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    • Lebanon and the Measuring of West Asia

      Lebanon and the Measuring of West Asia

      Man among rubble in Lebanon, Photo: Courtney Bonneau Photography

      The war between the United States, Israel and Iran has set West Asia ablaze—and Lebanon has once again become one of its frontlines. As is so often the case in Lebanon, it is misleading to treat individual military incidents in isolation. The war must instead be understood as part of a broader geopolitical reordering of the region. In this process, Lebanon is less an actor than a stage on which developments play out that reach far beyond its own political conflicts.

      Lebanon was drawn into the latest escalation on the night of March 2, when Hezbollah fired a rocket at Israel—two days after the killing of the Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei. Yet the events of that night explain the current situation only to a very limited degree. The situation along the Israeli–Lebanese border has been extremely tense for some time. Since the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in November 2024, Israel has continued to carry out attacks in southern Lebanon; reports speak of more than 15,000 violations of the agreement. Numerous villages have been destroyed, homes systematically leveled, and agricultural land laid waste to. International observers have described these developments with terms such as “domicide”—the deliberate destruction of homes—and “ecocide,” referring to the devastation of entire landscapes. The use of white phosphorus and glyphosate has damaged soil and vegetation, leaving behind long-term ecological harm. At the same time, Israel had been mobilizing militarily for months and stationed around 100,000 reservists along the border even before Hezbollah fired its rocket.

      Israel is now demanding the evacuation of the entire area south of the Litani River as well as the southern suburbs of Beirut. More than 100 villages are to be cleared, while airstrikes are carried out throughout the country. For southern Lebanon this means the evacuation of roughly a quarter of a million people; another half million live in the affected suburbs of Beirut. Within just a few days, more than 95,000 people have been officially registered as displaced—the actual number is likely much higher. More than 200 people, including children, have been killed and around 800 injured.

      The Litani as Strategic Line

      The Litani River is not merely a geographical line. It marks a political boundary within a space that has been repeatedly measured and re-measured as regional powers redraw the map of West Asia. The Litani is the longest river that runs entirely within Lebanon and a crucial water resource for agriculture, drinking water supply and energy production. At the same time, it has long functioned as a strategic line in the Lebanon–Israel conflict—not least since Israel’s “Operation Litani” in 1978, which first explicitly turned the river into a militarily defined security line.

      When Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in September 2024, he spoke of the “blessing” of economic integration between Israel and the states of West Asia, contrasting it with the “curse” of Iranian influence in the region. In that speech he also outlined how he envisioned the region’s economic development—and pointed to the attractiveness of the Litani River region in southern Lebanon.

      The Measuring of West Asia

      Such remarks must be understood in the context of broader plans to redraw the region militarily, politically and economically. One of the central frameworks for this is the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), announced at the G20 summit in September 2023. The corridor aims to connect India with Europe via the Gulf states, Israel and the Mediterranean through railway lines, ports, energy infrastructure and digital networks.

      Projects of this kind do more than establish infrastructure and transport routes—they also measure and reorder geopolitical space in imperial terms.

      IMEC stands in competition with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has been expanding global trade routes for years. In both cases, infrastructure functions as an instrument of geopolitical power: whoever controls corridors controls trade flows, and whoever controls trade flows shifts the balance of power. The eastern Mediterranean is therefore not a peripheral region but a strategically important hub.

      Lebanon, marked by its position as a geopolitical node where competing interests intersect, repeatedly becomes an arena in which larger conflicts play out. Civil war, military interventions, regional power politics and international interests have left behind a fragile state whose political institutions are repeatedly shaken. This, in turn, deepens social inequality, class conflict and the unequal distribution of political power.

      Hezbollah and the Limits of the Lebanese State

      These inequalities were a decisive factor in the Lebanese civil war from 1975 to 1990 and in the developments that followed. Many of its front lines ran along confessional affiliations. But to describe it simply as a religious conflict—as is often done—is highly reductive. The Shia population, for instance—long the country’s largest but also its most politically and economically marginalized community—was particularly affected by these structural tensions. While segments of Sunni, Druze and especially Maronite Christian elites exercised disproportionate influence over the state, economy and administration, many Shia communities in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and later the rapidly expanding suburbs of Beirut lived under conditions of persistent state neglect. For decades these regions suffered from poor infrastructure, weak state presence and limited economic prospects.

