“Entrenchment” is a military term, but it increasingly describes how we speak, read, and think—even beyond the battlefield. Fight or be crushed; arm or be harmed. The logic of war is creeping into every corner of political and civil life.

Two epicentres of war in particular have come to dominate our political imagination: Ukraine, which has been fending off the Russian attack for nearly four years, and the Middle East, with its craters of lethality stretching across Gaza and the West Bank, Syria, and Yemen. The war diaries of Yevgenia Belorusets, continued in Berlin Review Reader 5, examine Ukraine’s war-torn society up close. They pose a seemingly impossible question: can one reject militarization and still resist the violence of the aggressor? Is there any off-ramp for Ukrainians besides desertion and flight—or being crushed in the meatgrinder of line zero? Join us as Yevgenia discusses Ukraine’s predicaments at the end of the war’s third year with editor Tobias Haberkorn.

With regard to the Middle East, it remains entirely unclear how the region might pivot from a paradigm of killing to one of justice and peace. Together with Adam Raz, an Israeli historian recently relocated from Tel Aviv to Berlin, will explore possible pathways out of violence in societies where militarization has permeated every aspect of life.

Together with Carmen Herold, project lead at the Goethe-Institut im Exil, Israeli historian Adam Raz, who recently relocated from Tel Aviv to Berlin, as well as legal scholar and Islamic scholar Dr. Nahed Samour, who is a Research Associate at Radboud University Nijmegen, will explore possible pathways out of violence in societies where militarization has permeated every aspect of life.

An event organized by Berlin Review in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut in Exile.

Panelists

Yevgenia Belorusets is an artist and author. She lives and works between Kyiv and Berlin. Her work operates at the intersection of literature, visual art, and activism, often drawing attention to the more vulnerable segments of Ukrainian society—queer families, Roma, miners, and people living in the war zone. Her works have been shown at the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 56th and 59th Venice Biennale, among other venues. She has received numerous awards, including the HKW International Literature Prize (2020), the Schering Foundation Special Prize for Artistic Research (2022), and the Alice Salomon Poetry Prize (2025). Since February 24, 2022, she has been documenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Tobias Haberkorn is the founder and co-editor of Berlin Review, a multilingual print and online magazine for books and ideas launched in February 2024. He holds a PhD in literature from EHESS Paris and Freie Universität Berlin, and was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. As an editor and translator, he has worked with Die Zeit, Suhrkamp Verlag, and others. He currently writes the weekly newsletter What to Read at Berlin Review.

Adam Raz is a human rights researcher and historian. He works at Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research and is the author of Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property (Verso, 2024). He recently published The Lexicon of Brutality: Key Terms from the Gaza War (in Hebrew. co-authored with Assaf Bondy).

Dr. Nahed Samour, Research Associate at Radboud University, Nijmegen, studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard, and Damascus. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. She was a legal trainee at the Berlin Court of Appeal, a postdoctoral researcher at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki, Finland, and an Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. From 2014 to 2018, she taught as a junior faculty member at the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy. From 2019 to 2022, she was a Core Emerging Investigator at the Integrative Research Institute for Law and Society at Humboldt University in Berlin.