I have always described myself as a humanist. It is a deeply rooted identity that shapes both my ideas and my attitude toward the world—a critical lens through which I constantly observe and question human dynamics and their conflicts. Yet my training and experience as an analyst inevitably draw me toward other vantage points. It feels natural to interpret global events through the prism of strategy, applying the hard logic of geopolitics to weigh scenarios, balance forces, and mitigate resistance.

In contrast, my daughter Viviana—an international-affairs specialist with two master's degrees and now pursuing a PhD—embodies a sensibility that, while rigorously analytical, turns immediately toward the most tangible human dimension. For her, every conflict has a face, a name, and a story; every crisis translates into individual struggles, urgent needs, and practical solutions that genuinely change lives.

I often think these differences in our approaches are not merely professional trajectories but truly generational visions. I grew up in a world that placed high value on structures, power balances, and strategic stability as indispensable conditions for any meaningful human progress. She, however, belongs to a generation that questions far more intensely the immediate human cost of those structures—one that critically examines how to transform living conditions, reduce suffering, and generate measurable, positive impact on everyday life.

These complementary—and at times divergent—perspectives have fueled long conversations between us and continually push me to ask what the word Mankind really means today. Beyond a simple universal concept, what does it genuinely imply amid mounting tensions, planetary challenges, and internal fragmentations? Perhaps, precisely, these diverse generational lenses provide valuable clues for redefining, in practice, what it means to be truly human in the twenty-first century.

The promises of mankind: war and the political mindset

When one surveys the accelerating multiplication of armed conflicts in recent years—Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, the intractable Syrian tragedy, Yemen, the resurgence of tensions in the Caucasus, and, most recently, the dangerous escalation between Israel and Iran—it is hard not to wonder whether humanity has learned anything substantial about the psychological, social, and moral costs of war. UNHCR displacement figures now exceed 120 million people, and World Health Organization (WHO) studies show post-traumatic stress disorder rates of up to 30 percent in populations exposed to armed violence: vivid evidence of a collective wound that spans generations. Yet this humanitarian record scarcely dents the political logic that normalises war as a rational instrument of power.

Behind every front line lies a strategic mentality rooted in Realpolitik. In the wake of Clausewitz, decision-makers still conceive of war as “the continuation of politics by other means,” planning campaigns with the same cool detachment used to calculate a return on investment. Contemporary jargon—collateral damage, damage limitation, escalation management, precision strike, hybrid warfare—drapes technical language over a brutal fact. In the end, civilian suffering remains a “tolerable factor” in the cost-benefit equation. Think tanks model how much social pain an adversary can absorb before capitulating; futures markets trade on geopolitical risk; and war, far from being an accident, becomes a lever for regional reconfiguration and a growth vector for revitalised military-industrial complexes.

The June 2025 Israel–Iran clash lays bare this dynamic. Both governments cloak their decisions in the language of existential security while daily devastation is relegated to footnotes. Behind the reports of strikes on each other’s territories lies a less visible psychosocial toll. Israel’s Ministry of Health reported “thousands of calls” to its emotional-support hotline in the first week of Iranian bombardment, with spikes in acute anxiety and sleep disorders nationwide. In Tehran, near-total internet shutdowns, long petrol queues, and soaring prices for basic goods have deepened fear and uncertainty. Global headlines, however, stay locked on the missile-for-missile, drone-for-drone calculus, rarely pausing over the children sleeping in Tel Aviv air-raid shelters or the elderly queuing for painkillers in Isfahan. Thus, the logic of war goes largely unquestioned, and human anguish again slips from the spotlight.

To this day, the instrumentalisation of suffering endures because the international ecosystem allows it. The UN Security Council—founded to keep the peace—repeatedly stalls under cross-vetoes and sphere-of-influence trade-offs. Peacebuilding and peacekeeping missions run on thin budgets, overstretched staff, and unclear mandates. Meanwhile, great powers wave the banners of “regional stability” or “legitimate defence” to justify fresh weapons contracts, while multilateral forums issue solemn communiqués that condemn the violence, only to sidestep it.

