August 2026
Soheila Najand, Sahar Karimi
Introduction
Contemporary Western imperialism cannot be understood merely as a direct continuation of the colonial imperialism of the late nineteenth century. The structure of the global economy, the nation states, communication technologies, international organisations, and the forms of exercising power have all been transformed over the course of more than a century. Nevertheless, the concentration of power, control over resources and strategic routes, preventing the emergence of geopolitical rivals, and creating legitimacy for intervention in other societies remain fundamental elements of the imperialist order.
The crucial difference of the current era should be sought in the multi-layered nature of the instruments for exercising power. Military power remains fundamentally important, but alongside it, economic sanctions, technological dominance, information warfare, psychological operations, narrative production, media framing, and influence over collective perception have become increasingly integral components of the exercise of power. In such circumstances, the boundary between war and peace also loses its former clarity. A country may officially not be in a state of war, yet its economy may be under intense pressure from sanctions, its infrastructure may be targeted by cyber operations, its social cohesion may be impacted by information warfare, and its political legitimacy may be systematically undermined in the international arena.
From this perspective, contemporary war does not occur solely on the military battlefield; part of it is organized in the field of perception and meaning. Before military intervention becomes acceptable to a society, an image of the world must often be constructed in which the intervention is understood not as aggression, but as ‘liberation’, ‘counter-terrorism’, ‘protection of civilians’, or ‘defence of democracy’.
This article examines this process by linking three levels of analysis: first, the structural transformation of American imperialism and the place of West Asia (or, in colonial terminology, the Middle East) within it; second, the role of the media in manufacturing political legitimacy for war; and third, the role of language and cognitive frameworks in organizing public perception. The Iraq war, the differing media narratives of the battles of Aleppo and Mosul, the Syrian experience, and recent developments in Iran are used as case studies for this analysis.
Iraq and the Formulation of Imperialism in the Unipolar Order
In December 2002, only a few months before the US and its allies attacked Iraq, the editors of ‘Monthly Review’ published an article titled ‘U.S. Imperial Ambitions and Iraq’. The significance of this article lay in its analysis of the George W. Bush administration’s drive for war with Iraq not merely within the framework of claims about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘counter-terrorism’, but within the broader context of a transformation in the global structure of power.
The authors argued that the claim of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ cannot be examined independently of the history of US relations with Iraq. They pointed to the contradiction that in the 1980s, when the Iraqi government was considered a Western ally in regional equations, the transfer of materials and technologies with biological weapons to Iraq had taken place with the authorisation of the US government. In this framework, what was later introduced as an absolute threat and a justification for war had, under different geopolitical circumstances, previously met with a completely different reaction.
This contradiction exemplifies a broader issue: the definition of a ‘threat’ in international politics is not merely the result of the inherent characteristics of a weapon, state, or political force, but also depends on its position within the structure of power. A state can be introduced as a ‘strategic ally’ in one period and a ‘threat to global security’ in another, without this transformation necessarily corresponding to a proportional change in the nature of that state.
From the perspective of the Monthly Review authors, the Iraq war should be studied in the context of the US attempt to consolidate the unipolar order following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The goal was not merely to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s government; Iraq was one of the crucial links in the rearrangement of the political geography of West Asia (the Middle East) and the consolidation of the United States’ position in the post-Cold War global order.
From Colonial Imperialism to US Global Hegemony
To explain this transformation, the Monthly Review article distinguishes three major stages in the history of modern imperialism. The first stage was linked to the competition of European powers over colonies, markets, and the partition of Africa in the late nineteenth century. In this period, imperialist domination was often exercised directly, through territorial occupation and colonial administration. The second stage took shape after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. Competition among capitalist powers continued, but the emergence of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism also introduced a new variable into the international system. The third stage began after World War II, when the United States became the dominant power of the capitalist world. In this period, the concept of the ‘Grand Area’ gained importance: a set of strategic regions of the world whose political, economic, and military control was deemed necessary to preserve American hegemony.
