This is not an analytical commentary on the current state of geopolitics in the world. I doubt whether any meaningful analysis is even possible in these times. It is too early or too late for that. What is the point of it all? This essay is precisely about the sentiment quietly writhing within us as witnesses: that nothing coheres any longer. That meaning has collapsed.
With the news of the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the massive US and Israeli air strikes on Iran, we witness the world taken for a ride by the political elites leading nations, embodying forces of imperialism and capitalism. It is impossible to decouple the killing from the religious import this holds for Muslims across the world, compounded by the timing of it during the holy month of Ramadan. Language fails.
Ever since Israel’s anarchic forays into Gaza, we are living through a world where the international rules-based order seems to be invoked selectively, as the murder of civilians, including children, is broadcast in real time. Examples abound in the recent past.
There was a time when political elites at least employed the rhetoric of international law, but that facade now rests in the wastebasket of history. Atrocities are no longer only reframed or denied in full public view but are justified in the name of pre-emptive action. Add to this the wonder that is social media, compressing horror and entertainment in the same scrolling frame. The result is an affective condition where a blend of outrage and helplessness gives way to political exhaustion. Nothing seems to add up, and we are left searching for meaning. The normative orders and frameworks that once aided or configured our judgement no longer seem to operate.
This collapse of meaning has three dimensions: 1) the collapse of normativity; 2) the collapse of political accountability; and 3) the collapse of symbolic coherence.
By the collapse of normativity, I have in mind the liberal institutions that once promised to uphold the rules-based international order. The uneven application of that order renders it less law and more an instrument of violence. Take the case of Israel’s unlawful military campaign in Gaza in the last two years. Israel has destroyed civilian infrastructure, including bombing schools; it has recurrently violated ceasefire agreements; and it has underplayed the warnings of humanitarian catastrophe issued by the United Nations. The right to self-defence and the language of international humanitarian law have been marshalled to justify Israel’s atrocities. This resembles the pattern of justifications under R2P (responsibility to protect) by NATO in Libya, minus the legality – now a familiar script framing intervention as a moral necessity.
For a generation of witnesses, cynicism and irony has replaced critique. Returning to a question once posed by Talal Asad: how is state violence, even when it leads to mass civilian death, easily absorbed into the language of legality and security? In an era when state violence is both hyper-visible and publicly justified, the categories that once structured our judgment – lawful and unlawful, tragic and barbaric – fail to align with the scale of destruction we witness.
Political accountability is collapsing; perpetrators of state violence walk scot-free. The most that the reparative and corrective systems in place do is release statements of condemnation or debate within the walls of parliaments. Politics begins to resemble theatre where condemnations are issued, debates are staged, but meaningful consequences rarely follow. The Epstein files demonstrate how power bends the rules and the elite are insulated from the consequences of their actions, and Epstein is just the tip of the iceberg.
The silence of the Arab nations is deafening in the face of the strikes on Iran, a product of their entanglement in the neoliberal economy. Those directing state violence in Yemen and Gaza do not worry about the consequences. Western-backed monarchies across the Gulf are often celebrated as “pillars of stability” as Tariq Ali reminds us, even as they flagrantly violate the same human-rights framework that is invoked to attack the so-called rogue states.
The impunity allowed the perpetrators paves the way for a layered decline of trust in political institutions, diplomacy, and incremental reforms. The impunity is not accidental. It is intrinsic to the design of the geopolitical architecture of power. When such structures repeatedly shield regimes and strategic allies from consequences, the language of accountability appears hollow. The consequences are not confined to diplomatic discourse; they violently seep into the symbolic texture of everyday life. Take the example of time spent on social media, characterised by a deluge of real-time(mis)information.
We as witnesses are constantly exposed to violence in the same frame as entertainment, which numbs our senses to the political realities of the day. We move from images of starving children to pictures of bombing to travel and food reels in a matter of seconds, punctuated by war memes, dampening the effect of violence on our brains. What we are looking at is not merely numbers but lives destroyed, in full flesh and blood, yet we manage to slip into humour the next moment. For a privileged population with time to kill on social media, the collapse of symbolic coherence is marked by distortions of space and time.
The masses in Iran are trapped between internal repression of varying degrees and foreign intervention which violates the sovereignty of their nation. What is the way out? Is there a way out? Foreign interventions cannot claim moral high ground while producing destruction. The people of Iran know what follows in the aftermath of such interventions: a political vacuum, civil wars, networks of human trafficking, and state failure. Remember Iraq. What does it mean to speak of resistance in such circumstances?
We can condemn foreign intervention while also standing for a people’s right to self-determination in the face of an oppressive state. The inability to politically chart a map that can securely hold both these commitments simultaneously not only result in global indifference to the foreign aggression but also fosters a sense of helplessness among those living through the repression.
As Tariq Ali notes, any meaningful analysis of the Arab world cannot ignore the role of the United States, its guardianship of the region’s oil economy and its strategic alignment with Israel. These factors have deliberately structured not only the limits of resistance within the Gulf countries but also the political transformation in West Asia. Meaning collapses yet again, almost to the point of inducing political paralysis, paving way for moral disorientation.
For those witnessing the televised violence and mass destruction, the collapse of meaning renders nihilism seductive. Can the collapse of meaning be resisted? Perhaps, political meaning might not reside in global institutions but in webs of local solidarities, in smaller acts that invite people to think for themselves, in building a robust civil society, in archival documentation, and in art. Works like The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and testimonies collected by B’Tselem come to mind. Even if institutions fail to act, meaning might persist where individual people choose to act.