The result is a widening gap between the universalist promise that once inspired the notion of Mankind—that Enlightenment idea of a human community governed by liberty, equality, and dignity—and the real practice of a system that assigns life differing values according to strategic utility. Recent history shows that doctrines of “limited war” do not limit trauma, that “surgical interventions” leave open social scars, and that rhetoric about “necessary security” too often translates into existential insecurity for millions of civilians.

Even more troubling is the psychological normalisation of violence as a cultural narrative. On social media, war is gamified; in official speeches, patriotic sacrifice is romanticised; in hyper-realistic video games, the tacit lesson is repeated that technology can solve morality through precision. All of this reinforces a cycle in which human cost is trivialised and empathy fragmented along identity lines.

Yet history proves that the bill for this worldview always arrives. The Balkan syndrome, the lost generation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Syrian diaspora scattered across five continents, Ukraine’s devastated education system, and Palestine’s intergenerational trauma all testify that post-conflict societies drag decades of cognitive, productive, and relational deficit. Ignoring those invisible liabilities is, at best, short-sighted and, at worst, cynical.

In this light, the political mindset that legitimises war as a strategy exposes the ultimate paradox of the Enlightenment project: it proclaims itself guardian of “civilisation” while tolerating—and even incentivising—practices that dehumanise. Mankind, envisioned as a rational, progressive collective subject, ends up reduced to a calculated pawn on a board of state interests.

Until we acknowledge that genuine security must begin with the safety of each person’s mind and body, we will remain trapped in a loop where past lessons are ignored and future promises are mortgaged to the military supremacy of the present. Against that machinery of calculation, voices like Viviana’s rise to reclaim the primacy of human pain and dignity—a perspective that refuses to treat suffering as collateral and demands a new standard of success.

Pain as a yardstick: Viviana's lens

Viviana, my daughter, embodies a perspective on conflict that differs profoundly from the strategic outlook I have long embraced. From an early age, she displayed a rare sensitivity to the suffering of others—a genuine concern for the fate of ordinary people whose lives are abruptly reshaped by decisions taken in distant situation rooms. That sensitivity became the cornerstone of her academic and professional path: she trained as an international‐affairs specialist, focusing on the human dimension of armed conflict.

For Viviana and many in her generation, wars and humanitarian crises cannot be reduced to abstract statistics or explained exclusively through balance-of-power analysis. Behind every data point, they see names, families, and shattered dreams. They watch with growing frustration as the very institutions meant to protect human rights and avert catastrophe prove repeatedly ineffective—or unforgivably slow—when confronted with real, urgent human suffering. Our own family has experienced this first-hand: we were forced to leave our country, and we have followed the stories of friends and compatriots whose lives remain mired in uncertainty.

In recent years, Viviana has tracked crises such as the Venezuelan migration emergency, the humanitarian tragedy in Syria, and, most recently, the devastating after-effects of the Israel–Iran conflict. In each case, immediate human anguish is pushed to the background while broader geopolitical calculations dominate the agenda. What troubles her even more is how, in the midst of these tragedies, voices that try to put compassion and humanity above politics and strategy are censored, persecuted, and, at times, violently silenced.

Viviana has documented in detail how authorities across the globe deploy extraordinary measures to repress and muzzle those who publicly question their countries' military decisions: independent journalists in Russia, human-rights activists in China, pacifist demonstrators in the Middle East, and community leaders in Latin America. These crackdowns are not incidental; they betray a deep fear of challenges to the dominant logic that validates conflict as a policy tool. Censorship does not merely stifle inconvenient voices—it also exposes just how insecure regimes can be when forced to defend the moral basis of their actions.

Against this backdrop, Viviana and her peers maintain a clear standard: the success or failure of international policy must be measured by concrete, immediate, and sustainable improvements in people's lives. The effectiveness of political decisions should not be tallied in abstract gains of power or influence, but in lives protected, communities rebuilt, rights upheld, and dignity restored.

This human-centred, pragmatic stance does not deny the need for strategy or equilibrium; it insists rather that any strategy worth pursuing must keep human well-being at its core. Human pain is the truest metric of political failure; to reduce, relieve, and prevent that pain is the only genuine measure of success. For Viviana, this is more than an ethical ideal—it is, in her view, the sole pathway to rebuilding an international system that is just, effective, and authentically humane.