      It was from this social and political context that Hezbollah built its social base. Following the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon in 1982, it initially emerged as a resistance movement and eventually developed into the most powerful military and political actor in the country. At the same time, it became an important instrument of Iranian regional policy and an actor that has significantly limited the political agency and sovereignty of the Lebanese state.

      Accordingly, Hezbollah’s role within the Lebanese state remains deeply contested. While its supporters view it as a resistance movement against Israel, its critics within Lebanon have long argued that the organization does not act in the interest of a sovereign Lebanese state but rather in the strategic interest of Iran. In this way, it has become part of a regional power structure that repeatedly draws Lebanon into wider geopolitical conflicts.

      These opposing assessments do not arise in a political vacuum. Experiences of war, occupation and repeated attacks on Lebanese territory are part of the country’s collective memory—and make the desire for retaliation or deterrence, particularly among those most affected, understandable. Yet this poses a danger for an already fragile country: the logic of retaliation repeatedly pulls Lebanon into cycles of escalation that further undermine its political stability. Many Lebanese therefore wish for a state capable of making decisions independently of regional power blocs.

      State capacity, however, is not limited only by Hezbollah’s military autonomy. It is also repeatedly undermined from the outside by military interventions, attacks and occupation. It would therefore be misguided to respond to Lebanon’s reality with simplistic answers—for example the notion that a political solution could be reduced to the disarmament of Hezbollah. The entanglement of internal political conflicts, regional power interests and military escalation makes the situation far more complex.

      Lines of Power

      Today, the whole of Lebanon has once again become an arena of war. Airstrikes no longer hit only the border regions but cities and infrastructure across the entire country. The events cannot be reduced simply to the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah. Rather, Lebanon now lies at the center of several intertwined conflict lines within a broader attempt to reorder the geopolitical map of West Asia.

      One of these conflict lines follows the strategic confrontation between Iran and the United States. For Tehran, Hezbollah is a key component of its regional deterrence strategy against Israel. For Washington and its allies, this very connection is viewed as a security threat. At the same time, debates in Israel about territorial expansion have emerged that cannot be explained solely in terms of security interests. In this context, references—most recently by Yair Lapid—have also been made to the historical notion of a “Greater Israel.”

      Recently, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on a children’s book titled Alon and Lebanon, aimed at children aged two to six. The story is meant to teach children that Lebanon actually belongs to Israel. According to Haaretz, the book was partly financed by the far-right settler movement Uri Tzafon (“Awaken, O North”). The group openly advocates Israeli settlement in southern Lebanon. Maps and promotional materials depict areas south of the Litani River—including cities such as Tyre, Bint Jbeil and Marjeyoun—as part of an expanded Israeli territory. Lebanese place names are replaced with Hebrew ones. Notably, recent evacuation orders issued by the Israeli army follow the maps promoted by this movement: the areas designated for evacuation correspond to the regions marked as future settlement zones.

      Projects of this kind recall a political pattern long familiar in the region: buffer zones, security belts or military control areas that are initially introduced as temporary measures but later solidify into permanent territorial realities and form the basis for unlawful territorial expansion.

      Alongside this struggle over territory—often framed in the language of security policy—there is another conflict line: the geopolitical race for infrastructure corridors, trade routes and strategic spheres of influence in West Asia.

      Lebanon itself is also attempting to find its place within this newly measured geopolitical landscape. Leading Lebanese politicians have begun openly discussing the possibility of the country’s participation in IMEC. President Joseph Aoun has stated that Lebanon would be ready to take part in such initiatives if they serve national interests and strengthen the country’s logistical role in the region. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam likewise emphasized that integrating the ports of Beirut and Tripoli into new trade routes could represent a strategic opportunity for the economically battered country.

      What remains unclear, however, is how a country that exists in almost permanent conflict with Israel could practically participate in such a project. This question alone illustrates how geopolitical planning often moves ahead of the political realities of individual states—for instance the fact that the Lebanese state itself does not possess the capacity to militarily disarm Hezbollah or fully enforce its territorial sovereignty. Perhaps this reveals the double meaning contained in the measuring of West Asia: it refers not only to the measuring of territory, but also to the political hubris with which the territories of other states are treated as potential spaces of expansion.

