PSCRP-BESA Reports No 188 (March 9, 2026)

by Gershon Kogan

Debates about Iran’s possible fragmentation tend to reproduce the same conceptual error: state breakdown is framed as a geopolitical event — sudden, discrete, visible. Fragmentation is better understood as a process rather than an event: a gradual transformation of political coherence, institutional erosion, and narrative competition that reshapes regional security long before any border changes.(Keddie, 2006; Vakil, 2020)

Iran occupies a unique position as the southern hinge of Eurasian security — a structural node linking the Middle East, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Caspian basin into a single interdependent system.(International Crisis Group, 2024) Instability within Iran therefore does not remain confined to its immediate neighbourhood; it reverberates across Eurasian political and economic networks, affecting regions traditionally analyzed through separate geopolitical lenses. The post-Soviet space is not an external observer of the Iranian crisis — it is part of the same arc of risk.

Security dynamics around Iran are shaped not only by material capabilities but by perception — both within the Islamic Republic and among neighbouring states. Narratives of internal crisis, ethnic vulnerability, and external encirclement increasingly influence strategic behaviour, generating real geopolitical consequences regardless of whether fragmentation ultimately occurs.(Brookings Institution, 2023) This article argues that Iran’s potential fragmentation — understood as a process — would reshape Eurasian security dynamics through three interconnected mechanisms: regional spillover across the South Caucasus, strategic recalibration in Central Asia, and the expansion of cognitive and informational competition across the post-Soviet space.

Two parallel processes create a rare convergence of risks. US–Iran diplomacy on the nuclear file remains deadlocked as the US military build-up in the region accelerates — raising the probability of large-scale military strikes as an operative variable rather than a hypothetical scenario.(Financial Times, 2025; Reuters, 2026) Simultaneously, Iran is experiencing a new wave of protest dynamics, accompanied by intensifying information control and the further concentration of power within the security establishment.(BBC Persian, 2026; Al-Monitor, 2026)

Defining Fragmentation: An Analytical Framework

Fragmentation as applied to Iran is not synonymous with state collapse on the “Libyan” or “Somali” model. It denotes a process of transformation in political coherence that can fundamentally reshape regional security long before any borders change.(Dabashi, 2011; Vakil, 2020) Institutional erosion typically precedes visible collapse — and it is this erosion, not the endpoint, that constitutes the strategically significant object of analysis. Four dimensions are analytically useful.

Territorial fragmentation: peripheral regions de facto exit effective central control without formally declaring independence — a product of administrative overload rather than political separatism.(International Crisis Group, 2024)

Institutional fragmentation: competition between parallel power centres within the state apparatus. In the Iranian context, this is the growing tension between formal government structures and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which commands its own economic base and an increasingly autonomous strategic logic.(Financial Times, 2025) The state remains legally unified but operationally divided.

Functional fragmentation: failures in specific governance domains — border control, financial flows, logistics, basic security services. This is the form of fragmentation most directly exported to neighbouring regions, through smuggling, non-state actor activity, and migration pressure.(Brookings Institution, 2023) Instability diffuses through economic and informational networks without requiring territorial contiguity.

Cognitive fragmentation: the rupture of a unified state narrative, in which different regions, ethnic groups, and social strata begin operating with fundamentally incompatible pictures of political reality.(Keddie, 2006; Dabashi, 2011) Cognitive fragmentation typically precedes institutional stress and thus functions as its early indicator. The Iranian regime understands this threat acutely — which is why narrative control is no less a priority than territorial control.

These dimensions are not mutually exclusive. Realistic scenarios are always hybrid configurations in which institutional weakening amplifies functional failures, and cognitive rupture accelerates both. Most importantly, security dynamics are shaped as much by perception as by material capabilities.(Vakil, 2020) Iranian state-aligned media consistently frames protest activity as externally inspired — primarily by Israel and the United States.(Tasnim, 2021; Al-Monitor, 2026) This is not mere propaganda: such narratives structure the actual behaviour of security institutions and define how neighbouring states are perceived as threat or resource.

