Suchergebnisse

Part I. Theoretical Foundations of Risk Management in Support of Sustainable Development -- SDGs Risks and Digital Approach to Managing Them -- Macroeconomic Risks of Sustainable Development: Features of Developed and Developing Countries -- The Contribution of Digital Technologies to Management of Sustainable Development Risks -- Innovative Development of Kazakhstan as an Experience for the Economic Development of Russia -- Reducing the Digital Divide as a Mechanism to Ensure Sustainable Economic and Social Development -- The Role of Blockchain in Public Administration in the Field of Economic Activity -- Trends in Dispute Resolution in E-Commerce: China's Experience -- Transformation of Settlement Relations in the Context of Industry 4.0: Conversion of Blockchain Club's Crypto-codes into Legitimate Analogues -- Possibilities and Threats of Digitalization for Society -- Integration into Global Value Chains as a Driver of High Technology Exports Development in China -- Regional Aspects of Ensuring Security and Development of Entrepreneurship in the Digital Economy -- Strategic Management of Innovation-Oriented Activities of Business Structures, Taking into Account Noospheric and Sustainable Development Approaches Transformed on an Advanced Methodological Basis -- The Methodology of "Smart City" in the Experience of Theoretical Organization of Knowledge of Contemporary Urban Epistemology -- Assessment of the Risks of Transition from a Global Pandemic Crisis to a Model of Long-Term Economic Growth -- Remote Justice Procedures during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Russian Federation -- National Health as a Condition and Factor of Economic Growth: Legal Aspects -- The COVID-19 Pandemic and Crisis as a Source of Global Risks to Sustainable Development -- The Economic Impact of COVID-19 on the Development of Tour Operating in the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts -- Methodological Approaches to Risk Assessment of the Implementation of State Programs and their State Financing in the Field of Healthcare in the Regions of Russia -- The Impact of COVID-19 on the Economies of Petroleum-Exporting Middle Eastern Countries -- The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Socio-economic Spheres and International Migration -- Development of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Current Trends and the Role of China -- Optimization Diagnosis of Spasm of Accommodation Among Students in the Osh State University -- Electronic Evidence in the Civil Proceedings: The Experience of the Republic of Korea -- Reshaping The Institution of Liability in International Space Law -- International Legal Challenges to Biotechnological Products -- Problems and Prospects for the Use of Electronic (Digital) Evidence in Arbitration Proceedings -- New Forms of Dispute Resolution in the Russian Federation as a Reflection of Innovation in Law Enforcement: Platform Justice -- Legal Assessment of Objective and Subjective Justifiable Defense Signs -- Specifics of Preventive Visit as a Type of Preventive Measures (Using the Example of the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing) -- Comparison of Legal Regulation of Expense Accounting in the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China -- Mechanisms of the Legal Management of Sustainable Development Risks at the Macro Level of Economic Systems -- Protecting Social Rights in an Era of Economic Change -- A Universal Human Rights Mechanism for the Protection or Revision of the Institution of Family in an Era of Economic Change -- Trends of the Russian Labor Legislation Development in the Era of Great Challenges -- Impact of Customs and Tariff Regulation on Economic Security -- Customs and Tariff Regulation of the Eurasian Economic Union in the Context of New Geo-economic Realities and Challenges to Industry -- On the Indicative Approach to Assessing International Trade Within the EAEU -- Russian-Azerbaijani Bilateral Trade Cooperation in Terms of Eurasian Integration -- A Feasibility Study of China-EAEU Free Trade Agreement -- Dollarization in Ecuador, Economic Growth, Trade Balance, Impact on Ecuadorian Foreign Trade -- Integration Processes and the Economy of Peru: Current Trends -- The Impact of Socio-economic Inequality on the Relations Between the European Union Countries and the Assessment of Strategic Areas for its Reduction -- Development of the Institute of Customs Representatives in the Republic of Kazakhstan -- The Impact and Role of Foreign Direct Investment in the Modernization of China's Automotive Industry -- Economic Cooperation of the Levant Countries: Main Directions and Opportunities -- EAEU and BRI: Current Prospects of Mutual Cooperation -- Assessing the Economic Positions of the European Union Countries in the Context of Transforming Foreign Economic Relations and Implementing a New Industrial Strategy for Europe -- Geo-economic Interests of the Republic of Turkey in the Republic of Uzbekistan -- Rethinking the Potential of the International Transport Corridor "North-South" in Sustaining Russia's Foreign Trade -- Prospects of the Khorgos Free Economic Zone -- Part II. Applied Aspects of Risk Management in Support of Sustainable Development -- Philosophy of System Sustainable Development of Economic Systems from the Position of the Noospheric Approach -- Philosophy of Sustainable Development Risks Through the Lens of the SDGs -- Sociology of Sustainable Development: the Role of Responsible Communities in the Achievement of the SDGs and the Advantages for the Quality of Life -- Social Aspects of the Sustainable Development Risks: Social Support for Responsible Innovations vs. "Human Factor" as a Barrier on the Path of Their Implementation -- Matrix of Risks for Sustainable Development and the Universal Mechanisms of Risk Management of Implementing the SDGs -- Risks of Region's Sustainable Development: a Systemic View from the Position of Society, Economy and Law -- The Risks of Implementing and Managing the SDGs in the Company's Activities: a Case Study by the Example of the Largest Companies of Russia -- The Importance of the International Policy of Globalisation and Open Economy to the Reduction of the Global Risks for Sustainable Development -- The Role of the State Management Institutions in the Reduction of the Macro-Economic Risks for Sustainable Development -- Innovations as the Basis for Managing the Region's Sustainable Development Risks -- Corporate Social Responsibility to Manage the Risks to the Achievement of the SDGs in the Entrepreneurial Activities -- Social Entrepreneurship as an Institute of Sustainable Development Risk Management -- Modern Issues in Sustainability Reporting -- Assessment of the Strain-stress Distribution in the Vicinity Conceding Mountainside's Scarp using Mathematical Modeling -- Marketing Mix of a Responsible Company to Manage the Risks to the Achievement of the SDGs -- The Role of Personnel Training in Higher Education and HRM to Reduce the Sustainable Development Risks -- Values of Modern Organizations and Social Responsibility of Scientific Institutions -- Regulatory and Legal Provision of Sustainable Development Risk Management in the Agro-Industrial Complex: an Overview of International Experience -- Theoretical Basis of Risk Management in Manufacturing Enterprises -- Problems of Increasing Investment Attractiveness of the Agro-Industrial Complex of the Kyrgyz Republic and Ways to Solve Them -- The Impact of Sharp Fluctuations in Global Crude Petroleum Prices on the World Economy -- International Production in the Russian Automotive Industry -- Regression Analysis of the Development Indicators of Light Industry in Kyrgyzstan -- Development of the Competitiveness of Integrated Sectors of the Economy in the Market of Goods and Services -- Research on the Behavior of Online Consumers in the Global Internet Space -- Creation of a SaaS-System for Image Analysis in Agriculture Using Artificial Intelligence Methods -- Development of the Recycling Sector and its Marketing Support as a Factor in the Sustainable Development of the Forestry Sector of the Economy -- The Influence of Macroeconomic Factors on the Art Market (on the Example of International Sales of the MacDougall's Auction House) -- Transformation of the Structure of the Cross-border Agri-food Value Chain -- Middle East Energy Policy Transformation: Saudi Case -- Reflections of Gender Inequality in Language and Culture -- Integral Assessment of Labor Potential of the Region in the Age of Digital Economy -- The Model for Assessing the Professional Competencies of Employees in Today's Labor Market -- Influence of Parents on Formation of National Consciousness of a Teenager -- On the Etymology of the Kyrgyz Names of Dwelling and Family from the Point of View of the Theory of Linguo-Regional Unity of the Altai and Chinese Peoples -- Labor Migrants in the Economy of GCC Countries: History, Modernity, Problems, and Perspectives -- Titulature in the Text of the Epic "Manas" and "Babur's Notes" as a Source of Information About the Social Institutions of the Central Asian Region -- Monohexamethylenetetramine Zinc Iodide Complex Compound for Cotton Growth and Development Stimulation: Advantages in the Labor Market -- Assessment of Social Security of the Population of Federal Districts -- On the Reflexes of the Ancient Root "But" [Foot] in Nostratic Languages -- Social Unemployment Insurance Systems in China and Russia: Comparative Characteristics -- Instrumental Competencies of Linguists in an Undergraduate Degree -- Ethnonyms as Concepts of Foreign Culture in the Text of a Fiction -- Challenges Affecting Listening Comprehension in Professionally-Oriented English and the Strategies for Improvement (Railway Engineering) -- Translation of Structures with Social and Grammatical Gender in the English Language (based on Feature Film Scripts) -- Humanistic Philosophical Foundations of Social Work -- Quantitative Tool.

