Press Release
Distinguished Lecture Series
Roundtable Discussion with
H.E. Dr. Javad Zarif, Former Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran
“The post-polar world does not give us peace automatically; it gives us greater responsibility. We must move from security against one another towards security with one another, building a regional future based on dialogue, cooperation and shared prosperity.”
This was stated by H.E. Dr. Javad Zarif, Former Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran, while speaking during a roundtable hosted at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI), organised by its Centre for Afghanistan, Middle East and Africa (CAMEA) under the Distinguished Lecture Series.
Dr. Javad Zarif is a veteran Iranian diplomat, scholar and academic who has been closely associated with Iran’s diplomatic engagements on major regional and international issues. He served as Iran’s Foreign Minister from 2013-2021. He also played the central role in the negotiations that led to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and is recognised internationally for his role in multilateral diplomacy and international negotiations.
Dr. Zarif said that the emerging post-polar global order had created both challenges and opportunities for regional states and called for a shift from a threat-centred security paradigm towards a possibility-centred approach based on regional ownership, dialogue, cooperation and shared prosperity. He highlighted that the central question was not only what kind of world the international community was entering, but also what kind of future it was prepared to build. He argued that the future was not a finished destination but was being produced through the narratives, institutions, networks and choices made by societies.
Reflecting on the region’s history, Dr. Zarif said that West Asia had experienced colonialism, partition, sectarianism, occupation, invasion, externally sponsored conflicts, terrorism, sanctions and repeated military aggression. He said the past contained important lessons about the consequences of miscalculation, exclusion, domination and the outsourcing of security. However, he cautioned that history could become a prison when societies remained trapped in memories of past conflicts and grievances. Societies, therefore needed to confront the past honestly in order to recover possibilities that the past had suppressed.
Discussing the international order, Dr. Zarif described the current environment as a post-polar world, in which power had become distributed across regions, societies, markets, technologies, networks and public narratives. No single state, he argued, possessed the capacity to control every major outcome, while middle powers and regional states had acquired greater strategic agency. Permanent alliances and loyalties were giving way to issue-based coalitions and network relations, while economic interdependence, technology, information and non-state actors were increasingly shaping security and political outcomes.
Dr. Zarif maintained that this environment required a new regional political imagination. He argued that security needed to become more inclusive because one country could not achieve lasting security by creating insecurity for another. He called for moving from security “against” one another towards security “with” one another.
Dr Zareef spoke in detail about his initiative, the Muslim West Asia Dialogue Association (MWADA), a framework for replacing enmity with amity through dialogue, cultural ties, economic cooperation and, eventually, a regional non-aggression framework. In this context, Dr. Zarif emphasised Pakistan’s role as an important bridge between West Asia, South Asia and Central Asia, noting that the broader MWADA framework envisaged the participation of Pakistan, Türkiye and Egypt alongside the Persian Gulf littoral states. He said MWADA should be viewed not as a finished or static arrangement, but as an institutional possibility that could evolve according to the needs of participating states.
Speaking about Pakistan’s role in facilitating dialogue between Iran and the United States, Dr. Zarif applauded Pakistan’s sincere efforts to promote diplomacy and de-escalation. He acknowledged Pakistan’s constructive role in bringing the two sides to the negotiating table and said that the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) provided an important framework for dialogue and the peaceful resolution of differences. He also highlighted Pakistan’s diplomatic experience as an asset in managing complex regional dynamics.
Concluding his address, Dr. Zarif said that the past demonstrated that military superiority did not by itself produce political legitimacy, sanctions and coercion did not create stability, and foreign guarantees could not substitute for regional arrangements. He called for learning from history without allowing it to dictate the future. He called for a future in which geography was not a sentence, history was not a prison and differences were not used as a pretext for permanent conflict, emphasising that the task was not merely to predict what came next, but to build what should come next.
The talk was attended by Pakistan’s former Foreign Ministers, Foreign Secretaries, Ambassadors, senior civil and military officials, leading academics and security analysts.