Drivers of Instability: Three Layers

The Political-Institutional Layer

Iran’s governance system faces a structural contradiction that neither repression nor cosmetic reform resolves. The regime demonstrates institutional resilience: the IRGC is consolidated, commands its own economic base, and is independent of any electoral cycle.(Financial Times, 2025) Yet the protest dynamics of recent years — from the Woman, Life, Freedom movement to the current wave — have exposed a fundamental legitimacy deficit that securitization alone cannot close.(Brookings Institution, 2023; Reuters, 2026)

Securitization as a governance strategy carries an internal limit: the more aggressively the regime frames domestic dissent as external aggression, the more it binds its own legitimacy to the image of an external enemy. Any de-escalation with outside actors comes to be read internally as capitulation — and therefore becomes politically impossible. Threat perception begins to determine strategic behaviour more precisely than the actual balance of forces.(Vakil, 2020) Iranian state media’s consistent construction of Azerbaijan as a staging ground for Israeli and American influence on Iran’s northern border(Tasnim, 2026; Mashregh News, 2022) is not neutral analysis: it is a narrative that shapes real decisions by security institutions and defines the parameters within which neighbouring states are perceived.

Military Strike as Systemic Accelerator

A large-scale military strike on Iranian command infrastructure has occurred. Its defining feature is that the operation exceeded the “infrastructure strike” scenario: its principal result was the elimination of the Supreme Leader and several of the Islamic Republic’s senior commanders. This is not merely damage to nuclear or energy facilities — it is a direct decapitation of the regime’s command hierarchy. Holding this distinction is essential for understanding what follows.

The paradox is well-documented: a strike would likely produce short-term consolidation around the regime — external threat historically suppresses internal dissent — but its medium-term consequences are qualitatively different.(Keddie, 2006; International Crisis Group, 2024) Infrastructure destruction would accelerate functional fragmentation: disrupting logistics, undermining financial flows, and creating zones of reduced state presence on the periphery, particularly in ethnically heterogeneous border regions. The regime would simultaneously gain a powerful narrative resource — the “besieged fortress” acquires material confirmation(Fars News, 2026) — but this resource operates unevenly. For communities where the external-threat narrative no longer generates loyalty, a strike becomes not a consolidating but a radicalising force. The result is polarisation, sharpest on the peripheries. Information blockade intensifies, yet precisely in these moments alternative narratives — transmitted by diaspora networks, regional actors, and external players — find their largest audiences.(BBC Persian, 2026; Iran International, 2026) Cognitive fragmentation does not dissipate; it migrates to informal channels and ethnic networks, becoming less visible but no less real.

Peripheries and Uneven Statehood

Iran is a multi-ethnic state in which Persians constitute approximately half the population. Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Baluchis, Khuzestani Arabs, and Northeastern Turkmen are each embedded in Iranian statehood differently, with varying degrees of loyalty, autonomy, and historical memory of centre-periphery relations.(Keddie, 2006; Dabashi, 2011) Two symmetric analytical errors must be avoided: ignoring the ethnic dimension as irrelevant, or reducing complex political dynamics to separatism. Most peripheral movements seek expanded autonomy and recognition rather than independent statehood.(International Crisis Group, 2024) The strategic point is different: under the pressure of military strikes and institutional overload, the centre finds it objectively harder to hold the administrative perimeter — not because peripheries rebel, but because governance resources are redistributed toward the capital and key security nodes. Zones of reduced statehood emerge, immediately attracting external actors. These zones are precisely the point of articulation between the Iranian crisis and the post-Soviet security arc. Institutional erosion precedes visible collapse — and peripheries, as a rule, feel it first.

Why the Post-Soviet Arc — Not Only the Middle East

The conventional analytical reflex is to situate the Iranian crisis within the Middle Eastern security system. This is historically understandable but strategically insufficient. Iran functions as the southern hinge of Eurasian security: its territory, corridors, ethnic networks, and information flows link the Middle East with the South Caucasus and Central Asia in a single interdependent system.(Vakil, 2020; International Crisis Group, 2024) Instability south of the Caucasus reverberates northward — not by the laws of geographic adjacency, but by the logic of network connectivity.

The South Caucasus: First Receiver

Azerbaijan occupies a particular position in this configuration. The country shares over 700 kilometres of border with Iran, is a secular Turkic-speaking state with a documented Israeli defence-technology presence, (Asgarov, 2024; Inbar, 2018) and has therefore long been a central element of Iranian threat narratives. Iranian state-aligned sources consistently frame Baku as a staging ground for Israeli and American influence. (Tasnim, 2021; Iran International, 2022) The analytical distinction is crucial: this concerns perception and its strategic consequences, not the verification of specific operational facts. The structural contrast between a secular Turkic state and an Islamic republic arises independently of Baku’s political intentions — but it feeds Iranian anxiety and generates real tension dynamics.(Cornell, 2017) Iranian military exercises near the Azerbaijani border, diplomatic protests over Israeli presence, and encirclement rhetoric are not propaganda but elements of a real strategic logic built around a threat narrative.(Reuters, 2021)

