The “12 Day War” between Israel and Iran is the peak of a five-decade long conflict between a military-centric hierarchy of the Israeli state and the dispersed mosaic defence infrastructure of the Islamic Republic as a network state. Israel has been scoring several pyrrhic military wins against Iran’s network of networks in the region over the last year. Yet, while Israel’s degradation strategy bought the Jewish state breathing space, Iran’s network both within and across the region remains intact.
Iran is not a state in the traditional sense, vulnerable to top-down regime change or decapitation. It is a mosaic network state – an adaptive, self-organizing, and ideologically resilient structure that has proven to be able to absorb external shocks without collapsing. Israel’s campaign, its most direct and expansive confrontation with Iran to date,
demonstrated the limits of conventional state-on-state warfare against a network state. Degrading the Islamic Republic’s broader regional network, consisting itself of networked non-state actors, will not lead to swift victories but is a long-drawn process of degradation that would require the mobilization of a counter-network.
Iran has long moved beyond the rigid structures of bureaucratic hierarchy. Its governance and regional influence operate through what network theorists call an “all-channel heterarchy”—a decentralized but interconnected system of nodes. Domestically this network revolves around the Supreme Leader who embodies the ideological and institutional anchor of a decentralized network of different parallel institutions of governance and statecraft.
The Islamic Republic can therefore be defined as a network state Iran because it generates power not solely through traditional military or bureaucratic hierarchies, but through a dispersed web of surrogate forces, competing authority centres, networks of companies and financial flows that operate across the boundaries of traditional state sovereignty and territoriality.
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