The Gaza War: how the language of destruction on Israel and the Palestinians overlooks the greater tragedy of the Nation-state. – In the global battle over public opinion regarding the 2023-24 Gaza War, and more specifically within U.S. university campuses, the historical complexities of the geopolitical situation have been reduced to slogans asserting the absolute “right” of one side or the other not only to disregard but also to potentially eliminate the other. Consequently, the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is often interpreted as advocating the removal or destruction of the approximately seven million Jews currently residing in the region, just as the Islamist group Hamas is equated with all Palestinians, rendering them collectively deserving of elimination-a nihilistic claim to destruction mirrored by the opposing side.
The historical reality, however, is far more complex. The creation of the State of Israel was intended to serve as a refuge from persecution for a widely dispersed group, offering Jews protection from the hostility and consequences of historical anti-Semitism. In doing so, however, any possibility of a collective Palestinian political future was necessarily compromised for the population that had historically predominated in the area. The competing claims to the same territory that this process entailed cannot simply be resolved through the adoption of “better language.”
The war over language obscures the fundamental issue at stake: both Israelis and Palestinians are inheritors of the logic of the territorialized (ethno) nation-state, imported from nineteenth-century Europe. This underscores the broader tragedy of the nation-state that the Gaza War exemplifies. A shared political space remains inconceivable as long as this logic prevails.

Vladimir Putin’s territorial trap: what the invasion of Ukraine reveals about the contemporary war-sovereignty nexus. – The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is a clear demonstration of how the conduct of a war can highlight what purpose the war is supposed to serve. In this article, President Vladimir Putin’s putative objectives in the Ukraine war are connected to the war-sovereignty nexus through the concept of geopolitical order, arguing that war fulfills different objectives under different geopolitical conditions because different combinations of sovereignty regimes are operative under different geopolitical orders. Attention then turns to the discourse of sovereignty adopted by Putin and how it reflects a certain set of contradictory understandings about sovereignty implicit in the conduct of the war.