A Beach House, a Khachkar, an Orchard

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More than 25 years ago, during a visit home to Lebanon from Europe, where she had settled after the civil war, Mona Khalil saw a green turtle laying eggs on a beach south of Tyre, near her family’s seaside home. Learning that Lebanon’s sea turtle populations were under threat, she moved back permanently to dedicate herself to their conservation. A year later, she helped found the Orange House Project, painting her family’s home bright orange and running ecotourism and conservation programs from there.

For decades, she worked to protect Mansouri Beach, one of the eastern Mediterranean’s most important nesting sites for endangered sea turtles, from development, illegal fishing, and environmental degradation. Over more than 25 years, she helped transform part of the coastline in southern Lebanon into a refuge for wildlife and for people as well. She brought in researchers and volunteers and involved local children, many of whom grew up learning about marine life through the programs she established.

On June 20, an Israeli strike collapsed the Orange House on top of her. She died a few days later from her injuries.

Six days later, Lebanon and Israel signed the U.S.-brokered framework. By then, Israeli forces had already worked their way through southern Lebanon, razing homes, mosques, cemeteries, roads, parks, football fields, and farmland over months of destruction using bulldozers and manually laid explosives. In some villages, more than 70% of structures were leveled. Israeli commanders were clear the goal was to make civilian return “not something that will happen.”  By the time Lebanese and Israeli officials sat down to negotiate, Israel had killed thousands, displaced more than a million, and carved an 8–10 kilometer buffer zone into southern Lebanon’s landscape.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun called the agreement a first step toward “restoring sovereignty.”

But the deal does not require Israel to withdraw, and it ties the return of Lebanese residents to their border towns to the “successful” disarmament of Hezbollah, a non-state actor Lebanon does not fully control, with “success” defined by Israel alone. In effect, the agreement legitimizes Israel’s occupation and turns it into an open-ended bargaining chip, leveraged by a militarily superior adversary whose politicians have threatened to “return Lebanon to the stone age.”

In other words, Israel keeps what it seized, while Lebanon is offered a kind of conditional sovereignty in return; residents can come home, and the state might “restore” control, but only after meeting security benchmarks set, and ultimately judged, by the occupying power. Sovereignty here is no longer the default status of a recognized state; it becomes an outcome to be granted, suspended, or withheld based on compliance. Lebanon becomes, in effect, a state permanently auditioning for the return of what should never have been taken.

Armenia: Diplomacy After Dispossession

By the time Armenia and Azerbaijan initialed the U.S.-backed draft agreement in August 2025, Azerbaijani forces had already ethnically cleansed Artsakh and seized control over at least 241.4 square kilometers of sovereign Armenian territory through successive incursions in 2021–2022. In Shikahogh, Syunik region, they continue to reinforce their positions, clearing forests and laying new roads.

Unlike Lebanon, Armenia itself has not experienced active hostilities since 2022. The violence that produced this outcome was carried out most directly against the Armenians of Artsakh, a population that, because Artsakh was never internationally recognized, had no sovereign legal vehicle of its own. That lack of status doesn’t put the case outside this pattern. The mechanism simply moved one level up, to the Republic of Armenia, now made to absorb the consequences of that dispossession.

For years, Azerbaijan’s main mission was restoring territorial integrity; that Artsakh’s de facto independence violated it, even as Artsakh Armenians had the right to self-determination. Once Azerbaijan took control over Artsakh through blockade, military force, and ethnic cleansing in 2023, it did not stop. Instead, it escalated demands on Armenia: constitutional changes to remove references to Artsakh and the withdrawal of legal claims documenting atrocities. 

The draft peace agreement requires no withdrawal by Azerbaijan from Armenian territories it continues to occupy. Within one month of ratification, however, it does require both sides to withdraw, dismiss, or settle every interstate legal claim in any forum and bar new ones. This means Armenia is required to drop its seven interstate cases before the European Court of Human Rights, including those concerning the torture and execution of Armenian POWs. Individual applications before the Court, however, would continue unaffected. Armenia would also abandon its proceedings before the International Court of Justice related to the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh. In effect, the agreement forces the weaker party to legally ratify the outcome of violence and ethnic cleansing, while “success” and compliance remain defined on Azerbaijan’s terms.

Armenia’s leadership has presented these concessions as pragmatic necessities. When asked about accountability for documented torture, executions and mass displacement, Prime Minister Pashinyan said Armenia had to “escape the trap” of “mutual accusation”, warning that pursuing justice was itself “the road to reviving conflict.” Even after these concessions, Azerbaijan, a militarily and economically superior adversary whose president has called Armenians “dogs,” and whose politicians continue to press irredentist claims over Armenian territory, has gone beyond the terms of the initialed draft agreement by introducing the new demand that Armenia amend its constitution, a requirement absent from the negotiated text but later elevated into a condition for signing, under threat of renewed war.

