Bangladesh, July 17 -- In a Middle East shifting steadily from insurgency to statehood, the imagery of PKK fighters setting fire to their rifles resonated well beyond the Kurdish mountains. The symbolic gesture marked the end of a decades-long armed struggle and declared a definitive ideological departure from militancy. It was not driven by a military defeat or international coercion, but by an intellectual reckoning: the realization that the era of armed nonstate actors, long legitimized by historical grievances and regional chaos, is fading. Hezbollah, however, remains a glaring exception to this trend – one that increasingly places it at odds with a transforming region and a weary domestic population.

Across Iraq, Lebanon, and ...