This article endeavors to place the Gaza war not only as another stage in a more than century-old  national, colonial conflict but as an event of a different order occurring also in the West Bank, Lebanon, the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and even the International Courts in The Hague. This is not a temporary subversion of institutions, but rather something that marks a change in the form of government. The framework through which we seek to think about this multi-site crisis is not an analysis of inter-state struggles, that is, a struggle between what Hobbes called Leviathans, but rather an expression of an era characterized by the rise of non-state institutions – the crocodiles or behemoths. These, whether in the form of militias or proxy organizations of empires, which have economic resources and conflicting, destabilizing influence even within the countries in which they operate, as international corporations replacing or emptying the state institutions of substance. The sharp discrepancy between countries, their institutions and their methods of operation, and the new nature of the conflicts creates not only bloody encounters whose end is difficult to see (here as well as in Ukraine, for example); it can also explain the lack of political horizons and inability of political means to deal with them. The reframing we propose here for the turbulent period engulfing us is the transition from what can be called the “Leviathan age,” at the center of which is the state – the ultimate infrastructural organization of human political reality, to a period of “crocodiles” – a multitude of empires of various types and proxies, hollow shells of states, corporations, imperial centers, city-states, impoverished government institutions, and non-institutional communication networks.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.60.2024.159187