A Battle of Corridors: Twelve Days of a Geo-Economic War Regime

Abstract How can the Twelve-Day War between Iran and Israel be understood through the lens of the new global war regime? And what does this war reveal about that regime? The Twelve-Day War unfolded not as a simple bilateral conflict but as a multi-scalar episode within a global regime of corridor competition—a struggle over chokepoints, logistical routes, and infrastructural sovereignty embedded in the broader architecture of supply-chain capitalism. Revisiting the genealogy of this war since the critical conjuncture of 1977–82—the Mahapach in Israel, the Iranian Revolution, and the Carter Doctrine—the article examines how the two states’ divergent security rationalities took shape during the transition from the fading Cold War order to an emerging multipolar one. While Israel transformed itself into an augmented hub within global circuits of accumulation, Iran weaponized chokepoints as security levers—an enduring expression of its strategic solitude. In light of the geo-economic transnationalization of security—which has fragmented national territories, particularly across the peripheries, integrating some as nodal zones in a vascular cartography of transnational flows while rendering others disposable and war prone—the article calls for rethinking internationalism as a transversal alliance of struggles across the zones of war and circulation: a just-in-time internationalism.