War Archives - Public Seminar

History

Honest Truths From Wrongful Deaths

In an excerpt from Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, the author surveys how left-wing intellectuals responded to 9/11

December 3, 2025 • by Jeremy Varon

The first war the United States fought following 9/11, I argue, was a “war of interpretation” over the root causes and deep meaning of the attacks themselves. Below is a section from the first chapter of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War (University of Chicago Press, 2025), in ...

Genocide

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Sexual violence and the destruction of medical infrastructure are not separate catastrophes

December 2, 2025 • by Ayotunde Giwa

On October 28, 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher. Satellite images show what Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified as bodies scattered across the hospital grounds. Videos filmed by RSF fighters themselves show militia walking through ransacked wards, stepping over piles of dead ...

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Activism

A Lost Utopia

A review of Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History

October 7, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

In a speech delivered to the United States Congress on July 25, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a sharp retort to protestors against Israel’s genocide in Gaza: They call Israel a colonialist state. Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah ...

History

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

The success of an immigration or refugee resettlement can never be fully evaluated in the first decades

September 16, 2025 • by Catherine Simpson Bueker

Catherine Simpson Bueker explores the legacy of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act and how Vietnamese refugees in America reshaped US society....

Looking Back: The Indochina Migration and Refugee Act

Middle East & North Africa

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

A new book by Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

March 3, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025) is a book that will cause much outrage among some of its intended audience: fellow Jews. If there is one thing to which many Jews cleave, it is to our history of victimhood, and the purity that ...

Israel’s Grotesque Violation of Jewish Values

Education

Schools Are for Children, Not Soldiers

Global scholasticide is getting worse

December 3, 2024 • by Charles Bradley

The fact that you can read this article makes it likely that you, like 7.2 billion people worldwide who completed primary education, remember spending much of your childhood at school. Learning is, by definition, challenging, and those of us reminiscing about childhood may also remember the stresses of grappling with math ...

Education

Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War

There are currently no conversation partners for Western academics within the Russian academy

October 1, 2024 • by Nataliia Viatkina

A recent issue of Aeon featured an article entitled “The Missing Conversation,” with the subtitle “To the detriment of the public, scientists and historians don’t engage with one another. They must begin a new dialogue.” The article amounts to a conversation between the famous scientists and historians of science, professors Lorraine Daston and ...

Academic Dialogue Against the Background of War

Europe & Central Asia

Thinking in Dark Times: Life, Death, and Social Solidarity

Living through war can transform how we engage with philosophy

September 30, 2024 • by Aaron James Wendland and Volodymyr Yermolenko

This lecture was delivered as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic ...

Thinking in Dark Times: Life, Death, and Social Solidarity

Middle East & North Africa

On The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy’s journey into his country’s heart of darkness

September 23, 2024 • by Benoit Challand

Gideon Levy, an award-winning journalist for the liberal Israeli English-language daily Haaretz, has been covering the Palestinian occupied territories since the late 1980s. His column, “Twilight Zone,” published during the Oslo process, was famously unsettling to many Israelis because he established, week after week, that the celebrated peace process was ...

On <em>The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe</em>

Literature

Very Far From the Homeland

On contemporary readings from Etel Adnan, Mahmoud Darwish, and Alice Oswald exile in the Iliad

September 4, 2024 • by Lyndsey Stonebridge

One of the cruelties of the Iliad is how alive each person is made to appear just before they are killed. That is the point of Homer's long, detailed lists of Greeks and Trojans: names, deeds, parents, brothers, spouses, children, lovers, skills, bad hair, swift feet, words, and weapons. The poem about ...

Interviews

“The gun has become a type of thinking”

A conversation about war with the Sudanese writer Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin

June 26, 2024 • by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin and Anna Simone Reumert

Sudan needs a leader that is disconnected to this power. The “Messiah” in my novel about Darfur is not connected to any religion, he is a symbol of spirituality. The opposite of political Islam, which has ruled the country for so long....