West Asia held an exceptional position in this power architecture. The enormous concentration of oil and gas reserves, its geographical location between Asia, Europe, and Africa, and its position on major trade and energy routes transformed this region into one of the focal points of global competition.
For this reason, the issue of oil cannot be reduced solely to America’s direct need for energy. Control over or influence on the energy system of West Asia allows a hegemonic power to also affect the conditions of access to energy for other economic powers. In such a framework, Iraq gained geopolitical importance not only due to its oil reserves but also because of its location in relation to Iran, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and global energy routes. This analysis is also linked to the strategic concept of ‘break-out’: creating such technological, military, and geopolitical superiority that the emergence of a rival power or coalition becomes difficult or impossible. In this sense, the Iraq war was part of the effort to consolidate the unipolar structure of power after the end of the Cold War.
Legitimacy as a Source of Military Power
However, military power alone is not sufficient for war. States, especially in political systems reliant on public opinion, also need to produce legitimacy to enter a war. An important historical example in this regard is the ‘testimony of Nayirah al-Sabah’ on the eve of the Gulf War. In 1990, the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, in widely publicized testimony, claimed that Iraqi forces had removed Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them to die. This narrative quickly became one of the key emotional images in shaping public support for intervention against Iraq. Later, the public relations and organised dimensions of this affair were revealed, and the credibility of the initial narrative was severely questioned. The historical importance of this case lies not merely in the inaccuracy of a narrative, but in demonstrating the relationship between emotion, media, and the legitimisation of war.
To mobilize society in support of war, presenting geopolitical calculations about oil, hegemony, or the balance of power is usually insufficient. War requires a moral narrative. In this narrative, there must be a victim with whom the audience can empathize, an aggressor whose evil is beyond doubt, and an intervening force that presents its action not as a power with political interests, but as a saviour. Consequently, one can speak of a stage prior to military war: the stage of producing the meaning of war.
Media and the Double Standard: A Study of Aleppo and Mosul
Johannes Scherling’s (2021) comparative study of the media coverage of the battles of Aleppo and Mosul provides an opportunity for an empirical examination of this issue. The battle of Aleppo in Syria and the battle of Mosul in Iraq were both instances of extensive urban warfare, accompanied by severe destruction, civilian casualties, and massive displacement. Despite the structural similarities between the two battles, Scherling demonstrates that the way they were narrated in mainstream Western media differed significantly. This difference can be examined at four main levels: attribution of agency, source selection, lexical choice, and worthiness of victims.
Agency
In reports on Aleppo, responsibility for civilian deaths was often attributed directly to the Syrian government and its allies. The syntactic structure of the sentence explicitly identified the subject: a force drops bombs, and civilians are killed as a consequence. In the coverage of Mosul, however, responsibility for civilian casualties was frequently distributed among multiple factors – ISIS, civil war, airstrikes, and the complex conditions of urban warfare. As a result, the connection between coalition attacks and civilian deaths could be rendered linguistically more indirect. The significance of this distinction is that even the grammatical structure of a sentence can serve to create or diminish political accountability.
Source Selection
The second difference concerns the use of sources. In the coverage of Aleppo, the narratives of witnesses, activists, and sources linked to opponents of the Syrian government held a prominent place, while statements from the Syrian government and Russia were often reflected with distancing devices and skepticism. In Mosul, official coalition sources and military authorities enjoyed greater initial credibility, and in cases where coalition attacks led to civilian deaths, these same sources were able to provide explanations and reframe the incident Thus, media bias does not operate solely through the dissemination of false information. The very determination of who is considered a ‘credible source’ is itself one of the structural mechanisms of narrative production.