I am currently in the most wonderful Helsinki airport, waiting to go back to Berlin.  I have been in Helsinki to study the Finnish case for the Phil/Ora/Steve book on Defense Agencies.  It has been a great albeit cold and mostly wet week.  Definitely glad we have this case in the book, and, yes, it is making it imperative to go to Sweden to see how NATO membership is a common process with perhaps not entirely common politics.First, the joy of Helsinki before I discuss what I have learned for the book project.   It is on the Baltics, so when the wind blows, brrrrr.  Yes, we got some snow here last night, deep into April.  Makes me feel like I am back in Canada, except Ottawa has more sun and not as much cold winds. This is only my second time here, and the first one hardly counts as it was a brief layover between Leningrad (that tells you how long ago it was) and NY.  I got used to tramming around town, never using the metro as everyone was very well located in the center except a couple of interviews--one requiring a bus ride to beyond Helsinki and one or two requiring cab rides.  Two parliament buildingsand funky sculpture One of my fave new experiences for interviewing was that they had a conference center where folks could hold meetings with far less security and inconvenience than going out to the ministries.  I still did manage to go to the Ministry of Interior, which was not far away, and to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was a 20 minute walk or 15 minute tram ride.  The Parliament buildings were not just huge (everyone kept reminding me this is a small country with a small population, but their parliament buildings suggest otherwise), but also had more security than any other legislative building I can recall.  Sure, everyone has a front entrance with thick windows, x-ray scanners, etc, but to get from point a to b inside, my escort had to badge the doors every five or ten steps.  And, yeah, my escort in was the counsel to the defense committee, and on the way out ... a parliamentarian who was recently the chief of defense!  They don't have much of a history, by the way, of senior ex mil leaders serving in parliament but Ukraine changed that.  More on that below.reindeer on potatoI am not a huge fan of fish, so I tended to look for non-Finnish food (not all Finnish food is fish, to be clear), so I had Chinese, Italian, Mideast, and Georgian.  Pretty sure that was my first time having Georgian food, but the waitress didn't understand my order, so I didn't get the classic big bread thing dish, so I will have to try that in Berlin (I found a Georgian place near my apartment).  The people were very friendly, even though I have no Finnish.  They all understand that no one speaks Finnish besides Finns, so they all speak Swedish (there is a sizable Swedish minority and the Swedes used to run the place), and English.  Some folks remarked that the kids these days are less interested in learning Russian.  So much for Russia's soft power....Yes, Russia loomed large here, as the Finns have a strong memory of the trauma of the Winter War--their fight with the Russians during World War II.  Apparently, the Ukraine war hit the old folks very hard.   I did wonder where the bunkers are, as  I had heard that civil defense is a big thing here.  I didn't recognize the signs apparently, as I was told that pretty much all of Helsinki has underground facilities.  The difference between old US bomb shelters and Finnish bunkers--the latter are used on a daily basis--parking lots, swimming pools, gyms, etc that are underground.  This keeps them fresh, their air good, and also, most importantly, has the Finns comfy with going to these places.  The economy is not doing well, and it may or may not have much to do with the fact that the Finns have pretty much cut off most trade with Russia.  The whole of government thing Canadians and others have a problem doing?  Finland has whole of society, comprehensive security.  In its history, it has always been alone until ... the last year.  So, they are ready to mobilize the entire society if the Russians attack.  This means a draft (just for men [all young men including one NBA player], women can join the military but their conscription is voluntary [holy oxymoron]), an extensive reservist system so that the small army can swell to 280,000 and then 900,000, coordination of all parts of society to respond to an attack.  The drafted are paid about 5 Euros a day.... which does not go far in super expensive Helsinki.  Decorations inside Parl buildingThe military has been running a month-long defense course 4x/year for a long, long time, where they create cohorts of 50 people, elites from across society, to learn about the military and the rest of comprehensive security.  This is a hell of a public diplomacy effort--it is not cheap although some companies provide the food and booze and such for free.  Companies apparently don't have a big problem with losing an employee for a month.  To provide a comparison, the army exercise I did in 2019 was one day.  This experience is really important as it came up in almost all of the interviews and mostly without my prompting.In ye old comparative politics, the phrase is war made the state.  While not entirely true, the idea is that societies developed more and more extensive political institutions in order to fight and win or survive in international relations.  It may be the case that NATO membership has the same but smaller impact.  That joining NATO has caused Finland has to dramatically enlarge and perhaps empower its very small Ministry of Defense.  NATO requires meetings, document vetting, preparation, the sending of personnel to NATO hq's in Brussels, Mons, and elsewhere.  AND most NATO policy is made by civilians even though NATO is far more an organization about military stuff than civilian stuff (hence why much of the effort to build an Afghan government was run by separate national governments (foreign affairs, development agencies) rather than by NATO.  The relevance of this is that it gives the MoD a greater role in making defense policy than in the past.  That is, the Finnish defense forces made much of the policies but that may be changing now.  Oh, and it was the first EU country I have been in where the NATO flags easily outnumber the EU ones.In terms of the project, Finland is an interesting case with a largely autonomous military, that their number two in the MoD is always a retired senior military officer, their MoD is tiny (150 now, swelling recently thanks to NATO), their President is commander in chief which means the military can try to sideline the MoD and the PM by insisting that the President is the one who oversees them, the President and PM have tiny foreign/security offices, and that conscription deeply shapes everything.  Sweden will be a fun case to compare since the Swedes had a draft, dropped it, and have recently started it again while also joining NATO recently. Random things I heard along the way:five different Baltic pipelines have had "accidents" since the war in Ukraine started!Finland has reached 2% of GDP on defense because it frontloaded the cost of buying the F35s, which means that when that goes through the system, Finland may have a hard time procuring enough to keep at 2%.  Womb chairs!  Multiple waiting rooms in govt buildings reminded me of Oberlin's library way back in the day.  I do love my job even if it requires me to transcribe my interview notes.  I have many more countries to visit and I still have to do some work to figure out the German case as well as write up the Finish case.  All I know is that comparative civ-mil relations has been mighty good to me.Next week, Mrs. Spew hits Europe, so we drive through Germany and then fly to Italy.  So, a very different bit of fieldwork ahead.  Much more focused on comparative cuisine.  

