Thinking Globally about the Iran-Israel Twelve-Day War

Shabnam Holliday

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In the early hours of 13 June 2025, Iranians woke up to the Israeli Air Force targeting air defences, ballistic missile bases, and nuclear programme sites. As the war continued, it also disrupted the daily lives of millions of civilians and ‘resulted in at least 5,665 casualties, including 1,190 killed and 4,475 injured, both military and civilian’. (HRANA 2025, 4). This piece seeks to position this war in the context of the global turn in International Relations (IR). Amitav Acharya’s (2014) Global IR has gained momentum in debates regarding how to challenge Eurocentrism in IR. Pinar Bilgin and Karen Smith’s (2024) proposal builds on this and calls for us to ‘think globally about politics’. Drawing from such debates, I argue that an analysis of the Iran-Israel Twelve-Day War that is in the spirit of these two projects requires three approaches.

First, there needs to be a better understanding of those actors that are often constructed as the ‘other’ in both foreign policy and academia by establishing them at the centre of the analysis (Holliday 2020, 5). Second, there should be a multi-scalar analysis rooted in historical contexts (Powel 2020) that appreciates the interconnectivity between domestic and international politics both in the past and the present (Go and Lawson 2017). Third, we need to highlight the agency of those on the periphery of global politics (Bilgin 2021). Together, these approaches highlight complexity.

So, what does such an approach look like when reflecting on the Twelve-Day War? Iran was firmly positioned as the ‘other’. This was not only apparent in the very idea of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Operation Rising Lion, but also in the G7’s reaction. Their Joint Statement firmly favoured Israel: “We reiterate our commitment to peace and stability in the Middle East. In this context, we reaffirm that Israel has a right to defend itself. We reiterate our support for the security of Israel” (G7 2025). In such a situation, reconstructing the ‘other’ as the ‘self’ involves being Iran-centric as the starting point for analysis instead of simply being Israel-centric, or indeed US-centric.