‘Fall’ and ‘Liberation’
Among Scherling’s most illuminating findings is the divergent vocabulary employed to frame the outcomes of the two battles The Syrian government’s recapture of Aleppo was consistently described as the ‘fall of Aleppo’, whereas the recapture of Mosul from ISIS was termed its ‘liberation’. From a purely military standpoint, in both cases, one armed force regained territorial control from another. But ‘fall’ and ‘liberation’ are not semantically neutral. The former suggests loss and defeat, while the latter implies freedom and legitimacy.
Consequently, the audience is presented not with a neutral account, but with a moral judgment embedded in the very language used to report the event.
‘Worthy’ and ‘Unworthy’ Victims
This finding resonates with the concept of ‘worthy and unworthy victims’ as developed in the media criticism tradition of Herman and Chomsky Biologically, all deaths are identical, yet not all victims are granted equal media value. Some are given names, faces, families, and personal histories. Their dreams, their schools, their parents are reported in detail. The audience experiences them not as numbers, but as human beings. Others, by contrast, may appear only as ‘casualties’, ‘the killed’, or ‘collateral damage’.
This distinction is of great importance in the coverage of contemporary wars. The extensive coverage of the attack on the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv in July 2024 is an example of transforming civilian suffering into a moral and global issue.
The critical question is not why these victims received attention; such attention is entirely necessary. The question is why victims of similar attacks in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, or Iran do not necessarily receive the same degree of visibility, personalisation, and empathy.
The double standard becomes precisely apparent when our moral demand is not ‘reducing empathy for the first victim’, but rather ‘extending that same empathy to the second victim’.
From Media Analysis to Cognitive Science: The Issue of Framing
At this juncture, George Lakoff’s theory of language and cognitive frameworks becomes essential. In cognitive linguistics, language is not simply a conduit for transmitting neutral information from one mind to another. Rather, words activate concepts and frameworks that are embedded within broader networks of experience, value, and moral judgment. The concept of the ‘frame’ is central here.
When an event is placed within the ‘liberation’ frame, a set of concepts related to captivity, freedom, legitimacy, and salvation are activated. When the same event is labelled ‘occupation’, an entirely different network of associations is activated: aggression, domination, and the denial of self-determination. Thus, words do not merely describe reality; they actively shape how reality is perceived.
From this perspective, the distinction between phrases like ‘Russia bombed the hospital’ and ‘an explosion occurred at a hospital’ is not merely a matter of stylistic preference in writing. In the first sentence, the agent, the action, and the victim are placed in a clear causal relationship. In the second sentence, the incident exists, but agency is effectively removed from the perceptual field.
The same logic applies to terms such as ‘collateral damage’, ‘counter-terrorism operation’, ‘pre-emptive strike’, ‘moderate opposition’, ‘regime’, and ‘humanitarian intervention’ – each of which carries embedded assumptions that shape reality, rather than simply describe it.
From Propaganda to Imperialism of Perception and Meaning
Here, the concept of ‘imperialism of perception and meaning’ can be proposed as an analytical framework.
What is meant by this term in the present discussion is the exercise of power through the consolidation of a conceptual apparatus that allows a centre of power to name and classify actors, acts of violence, and interventions. A power that can determine who is a ‘terrorist’ and who is a ‘freedom fighter’, which state is a ‘government’ and which is a ‘regime’, which operation is ‘aggression’ and which is ‘humanitarian intervention’, has not merely dominated language; it has also taken control of part of the field of political legitimacy. This issue marks an important difference from the simplistic notion of propaganda.
Propaganda does not necessarily mean outright lying. Its more effective form can operate through the selection of real events, the omission of other realities, the establishment of hierarchies of importance, the choice of images, the selection of sources, the crafting of headlines, and the repetition of specific words.
Consequently, individual components of a report may be formally correct, but their totality can produce a highly skewed image of reality.
Syria: From Social Crisis to the Internationalisation of Conflict
The Syrian experience holds particular importance for understanding this mechanism. The protests and social grievances in Syria in 2011 cannot be seen solely as a product of foreign intervention. Syrian society had real political conflicts, inequalities, and grievances. But the subsequent process demonstrated how a domestic crisis can be transformed into an internationalised war through intervention by regional and global actors, the transformation of the conflict into armed struggle, economic sanctions, information warfare, and the importation of jihadist groups.