An iconic New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, has just been squired around the Middle East by the commander of Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for operations in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and North Africa. Now, don't get me wrong, the military and American journalists have cultivated symbiotic relations since the Civil War. It's in the nature of things. The press needs access, and the military needs public and congressional support. Quality time shared by the top U.S.military officer for this volatile region and the top foreign affairs columnist for the nation's top broadsheet makes sense.Among their whistlestops were U.S. installations in Syria. About 900 American troops are there, distributed in penny packets among seven bases. Some of these protect oil fields that supply U.S.-backed Kurdish authorities; others are in the far northeast, where they assist Kurdish units, help secure and supply the cluster of camps that house ISIS prisoners and their families and continue to hunt ISIS fighters; and still others in the southeast, at a road junction where the Iraqi, Syrian and Jordanian borders meet. This base was set up to interdict Iranian-backed forces attempting to entrench themselves in Syria and transport supplies to Lebanon.In Friedman's recap of this visit, he explained that the importance of these U.S. deployments lay in the need to fight the terrorists over there so we would not have to fight them over here. Let's say, for the moment, that there are several other rationales for maintaining troops in Syria. Iran, for example, does seek to use Syria as a land corridor to Lebanon and the Israeli-Syrian border, from which it can carry the fight to its enemy. Iran is 1,200 kilometers from Israel, so if it wants to reach out and touch someone without using ballistic missiles, it needs to be on Israel's borders. Rendering this a bit more difficult than it might otherwise be makes a regional blow-up marginally less likely. Maintaining a garrison at the oil fields is meant to secure them from capture by either ISIS or the Assad regime, against which the U.S. maintains heavy sanctions. Reserving the oil for use by Kurds, both for sale and consumption, reflects a longstanding policy that favors Kurdish autonomy in Syria. This policy preference, which owes in part to a romanticized image of Kurds as daring fighters fending off terrorist hordes to spare the U.S. an onerous burden, also dictates the use of U.S. forces in northeast Syria as a tripwire deterrent against Turkish attempts to suppress Syrian Kurds. For many members of Congress, they seem to be something like T.E. Lawrence's Bedouin insurgents in World War I, or U.S.-backed Montagnard guerillas in the Vietnam War. For them, abandoning the Kurds to the tender mercies of Turkey, or compelling them to seek protection from the Assad government, would be immoral and shred America's reputation as a reliable ally. (See under: Munich.) Trump, marching to the beat of a different drum, pointed out that the Kurds "didn't help us in the second world war, they didn't help us with Normandy as an example… ." The U.S. role in helping local forces and NGOs manage the ISIS detention centers and refugee camps as well as the slow process of the repatriation of Iraqi detainees, is meant to contribute to Iraqi stability, in which the U.S. has a stake. The fact that these bases are magnets for attack by Iran-backed militias is arguably a factor that outweighs any of these other considerations.One can have this or that view on the validity of these rationales or the salience of these objectives for core U.S. strategic interests. If the Turks and their radical Arab militias rip into the Kurds to get at the PKK, as they have done twice already, U.S. strategic interest is unlikely to suffer very much. If ISIS fighters escape the camps in Syria, Iraqi forces with U.S. help could probably limit the threat to Iraqi stability. The U.S. installation at al-Tanf in the southeast can be bypassed by Iran-backed militias via an Assad-controlled base at al bu-Kamal, a bit northeast of al-Tanf, so the U.S. base there might have outlived its usefulness. Of course, on any given day there are about 30,000 U.S. military personnel in the region, as there have been for decades, so 900 isn't a particularly impressive number. It's a good example of limited interests served by a commensurately limited commitment. Whether to stay or go comes down to a narrow judgment call.But of all the factors to consider there is one that does not merit concern: the idea of fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. It's a vacuous meme trotted out to defend the controversial commitment and use of forward deployed forces and creation of distant security perimeters. If you were a Briton in September 1939 facing the German juggernaut, Friedman's old chestnut would have been pretty compelling. But since World War II, its specific gravity has dissipated. During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson defended the U.S. commitment by asserting that the countries of southeast Asia were like a row of dominos; if south Vietnam were to fall, it would tip over all its neighbors until all of Asia was communist. The problem, he explained, was that "Everything that happens in this world affects us because pretty soon it gets on our doorstep." Anyone who was politically sentient at the time was bombarded by Friedman's repurposed, shopworn epigram. Yet, the dominos never fell following the U.S. pullout and the collapse of South Vietnam; in the fullness of time, we never had to fight them over here and the only stuff on our doorstep are Amazon boxes. President George W. Bush, in a major speech at the 89th Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, declared "Our strategy is this: we will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America." But the insurgency in Iraq was created by the 2003 U.S. invasion, which decapitated the regime and destroyed the capacity of the state to manage the country's affairs, while unleashing Shi'a power and Iranian influence. This ignited a brutal Sunni insurgency carried out, in part, by tens of thousands of soldiers the U.S. threw out of their barracks and left to fend for themselves in an anarchic and violent environment. The ideology and strategy of both Shi'a and Sunni insurgents had nothing to do with al-Qaida, let alone engaging SWAT teams in Dallas, or stealing our lawn furniture, as one of my former counterterrorism colleagues put it. Their concerns were local. Al-Qaida sought to attack the great power, the "far enemy," that underpinned the "near enemy," namely the conservative monarchy ruling Arabia. Al-Qaida in Iraq, ISIS, the Mahdi Army and Iran-backed militias fought a battle for power on their turf and against an occupying army, not an expeditionary war against the U.S. homeland. The mayhem, moreover, had nothing to do with 9/11. The fact that there was never another al-Qaida attack was not because the U.S. invaded Iraq; it was because of al-Qaida's inability to follow up on its spectacular success. And that was a function of the loss of its support network in the U.S., the decimation of its top tier, and the swift tightening of security at U.S. borders. Now we are told once again that U.S. troops have to be somewhere else to prevent fighters operating in that space from coming to the United States and waging war here. The designated enemy in this case is the Islamic State, an organization that has inspired or arranged successful attacks in Europe but not in the U.S. It would be foolish to assume that no one in the organization dreams of murdering Americans in their beds. But they lack the capacity to do so and, more importantly, have urgent local goals that soak up resources, planning and organizational capacity, and face serious local constraints. There is a legitimate debate about the presence of U.S. forces in Syria. But it should be premised on the value of the real things at stake and the cost of protecting those stakes. It should not be distorted by old canards intended to inflate threats to the American homeland.

