NORMALISATION OF SHADOW WARFARE: A HUMANCENTRED ANALYSIS OF THE ISRAELI AMERICAN IRANIAN CONFLICT

Abstract

There is a quiet cemetery in a village in southern Lebanon where the graves bear no names. They are marked only by datesthe dates of Israeli airstrikes, of Hezbollah rocket fire, of the endless, nameless violence that has defined life on this border for generations. Not far away, in an Israeli town near the Gaza periphery, a playground sits empty. The swings are still, the slide unused, because the children who once played there have been evacuated, their homes now within range of a new generation of precision-guided missiles. In Tehran, a mother scrolls through her phone, watching videos of explosions in Damascus, knowing that her son, a soldier in the Revolutionary Guard, is stationed somewhere in that chaos. In Washington DC, a veteran lies awake at night, the sound of a drone's buzz still echoing in his memory years after his deployment to Iraq.
The term 'Shadow Warfare' once described the exceptional, the covert, the deniable. It was the stuff of spy novels and intelligence briefingsassassinations carried out by unknown actors, cyberattacks that left no fingerprints, proxy forces that could be disavowed. It was a tool used sparingly, when conventional warfare was too costly and diplomacy had failed. However, over the past two decades, and particularly in the context of the Israeli-American-Iranian conflict, shadow warfare has been normalized. It has become the baseline, the default, the ordinary.1
This normalization is not merely a strategic shift; it is a profound human tragedy. When shadow warfare becomes normal, the boundaries that protect civilians erode. The distinction between combatant and non-combatant blurs. The laws of war are tested and often violated. And ordinary peoplethe farmer in his field, the child in her classroom, the mother in her kitchenbecome the unwilling participants in a conflict they did not choose and cannot escape.