The CIRS Long View | Zarqa Parvez | Psychological Warfare in The Iran-US/Israel War | May, 2026

Modern warfare has fundamentally transformed. No longer confined to physical battlefields, conflict now plays out across digital spaces, in real time, on the devices in our pockets, minute by minute. These platforms haven’t just changed how we consume war; they’ve changed how we experience it emotionally, psychologically, and collectively. With the escalating Iran-US tensions and the deeply complicated position of Gulf states at the center of our conversation, this episode examines how information, perception, and psychological manipulation have become weapons as consequential as any missile strike, and arguably, far harder to defend against.
From propaganda and virality to cognitive warfare and the collapse of shared truth, this conversation unpacks how information itself has become one of the most consequential and difficult-to-defend-against weapons of the modern age.

Speaker: Zarqa Parvez, Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University in Qatar and Visiting Faculty at Hamad Bin Khalifa University

Dr Zarqa Parvez is a political sociologist and social scientist whose research focuses on the intersections of statecraft, national identity, society, and youth in the Arab Gulf region. Her scholarship employs intersectional and post-colonial theoretical frameworks to examine state-society dynamics through the lens of identity politics, women’s agency, and youth engagement, generating nuanced understandings of Gulf regional dynamics that transcend conventional narratives. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University in Qatar and visiting faculty at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, College of Humanities and Social Sciences.