      For Lebanon, the existential question is how a state that for decades has served as an arena for regional conflicts can regain room to maneuver politically. Normalizing relations with Israel and making security concessions may appear to be among the few remaining options to avoid being crushed between the interests of regional and global powers. Yet even this path would be less an expression of sovereignty than of coercion.

      What one might wish for Lebanon is something different: the possibility of once again deciding its own political future—without proxy wars fought on its territory, without recurring external interventions and without being treated as a geopolitical transit corridor.

      Hope begins precisely here: in the utopian imagination of what might become possible if Lebanon were no longer the object of this measuring.

      Sources and Background Material

      The arguments developed in this text draw on reports by international media outlets, investigations by human rights organizations, analyses by regional research institutes, as well as background conversations with government representatives.

      1. Conflict Reporting and Monitoring

      2. Human Rights Reports and Forensic Investigations

      3. Journalistic Reporting

      4. Geopolitics and Infrastructure (IMEC)

      5. Academic Literature

    • Colonial versus anti-colonial transgressions of the civilian–combatant divide

      Nicola Perugini, “Between Anti-Colonial Resistance and Colonial Genocide: Gaza at the Limits of International Law”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, November 2025, 1–14, doi:10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214.

      Perugini highlights a major blind spot in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as to how it has recognised anti-colonial wars. Perugini points out that IHL’s limited recognition of anti-colonial violence – enshrined in the 1977 Additional Protocols which institutionalised the right to fight against colonial occupation through armed struggle – rests on a static state-centric framework where the civilian is imagined only as a passive, nonpartisan victim in need of protection, while it is the combatant who engages in violently dismantling colonial occupation and domination through anti-colonial resistance. However, historically we know that anti-colonial movements have challenged this IHL principle of distinction between civilians and combatants by blurring the line between the two in a collective struggle. Adopting the perspective of the colonized, Perugini thus calls for “decolonizing the civilian” in international law. To Perugini, this perspective “forces us to rethink the civilian as a figure of resistance rather than passivity” (p.2).

      In the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the stakes around the distinction between civilians and combatants decide over life and death for most Gazans, and certainly for all males and even male children. As Perugini points out, Israel uses precisely this distinction to kill with impunity all those who dare to blur the line between civilians and combatants. The recent example of a local ZDF contractor also illustrates, how targetting of journalists is justified by Israel and German media by questioning the civilian status of journalists.

      More specifically, by drawing on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Perugini highlights two dialectically entwined forms of transgression that are at odds with IHL. On the one hand, anticolonial forces merge the civilian and the combatant in their anticolonial struggle through, for instance, the network and infrastructure of tunnels which have a commercial and a military purpose. Through tunnelling, Palestinian resistance groups have undermined the distinction to be able to “challenge the asymmetry of the battlefield” through “subterranean warfare” (p.7). On the other hand, the state of Israel uses this very indistinction in order “to destroy the colonised people as people”. To Perugini, both transgressions of international law allow us to better grasp the limits of international law, as well as the relationship between colonial genocide and anticolonial resistance in settler-colonial contexts.

      Perugini’s call to decolonize the civilian in IHL thus allows us to better understand why anticolonial resistance necessitates the indistinction, and how IHL allows Israel to justify self-defence as a coloniser by denying the colonised their own right to self-defence. “This inversion of aggression and defence is central to the colonial logic of genocide.” (p. 10).

      ↗ https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2025.2578214

    • The terms “war” and “genocide” should not be played off against each other.

      The terms “war” and “genocide” should not be played off against each other.

      Both in internal KriSol debates and, for example, in an interview with Omer Bartov in German-language Jacobin, it has recently become clear that there are considerable reservations about the term “war” within movements in solidarity with Palestine. Instead, the preference is to link the moral and political assessment of the mass violence against Gaza and its population to the legal concept of genocide—even though for some time now, members of the German federal government have been deliberately using this term as an opportunity to avoid drawing any conclusions from the violence. They point out that the courts have yet to decide whether genocide has actually been committed, or they ignore journalistic inquiries about consequences of genocide altogether. The latter was the case, for example, at a government press conference shortly after the fragile ceasefire began in October 2025, which dealt, among other things, with the German chancellor’s considerations regarding the resumption of unrestricted arms exports to Israel. Obviously, the term “genocide” alone is not enough to build political pressure. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the courts will actually rule in a few years’ time that the Israeli government has committed genocide in Gaza.