In other words, the initialed peace agreement’s structure produces an effect where it will be difficult to reverse Azerbaijan’s seizure of Armenian territory by force, while requiring Armenia not only to accept a form of conditional sovereignty, but to actively dismantle its own legal and historical case against the violence and dispossession. In this sense, diplomacy risks becoming an instrument that recasts justice and accountability as obstacles to peace.

Iraqi Kurdistan’s Routinization of Turkish Control

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) illustrates this logic at an earlier phase—the routinization of a foreign military presence before any formal agreement. Turkey has established de facto control over more than 2,000 square kilometers of Iraqi Kurdistan through a network of more than 130 military bases and operations—an ongoing, cross-border securitization of the Kurdish communities there. Turkish forces routinely burn farmland, destroy orchards, and restrict access to water sources and prevent displaced villagers from returning. As recently as June 2026, residents of around 21 villages near Zakho were turned back at Turkish military checkpoints—inside Iraq—despite approval by local officials.

The 2024 Turkey-Iraq memorandum on “jointly countering the PKK,” presented as security cooperation, provides political cover for this open-ended presence. The Kurdistan Regional Government’s ruling KDP, aligned with Ankara for its own economic and political reasons, has actively helped normalize the Turkish military footprint. 

In effect, the arrangement subordinates Iraqi-Kurdish civilian life, including farming, movement, and return, to security criteria defined by Ankara, legitimizing Turkey’s permanent securitization of Kurdish territory. There is no active Turkey-Iraq war, and the PKK, the group Turkey claims to be fighting in Iraq, has dissolved. Yet Turkish control continues to expand and consolidate regardless. This is because Turkey sees and frames Iraq-based Kurds not as neighbors or partners with a security problem but as part of a transnational Kurdish threat network, unless they align with Ankara’s goals. 

When a People Become a Security Problem

What links these cases is how the population on the losing end gets defined in the first place. In each case, a whole group—Lebanese Arabs, Armenians, Iraqi Kurds—is securitized and dehumanized. They’re not all militants or combatants but are still somehow a threat to neutralize. The historian Simon Maghakian, writing on the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in Nakhichevan, calls this “regime security“, violence and erasure justified not by an actual threat, but by what a population’s mere presence is taken to testify to: continuity, claim, belonging, a threat to an autocratic regime’s longevity. Once presence itself is treated as the danger, the target isn’t only the people. It is anything that proves they were, or are, there.

In Armenia’s case, with Artsakh already emptied and the draft agreement extracting Armenia’s legal capitulation, active securitization of Armenians has, for now, paused; there’s no active campaign targeting Armenia’s population in the way Artsakh’s was. But the language kept in reserve shows the logic is only dormant. The way Azerbaijani officials describe Armenia’s military reforms, by all accounts normal efforts to rebuild an army still vastly outmatched by an oil-rich adversary three times its size, as an “arms race” and “regional threat” pushing the region back toward war. The point isn’t the facts; it’s keeping the security framing ready to reactivate when useful, without the cost of sustaining it in the meantime.

This is the genocidal logic underneath the diplomatic language. Once a people’s mere presence is categorized as the danger, no negotiated concession satisfies it short of the people’s neutralization through expulsion, cultural erasure, or permanent subjugation. Everything downstream, including the agreements and legal capitulations, becomes the administrative machinery that turns that logic into something that can be spoken about like peace and cooperation.

Local elites are the ones who make that ratification possible. They provide the narratives that stabilize these unequal arrangements, and while their position is unenviable, in each case they have too often gone beyond managing necessity to legitimizing it, even as they’re praised for their “political maturity”, especially by international partners backing the process.

But this isn’t just the banal fact that stronger parties dictate the terms, something true of nearly every asymmetric conflict, and which explains little on its own. What makes these cases more troubling is the conversion process which is completed only once the weaker party’s own officials sign off on it. Once that apparatus has institutionalized or routinized the result, force can step back, because the structure now reproduces itself. Now, any future attempt to reverse it must go through the same mechanisms that already declared it settled.

Maghakyan’s treatment of Nakhichevan shows this logic at its endpoint. Armenian heritage there wasn’t destroyed because khachkars posed a plausible security risk; it was erased because it indexed a people. Once a population is collectively securitized and cast as the security problem itself, its monuments become evidence in the deepest sense: proof of presence, continuity, belonging and historical claim, and therefore targets in their own right.

The Orange House wasn’t a military site or battlefield position. It was a widely recognized beach house and sanctuary, where a woman and her community spent 25 years protecting sea turtles and teaching a new generation to care for the land and sea that make up their home. It was destroyed because it also indexed a people, because it was the kind of place that gives a community a sense of belonging to its own coastline. Where Nakhichevan shows what the logic of security does to the evidence of a people’s past, Lebanon shows what it does to their future.

Opinion