Telos 205 (Winter 2023): Forms of War

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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Telos 203 (Summer 2023): The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights

Telos 203 (Summer 2023): The Manifold Foundations of Human Rights 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 disappointing human rights debacles in the last few years was the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. For those who still take an interest, the human rights situation there has become horrendous, with Human Rights Watch documenting the denial of schooling and employment to women, extrajudicial killings, and torture. Moreover, in a severe rebuttal to those who supported the withdrawal, Taliban rule has created the conditions for a renewal of terrorist groups that can now develop and train in Afghanistan with impunity. There is also a good case to be made that the U.S. withdrawal there emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, calculating that the United States and its allies no longer have the stomach for protracted conflicts in order to prevent human rights abuses. It may be that we have traded a low-grade conflict in Afghanistan for a high-intensity one in Ukraine. The lesson here is that the struggle for human rights, while beginning as a moral problem about our common responsibilities, can only be taken seriously when we consider its political ramifications. What do we owe to our fellow humans, and what sacrifices should we make in order to fulfill those responsibilities?

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The Telos Press Podcast: John Milbank on Carl Schmitt and the Current Global Crisis

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with John Milbank about his article “A Tale of Two Monsters and Four Elements: Variations of Carl Schmitt and the Current Global Crisis,” from Telos 201 (Winter 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the three idioms into which Milbank divides Carl Schmitt’s thought; why they should be seen as separate idioms rather than different aspects of a single perspective; the extent of overlap between the idioms; whether the decisionist Schmitt is as arbitrary as he is made out to be; the characteristics of a medieval European conception of nomos that Schmitt wishes to retrieve; the similarities between Schmitt’s third idiom of global regions and both Nazism and Russian theorists like Gumilev, Panarin, and Dugin; Schmitt’s decisionism, basic values, identity, and thinking through popular sovereignty. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 201 are available for purchase in our online store.

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Twenty-First-Century Imperialism

On the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the continuing war indicates that the foundations of a rules-based global order are not just the rules themselves but also the structure of sovereignty that supports those rules. Sovereignty includes both the use of power and the establishment of a legitimating vision of order. The challenges to the Westphalian system of global order consequently come not just from the Russian invasion but also from the Russian idea of its civilizational mission against Western secularism as well as China’s idea of a “shared humanity for mankind.” Telos 201 provides analyses of both of these alternative visions for global order. Matthew Dal Santo, for example, describes Russia’s stance as a defense of a spiritual rather than a secular conception of the basis of order. Gordon Chang analyzes the way in which China has been promoting its tianxia model of unified global governance against the chaos and conflict of separate sovereign nation-states. The frame within which to view these alternative visions is not the struggle between spirituality and secularism or between China and the West, but the global development of nationalism.

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How Volodymyr Zelensky Changed the World

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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National Populism at War

One of the surprising aspects of the Ukraine War is that it came as a surprise. After the devastation that Russia wreaked in Chechnya, after the invasion of Georgia, after the occupation of Crimea—and the list goes on: after Russia’s complicity in the destruction of Aleppo and the violence of the Wagner Group deployments especially in Africa, and, most obviously, after Putin’s explicit declaration of his intent, the West could nevertheless watch Russia prepare for the invasion and still believe that it would not happen. Before the invasion would have been the time to arm Ukraine. Instead the West succumbed to a Chamberlain-like logic of self-delusion: if we do nothing, the aggressor will dissipate. The wishful thinking of liberalism is a scourge. It remains to be seen whether the brutality of Russian violence will change that mindset in the foreign policy elite. Optimism is not warranted.

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