Israel's Survival in a 'State of Nature': Unprecedented Obligations of Law and Strategy
Facing recurrent cycles of terror-violence in a “state of nature,” Israel must defend itself in both law and strategy. Though generally unacknowledged, this dual-level defense could prove gainful not just for Israel, but also for other “civilized nations” in world politics. A patently core obligation, it is universal in scope and justice-seeking in objective. Multiple [...]
JURIST Senior Editor for Long Form Content Pitasanna Shanmugathas interviews Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, chief editor of LeftWord Books, and author of forty books including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World and The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. In this interview, Prashad delves [...]
Continuing one of America’s most influential legacies, Dr. Bernice A. King has established herself as a formidable force for justice and reconciliation in her own right. As we mark Black History Month, JURIST Senior Editor Pitasanna Shanmugathas sits down with the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—a woman who was just five years [...]
“The safety of the people shall be the highest law.” Cicero, The Laws During the coming year, the United States, in occasional concert with Israel, must confront expanding terrorist threats. Topping pertinent concerns in Washington and Jerusalem will be a sordid assortment of jihadi groups, some spawned by the al-Assad regime collapse in Syria and [...]
Israel's Nuclear Doctrine: A Science and Law-Based Assessment
“Science, by which I mean the entire body of knowledge about things, whether corporeal or spiritual, is as much a work of imagination as it is of observation… The latter is not possible without the former.” Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, Man and Crisis (1958) For now, the fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria has [...]
Syria rights group reports over 112,000 individuals remain forcibly disappeared due to Assad regime
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) reported on Saturday that at least 112,414 individuals remain forcibly disappeared due to the actions of the Assad regime in Syria, despite the recent releases of thousands of detainees. The SNHR emphasized that these disappearances are not isolated incidents but part of a broader strategy employed by the [...]
Though the fall of Syria’s Assad would appear gainful for Israel prima facie, a potential nuclear threat from Iran not only remains, but is plausibly greater than before. One reason for such a counter-intuitive suggestion is that Tehran is now more likely to feel “cornered” in certain crisis circumstances (both foreseeable and unforeseeable) and to [...]
The lightning-fast overthrow of Bashar al-Assad by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in late 2024 has dramatically changed the regional balance of power in Syria. After years of military dominance patronized by Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, the regime of Assad crumbled due to a combination of internal decay, declining morale among his forces, and strategic miscalculations. [...]
Enhancing Strategic Deterrence: Israel, Iran, and Limited Nuclear War
“For by Wise Counsel, Thou Shalt Make Thy War.” Proverbs 24.6 For mostly good reason, policy discussions of Israel’s nuclear strategy and doctrine have been intentionally vague and without evident nuance. More specifically, there have been few open-literature assessments of a limited nuclear war and its law-supported capacity for enhancing Israel’s strategic deterrence. Now, however, [...]
The opening days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a fierce and inspiring response by ordinary Ukrainians. They joined together in a mass uprising to defend their homeland. Under international humanitarian law (IHL), such an act of resistance is known as a “levée en masse” (levée). A levée is a unique category that temporarily [...]
