When Escalation Becomes Norm: Why Our Moment Requires Metamorphosis

IN FOCUS, 9 Mar 2026

Derya Yüksek - TRANSCEND Media Service

4 Mar 2026 – When the use of force becomes normalized as routine policy rather than exceptional measure, the challenge is no longer confined to addressing crises. It concerns the structure of the order producing them. The recent U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, followed by Iranian retaliation, is not simply another confrontation in a volatile region. It exemplifies an expanding pattern.

Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, and other zones of armed conflict increasingly share structural features: the normalization of unilateral military aggression by major powers; the erosion and deliberate circumvention of international law; the diminishing capacity of multilateral institutions to constrain violence; and the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into surveillance, targeting, and autonomous lethal decision-making. What connects these episodes is not merely geography or alliance politics, but a systemic drift in how power, security, and legitimacy operate globally.

The language accompanying recent escalations makes this drift legible. In announcing strikes on Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump declared they would continue “as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD.” The coupling of sustained bombardment with the language of peace is not rhetorical excess—it encapsulates a recurring logic in contemporary geopolitics: escalation as stabilization. Violence rendered indistinguishable from the peace it claims to produce.

Peace scholarship has long urged us to look beyond visible eruptions of violence toward the deeper patterns that sustain them. The present escalation is not an aberration from an otherwise functioning order. It is the order, expressing itself. In peace studies terms, resolution and transformation presume a system capable of renewal—one in which institutions and norms can be reconfigured within an existing architecture. However, the current architecture of global politics is itself now the epicenter—shifting toward permanent securitization, algorithmic warfare, selective legality, economic dependence on militarization, and the persistent conflation of coercion and violence with peace, while multilateralism is reduced to symbolic consultation, invoked or bypassed at convenience.

Deep reforms can improve a system under strain. But when the system’s own organizing principles are the source of the crisis, what is required is something more fundamental: metamorphosis—a radical, deliberate, purposive reorientation to reconsider and redefine the principles and practices upon which the system rests.

Transitional Deep Reforms: Preparing the Ground

Metamorphosis cannot occur in a vacuum. Systems under acute strain require improvement before reconstitution becomes possible. Deep reforms are not the destination, but they are the necessary transition—preventing further degeneration while creating conditions for structural reorientation.

Four domains demand urgent action.

First, international legal accountability: the selective invocation and deliberate circumvention of international law by major powers erodes not only norms but the very trust on which global governance depends. Strengthening universal jurisdiction, expanding the independence of investigative bodies, and establishing binding transparency requirements for AI-powered military systems are concrete, achievable steps that should be made a priority—if political will exists to pursue them. That political will is not absent: from the UN Secretary-General’s explicit invocation of the UN Charter to condemnations by states across different geopolitical blocs, voices naming unilateral military force as illegal are louder and more persistent.

Second, the political economy of militarization: as long as defense expenditures are let to function as engines of economic growth and geopolitical leverage, escalation remains structurally incentivized. Incremental reallocation of military budgets toward climate resilience, public health, and education would begin to shift priorities without triggering state destabilization. This does not dismantle militarization; but interrupts its automatic expansion.

Third, AI governance in warfare: the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into targeting and predictive security systems demands governance frameworks commensurate with its risks. Binding constraints on fully autonomous lethal systems, meaningful civilian oversight, and international coalitions to institutionalize restraint are already under discussion — and civil society networks are actively pressing for them. The window to act before technological normalization outpaces ethical judgment remains open, if narrowing.

Fourth, multilateral institutional reform: veto restraint initiatives, strengthened General Assembly oversight, and coordinated regional de-escalation frameworks can begin to address the Security Council’s structural paralysis. These measures operate within the current architecture while challenging its most destabilizing asymmetries. These are not abstract proposals: veto restraint has been formally debated within the UN system, and the General Assembly’s use of the Uniting for Peace resolution demonstrates that existing mechanisms can be activated when political will converges.

Overall, these reforms are substantial. They recalibrate incentives, reinforce norms, and slow the momentum of escalation. But they do not, by themselves, redefine the organizing logic of global order. That is the work of metamorphosis.