In the event of large-scale strikes and peripheral destabilisation, northwestern Iran — predominantly Azerbaijani-populated — becomes a zone of heightened sensitivity: not as a separatist flashpoint, but as a space where administrative failures, information warfare, and ethnic identity intersect most densely. For Baku this creates simultaneous risks — border instability, migration pressure, provocations — and strategic dilemmas about conflict positioning.(de Waal, 2013; Cornell, 2017) Armenia, though asymmetrically positioned, is embedded in the same dynamics: Iran has traditionally viewed it as a counterweight to the Azerbaijani-Turkish influence corridor, and destabilization reconfigures that calculus while deepening Yerevan’s own geopolitical uncertainty.(de Waal, 2013) Georgia, less directly affected geographically, nonetheless hosts key transit corridors whose strategic value rises sharply under regional disruption.

Central Asia: Second Receiver

Central Asia is connected to Iran less visibly but no less structurally, through three channels. The first is transit-logistical: Iran is a critical element of Eurasian transit routes, including the North-South Corridor. Its destabilisation — and still more the destruction of infrastructure in the course of military operations — forces Central Asian states to urgently reorient commodity and energy flows, deepening dependence on alternative routes and creating conditions for the criminalisation of transit.(Al-Monitor, 2021) The second is identity-informational: Turkmenistan borders Iran; substantial populations in western Afghanistan are Persian-speaking; Islamic networks historically linked to the Iranian space are present across the region. In conditions of Iranian crisis these networks become conduits simultaneously for migration flows, information campaigns, and potential radicalisation.(Pew Research Center, 2017) The Turkic factor is ambivalent: it creates cultural distance from the Iranian narrative while simultaneously making Central Asian societies targets of competing information operations. The third channel is security: the weakening of Iranian border control creates openings for opportunistic actors — arms smuggling, narcotics trafficking, non-state armed groups — adding a western vector of risk to states already under pressure from Afghan instability.(International Crisis Group, 2024)

Major Powers: Interests and Limits

Russia occupies a structurally contradictory position: controlled instability on its southern flank has historically served Russian interests as a lever against post-Soviet states and a constraint on Western penetration,(Vakil, 2020) but uncontrolled turbulence near Caucasian corridors and Central Asian markets represents a direct threat — the more acute given Russia’s own strategic overextension on the Ukrainian front. Turkey operates simultaneously in competition and pragmatic cooperation: the Turkic vector creates structural rivalry with Iranian regional presence, but Ankara’s instruments of direct influence are limited. China is guided above all by corridor stability: Iran is an element of the Belt and Road Initiative, and its destabilisation directly threatens Chinese energy and infrastructure investments.(CSIS, 2020) All three powers share one characteristic: none possesses instruments sufficient to manage full-scale Iranian destabilisation. Post-Soviet states will face the crisis amid competing external agendas and no single stabilising actor.

Scenario Matrix

Scenario analysis here is not futurology. Its purpose is to identify which risk configurations are already active, by what mechanisms they are unfolding, and what consequences they are producing for the post-Soviet security arc. All three scenarios below should be read not as alternative futures but as simultaneously activated tracks of a single crisis process: the operation has set them in parallel motion, and the central question is which will prove dominant.

Scenario A: “Contained Turbulence”

The regime withstands the combination of external pressure and internal protest. The IRGC retains operational control over key institutions; a military strike, if it occurs, damages infrastructure but does not break the command hierarchy. Territorial integrity formally holds — but “containment” here is not stability in the conventional sense. It is a state of chronic tension in which institutional erosion continues, simply more slowly than in other scenarios.(Keddie, 2006; Vakil, 2020) For the post-Soviet arc: the South Caucasus experiences the scenario primarily through information pressure — Iranian encirclement narratives intensify, provoking diplomatic tension with Azerbaijan and creating conditions for border incidents.(Reuters, 2021; Tasnim, 2026) Central Asia faces moderate growth in smuggling flows and grey logistics chains. Major powers maintain a wait-and-see posture. Cognitive fragmentation within Iran deepens but remains latent. The key risk of Scenario A is its temporal instability: contained turbulence tends toward self-reinforcement. Each repression cycle narrows the loyalty base and expands zones where state presence becomes nominal. Scenario A is not an equilibrium — it is a trajectory.