      There is therefore ample reason to fear that a discursive narrowing to the term genocide could be used not only now, but especially in the future, to ward off responsibility and deny mass violence. Against this background, we advocate the strategic revaluation of an empirical-analytical concept of war that refers to observable reality, thereby emphasizing the political significance of empirical evidence and not making itself dependent on legal judgments.

      Genocidal war is no less cruel than genocide

      The term “war” is often considered inappropriate, especially by those who strongly condemn the mass violence against Palestinians and urgently demand political consequences.  They criticize that “war” implies symmetry—a conflict between sides with at least roughly equal capacity to act—and thus could enable both-sidesism in the assessment of mass violence against Gaza (this is also roughly the reasoning behind the rejection in the interview with Bartov linked above). We share the criticism of both-sidesism. At the same time, as peace and conflict researchers, we disagree with the impression that wars are symmetrical per se. Empirically, this is definitely not the case.

      “War” primarily refers to the circumstance that violence is exercised and suffered on a massive scale. Admittedly, in quantitative research, the term is indeed mainly attached to the number of battle-related deaths, suggesting that war consists primarily of combat between opposing sides. The idea here is that armed actors (at least one of them a state army) fight each other and that both combatants and (unintentionally or acceptably) civilians are killed in the process (see, for example, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program). However, such definitions have long been criticized within peace and conflict research and are considered overly simplistic and insufficiently reflective of the actual dynamics of war. The concept clearly does not apply to Gaza, for example, where civilians and civilian infrastructure were directly and immediately attacked, killed, and destroyed. Direct attacks on the civilian population also occur in wars for which no genocidal logic can be empirically identified, i.e., wars that do not specifically destroy the living and survival conditions of members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, to stay close to the Genocide Convention. Examples of non-genocidal violence against civilian populations can be found, for example, in the context of military interventions – think of the US drone wars and the unspeakable term “collateral damage” – and also in civil wars, where non-state armed actors sometimes use violence against the civilian population to obtain food, labor, and forced recruits.

      When we nevertheless speak and write of “war” in such situations, this takes into account the fact that, from a global and historical perspective, mass violence has rarely been symmetrical and that it has very often been and continues to be directed against civilian populations. All forms of colonial, and often genocidal, violence since the 16th century could serve as examples here. In this respect, unilateral mass violence is not actually a special case. Rather, the symmetrical struggle between uniformed armies, which has mistakenly (only thanks to Eurocentrism) shaped the image of war in Western minds, should be considered to  be a special case.

      We therefore propose not rejecting the concept of war outright, but using it free of Eurocentric assumptions of symmetrical violence in order to bring the relevance of empirically proven violence to the fore. The advantage of such a term is that it can be used to characterize mass violence in very different forms as morally and politically relevant—because “war” is a man-made catastrophe, and the term signals that action is needed here. The second step is to empirically clarify the central characteristics of the war in question. One suggestion for the empirical description of mass violence in Gaza is “genocidal war”: that is, mass violence that, based on empirical observations, can plausibly be interpreted as an intent to destroy. Compared to genocide, “genocidal war” has the advantage that it does not have to be confirmed by courts, but is based solely on extensively documented empirical observations – which in politics is usually sufficient as a basis for decision-making and action! The use of the term “war” can and should therefore be used to counter arguments that court proceedings must be awaited before decisions can be made about consequences in relation to the Israeli government. Whatever the courts decide, the empirical evidence alone should be proof enough that a genocidal war has been waged and that this is just as unacceptable as genocide established by a court of law.

      This brings us finally to the de facto hierarchization of suffering, which also concerns Dirk Moses and is undoubtedly a core problem of the legal concept of genocide. This concept is intended to describe the worst of all crimes, but is so narrowly defined that the vast majority of mass violence cannot be covered by it and is thus inevitably labeled as “less serious.” Here, too, the concept of war could have a corrective effect in the long term by counteracting such a hierarchy.