On Sunday, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized Israel's actions in Gaza in the strongest possible terms. "What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in any other historical moment," Lula said to a gathering of reporters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After a beat, the head of Latin America's largest nation added that, actually, there was a similar episode worth recalling: "when Hitler decided to kill the Jews." Lula's comments in Ethiopia came after a brief visit to Egypt, where he addressed the Arab League. Both African nations are new members of the BRICS — a growing geopolitical grouping originally composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. While Lula's visit emphasized past ties and future opportunities, his comments on Hitler eclipsed whatever other message he may have hoped to convey. The fallout opened a new line of attack against him at home, undermining his administration's domestic policy goals at least temporarily. The practical result abroad, however, is unlikely to add up to very much. If anything, the newly pronounced enmity between the Lula and Netanyahu governments is clarifying. The differences between this historical moment and World War II so vastly outweigh the similarities that it is hardly worth debating the merits of the comparison that Lula drew. The more intriguing question is whether Lula's comment signaled any kind of shift in Brazil's position on the issue of Israel-Palestine. There are multiple ways of reading his intentions. Many foreign critics pilloried him for invoking the Holocaust to make a political point. Netanyahu called Lula's remarks "shameful and serious," suggesting the Brazilian president aimed to "harm the Jewish people and Israel's right to defend itself." For Netanyahu, who has faced mounting legal troubles and popular opposition at home while overseeing a military campaign plausibly accused of acts of genocide, Lula's words "cross[ed] a red line."Standing alongside Brazil's ambassador to Israel at Yad Vashem, Foreign Minister Israel Katz on Monday declared: "We will not forget nor forgive. It is a serious antisemitic attack. In my name, and in the name of all Israeli citizens, tell President Lula that he is persona non grata in Israel until he retracts his statements."At home, opposition forces have mounted a quixotic impeachment effort that has nevertheless garnered significant support, including from some members of Lula's governing coalition. Lula was hammered in several of Brazil's mainstream press outlets for purportedly isolating his country on the world stage, supporting Hamas, or trivializing the murder of 6 million Jews between 1941 and 1945.A more charitable interpretation of what happened is that Lula simply spoke off the cuff and made a bad historical analogy. After all, nothing had fundamentally changed up to that point in his government's position, which was to work with the Israeli government even as it strongly criticizes what it sees as unconscionable excesses in its war against Hamas. Before this weekend, Brazil had not gone as far as other countries in Latin America in reconsidering its ties with Israel.Moreover, it's unclear why Lula would make a calculated decision to stake so much on an extemporized comparison between the Netanyahu government and the Third Reich. He surely would have known that the fallout, entirely predictable as it has been, would be extremely inconvenient in political terms. For example, the week ahead promises even more troubling legal news for former president Jair Bolsonaro, the leading counterweight to Lula in terms of Brazil's national politics. Rather than allowing the media narrative this week to focus on Bolsonaro, the Lula government has had to expend time and energy on addressing criticisms of the president's remarks. In so doing, it has established the contours of a new, much more openly hostile relationship with the Netanyahu government.On Monday, Lula recalled the Brazilian ambassador to Israel for consultations. Celso Amorim, Lula's former foreign minister and close current adviser, said the president would not apologize for his comments. "Israel is the one placing itself in a condition of increasing isolation," he insisted. According to journalist Eliane Oliveira, the Lula government is annoyed with what it sees as Netanyahu's eagerness to make hay of the Brazilian president's remarks and use them to his own political benefit. In that regard, it is worth noting that Bolsonaro was a close Netanyahu ally. The prime minister even endorsed Bolsonaro in his 2022 race against Lula, indicating that there was already a vast political divide between Lula and his Israeli counterpart. On Monday night, Alexandre Padilha, Brazil's Minister of Institutional Relations, spoke at length about Lula's comments during a televised interview, asserting that the president's critique constituted a passionate reaction against the Netanyahu government, not a criticism of Israel per se and certainly not of Jews worldwide.Since last year, Lula has strongly criticized Israel's assault on Gaza, calling it "as grave" as the Hamas attack on October 7. Before that, Brazil secured overwhelming support within the United Nations Security Council for a resolution that called for "humanitarian pauses" in Israel's bombing to allow for aid and supplies to enter Gaza, but the measure was vetoed by the United States. The implosion of Brazil's relationship with the Netanyahu government is unsurprising given the politics of the Brazilian left that makes up Lula's base and the broader landscape of Latin America. Countries like Colombia, Bolivia, and Chile, which has the largest Palestinian refugee population outside the Arab world, have been more strident and willing to act on their criticism of Israel's military campaign in Gaza, so the continued degradation of the Brazil-Israel relationship should surprise no one.On Tuesday morning, Amorim doubled down on the argument that Lula's comparison, attributed to a sense of visceral outrage, might push the international community to take firmer action on the matter: "Lula's speech shook the world and triggered a swirl of emotions that could help resolve an issue that the coldness of political interests has been unable to resolve." The fact that the Lula administration has closed the door on any public apology to the Netanyahu government is telling and is, in fact, what seems to have changed the nature of the bilateral relationship. It signals that the Brazilians have decided they are comfortable, if not entirely pleased, with where they've landed vis-à-vis Israel after the weekend. Since returning to the world stage for a third term in January of last year, Lula has rekindled his country's independent streak, steadfastly refusing to embrace the U.S. line on a host of key geopolitical issues even while working assiduously with Washington on matters of mutual interest. As I have argued previously in these pages, Lula insists on cultivating ties across ideological and political lines in pursuit of greater Brazilian influence over a shifting world order.It is not entirely clear whether a firm break with Israel is actually in the offing. As far as Brasilia is concerned, a meeting between Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira and Israel's ambassador on Monday constituted the end point of current tensions. No more escalation is expected from the Lula government, which now sees the ball as being in Netanyahu's court, according to journalist Guilherme Amado.The Israeli government, however, seems unlikely to tone down its criticisms of Lula. On Tuesday afternoon, the country's official X account accused Lula of Holocaust denialism and, in a post written in Portuguese on the same platform, Israel's foreign minister reiterated that Lula was persona non grata until he issued an apology, something the Brazilian government has said it will not do. So will Brazil break with Israel over its sustained bombardment of the Gaza Strip? A great deal of other Global South players have been there for some time. Brazil may well arrive there now, too.Either way, Lula is unlikely to garner any political benefit at home from this row, especially considering that those likely to welcome escalating tensions with Netanyahu already saw Lula as a staunch ally of the Palestinian cause. Given the challenges facing his political agenda, the last thing Lula needs is a muddled diplomatic crisis like this to galvanize opposition forces. The Israeli prime minister, on the other hand, may well benefit from having the Brazilian as a foil — which, from a Brazilian perspective, is precisely why Lula should have been more careful on that stage in Addis Ababa.