Scenario B: “Institutional Dual Power”

Under the pressure of external escalation and internal shocks, the unity of the Iranian state machine fractures. The IRGC and formal government structures increasingly fail to act as a single organism — competing centres of decision-making emerge with different strategic horizons and different thresholds of acceptable compromise.(Financial Times, 2025; Brookings Institution, 2023) The state remains legally unified but operationally divided. Crucially, this institutional erosion precedes any visible territorial change and is therefore harder to diagnose from the outside — external actors continue to engage with “the Iranian state” as a unitary actor while dual power logic already operates within it. For the South Caucasus: Azerbaijan faces a particular dilemma — Iranian security structures may act incoherently, generating incidents unsanctioned by the formal government.(Cornell, 2017; Asgarov, 2024) Armenia loses a predictable interlocutor in the Iranian Foreign Ministry, whose actual negotiating leverage collapses in conditions of dual power. For Central Asia: the scenario means above all the growth of grey zones — spaces in which no competing Iranian authority exercises effective control, immediately colonised by non-state actors.(International Crisis Group, 2024) Russia, Turkey, and China begin building parallel influence channels bypassing formal state structures, further accelerating institutional disintegration. Competing Iranian power centres inevitably produce competing narratives — and this informational dual power is exported outward. Post-Soviet societies, familiar with the logic of state narrative and its managed deformation, prove relatively receptive to this export.(Al-Monitor, 2026; Iran International, 2026)

Scenario C: “Peripheral Fragmentation”

Large-scale military strikes and the accompanying institutional overload result in the centre de facto losing effective control over a number of peripheral regions. This is not proclaimed independence or armed separatism in the classical sense — it is a governance vacuum immediately filled by external actors, ethnic networks, and non-state armed formations.(Dabashi, 2011; International Crisis Group, 2024) Instability diffuses across regional networks without requiring direct territorial breach. This is the most destructive scenario for the post-Soviet arc — and therefore the least desirable for all major regional players, including those who might extract short-term tactical advantages from Iranian weakness. For the South Caucasus: a migration shock and a sharp intensification of border incidents. Azerbaijan faces pressure from northwestern Iran in the form of displaced persons flows and attempts by external actors to use the Azerbaijani-Iranian borderland as an operational space.(Cornell, 2017; de Waal, 2013) Armenia and Georgia face emergency restructuring of transit routes and border security mechanisms. For Central Asia: direct risk of weapons proliferation and armed non-state actor activity along the western vector, compounding existing pressure from the Afghan direction.(Brookings Institution, 2023; International Crisis Group, 2024) None of the major powers — Russia, Turkey, China — possesses instruments sufficient to stabilise peripheral Iranian fragmentation. Post-Soviet states will confront the crisis amid competing external agendas, without a single stabilising actor and without institutional mechanisms for collective response. Cognitive fragmentation in Scenario C reaches its logical limit: competing narratives about “what is happening in Iran” become an independent destabilising factor, creating mutually incompatible pictures of reality among actors who must coordinate their crisis response. The informational gap between them becomes a strategic vulnerability.

Implications for Israel and Western Actors

Israeli strategic discourse traditionally frames the Iranian threat through the lens of the nuclear programme, ballistic missiles, and proxy networks in the Middle East. This is warranted — but insufficient. The post-Soviet security arc represents a distinct and underappreciated dimension of Israeli strategic interests.(Rubin, 2022; Eisenstadt, 2021) The South Caucasus is not a periphery but a “screen”: the space through which Iranian instability is transmitted into the Eurasian system, and simultaneously a corridor through which risks can travel in both directions. Israel’s defence-technology presence in Azerbaijan — a well-documented fact(Asgarov, 2024; Inbar, 2018) — is already an element of this calculus. Under conditions of large-scale Iranian destabilisation, the stakes of that presence rise sharply: it ceases to be an instrument of bilateral relations and becomes a variable in the broader Eurasian security equation. The Iranian regime has already built a narrative in which Israeli presence in Azerbaijan is an element of strategic encirclement — and acts accordingly. Any Israeli moves in the region, regardless of their actual purpose, will be interpreted by Tehran through this frame and produce corresponding behavioural consequences.(Vakil, 2020)

