As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue, the subjective experience of war has become more and more important to our view of the conflicts and the way they are transforming the societies that experience these wars directly. In a follow-up to our recently released Telos issue on Forms of War, we present this week some reflections on the experience of war. Gabriel Mayer-Heft recounts his visit to one of the places where Hamas carried out their massacre of Israelis. We have also made available the video of the session on the subjective experience of war at our Forms of War conference last March, featuring Beau Mullen, Mario Bosincu, and Camelia Raghinaru.
Every war forces us to reconsider the character of war and the forms that it can take. In the first place, the insight that leads to a war is one about the nature of a conflict. War only begins once the parties determine that there is an otherwise irresolvable conflict about the basis of order. The course of a war also results in a practical insight into the form of a postwar order. Peace and stability cannot arrive until all come to an agreement about the new understanding of order. The essays in Telos 205 are based on papers presented at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference on “Forms of War,” held in New York in the spring of 2023. The participants considered different ways of understanding the relationship between conflict and insight in war as well as examples of how the conceptualization of conflict affects the outbreak, progress, and outcome of wars.
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From ideological dynamics in revolutionary Russia, cultural stagnation in the USSR, and ineffective Soviet governance in the 1980s to the USSR’s institutional collapse in 1991, the emergence of the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin’s wars in Ukraine since 2014, Timothy Luke investigates how the geopolitical clout of the United States has worked to contain, but at other times sustain, the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. Luke’s critical studies also examine how Moscow’s strategies provoked radical Islamic resistance movements in Afghanistan and aided anti-Western client states, like Iraq and Syria, that threatened the New World Order envisioned in Washington after 1991.
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