For the first time — and it is rather remarkable that this is the first time — the United Nations COP28 climate summit beginning this week in Dubai will include a "Global Stocktake" of progress made in achieving the goals set out and commitments made by global agreements since the 2015 Paris climate accords. If this stocktaking is honest, it will also be extremely depressing.In order to prevent the rise in global temperatures since pre-industrial times from exceeding the reasonably safe limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), COP26 in Glasgow established a goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by 45 percent by 2030. Those goals are now unachievable. Based on present trajectories, emissions will actually rise nine percent above 2010 levels by that date. Since carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years, this means that a rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius is now inevitable and cannot subsequently be reversed, at least with any technology now available to us.The inevitable result will be an intensification of the heat waves, droughts, forest fires and floods that have plagued large parts of the world — including the United States — over the past year. Without a radical change of course, however, much worse lies ahead. If emissions continue to rise until 2030, it is almost impossible to imagine how "net zero" (whereby carbon extracted from the atmosphere equals that put into it) can be achieved by 2050. Even with the commitments made by states under the Paris agreement — hailed as a radical breakthrough in climate change action — it has been estimated that by the end of this century global temperatures will rise by 2.5 degrees Celsius. This would bring us into quite unknown territory. The negative impacts of natural disasters and on agricultural yields in key parts of the world will rise exponentially. Perhaps new crops genetically modified to withstand heat will ward off mass famines, or perhaps not. Apart from anything else, hundreds of millions of agricultural workers in Asia and elsewhere cannot be genetically modified to withstand sustained exposure to temperatures that are lethal to human beings.This will happen even if this rise in temperatures occurs, as it has until now, in a linear and gradual fashion (gradual by the standards of humanity, not of the Earth). There is however a real, albeit unquantifiable, risk that such an increase will lead to "tipping points" and "feedback loops," whereby a rise of two degrees will lead to three degrees and three degrees to four degrees over a short period of time. If so, civilization as we know it will be destroyed. No organized society on Earth could withstand both the physical disruption involved and the immense movements of desperate people that would result.This danger of feedback loops exists primarily in the Arctic, where the melting of sea ice reduces the reflectivity of sunlight back into space, and the melting of the Arctic permafrost risks releasing enormous quantities of methane from frozen rotted plants. Although methane is far less long-lived than carbon dioxide, it is almost 40 times more powerful in terms of its greenhouse effect. And the Arctic is warming at almost three times the rate of the planetary average.This is why the approach of the U.S. security establishment to the warming of the Arctic is so bitterly indicative. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of papers, briefings and articles have concentrated on the supposed threat that the melting of the Arctic sea ice will allow Russia and China to sail more ships through the region. To this, the only sensible answer must be: So what? Russia and China cannot invade Alaska or Canada through the Arctic, and the danger posed by nuclear missiles or bombers overflying the region has existed for more than sixty years and is completely unaffected by climate change. Meanwhile, these writers appear completely indifferent to the likelihood that climate change in the Arctic will drown American cities, wreck much of U.S. agriculture, and inflict grievous harm on the lives and health of hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens. We are suffering from a severe case of "residual elites;" foreign policy and security establishments that grew up to deal with one kind of challenge — in the U.S. case, World War II and the Cold War — but whose structures, ideologies and economic interests render them incapable of meeting a wholly different set of challenges. A parallel might be made with the "Confucian" elites of 19th-century China. They represented by far the oldest and most successful governing tradition in history; but it was one that was wholly unprepared to meet the completely new challenge of Western imperial capitalism.It must be said of course that this criticism applies just as much or more to the security elites of other major powers, including the Indians and Chinese, who are also focused on geopolitical ambitions and risks at the expense of action against climate change. Indeed, they can be considered even more foolish. While, for a long time to come, developed societies in the West will be able to withstand or adapt to the direct physical effects of climate change, parts of Asia are far more immediately threatened. This is especially true of South Asia, where even fairly limited increases in temperatures are projected to have potentially disastrous impacts on agricultural production. Yet too much of the Indian approach to COP28 seems to consist of diplomatic grandstanding intended to boost India's status and prestige by acting as the leader of the "Global South" in demanding reparations and vastly increased aid from Western countries to compensate for their emissions since the Industrial Revolution. This may be just. But it misses the point that the duty of Indian officials today is to do everything possible to minimize damage to India, above all by reducing India's own steeply rising emissions from coal.The other issue exemplified by South Asia is the prospect that rapid climate change will radically increase migration. It is natural that Western commentators and analysts should concentrate on illegal migration to Europe and America and both the human suffering and the political dangers involved. Yet one of the two most ferociously defended anti-immigrant borders in the world is India's with Bangladesh, a line on which more than 1100 Bangladeshis have been shot dead by Indian security forces over the past decade. Indian worries about Bangladeshi migration have been amplified by the fact that Bangladesh is one of the countries both most over-populated and most endangered by climate change and consequent sea level rise. Moreover, mass Bengali migration into the surrounding hill country has sparked numerous bloody instances of ethnic strife in eastern India over the past decades, and contributed to Burmese hostility to the Bengali-speaking Rohingya minority in Myanmar.After a long series of record-breaking years, 2023 is now set to be the hottest since records began. Across the U.S., local heat records have been shattered. Massive forest fires have devastated areas of northern Canada where such events would have been unthinkable in the past. U.S. neighbors in Central America, already under severe social, economic, criminal and ecological stress, are facing a future when the additional effects of climate change will render their governments completely unable to cope. These are threats to American society and ordinary Americans that dwarf anything China and Russia can do (short of nuclear war). While the Biden administration has declared rhetorically that climate change is an "existential threat," the country's security establishment has still failed to reorder its priorities accordingly. If U.S. elites truly believe that America is the "indispensable nation," they should feel compelled to do so. For if we continue with one international "agreement" after another that fails to meet its own stated goals, then historians of the future will consider that U.S. global leadership failed at its most important test.Sophia Ampgkarian contributed to the research for this article.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!

In his recent address concerning the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and U.S. involvement in both, President Biden quoted the famous line by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that America is "the indispensable nation." This is indeed the belief by which the U.S. foreign and security establishment lives and works. As Biden's speech reflected, it is one way in which the establishment justifies to American citizens the sacrifices that they are called on to make for the sake of U.S. primacy. It is also how members of the Blob pardon themselves for participation in U.S. crimes and errors. For however ghastly their activities and mistakes may be, they can be excused if they take place as part of America's "indispensable" mission to lead the world towards "freedom" and "democracy."It is therefore necessary to ask: Indispensable for what? Empty claims about the "Rules-Based Order" cannot answer this question. In the Greater Middle East, the answer should be obvious. I suppose that a different hegemon might have made an even bigger mess of the region at even greater cost to itself than the United States has succeeded in doing over the past 30 years, but it would have had to put some really serious effort into the task. Nor is it clear that the absence of a superpower hegemon could have made things any worse.In this time, not one beneficial U.S. effort at peace in the region has succeeded; few were even seriously attempted. And more than this, the U.S. has not even fulfilled the core positive role of any hegemon, that of providing stability. Instead, it has all too often acted a force of disorder: by invading Iraq and thereby enabling an explosion of Sunni Islamist extremism that went on to play a dreadful role in Syria as well; by pursuing through 20 years a megalomaniac strategy of externally-driven state-building in Afghanistan, in defiance of every lesson of Afghan history; by destroying the Libyan state, and thereby plunging the country into unending civil war, destabilizing much of northern Africa, and enabling a flood of migrants to Europe; by repeatedly wrecking or abandoning possibilities of a reasonable deal with Iran; and most gravely of all, by refusing to take an even remotely equitable approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and failing through the greater part of the past thirty years to make any serious effort to promote a settlement.Over the past generation, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye, not merely while the Likud