Author
In moments of global crisis, narratives move faster than facts. As states exchange missiles and accusations, and headlines race to assign blame, a central question often goes unasked: how do we come to understand military violence? For most of it is not through direct experience, but through stories. And those stories are not neutral.
Narratives are not just matter-of-fact commentaries; they are structuring forces. As Philip Smith argues in “why war?”, narrative forms are essential to the very organization of political (and military) action. They make complex realities easy to understand by reducing them into cause, effect, villains, and heroes. In times of deep conflict, these narrative frames become even more rigid. Simplification is not merely incidental to violence; it is what makes violence possible.
Smith argues that war narratives often adopt an apocalyptic genre, casting large scale (usually military) violence as both unavoidable and cathartic. In the current escalation involving Iran, Israel and the United States this genre is no longer just theoretical abstractions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently stated that Israel’s airstrikes had eliminated “two immediate existential threats” referring to Iran’s nuclear facilities. This statement exemplifies the genre’s moral coding: Iran becomes more than an adversary – Iran becomes a threat to (Israeli) civilization and violence is framed as necessary. It is either them or us.
This juxtaposition is not confined to Israeli rhetoric. A month prior to the stacks United States President Trump referred to Iran as “the most destructive force in the Middle East” and warned them against an Iranian continuation of “Chaos and Terror”. The reference to Iran causing terror is most likely not a coincidence but ties in with what we usually refer to as ‘the war on terror’ a powerful reference that has deep emotional memories in western countries in general and the United States in particular. In such a tale, the space for proportionality collapses. Violence is not framed as one policy option among many, but as a moral imperative.
These narratives are not mere stylistic choices; they help shape public tolerance for violence, what leaders justify, and determine how the moral lines are drawn. Peace, in this frame, is not the result of genuine dialogue, but part of a narrative orchestration. Negotiation of peace by and large becomes a symbolic gesture that is not performed to resolve conflict, but to legitimize strategic power already in full and deadly motion.
We see narrative power operating in real time. Claims of ceasefire violations are made before independent evidence is available. Missile launches are reported and then denied. Harm to civilians is referred to selectively, if at all. (Try counting the (lack of) international articles concerning how the escalation affects Iranian civilians). Meanwhile, terms such as ‘retaliation’, ‘defense’ and ‘response’. These are terms which pre-shapes public understanding in positioning some forms of violence as legitimate and others as deviant. Who is perceived to have started the conflict can depend less on chronology and more on narrative framing.
The narrative structure of violence often mirrors apocalyptic myth more than reportage. A cycle of threat and safety. A cycle of peace shattered, and order restored. It is exactly this apocalyptic tale that makes continued violence appear not only reasonable but a necessity. Once a narrative becomes dominant it tends to absorb contradictions rather than fall apart: “we are defending ourselves” becomes the interpretive filter. New facts don’t necessarily disprove it instead they get reinterpreted to fit the filtered lens no matter how logically flawed they are.
This is not to say that all actors are the same, or that truth is unattainable (at least in theory). But truth in escalations like these is always mediated. As someone who studies political violence my focus should not only be on what happened, but how what happened is made meaningful. Which voices are heard loud and clear, which silences are sanctioned, who are demanded to speak when they would rather not, and which scripts are recycled?
The current escalation between Israel, the United States and Iran with its contested ceasefires and choreographed press conferences, offer a painful but important reminder: war is always narrated. In this gap between action and understanding lies the space where power does something of its most enduring work.