Session addresses transition to global militarization, “pre-war” preparedness, and the fraying nuclear order
A photo from the panel on crisis preparedness in a pre-war world at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs conference on Sunday, May 10. Seated left to right: researcher Dr Tahir Mahmood Azad, former ambassador Mustafa Kamal Kazi and historian Victoria Schofield. PHOTO: LA TRIBUNE EXPRESS
Experts warned on the second day of an international conference titled “Living on the Threshold of Global Crises” that the world was no longer just preparing for future conflict but was already structurally anchored in a “pre-war” international order, amid the conflict between the United States and Iran.
Organized by the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA), Sunday’s session looked at the transition to global militarization and “pre-war” preparedness, the crumbling of the nuclear order and the “poison” of information warfare.
The morning session, chaired by former Ambassador to Russia, the Netherlands, Indonesia and Iraq Mustafa Kamal Kazi, focused on “preparing for crises in a pre-war world.” Dr Tahir Mahmood Azad, Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading, spoke about armament and defense transformation in the Global South.
He said the traditional lens of “militarization” – defined by quantitative expansion and large budgets – did not capture today’s qualitative transformation; it was captured more precisely through “militarization.”
“We are no longer seeing just militarization…we are seeing systematic militarization in a pre-war international order,” he said, adding that global military spending had reached $2.9 trillion, representing 2.5 percent of global GDP, while the distinction between peacetime and wartime was “functionally erased.”
Azad identified China as a “challenge to the entire Western-dominated arms export architecture,” offering a “GPS-agnostic arms ecosystem” to the Global South without any political strings attached.
“The pre-war world is not coming. We are already there.”
Dr James Nixey, former director of Chatham House Russia and an independent consultant whose work focuses on Russia, addressed the usefulness of “strategic ambiguity” in foreign and security policy, warning that while it could leave an adversary in uncertainty, it was often mistaken for “paralysis or worse, cowardice”.
Criticizing Western policy in Ukraine, he said that “Russia plays the game of strategic ambiguity relatively well,” while the West has been too clear about what it would not do. “This so-called strategic ambiguity…this paralysis…is indeed covered in a lot of blood,” Nixey said.
Historian and international affairs commentator Victoria Schofield provided an overview of the conflict zones, particularly occupied Kashmir, where she noted that “the prospects for peace were better” in the 1990s than they were today. After 30 years of documenting conflict, she observed that “wars are easier to start than to end.”
She concluded with a plea for humanity, quoting the Persian poet Saadi in his poem Bani Adam: “If you have no sympathy for human pain, you cannot remember the name human.”
Deterrence in the era of “invisible” threats
The second panel, chaired by Dr Rukhsana A Siddiqui, a PhD in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania, explored “nuclear order under tension”.
Physicist Abdul Hameed Nayyar warned that emerging technologies such as quantum sensing were “undoing some of the work” of modern stealth platforms by making them visible. “Quantum sensing threatens to upend modern warfare by making the invisible visible,” Nayyar explained, adding that even submarines on the ocean floor could now be detected via “magnetic field shifts.”
He detailed nuclear treaties over the years, explaining how the expiration of many nuclear treaties led to “instability of the nuclear order.”
“The withdrawal of ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty and collapse of the INF [Intermediate-range Nuclear Force] These are two fundamental problems which gave the signal of the instability of this nuclear order. Then the New START treaty… expired earlier this year in January, and no work has been done since then to revive it. And that’s a problem,” he said.
Johnmark Ochieng, a Kenyan communications specialist at the Research Institute for Innovation and Sustainability, said deterrence was no longer just a matter of military capability but also of perception. He warned that “nuclear language has entered everyday political discourse” through social media, which “blurred the line between rhetorical posturing and actual engagement.”
Ochieng said the “normalization of nuclear rhetoric” has caused it to lose its exceptional status, making the unthinkable routine.
Dr Ahmed Ijaz Malik, associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations at Quaid-i-Azam University, criticized the foundations of arms control, calling existing frameworks “epistemologically deficient”.
He said the goal of arms control frameworks was to prevent global nuclear conflict, but the conclusion that nuclear weapons were “simply weapons of deterrence, crisis causation and strategic coercion” was far-fetched.
Disinformation, control and narrative warfare
The final session, “Information Wars and Narrative Control,” chaired by human rights activist and journalist Zohra Yusuf, addressed the “information tsunami.”
Journalist, columnist and co-host of private television program Zara Hat Kay, Zarrar Khuhro compared modern social media to ancient Roman times, when Julius Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian inscribed insults defaming Mark Antony on coins.
“What has changed over the intervening centuries, millennia? It’s not the nature of propaganda; it’s the nature of the technology that spreads that propaganda.”
He said one of the reasons misinformation spread quickly was a person’s desire to believe something that fit their worldview, “and when we want to believe, then we are willing to believe anything, and that’s why it spreads.”
One of the reasons people spread misinformation was what he described as a “financial motive,” referring to the recent story of an AI-generated right-wing viral influencer named Emily Hart, where a young man had created this avatar simply as a way to “pledge on a farm” in order to pay for college.
He also talked about state actors who push disinformation and “quasi-state actors,” such as people working for political movements, who push disinformation to serve certain agendas. He ended by warning that the truth was losing the race: “The moment the truth got out of bed…the lies burned the whole city.”
Dr. Mabel Lu Miao, co-founder and secretary-general of the Center for China and Globalization, spoke by video from Beijing, saying the Global South was “rewriting the history” of multilateralism. She said the old Western-led narrative had collapsed, failing to resolve conflicts or nuclear tensions.
“We are no longer demanding a seat at the table…we are demanding that the table be rebuilt,” she said, highlighting the expansion of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as new models of “diverse and inclusive multilateral cooperation.”
Journalist and co-founder of Safe Journalism, a platform seeking to unite media professionals and civil society in efforts to bring justice to journalists in Pakistan, Mehmal Sarfraz, highlighted the “information siege” surrounding Palestine, declaring that “the new normal is disinformation.”
“Tools are now being used around the world to disenfranchise media and civil society due to the rapid evolution of technology and the advent of AI,” she said, going on to detail the grave risks faced by journalists and pointing out that Israel was responsible for killing two-thirds of all media workers by 2025.
Regarding Pakistan, she described a campaign of “coordinated online harassment” against female journalists involving “sexualized abuse, doxing” and “threats of rape.”
“There are more and more AI photos, videos, rape threats and death threats, and attempts to hack our social media accounts like Twitter. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and even our emails have become the norm.
Sarfraz called for a united front: “We must overcome our differences… because if we don’t, our future is dark.”
Concluding the two-day event, Dr. Masuma Hasan, Honorary President of PIIA, and former Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed thanked all participants for their presence. Hasan emphasized at the end that the collapse of multilateralism had allowed “impunity” to take root globally.
“Spheres of influence are created with gunshots and peace is built through trade agreements.”