governments slowly killed the "two-state solution" and stoked Palestinian and Arab rage through its settlement policy, but while Prime Minister Netanyahu deliberately helped build up Hamas as a force against the Palestine Liberation Organization, so as not to have to negotiate seriously with the latter. This strategy has now proved catastrophic for Israel itself. It was also carried out with no regard whatsoever to the interests of the United States or its European allies in the face of Islamist terrorism.And what have the American people themselves gained from this? Nothing at all, is the answer; while the losses can be precisely calculated: More than 15,000 soldiers and contractors killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; more than 50,000 wounded, and often disabled for life; more than 30,000 veteran suicides; 2,996 civilian dead on 9/11, an attack claimed by al-Qaida as a reprisal for U.S. Middle East policy; some $8 trillion subsequently expended in the "Global War on Terror."Elsewhere in the world, the U.S. record has not been so disastrous, but nor has it remotely justified claims to the necessity of U.S. primacy. The only area where this has been broadly true is in Europe. In World War II and the Cold War, the United States liberated western Europe and defended democracy there; while in the rest of the world, all too often it stepped into the shoes of European colonialism. After the Cold War, populations in eastern Europe genuinely welcomed U.S. protection — though Biden's claim that if not stopped in Ukraine, Putin will invade Poland is baseless. Russia has neither the will nor the capacity to do so; and in any case, if NATO membership is not a sufficient deterrent, what was the point of offering NATO membership to Ukraine?Outside Europe, the only region where the United States can truly be said to have played a largely positive role to date is East Asia (the Vietnam War obviously excepted), and for the same reason: that Japan and South Korea welcome alliance with the United States. And while other states, like the Philippines, wish to balance between America and China, they do not wish America to leave. This role however requires U.S. presence, not U.S. primacy. Since China cannot invade Japan and South Korea — let alone Australia — the United States can perfectly well stand on the defensive behind its existing alliance systems, while sharing influence elsewhere with Beijing.As to Africa, countries there do not have conflicts with each other that America has to control or mediate. Africa's problems are internal, and the U.S. has done very little since 9/11 and the Global War on Terror to help. The recent increase of U.S. interest in Africa is mainly a reaction to Russia's and China's growing commercial stake there.Strangest and most striking of all is the U.S. role in its own backyard, in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, whose problems really do affect the population of the United States. As in Africa, the United States does not need to suppress local conflicts between states, for these have long since ceased. Once again, the threats are internal, but are also driven to a very great extent by the demand for illegal drugs in the United States. One result of the internal decay of these countries is the huge flow of migrants to the United States, which is causing blowback and political discord in America itself.Faced with this threat, and concerned with the interests of U.S. citizens, it might be assumed that the regional hegemon would prioritize this region and devote serious resources to its development. This would also be in tune with the "foreign policy for the middle class" that Biden promised in his election campaign.In fact, the comparative figures for U.S. aid are positively grotesque. Total U.S. development aid to Mexico and all of Central America since 2001 comes to $12.21 billion. This compares to $64.8 billion to Israel and $32.8 billion to Egypt. Even Georgia has received almost twice as much aid as Mexico ($3.9 billion to $2.1 billion) — and Georgia is 6,000 miles from the shores of the United States with a population less than one thirtieth that of Mexico. Faced with problems from Mexico spilling over into the United States, some leading Republican politicians are now calling not for more assistance, but for the U.S. military to be deployed in Mexico to fight drug traffickers — an insane idea that reveals the moral and practical bankruptcy of U.S. primacy on its own continent.The neglect of America's neighbors to the south reveals something else about U.S. primacy: that whatever a region's problems, the U.S. only becomes engaged if it sees a real or alleged danger that a rival power is taking an interest. This could be called the approach of the dog in a manger elevated to a basic strategic principle. It is well summed up in an article by Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution about the previous — and disastrous — attempt of the Biden administration partially to pull back from the Middle East without solving the basic problems there:"The White House devised a creative exit strategy, attempting to broker a new balance of power in the Middle East that would allow Washington to downsize its presence and attention while also ensuring that Beijing did not fill the void."If the U.S. really wants to pull back from the Middle East, it should welcome other states trying to play a positive role — as China has done by promoting détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia.The pursuit of global primacy is also intellectually and morally corrupting for Americans themselves. To justify its costs and sacrifices to ordinary Americans requires on the one hand vastly overblown claims to the promotion of democracy, on the other a colossal exaggeration of both the threat and the evil of other states. The result is a public discourse that all too often resembles baby food spiked with cyanide — the pap being the language of America spreading freedom, and the poison being that of mistrust for other countries and their peoples. Even if a successful — if not "indispensable" — U.S. global primacy were possible, it could not be based on a foundation as corruptive as this.

Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite us to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. Drawing on Malkki (1992 #3729@31, 34), sedentarism is defined as combining four elements. (i) Being rooted to a territory, or more generally soil, is the condition of identity and stability, the condition of proper being. Being a refugee, for example, emerges as being uprooted from the soil or territory where one belongs. (ii) The world exists by segmenting space into discrete territorial and cultural units. Borders and boundaries are constitutive because they define the units by partitioning insides from outside. (iii) This understanding of matter and life as rooted into segmented territorial entities is naturalised through various practices that make it a commonsense, self-evident imagination of the nature of life and matter. This process includes daily expressions like 'home sweet home', cartographic representations of migration, and representing human history in terms of an evolution from early hunter-gatherers to agricultural communities that expand into cities and later nation-states. (iv) Displacement is pathological in a sedentary world, an uprooting that pulls the living from the soil where they thrive.
This article contributes to the work that has developed mobility agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means establishing conceptions of it as the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement, and that movement is continuous and undivided.
Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another.
A sedentary world is not without movement. There is lots of movement — trade between states, migration of people, flows of viruses, migration of animals, tourism and so on. Of interest here is not a list of movements or the tension or relation between movement and sedentary entities, but the specific nature of movement as it emerges in sedentarist metaphysics. Our way into this is to look closer at the kind of line privileged in drawing a sedentary space. In sedentary conceptions of worlds, the defining lines are partitioning lines, lines separating insides and outsides by drawing perimeters that divide an existing space into enclosed figures. They separate an entity from the environment in which other entities exist. Once we partition space into insides and outsides, movement can appear as crossing from inside to outside and vice versa. Movement takes the form of border or boundary crossing.
If we change the defining line from the one separating A and B to the connecting one, the one crossing the distance between A and B, do we enter a different world? We do, and it is a relatively familiar one. We move from a world of states or sedentary communities to networks. Instead of drawing enclosed figures on the page to visualise a social or political space, we draw points and lines connecting the points. The dots, or nodes, can be territorially circumscribed places, like cities or ports, but they can also be computer servers or individuals. Movement connecting makes the network different from the sedentary conception of space. What matters are the speed, density, and intensity of the movement of goods, people, animals, and services that connect the nodes. The multiple lines of transport that connect the dots create the network.
Networks retain an awkward static-ness, however, not in the sense of 'absence of movement', but as letting movement arise from positions. The nodes are spatial positions — a city, a server, a port. From the point of view of circulation, they are projected onto the flows as positions where movement arrives and stops before moving on. Even if the nodes change location or relevance at different points in time, the movement is sensed through a series of positions rather than through the movement itself. The life being lived along the lines is not important. In that sense, we can say that a juxtaposition of immobilities — the nodes — organises the network; movement becomes simply the bridging of the distance between these points of immobility. That explains why, for circulation through networks, the life being lived and the entangling and encountering that takes place while moving along the line are not crucial for understanding movement. Migration, for example, is imagined and regulated as movement connecting nodes that represent 'transport hubs', which can be train stations, coastal areas, detention centres, etc. The connecting lines are not the actual route the migrants take but represent the crossing of distance between the hubs.
