By David Pan · Monday, February 12, 2024 
As much as war has become automated and mechanized, the subjective experience of the horror of war remains central to its meaning today. Russia, through its intentional bombing of civilians, and Hamas, with its massacres, have both sought to manipulate personal experience by terrorizing their enemies to achieve their war aims. Such tactics have also become the basis of their rule, in which they use fear to intimidate domestic political opponents to maintain their power. While they seek to create fear, the response of Ukrainians and Israelis alike has been to respond to subjective horror with the courage to maintain resistance while also affirming their values. War continues to be grounded in the way in which the participants’ most personal experiences can create a unified political will.
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By David Pan · Friday, January 12, 2024 Telos 205 (Winter 2023): Forms of War is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 One of the most challenging aspects of the wars in Ukraine and Israel is the way in which the conflicts have been constantly shifting in form. In the first place, there is a conventional ground war between Russia and Ukraine, in which the identity and will of the two peoples are at stake. Yet Russia has used weapons supplied by Iran and North Korea, and Ukraine relies on NATO for its own supplies, indicating that this war depends on the maintenance and expansion of alliances. The stability of these alliances in turn depends on a combination of Realpolitik and shared values as the glue that holds them together. This logic of alliances motivates the energy war that Russia is waging with Europe, revealing that, unbeknownst to Europe, Russian energy policy over the last decade was an early form of the war. Similarly, the threat of nuclear war also tests the resolve of NATO, forcing it to consider the values at stake in the conflict. Is the war about Ukraine’s sovereignty or the principle of nation-state sovereignty itself? Is it about human rights for Ukrainians or the entire human rights project? For Russia, is it about self-defense or a pan-Slavic identity? Is it about the protection of Russian minorities in Ukraine or the threat of Western secularization? The answers to these questions will determine the will to fight on each side and thus the length and ferocity of the war.
Similarly, the war between Israel and Hamas began with Hamas’s use of terror and rape as instruments of war. The idea was to provoke Israel into attacking Hamas and causing civilian casualties. Because the terrain of war extends to public opinion in the West, Hamas’s use of Israeli hostages and Palestinian human shields becomes part of its strategy of increasing civilian casualties in the war. Even though Hamas is the ultimate cause of such casualties, Hamas is able to pressure Israel by placing civilians in the path of Israel’s war effort. The conflict on the ground in Gaza is thus overshadowed by the struggle for hearts and minds across the globe.
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By David Pan · Monday, October 24, 2022 Volodymyr Zelensky has virtually single-handedly demonstrated the world-historical importance of sovereignty and its mechanisms. Before his courageous insistence on Ukrainian sovereignty, the world—including the United States, with its offer of a helicopter ride for Zelensky out of Kyiv—was already treating the Russian subjugation of Ukraine as a fait accompli and the continuation of business as usual. Russia was using in Ukraine the methods that it had already successfully practiced in Chechnya, Syria, and Belarus while the rest of the world stood by to allow such methods to become normalized. By taking his stand in Kyiv, Zelensky was declaring to the Ukrainian people and the rest of the world that Russia’s invasion was in fact not a normal action that had to be accepted. Suddenly, Russia’s years-long undermining of the idea of popular sovereignty in different parts of the world had been called out as a transgression, leading to global insights about recent history and our role in its development. The nations of Europe above all, but also the United States, have had to face the extent to which their energy policies were contributing to Russia’s reshaping of global norms. Zelensky has forced us to take a stand one way or the other in deciding the political shape of the world for the foreseeable future.
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By Telos Press · Monday, July 25, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Mark G.E. Kelly and Timothy W. Luke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its consequences for world order. Our current issue, Telos 199 (Summer 2022), features essays by Luke, Kelly, and Pan on the war in Ukraine, excerpts of which appear here. Click through to read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are also available for purchase in our online store.
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