This experience compels a fundamental theoretical distinction: no pretext – not even genuine internal grievances – can legitimise foreign intervention. A society may simultaneously stand in need of profound political and social transformation and retain the right to pursue that transformation without bombardment, occupation, devastating sanctions, or external political engineering.
Nor was the consequence merely a change in the structure of political power. The destruction of infrastructure, the displacement of millions of people, mass migration, the deepening of religious and ethnic divisions, and the erosion of social cohesion were the long-term consequences of this war. This experience compels a fundamental theoretical distinction: no pretext – not even real internal problems – legitimizes foreign intervention.
A society can simultaneously require profound political and social transformations and have the right to pursue those transformations without bombardment, occupation, devastating sanctions, and external political engineering.
Iran and the Conflict over Defining Reality
The same issue gains importance in examining developments in Iran.
The protests and conflicts of January 2026 were met with sharply conflicting narratives. Part of the Western media framed the events primarily within the context of pro-democracy protests and the government’s confrontation with protesters. In contrast, Iranian official sources spoke of the presence of armed groups, the killing of police forces, the discovery of weapons, and the involvement of foreign networks. From the standpoint of academic analysis, neither set of claims should be accepted or rejected a priori solely on the basis of the speaker’s identity. The Iranian government’s claims about Mossad or CIA intervention require independent scrutiny of evidence just as much as the figures published by media and organisations opposed to the government regarding the number of victims.
But precisely at this point, an important epistemological issue emerges.
If the claims of sources close to one side are placed within the framework of ‘reporting’ even before verification, while the claims of the other side are labelled ‘propaganda’ from the outset, a hierarchy of credibility has been established prior to the examination of evidence. Therefore, the critique of the double standard should not lead to replacing one official truth with another official truth. The goal should be to demand uniform standards for evaluating all claims. At the same time, Iran’s protests cannot be analysed independently of the material conditions of society. Widespread economic sanctions, declining purchasing power, the structural problems of the economy, the government’s domestic policies, inequality, and social dissatisfaction are all part of the context of the crisis.
Critical analysis retains its power when it can see two realities simultaneously: the existence of genuine domestic grievances and the high likelihood of imperialist powers exploiting those same grievances.
Hybrid Warfare and the Erosion of the Boundary Between War and Peace
The concept of hybrid warfare makes it possible to place these elements within a shared analytical framework.
In classical warfare, the beginning of war is usually marked by an identifiable event, such as a military attack. In contemporary wars, this boundary can be much more ambiguous. Economic sanctions, financial blockades, cyber operations, targeted assassination, information operations, (financial) support for opposition groups, psychological warfare, legal and diplomatic pressure, and military attacks can operate not as independent stages, but as simultaneous components of a single warfare. In such a situation, language also becomes part of the instruments of war.
Before attacking a state, its legitimacy is gradually undermined in the public sphere. Its official institutions are listed as criminal or terrorist organisations. Normal diplomatic relations are portrayed as morally indefensible, and ultimately, military action against that state is represented not as war between states, but as the execution of a kind of security or moral necessity.
This process can be called ‘manufacturing the political possibility of war’.
Narrative Engineering and the Danger of Engineering Hatred
The connection between Scherling’s analysis and Lakoff’s framing theory leads us to an issue beyond media bias: the possibility of transforming narrative engineering into the engineering of social polarisation. The continuous repetition of binaries such as ‘the people versus the regime,’ ‘civilisation versus barbarism’, ‘democracy versus terrorism’, or ‘us versus them’ can reduce social complexity to two moral camps.
This process becomes more dangerous when external frameworks enter the target society itself.