From mankind to humanity

The passage from the idea of Mankind to the concrete reality of Humanity is more than an ethical imperative; it is a prerequisite for tackling today's global challenges. For decades, we operated under the comforting illusion that grand international structures, intricate diplomacy, and abstract negotiations were enough to maintain stability and order. Yet in a world where crises are increasingly human and decreasingly abstract, it is clear that we must re-focus our very conception of international life.

This shift calls for a new diplomacy—one that blends strategic acumen with integrated humanist logic. International cooperation must move beyond conventional summitry and defense pacts toward frameworks that foreground dignity, safety, and restorative justice. Nowhere is this more urgent than in migration policy. Movements of people can no longer be framed mainly as threats to stability or problems of security; they are, first and foremost, complex human tragedies driven by political violence, systemic injustice, stark inequality, and an intensifying climate crisis.

Reframing migration in this way compels states to treat displacement as a shared global responsibility rather than a burden to be deflected. Humane corridors, expedited asylum procedures, and development partnerships aimed at tackling root causes should replace deterrence-only approaches. Such policies would not weaken the international order; they would strengthen it, anchoring cooperation in the protection of human life and transforming collective security from a calculus of fear into a project of genuine solidarity.

Global education plays an essential role in this transition. We must form new generations in foundational values such as empathy, social justice, and peaceful conflict resolution. Learning rooted in compassion and intercultural understanding should not be dismissed as a soft add-on; it ought to be a central pillar in training tomorrow's decision-makers. This does not mean removing strategic or geopolitical studies from the curriculum; it means ensuring they are addressed from an ethical, critical, and empathetic standpoint.

On the practical front, this perspective demands a determined effort to build global networks of solidarity capable of acting where traditional institutions are slow or ineffective. NGOs, transnational citizen networks, youth movements, and local associations must be recognised not as occasional partners but as strategic actors able to respond swiftly to immediate human crises.

The deepest challenge, however, lies in redefining the very concept of Humanity. Too often, it has been treated as a comfortable abstraction—a distant, generic ideal. The time has come to translate that ideal into clear operational terms: humanity means real and effective respect for every individual, practical commitment to fundamental human rights, and a collective obligation to prevent avoidable suffering. Understood this way, humanity stops being an abstract promise and becomes a practical, urgent, and indispensable project.

Moving from Mankind to Humanity is therefore not merely a change of vocabulary; it is a radical change in how we see the world and act within it. It acknowledges that true power is not measured by dominance over strategic landscapes, but by our capacity to transform, dignify, and protect real lives. That approach is not only ethically preferable—it is strategically necessary, because the global future ultimately depends on our ability to remain profoundly human.

A shared expectation

My conversations with Viviana reveal a creative tension between two indispensable ways of seeing the world. One—the strategic—maps risks, balances forces, and charts routes toward global stability. The other—the empathic—refuses to accept that human suffering is the inevitable price of such manoeuvres. The future we long for cannot dispense with either: every security architecture loses legitimacy if it fails to protect real lives, and every act of compassion loses momentum if it ignores the complexity of the threats arrayed against it.

Moving from the abstract notion of Mankind to the tangible reality of Humanity does not require us to abandon calculation or political intelligence; it requires us to subordinate both to a single governing principle: the irreducible dignity of every person. Only then can a truly sustainable strategy take root—one capable of navigating uncertainty without sacrificing the very human essence it claims to defend.

Breaking the inertia that normalises violence demands a wider lens: we must include the psychology of trauma, the political economy of war, the impact of technology in automating harm, and the slow erosion of collective empathy. Honouring the promise of modernity—a global order that safeguards every concrete, unrepeatable human being—means recognising that the protection of life is not a moral add-on but the ultimate metric of every power equation.

This, at heart, is the generational pact we envision: a world where strategy and compassion do not compete but cooperate; where the most sophisticated calculation begins with the simplest, most radical question—how do we reduce pain and preserve human dignity, here and now?

Only by answering that question can we bequeath to those who follow us—on this and every Fourth of July—a world that is not merely independent on paper but genuinely free from needless pain, more habitable and profoundly more humane.