Metamorphic Pathways: Reconstituting the System

Metamorphosis means reconstituting the principles and practices upon which global order currently rests. If the epicenter of recurring conflict lies in the normalization of deterrence, unilateral authority, algorithmic militarization, and economic dependence on arms production, change must occur at that level—not around it.

The first metamorphic shift concerns security itself. The dominant doctrine of deterrence presumes stability through threat and accumulation. A metamorphic reorientation would replace deterrence as the primary organizing principle with cooperative security frameworks grounded in shared vulnerability and mutual interdependence—measuring stability not through military superiority, but through resilience, institutionalized restraint, and genuine de-escalation capacity. This is not pacifism. It is a paradigm shift in what security is for.

Second, sovereignty must be reconsidered in relation to accountability. As long as the most powerful states retain structural immunity—through veto privileges or selective enforcement of law—legitimacy remains a function of power, not principle. Metamorphosis requires reconfiguring multilateral governance so that accountability mechanisms cannot be overridden by great-power prerogative. The principle that no state stands above legal scrutiny must move from aspiration to binding practice.

Third, the economic infrastructure of militarization must be reoriented. Defense industries are deeply embedded in national economies and political influence networks. A metamorphic pathway involves coordinated international conversion strategies—long-term transitions that gradually decouple economic vitality from arms production. Peace would then cease to be economically disadvantageous.

Fourth, the technological trajectory of warfare must be redefined. If algorithmic targeting and autonomous lethal systems become normalized components of global security infrastructure, violence risks becoming automated, permanent, and progressively abstracted from human consequence and moral accountability. A metamorphic shift would treat autonomous lethal decision-making as categorically incompatible with humanitarian principles—not merely requiring regulation, but prohibition.

Fifth, legitimacy itself requires reconstitution. When multilateral institutions are routinely bypassed and civic voices structurally marginalized, global governance hollows out. Metamorphosis would institutionalize civic participation at the supranational level—through institutionalized global assemblies, recurring public hearings, transnational forums and other durable channels for peoples, not only states, to articulate and evaluate peace frameworks. Civic multilateralism does not replace states nor it merely supplements state diplomacy; it rebalances the sources of normative authority in a way that is not reducible to geopolitical interest. The proposal for a Civic Board of Peace can be understood as a founding gesture precisely in this direction.

These pathways are not immediate revolutions. They describe a long-term reorientation. But they reflect the scale of change proportionate to the systemic drift underway. To insist on reconstituting principles and practices—of security, accountability, economic reorientation, technological restraint, and civic legitimacy—is not to abandon realism. It is to redefine realism in light of present conditions.

Conclusion: Responsibility at the Epicenter

If episodes of violent conflict continue to command our attention while the epicenter remains intact, escalation will appear cyclical, inevitable, even natural. Gaza followed by Iran; Iran by another confrontation; each crisis analyzed in isolation while the structural drivers deepen.

Metamorphosis, in this sense, is not utopian rupture. It is responsibility proportionate to structural change. When war becomes infrastructural, when legitimacy becomes optional for the powerful, and when technological acceleration distances decision-making from human consequence, incremental adjustment risks normalizing the unacceptable. Metamorphosis names the task of rethinking what security protects, what sovereignty permits, what technology enables, and who is authorized to define peace and how. It is oriented toward the protection of human and ecological co-existence as the primary obligation of any legitimate global order, and re-establishing the conditions for it.

Whether this moment becomes another episode or a turning point depends on our willingness to confront its epicenter—and to act accordingly.

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Dr. Derya Yüksek is a communication and media studies scholar whose work focuses on alternative media, participatory democracy, and conflict transformation. Her research bridges theory and practice to examine how participatory processes reconfigure political imagination and civic agency in contexts marked by division and protracted conflict. Alongside her academic career, she has specialized in project management and worked as a manager and consultant on international cooperation initiatives in the field of culture, arts, and education across the Euro-Mediterranean and beyond.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 9 Mar 2026.

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