Conflict transmission and peripheral vulnerability: the USA-Israel war on Iran and its cascading effects on African political economies

The joint United States-Israel military campaign against Iran, launched in late February 2026, has generated consequences extending well beyond the Middle East. This conceptual paper develops a framework for understanding how armed conflicts initiated by core states produce cascading political-economic disruptions in peripheral regions, with particular attention to Africa. Drawing on world-systems theory, dependency analysis, and securitisation theory, the paper identifies five distinct transmission channels through which the Iran conflict reverberates across African political economies: energy price shocks, trade route disruption, security partnership vacuums, proxy activation, and diplomatic realignment. The analysis demonstrates that Africa’s structural position within the global political economy renders the continent disproportionately susceptible to the externalities of great power military interventions. The paper contributes to an under-theorised intersection between Middle Eastern geopolitics and African political economy, proposing the concept of ‘conflict transmission’ as an analytical tool for examining how the costs of warfare in the global core are externalised onto peripheral economies. The argument carries implications for scholarship on dependency, conflict spillovers, and the political economy of the Global South, highlighting how peripheral vulnerability is compounded by external shocks.