From Escalation to War: Regime Transformation and Adaptive Political Capacity

This article reconsiders escalation in international politics by shifting the analytical focus from discrete events to transformations in political order. While existing approaches have generated important insights into the dynamics of conflict, particularly through the analysis of decision-making, interaction, and violence intensity, they tend to conceptualize escalation as unfolding against a relatively stable political background. This article builds on these contributions while advancing a complementary perspective in which escalation is understood as a regime-level transformation driven by the progressive loss of adaptive political capacity, the ability of political systems to sustain non-coercive coordination under stress. Drawing on debates on temporality, resilience, and anticipation, it shows how escalation reshapes institutional mediation, informational environments, and relational structures, progressively reorganizing political order around coercion. The analysis clarifies the distinction between escalation as variation within an existing order and escalation as transformation of that order, and reflects on the implications of this perspective for the study of war and security. The framework is empirically applied to the destruction of informational coordination infrastructure during the Gaza War (2023–2025), where documented patterns of journalistic infrastructure elimination offer a contemporary case through which to examine the mechanisms by which coercive coordination becomes entrenched.