A third conception of movement displaces both a sedentarist and network metaphysics and starts from taking everything as movement and nothing else. Giving primacy to movement then refers to specific modes of thought that foreground movement as continuous passing and refuse conceptualising movement in relation to stasis or non-motion. It holds that movement slips through our fingers when we recognise non-motion — stasis — exists. We render it as positions in space or time by drawing lines to enclose perimeters or connectors between points. Instead of connectors, it conceptualises the lines of movement as threads. Threads are drawn in a continuous movement rather than from point to point. A thread bends and entangles but is not cut up in points. It moves and is moved by other movements like the wind, someone running into the thread, and so on. Transitions and changes are bending the thread rather than cutting it or partitioning it into discrete bounded sections. The thread is a line that remains continuous, undivided. Movement is passing. What matters are the experiences, encounters and forces along the lines and the meshing of various filaments moving in relation to one another. The network nodes fade, and the lines meander as lines without points. The movement of a ship, for example, entangles with movements of wind, water, and barnacles. But the ship and its movement are also linked to the entangling movements of people living on the ship that create and alter the patterns of social relations and the changes made to ships, for example, in repairs or when taken over by pirates. Life on and off a container ship becomes important, transfiguring the container ship from a vehicle into the entangling of multiple threads that continue outwards. Analytically, the ship is understood in terms of the bendings and tensions between threads; it is a knot or meshwork of knots rather than a place.
Movement as threading introduces a point of view that refuses stasis by taking everything as in continuous motion. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that 'the international' can then no longer be the defining reference with which to organise the analysis as long as the concept of 'the international' inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing. When saying that such a conception of movement makes it impossible for 'the international' to be the analytical driver, it does not mean that the matters of concern that drive IR, such as questions of borders, territorial rule, logistics, and war, disappear or are written out of the world. They exist from a transversal point of view but are sensed differently — they are transmuted. For example, borders transmute into mobility regimes — into confluences of movements moving — and thus are no longer 'borders' that draw partitioning perimeters rooting life, matter, and rule into exclusionary territories. That does not mean violence, suffering, and relocating are no longer analytically present. They are, but they must be thought through the inter-twining of movements rather than fixing perimeters.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken signaled that the U.S. would not stop Ukraine from using American-made, long-range missiles to attack targets inside of Russia.
"In terms of their targeting decisions, it's their decision, not ours," Blinken told ABC before adding that "we haven't encouraged and we haven't enabled any use of weapons outside of Ukraine's territory."
Blinken's comments, which come on the heels of reports that the U.S. will soon send long-range missiles to Ukraine, are the latest example of Washington's slow-moving approach to breaking through Russian red lines in the conflict. President Joe Biden had long argued that providing Kyiv with Army Tactical Missile Systems, better known as ATACMS, would be a bridge too far for the Kremlin, but that view has apparently lost purchase as Moscow has failed to back up its threats of escalation.
Meanwhile, Russian hawks have grown increasingly frustrated with President Vladimir Putin, with many prominent figures arguing that the Russian leader must do more to deter American involvement in the war. This increase in pressure could push Putin to make a drastic move, according to George Beebe of the Quincy Institute.
"The danger is that as Washington grows more confident that it need not fear Russian retaliation, Putin is coming under growing pressure to enforce redlines against the West," Beebe argued. "His critics are arguing that unless he draws a firm line soon, there will be no limits to what the United States might provide to Kyiv."
With the risk of escalation continuing to grow, it's useful to look back at how pressure on Putin has grown in response to Western decisions to cross his red lines.HIMARS (June 2022)The Biden administration spent the first months of the war arguing that any transfer of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, better known as HIMARS, would represent an unacceptable provocation for Russia. But, as Ukraine turned the tide in April and May of last year, the U.S. decided it was time to give Kyiv the advanced weapon system.
Notably, the decision came with significant strings attached. Colin Kahl, who then served as undersecretary of defense for policy, said the U.S. had secured promises from Ukraine that the HIMARS would not be used to attack targets within Russia — a promise backed up by the fact that Washington was only sending shorter range rockets for use with the high-tech system.
"We don't have an interest in the conflict in Ukraine widening to a broader conflict or evolving into World War III, so we've been mindful of that," Kahl told reporters at the time. "But at the same time, Russia doesn't get a veto over what we send to the Ukrainians."
The move drew immediate blowback in Russia. One prominent Russian television host said providing the weapons would "clearly cross a red line," adding that she sees the move as "an attempt to provoke a very harsh response from Russia." Later in the summer, Duma member Mikhail Sheremet said U.S. policy "has long crossed all permitted red lines, thereby continuing to push the country into the abyss and chaos at full speed."Russian hawks continued to put pressure on the country's leadership as Western support grew. By September of last year, these critiques had grown so loud that Pravda, a loyal government outlet, published a meme skewering the Kremlin for allowing the West to cross so many red lines in recent years.Despite this pressure, the Kremlin did little to back up its claimed red lines. In October, Alexei Polishchuk, a high-ranking Russian diplomat, seemed to move the goalposts when he said that "the supply of long-range or more powerful weapons to Kyiv" would be a red line for the Kremlin.M1 Abrams tanks (January 2023)Just a few months after Polishchuk's comments, the U.S. agreed to send Ukraine its most powerful weapons system yet: the M1 Abrams tank. Officials had previously argued that the vehicles would create too many logistical and maintenance problems for Ukraine, and escalation concerns almost certainly factored into the administration's hesitation. But once Germany decided to send some of its own Leopard II tanks, the decision became easier for the United States.In his announcement of the move, Biden played down the risk of escalation. "It is not an offensive threat to Russia," he said. "There is no offensive threat to Russia. If Russian troops return to Russia, where they belong, this war would be over today." Russian officials called Western decisions to give tanks to Ukraine "extremely dangerous" but also appeared to play down the importance of the move as a "rather disastrous plan" that would provide little help to Kyiv.But Russian experts became more brazen in their criticism in the ensuing months. By March, former Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev had suggested that Moscow should consider using nuclear weapons in the conflict if Ukraine began to target what Russia considers to be its territory, including Crimea. In April, political scientist Sergei Markov said "angry patriots" wanted the Kremlin to respond more emphatically to what they view as direct American attacks on Russia.F-16s (May 2023)Since the earliest days of the war, the Biden administration expressed concerns about the ramifications of sending fighter jets to Ukraine. At one point last year, the White House even blocked a Polish proposal to send Russian-made planes to Kyiv due to worries about escalating tensions with Moscow.The Pentagon was reportedly at the heart of opposition to transferring F-16s, while Blinken played down concerns about escalation by noting that Russia has failed to back up any of its red lines so far. As recently as February of this year, Biden deflected on the question, arguing that Ukraine "doesn't need F-16s now."In the end, Blinken and his allies won out. Biden announced in May that the U.S. would allow Denmark and the Netherlands to send some of their F-16s to Ukraine. Ukrainian pilots have started to undergo intensive training on how to operate the planes, which are expected to arrive in the next year.Russia said F-16s would be a "colossal risk" due to the fact that the planes are capable of carrying nuclear weapons. (Ukraine, it should be noted, does not have access to nukes.) One prominent Russian blogger took a shot at Moscow's unwillingness to enforce the red line against F-16s, writing that "if our officials do not take timely and decisive action, the situation will systematically continue to deteriorate."A retired Russian general took it a step further and suggested that Moscow should move tactical nuclear weapons to bases near Ukraine or even consider attacking airfields in NATO countries that might deliver F-16s.ATACMS (September 2023)In July 2022, Jake Sullivan argued that sending long-range missiles to Ukraine would risk putting the U.S. and Russia on "the road towards a third world war." That stance drew significant attention from Ukraine's most zealous backers in the U.S., including Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who accused Biden last year of "buying into Putin's rhetoric" on the issue.Biden has so far held the line on Army Tactical Missile Systems, arguing in December that the potential for escalation to a NATO-Russia war was too great to countenance. But recent reports indicate that the administration is set to shift its policy yet again after months of pressure. By some accounts, an aid package including ATACMS could be announced as soon as this week.If those reports are true, Russia will almost certainly see the move as a major provocation, as Biden himself argued last year.Attacks inside Russia and the path toward escalationMuch of this debate centers on one key question: Should the U.S. encourage Ukrainian attacks within Russia? Blinken's recent comments suggest that the Biden administration has shifted its position on this question from a hard "no" to a tacit "yes".