In such conditions, the political opponent is no longer merely someone with different interests, experiences, or analyses; they become a moral enemy. The space for negotiation, compromise, and the construction of common institutions contracts, and political conflict can devolve into identity conflict. A society in which different groups no longer see each other as part of a shared whole is far more vulnerable to civil war. Foreign interventionists clearly are aware of this. The Syrian experience shows that social collapse does not necessarily arise from a single, pre-planned scheme. A set of real grievances, governmental mistakes, foreign interventions, regional power rivalries, the arming of opponents, the rise of fundamentalism, and social polarisation can reinforce each other in a chain-reaction cycle until ultimately a system emerges that none of the initial actors alone can control.
This point is crucial for the analysis of Iran.
Anti-Imperialism and the Right to Self-Determination
The critique of imperialism remains theoretically coherent and essential when it is not conflated with unconditional defence of the states targeted by imperialism. One can be a critic of Iran’s political structure and simultaneously oppose military attack on Iran.
One can defend the rights of protesters and at the same time hold the intervention of foreign governments in the protests unacceptable.
One can call for fundamental social and political changes and simultaneously emphasize that determining the future shape of Iran is the right of the Iranian people, not Washington, Tel Aviv, or European states. Indeed, this distinction is one of the fundamental principles of anti-imperialism.
The right to self-determination is meaningful when the people of a society can resolve their internal conflicts, even if deep and radical, without the threat of infrastructure destruction, the partition of the country, or the imposition of a political order from outside. The experience of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria demonstrates that the collapse of a state is not necessarily synonymous with the liberation of society. The destruction of a country’s institutional capacity can lead to a power vacuum, civil war, fundamentalism, mass migration, and long-term dependency.
From this perspective, social liberation and independence from foreign domination are not contradictory projects. A transformative project must be capable of demanding both simultaneously.
Conclusion: The Occupation of Concepts Before the Occupation of Territory
An analysis of contemporary imperialism is incomplete without examining military, economic, and technological power; but equally, an analysis without studying language, media, and cognition is no longer sufficient. From the Iraq war to Syria, and from the differing coverage of Aleppo and Mosul to the narrative conflict surrounding Iran, a common issue can be observed: power does not operate only through the control of territory; power also operates in determining the meaning of events. Who is a ‘terrorist’? Who is a ‘freedom fighter’? Which city ‘falls’ and which city is ‘liberated’? Which attack is ’aggression’ and which attack is a ‘pre-emptive operation’? Why does one victim acquire a name, image, and life, while another victim is reduced to ‘collateral damage’? These are not marginal linguistic questions. They are directly linked to the distribution of power in the international system. A power that can define the legitimate vocabulary for describing the world has already seized a portion of the authority to judge that same world.
Resistance to contemporary imperialism, therefore, cannot be waged solely on military or economic fronts. One of its primary arenas is epistemic resistance: restoring agency to the sentence, comparing journalistic standards, revealing sources, separating data from claims, independently scrutinizing evidence, and refusing to divide human beings into worthy and unworthy victims.
This resistance also requires liberation from a false binary that forces society to choose between defending the existing government and supporting foreign intervention. Another possibility exists: simultaneously defending the people’s right to change internal structures and the society’s right to remain immune from foreign domination and manipulation.
In a world where the post-Cold War unipolar order is facing structural transformations, this issue acquires heightened significance. The decline of a hegemony does not necessarily lead to the emergence of a more just order; transitional epochs often see intensified competition, militarism, and desperate efforts by declining powers to preserve their position.
Therefore, the task of criticism is not to replace the propaganda of one camp with the propaganda of another, but to break the monopoly on the production of political truth. When the contemporary war begins, before the first missile is launched – with the production of narrative, the classification of human beings, and the organisation of public perception, then resistance to war must also begin before the first explosion.
Before the occupation of territory, one must recognize the possibility of the occupation of meaning and concept.
Sources
– https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1750635219870224
– https://monthlyreview.org/articles/u-s-imperial-ambitions-and-iraq – https://archive.org/details/whatorwelldidntk0000unse