Session dives into shift toward global arms build-up, ‘pre-war’ preparedness, fraying of nuclear order
A photo of the panel on Crisis Readiness in a Pre-War World at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs conference on Sunday 10 May. Seated from left to right: researcher Dr. Tahir Mahmood Azad, former ambassador Mustafa Kamal Kazi and historian Victoria Schofield. PHOTO: EXPRESS TRIBUNEN
Experts warned on the second day of an international conference titled “Living on the Threshold of Global Crises” that the world was no longer simply preparing for a future conflict, but was already structurally embedded in a “pre-war” international order amid the conflict between the US and Iran.
Organized by the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA), the session on Sunday delved into the shift towards global arms buildup and “pre-war” preparedness, the unraveling of the nuclear order and the “poison” of information warfare.
The morning session, chaired by the former ambassador to Russia, the Netherlands, Indonesia and Iraq, Mustafa Kamal Kazi, focused on “Crisis Preparedness in a Pre-War World”. Dr. Tahir Mahmood Azad, a researcher at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading, spoke about weaponization and defense transformation in the Global South.
He said the traditional lens of “militarization” — defined by quantitative expansion and big budgets — did not capture today’s qualitative transformation; it was more accurately captured by “weaponization”.
“We are no longer simply witnessing militarization … we are witnessing systematic weaponization within a pre-war international order,” he said, adding that global military spending had reached $2.9 trillion, representing 2.5% 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-independent weapons ecosystem” to the Global South without any political conditions.
“The pre-war world is not approaching. We are already in it.”
Dr. James Nixey, former director of Chatham House Russia and an independent consultant whose work focuses on Russia, addressed the utility of “strategic ambiguity” in foreign and security policy, warning that while it could keep an adversary guessing, it was often mistaken for “paralysis or, worse, cowardice”.
He criticized Western policies in Ukraine, arguing that “Russia is playing the strategic ambiguity game relatively well” while the West has been too clear about what they will not do. “That supposed strategic ambiguity … that paralysis … has a lot of blood on it,” Nixey said.
Historian and commentator on international affairs Victoria Schofield gave a look at conflict zones, specifically occupied Kashmir, where she noted that “the prospects for peace were better” in the 1990s than they were today. After 30 years of documenting the conflict, she noted that “war is easier to start than to end”.
She concluded with a plea for humanity, quoting the Persian poet Saadi from his poem Bani Adam: “If you have no sympathy for human pain, you cannot keep the name of man.”
Deterrence in an age of ‘invisible’ threats
The second panel, led by Dr. Rukhsana A Siddiqui, who holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania, explored “Nuclear Order Under Strain”.
Physicist Dr. Abdul Hameed Nayyar warned that new technologies such as quantum sensing “undo some of the work” of modern stealth platforms by making them visible. “Quantum sensing threatens to elevate modern warfare by making the invisible visible,” Nayyar explained, adding that even submarines deep in the ocean could now be detected via “magnetic field shifts.”
He detailed nuclear treaties over the years and explained how the expiry of many nuclear treaties led to “instability in the nuclear order”.
“The withdrawal from ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty and the collapse of the INF [Intermediate-range Nuclear Force] The treaty was two fundamental problems that started the sign of instability in this nuclear order. Then the New START treaty expired … early this year in January, and there has been no work since then to restart 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 about military capability, but perception. He warned that “nuclear language has entered everyday political discourse” through social media, which “blurs the line between rhetorical positions and actual engagement”.
Ochieng said the “normalization of nuclear rhetoric” made it lose its exceptional status, making the unthinkable feeling routine.
Dr. Ahmed Ijaz Malik, associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations at Quaid-i-Azam University, criticized the basis of arms control, calling existing frameworks “epistemologically flawed”.
He stated that the purpose of arms control frameworks was to prevent global nuclear conflict, but the conclusion that nuclear weapons were “merely deterrence, crisis-causing and strategic coercion” was far-fetched.
Misinformation, control and narrative warfare
The final session, “Information Wars and Narrative Control”, chaired by human rights activist and journalist Zohra Yusuf, addressed the “tsunami of information”.
Journalist, columnist and co-host on private television program Zara Hat Kay, Zarrar Khuhro compared modern social media to ancient Roman times, when Octavian, the adopted heir of Julius Caesar, inscribed coins with insults defaming Mark Antony.
“What has changed in the intervening centuries, millennia? It’s not the nature of propaganda; it’s the nature of the technology that delivers that propaganda.”
He stated that one of the reasons misinformation spread quickly was because of a person’s desire to believe something that aligned with their worldview, “and when we want to believe, we’re willing to believe anything, and that’s why it spreads.”
One of the reasons people were spreading misinformation was what he described as a “financial motive,” referencing a recent story about an AI-generated viral right-wing influencer named Emily Hart, where a young man had created this avatar simply as a means to “farm engagement” as a way to pay for his education.
He also talked about state actors pushing misinformation and “near-state actors,” such as people who work for political movements, pushing misinformation to serve certain agendas. He concluded by warning that the truth was losing the race: “By the time the truth has got out of bed … lies have burned down the whole city”.
Dr. Mabel Lu Miao, co-founder and secretary-general of the Center on China and Globalization, speaking via video from Beijing, argued that the global South was “rewriting history” on multilateralism. She argued that the old Western-led narrative had collapsed, unable to resolve conflicts or nuclear power.
“We are no longer begging for 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 for “diversified inclusive multilateral cooperation”.
Journalist and co-founder of Safe Journalism, a platform that seeks to unite media practitioners and civil society in efforts to bring justice to journalists in Pakistan, Mehmal Sarfraz, highlighted the “information siege” surrounding Palestine and said “the new normal is disinformation”.
“Tools are now being used around the world to disenfranchise the media and civil society as a result of the rapid change in technology and the rise of artificial intelligence,” she said, going on to elaborate on the serious risks journalists face, noting that Israel was responsible for killing two-thirds of all media workers by 2025.
Addressing Pakistan, she described a “coordinated online harassment” campaign against female journalists that involved “sexualized abuse, doxing” and “rape threats”.
“There are more pictures, AI videos, rape and death threats and attempts to hack our social media accounts like Twitter. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, even our emails have become the norm.
Sarfraz called for a united front: “We have to rise above our differences … because if we don’t, our future is bleak.”
At the end of the two-day event, Dr. Masuma Hasan, Honorary Chairperson of PIIA, and former Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed all the participants for their attendance. Hasan eventually noted that the breakdown of multilateralism had allowed “impunity” to take root globally.
“Spheres of influence are created through the barrel of a gun and peace built through business deals.”
