage can establish symbolic continuity between contemporary political communities and sacred history. This creates powerful incentives to nationalize the past.

The resulting argument often follows a deceptively simple formula: it existed here, therefore it belongs to us, therefore we are its historical successors. History rarely follows such clean lines. The same city may have belonged to several civilizations. The same religious tradition may have passed through several languages and societies. The same technological practice may have emerged through exchanges among distant populations. The same epic narrative may contain motifs much older than the civilization that eventually recorded it. The further back we travel historically, the less useful modern political borders become. Attempts to impose contemporary national categories upon ancient history therefore risk creating an illusion of continuity where the historical reality was far more complex.

Cultural heritage is frequently described as something that naturally brings people together. It can, but it can also do precisely the opposite. Monuments become territorial markers. Archaeology is mobilized to validate political claims. Museums become arenas of diplomatic conflict. Historical anniversaries reopen unresolved disputes. Competing narratives of victimhood reproduce conflicts among generations that never experienced the original events. In extreme cases, destroying another community’s heritage becomes a way of denying that community’s historical legitimacy. Heritage policy should therefore no longer be regarded as a marginal cultural matter. It increasingly belongs to diplomacy, peacebuilding and international security.

SHARED DOES NOT MEAN OWNERLESS

One possible response is to declare all important heritage simply “the heritage of humanity.” The proposition is attractive but insufficient. Universalizing heritage can itself erase legitimate historical relationships. The Parthenon forms part of humanity’s heritage, but it is also specifically Greek. Angkor belongs to world civilization, but it cannot be separated from Cambodia. Indigenous traditions may possess universal significance while remaining inseparable from the communities that preserved them. Shared heritage therefore does not mean ownerless heritage, nor does it require cultures to abandon their distinctive identities.

A more useful principle is that heritage can possess several layers of belonging simultaneously. A historical object, tradition, person or site may belong to a local community, a religious or linguistic tradition, a nation, several nations connected through history, a wider civilization and, ultimately, humanity. These identities need not contradict one another. Conflict begins when one layer attempts to invalidate all the others.

This distinction allows us to move beyond the false choice between national ownership and abstract universalism. A society does not lose its relationship with its past simply because another society also has a legitimate relationship with the same historical phenomenon. Recognition does not have to operate as a zero-sum game. Indeed, the attempt to establish exclusive ownership over historical phenomena that emerged through centuries of migration, exchange and cultural borrowing often tells us more about contemporary politics than about the historical processes themselves.

FROM OWNERSHIP TO STEWARDSHIP

The vocabulary of heritage should consequently expand. International discussions remain dominated by concepts such as ownership, possession, origin and restitution. These are necessary legal categories, but another concept should stand beside them: stewardship. Ownership asks who something belongs to. Stewardship asks who has responsibility for preserving it, studying it, interpreting it and transmitting it to future generations. The second question frequently creates possibilities for cooperation that the first cannot provide.

Two states disputing the historical ownership of a tradition may nevertheless document it jointly. Museums disputing an artefact may conduct shared provenance research. Countries connected by an ancient trade route can construct a common digital archive. Communities with conflicting interpretations of the same historical event can preserve parallel narratives rather than forcing an artificial consensus. The objective should not always be to produce one agreed history. In many cases that is neither possible nor desirable. The objective should be to create an institutional framework within which different historical memories can coexist without becoming instruments of contemporary conflict.

This requires several principles. Historical connection should be distinguished from exclusive ownership. Multiple layers of belonging should be recognized rather than artificially reduced to a single national attribution. Archaeological, linguistic, genetic, archival and historical evidence should be clearly separated from later political narratives constructed around that evidence. Where exclusive ownership cannot resolve a dispute, shared stewardship should be considered through joint archives, common research programmes, travelling collections, digital repatriation and multinational heritage projects. Finally, heritage disputes should increasingly be treated as a field of preventive diplomacy because apparently symbolic historical controversies can become early indicators of much deeper identity, territorial and political conflicts.

A NEW ROLE FOR DIPLOMACY

Traditional diplomacy usually enters heritage disputes late. A museum receives a restitution claim. A monument becomes politically contested. An archaeological site is damaged during conflict. A government protests another country’s historical interpretation. Diplomacy then attempts to manage the consequences. The sequence should be reversed. Shared heritage can itself become a diplomatic instrument.