Four Monitoring Priorities

For Israel and Western analytical structures, Iranian destabilisation poses specific early-warning tasks that extend beyond the traditional Middle Eastern perimeter. First: border corridors and their transformation. The weakening of Iranian border control immediately affects the configuration of arms-smuggling routes, narcotics trafficking, and non-state armed group movement — historically running through the Azerbaijani-Iranian and Turkmen-Iranian borderlands.(International Crisis Group, 2024; CSIS, 2020) Second: information operations. The post-Soviet information space is already an arena of competing narrative campaigns. Iranian state media, diaspora networks, and external players simultaneously work with audiences in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and Central Asia, constructing incompatible pictures of events.(Al-Monitor, 2026; Iran International, 2026; Fars News, 2026) Monitoring these campaigns is not a secondary analytical task: cognitive fragmentation precedes political fragmentation, and its early diagnosis identifies points of institutional stress before they become visible at the material level. Third: diplomatic signals between regional actors. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, and Central Asian states are already probing each other’s positions with heightened intensity. Tracking these signals — including what is deliberately left unsaid — yields a more accurate picture of real strategic calculations than official declarations.(Cornell, 2017; de Waal, 2013) Fourth: proxy-structure activity. Institutional dual power within Iran, if it materialises, will inevitably be reflected in the behaviour of IRGC-affiliated structures beyond Iranian borders — their activation or, conversely, their disorientation in a crisis period is an indicator of fragmentation depth and an independent regional destabilizing factor.(Financial Times, 2025)

A final analytical note: the purpose of this analysis is risk comprehension, not its instrumentalization. A scenario of Iranian fragmentation is not strategically advantageous for any regional actor in the medium term, including those who might extract short-term tactical gains. Israel has an interest in eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat — but not in generating an unmanageable arc of instability to the north and east of its direct sphere of interest.(Rubin, 2022; Eisenstadt, 2021) The structural contrast between different models of statehood in the region arises independently of anyone’s intentions — but how it is managed in a crisis period is determined by the quality of analytical preparation and the timeliness of strategic planning.

Conclusion: The Eurasian Arc as a Unified Risk System

Fragmentation does not begin with the collapse of borders — it begins in the cognitive domain. Competing narratives undermine state coherence before this becomes visible at the institutional or territorial level. Iran is no exception: informational dual power, the gap between the official picture of reality and that formed by peripheral communities and ethnic networks, is already a form of fragmentation, even if no border has yet changed.(Dabashi, 2011; Vakil, 2020; BBC Persian, 2026)

The analytical horizon of this article is therefore deliberately broader than the question of whether Iran will break up. Fragmentation is a process rather than an event: institutional erosion precedes visible collapse, threat perception shapes strategic behaviour more precisely than the actual balance of forces, and instability travels through economic and informational networks long before it acquires territorial expression.(Keddie, 2006; International Crisis Group, 2024) The mere possibility of fragmentation already changes the behaviour of actors — and this change must be tracked and analyzed regardless of which of the three scenarios materializes.

Iran functions as the southern hinge of Eurasian security — and it is precisely this that makes its internal dynamics strategically significant for the post-Soviet space. The South Caucasus and Central Asia are not external to the Iranian crisis: they are embedded in the same arc of risk, connected to it through border corridors, transit routes, ethnic networks, and information flows.(Vakil, 2020; Cornell, 2017; Al-Monitor, 2021) Instability south of the Caucasus reverberates northward — not by the laws of geographic adjacency, but by the logic of network connectivity that recognises no administrative boundaries.

The structural contrast between different models of statehood in the region — secular and theocratic, Turkic and Persian, Western-integrated and autonomy-seeking — arises independently of the political intentions of specific actors.(Cornell, 2017; de Waal, 2013; Asgarov, 2024) This contrast feeds Iranian threat perception, generates encirclement narratives, and produces real geopolitical consequences regardless of its factual accuracy. Threat perception frequently precedes strategic adaptation — and it is precisely for this reason that monitoring narrative dynamics is not an auxiliary but a central analytical task.

The question for strategists in Jerusalem, Washington, Brussels, and the capitals of post-Soviet states is not whether Iran will fragment. It is whether they are prepared for a world in which the very logic of its possible fragmentation is already quietly reshaping the Eurasian security arc — through networks, through narratives, through corridors — before it becomes apparent to those accustomed to responding to events rather than to processes.(Rubin, 2022; Brookings Institution, 2023; Financial Times, 2025)

Bibliography

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Gershon Kogan, PhD, an Israel-based expert in Iranian politics, strategic culture, and Middle Eastern security. He contributes expert analysis to the media, and writes independently on Iranian and regional affairs