      Taking a multi-pronged discursive approach

      Of course, it still makes sense to use the concept of genocide, especially to demand the application of international law. Our central point is only that it is unwise for movements in solidarity with Palestine to put all their political and moral eggs in one basket—especially in the case of international law, which is known to be selectively effective and permeated by colonial logics! We should pursue a multi-pronged discourse in order to escape a situation in which key actors deny responsibility for the most serious crimes and in which moral and legal condemnation are so closely intertwined that future acquittals would, in the worst case, amount to whitewashing. The term “genocidal war” allows us to do this.

    • An invisible university for Ukraine and the rest of the world

      Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War, ed. by Ostap Sereda, Balázs Trencsényi, Tetiana Zemliakova, Guillaume Lancereau, Ithaka/London (Cornell University Press) 2024.

      It is a global phenomenon: Universities around the world are under massive pressure—from defunding, subjugation to market logic, the elimination of entire departments, political interventions, and attacks on academic freedom and freedom of teaching, to the targeted physical destruction of university buildings, the killing of scientists, and “scholasticide” when the aim is to strike at an entire people. Since 2022, the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) has been offering online courses for Ukrainian students to help them work through their war experiences and the genocidal threat posed by Russian aggression, using innovative academic methods; almost 1,000 students have benefited from the courses so far. The collection “Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War,” published just under a year ago, features very moving personal contributions from students and professors at the highest level of reflection in the Ukrainian context, showing what one would wish for in any other context: a new, honest, unreserved way of generating knowledge at the university.

      “The need for uncommon institutional responses to the autocratic pressure on higher education has been a recurring topic of discussion since the late 2000s,” write Ostap Sereda und Balázs Trencsényi in the introduction; as early as that, the “Western” model of university education had already lost credibility in Eastern Europ. “The Invisible University was also a response to this crisis of academia, experimenting, under the pressure of an unprecedented situation of mass dislocation of students and scholars, to relink the educational, research, and civic components in unconventional and innovative ways.” The Invisible University does not see itself as a solitary entity, but rather as part of a cross-temporal and cross-spatial network, connected to other similar initiatives in the 20th and 21st centuries, in a history that is briefly and impressively traced in the introduction.

      These initiatives, whether online or offline, have and always had a few things in common: a transnational, global perspective that combines global and regional perspectives and transcends national boundaries; a radically democratic approach that seeks dialogue rather than hierarchies; and a connection between the academic and the existential dimensions. The Russian war against Ukraine is the immediate catalyst for the Invisible University for Ukraine and the conditioner of its tensions, specifically: Although the IUFU works against Eurocentrism and uses postcolonial tools, it sees itself in a struggle that is, in addition to survival, about insisting on common “European” values. It must endure the fact that its civil engagement can conflict with the survival imperatives of war when it becomes critical of its own government. And it faces the (resolved) dilemma of how to deal with Russian colleagues as its main goal is to work toward a non-Russocentric understanding of the post-Soviet space and as it consistently boycots all Russian state institutions.

      The individual contributions show how the existential and the academic can be integrated and convey different, complementary lessons from the war. It is above all the dramatic changes in the concept of time brought about by the war – the altered temporalities – that have a profound effect on knowledge. The contributions spell out what this means in concrete terms: in the daily struggle for survival with the “sobering absurdity of death” (Denys Tereshchenko), where sacrifices are demanded and one makes them, or one doesn’t; in dealing with the media side of the war, the “digital witnessing” in the face of a volatile global public, and the ignorance of even well-intentioned reactions; but above all in readjusting the relationship between participation and observation in research and teaching. Only through honest dialogue can a future remain conceivable with new ideas – “my war is about creating spaces of dialogue” (Balázs Trencsényi). The feeling of “professional failure,” of “should have known” (Diána Vonnák), “wading through unmetabolized experience and a cacophony of guesswork, motivated speech, misinformation, and rudimentary analysis,” is made fruitful as a lesson in epistomology: “We could call it a fog of war in the epistemic sense, but if we flip this around, this fog is ever-present, the stuff of fieldwork, and navigating it is a predicament of any contemporary empirical research.”

      The anthology ends with an overview of all the courses that IUFU has taught since 2022 and the very moving and sometimes also funny short biographies of the contributors in the shadow of war. Tetiana Zemliakova, for example, who, apart from the IUFU, can only focus on the ontology of time: “She always knew she was living through the last days of historical humankind, but she could never guess these would be so stupid.”

      ↗ https://d119vjm4apzmdm.cloudfront.net/open-access/pdfs/9781501782886.pdf