Countries with difficult political relationships may still cooperate around archaeology, archives, conservation, language, museums and historical research. Such cooperation can create relationships among historians, universities, museums, municipalities, religious communities and professional associations before governments are capable of resolving larger political disputes. Heritage diplomacy can therefore operate below the threshold of formal political agreement. It provides a comparatively low-risk environment in which societies can acknowledge connections without first resolving every political disagreement between them.

This changes the meaning of heritage diplomacy. Heritage is not merely something diplomacy should protect after conflict has begun. It can become an instrument through which relationships are built before conflict occurs. A shared archaeological mission, jointly curated exhibition, common historical archive or multinational research programme may appear insignificant compared with formal negotiations between governments. Yet such projects create networks of trust, professional familiarity and shared responsibility that conventional diplomacy often struggles to produce.

THE DIGITAL OPPORTUNITY

Digital technologies make a further step possible. For most of history, knowledge was organized according to institutions that possessed physical objects: archives, museums, libraries and universities. Digital environments do not require the same architecture. A single historical object can simultaneously be connected to several countries, civilizations, languages, communities, archaeological sites, academic interpretations and competing historical narratives. Instead of forcing the user to choose one category, a digital knowledge system can preserve the relationships among all of them.

This creates the possibility of moving from national collections toward connected histories. A shared-heritage environment could connect objects, places, people, historical events, archival documents, archaeological evidence, oral traditions, academic interpretations, communities and contemporary disputes. It would not need to become another universal encyclopedia presenting one supposedly authoritative account of the past. It could instead become a map of relationships among different interpretations of human history, clearly distinguishing documented evidence from hypothesis, scholarly disagreement and contemporary political narrative.

Such an architecture is particularly important because the digital organization of knowledge is never neutral. If every historical phenomenon must be assigned to one country, one culture or one civilization, the database itself reproduces the logic of exclusive ownership. If the same phenomenon can belong simultaneously to multiple historical relationships, digital infrastructure can represent the complexity that conventional political categories often conceal.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE

Governments, universities, museums and international institutions should begin experimenting with practical mechanisms of shared heritage. Multinational research groups should be created for contested historical subjects, not as commissions designed to manufacture political consensus but as professional environments capable of documenting areas of agreement, disagreement and different levels of evidence. Important historical objects, traditions and phenomena could receive Shared Heritage Passports, digital records identifying all communities, territories and civilizations with documented relationships to them. Museums and archives could develop interoperable provenance databases capable of reconstructing the historical movement of important objects across institutional and national boundaries.

Heritage-dialogue mechanisms should also be established before disputes become political crises. Universities, museums and professional associations can provide neutral environments for conversations governments may find politically difficult. Competing interpretations should remain visible rather than being artificially reconciled. A mature knowledge system should distinguish established evidence, plausible interpretation, disputed interpretation and political narrative. Shared archaeological missions, archives, exhibitions and research programmes should also be treated as potential confidence-building measures between societies with difficult political relations.

The purpose of such mechanisms is not to depoliticize history. History will always have political consequences. The objective is instead to make the relationship between evidence, interpretation, identity and political use more transparent. A society should be able to say, “this is part of our history,” without requiring another society to accept the proposition that it therefore cannot also be part of theirs.

CONCLUSION

Human beings inherited the past long before they divided the contemporary world into its present states. This does not make nations irrelevant. It makes history larger than nations. The task is therefore not to erase national heritage or dissolve cultural identities into an abstract universal culture. It is to recognize a more complex reality: what is ours can also be shared.

A civilization becomes no less important when we discover that it borrowed from another civilization. A national tradition becomes no less meaningful when its deeper origins cross modern borders. A religious story does not lose its significance because related narratives existed elsewhere. Quite the opposite. Connected histories reveal the extraordinary process through which human civilization was actually constructed: through migration, exchange, borrowing, adaptation, conflict, memory and continuous reinterpretation.

The international system has spent centuries developing mechanisms for dividing territory. It now needs better mechanisms for sharing memory. The question “Who owns the past?” may therefore have no single answer. A better question is: who is prepared to take responsibility for preserving it, understanding it and allowing others to recognize themselves within it?

That question changes the nature of the problem. Heritage ceases to be merely another object of geopolitical competition and can become an infrastructure of cooperation.

DIPLOMATIC STUDIES
The Living Journal of International Affairs

Backgrounder No. 001 | History, Civilizations & Shared Heritage

This paper is intended to initiate professional discussion. Its propositions are open to evidence, critique and revision through the Diplomatic Studies working-group process.

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