Paola Rivetti

Contemporary warfare increasingly reflects an international environment in which military force is deployed unilaterally and beyond established legal frameworks. In this context, war emerges as a central instrument for managing contested sovereignties and “surplus populations” through two distinct but overlapping modalities: annihilatory warfare, aimed at erasing the conditions for human presence, and asymmetrical confrontation, in which overwhelming force encounters adaptive strategies of resistance. Iran constitutes a critical case within this evolving landscape. Decades of sanctions, isolation, and geopolitical pressure have contributed to the development of asymmetrical and unconventional warfare capabilities that complicate, though do not eliminate, structural power imbalances. These dynamics resonate with earlier post-Cold War patterns of unilateralism and the instrumentalization of international law, yet also point to an important transformation: the declining need for legal or moral justification by dominant powers. Taken together, these developments suggest the emergence of a post-unipolar condition, in which the coherence of post-Cold War unipolarity has eroded without being replaced by a stable alternative order. Within this framework, the “Iran war” may be understood as an early manifestation of this phase, marked by fragmented authority, weakened normative constraints, and increasingly unrestrained uses of force.