As Russian hawks continue to call for escalation, Putin is left with a dwindling set of options for signaling his displeasure with American policy on the war. Among other things, he could shoot down a Western plane flying near Russian airspace, or perhaps set up a covert attack against a NATO base, as he did with a Czech arms depot in 2014. As Beebe of the Quincy Institute has noted, Putin could also attack American satellites in order to hurt Western logistical support for Ukrainian operations.
But a more ominous threat looms on the horizon. If Ukraine starts to rack up more military successes with advanced Western weapons, some analysts worry that Putin could reach for the ultimate weapon.
"If the Russian military is not able to escalate or to prevent Ukraine from [retaking its territory], Putin will have no other way of escalating the war militarily than through a nuclear weapon," retired Gen. Kevin Ryan told RS earlier this year.

"Diese und andere Karikaturen des bekannten polnischen Graphikers und Satirikers Andrzej Mleczko finden Sie in unserer Neuerscheinung mit den Texten des Mitarbeiters des DPI Dr. Matthias Kneip "Darüber lacht Polen. Eine Landeskunde in 72 Karikaturen und Texten"." https://www.deutsches-polen-institut.de/publikationen/einzelveroeffentlichungen/darueber-lacht-polen-eine-landeskunde-in-72-karikaturen-und-texten/ Bereits zum 1. April wollten Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz und Szymon Hołownia Ernst machen: Ausgerechnet für diesen Tag kündigten die Parteivorsitzenden von Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe ("Polnische Volkspartei" oder "Polnische Bauernpartei", kurz PSL) und Polska 2050 ("Polen 2050") an, die Ergebnisse der Verhandlungen zur gemeinsamen Wahlliste bei den Parlamentswahlen bekannt zu geben. Das neue Wahlbündnis sollte für einen Generationswechsel in der polnischen Politik und eine Entpolarisierung der Parteienlandschaft stehen. Am Ende wirkte das nicht eingelöste Versprechen und das Stillschweigen zum aktuellen Stand der Verhandlungen weniger wie ein schlechter Aprilscherz, sondern wie ein Eingeständnis, dass sich die Gespräche viel zäher gestalteten als es die Beteiligten zu Beginn erwartet hatten. Erst knapp einen Monat später verkündeten sie offiziell das Wahlbündnis. Die Sympathie und Harmonie, welche die beiden Parteivorsitzenden in ihrem gemeinsamen Podcast "Hołownia i Kosiniak"[1] ausstrahlten, schienen sich mitnichten auf das Verhältnis ihrer gesamten Parteiapparate zu übertragen.Nimmt man die strukturellen und habituellen Eigenarten der beiden Parteien in Augenschein, verwundert es kaum, dass es sich bei dem Projekt einer gemeinsamen Wahlliste um eine schwere Geburt handelte. Beide politischen Gruppierungen verstehen sich zwar als christdemokratische Zentrumsparteien, legen Wert auf Rechtsstaatlichkeit, auf ein gutes Verhältnis zur EU und sie sind sich in energiepolitischen Fragen relativ einig.[2] Dennoch kann diese punktuelle inhaltliche Nähe kaum über eine lebensweltliche Kluft und die völlig unterschiedlichen Traditionen, welche die Parteien trennen, hinwegtäuschen. Während Polen 2050 - erst im Jahr 2020 gegründet und 2021 als Partei eingetragen - in der Tendenz eine städtische, gebildete Wählerschaft anspricht, bedient PSL mit ihrer mehr als 100-jährigen Geschichte traditionell das ländliche Elektorat. Eine neue Studie zeigt sogar auf, dass es zwischen den Parteien kaum Überschneidungen des Wähler*innenpotentials gibt. Ihre potentiellen Wähler*innen begegnen der jeweils anderen Partei und deren Parteivorsitzenden mit Gleichgültigkeit bis starker Antipathie. Im folgenden Beitrag werden die Besonderheiten der PSL im polnischen Parteiensystem verdeutlicht. Wie keine andere Partei in der Dritten Polnischen Republik steht die PSL für Kontinuität. Als einzige ist sie seit dem Ende des Realsozialismus ununterbrochen im Sejm vertreten. Drei Mal war sie als Juniorpartner an der Regierung beteiligt:1993 bis 1997 und 2002 bis 2003 mit der postkommunistischen SLD (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, "Demokratisches Linksbündnis") sowie 2007 bis 2015 mit Donald Tusks liberal-konservativer Bürgerplattform (Platforma Obywatelska, kurz PO). Dabei erwarb sich die PSL nicht ganz ungerechtfertigt das Image einer ideologisch wenig gefestigten Partei der Postenjäger, in der Patronage und Nepotismus praktiziert werden, etwa bei der Besetzung von Posten im Bereich staatlicher Unternehmen oder der Forstwirtschaft.[3]Dennoch erklärte sie ihren Austritt aus der Koalition mit der postkommunistischen SLD 2003 mit deren unzureichender sozialer Sensibilität. Die Haltung der Partei gegenüber dem polnischen EU-Beitritt war eher ambivalent, was sich später mit dem für alle landwirtschaftliche Betriebe messbaren Finanzfluss der Agrarsubventionen stark ändern sollte. In ihrem sozioökonomischen Programm von 2004 moniert sie, dass angeblich nur wenige Prozent der Bevölkerung von der wirtschaftlichen Transformation profitierten, rund zwei Drittel aber zu den Verlierern zählten. Die PSL forderte ein aktives Eingreifen des Staates in die Wirtschaft.Agrarismus als Besonderheit der Semi-PeripherieUm die Polnische Bauernpartei (PSL) verstehen zu können, muss man in ihre Geschichte schauen. Sie gehört zu den ältesten noch bestehenden politischen Gruppierungen Europas. Ihre Tradition geht auf das Jahr 1893 zurück, als der Związek Stronnictwa Chłopskiego ("Bund der Bauernpartei") gegründet wurde, der sich 1903 zu Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe weiterentwickelte. Der amerikanische Historiker Brian Porter-Szücs, ein ausgesprochener Polen-Spezialist, macht darauf aufmerksam, dass im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert die ideologische Strömung des Agrarismus die dritte große Strömung neben Nationalismus und Sozialismus war. Dies bezeichnet er als ein Spezifikum der Länder der ostmitteleuropäischen und südosteuropäischen Semi-Peripherie.[4] Eine wahrgenommene Fremdherrschaft, kontroverser Besitzstand und das Fehlen einer breiten polnischen Mittelschicht waren jedenfalls günstige Voraussetzungen für die Entstehung der ludowcy, wie sich die Agrarier als soziale und politische Strömung in Polen nannten. Bei den Besonderheiten in der Entstehungsgeschichte gibt es durchaus strukturelle Parallelen zur Intelligenz-Schicht, auf deren Vermächtnis sich Polen 2050 punktuell beruft.[5] Laut dem polnischen Politikwissenschaftler Lech Rubisz fanden die ludowcy bei ihren tschechischen, soziokulturell stärker plebejisch geprägten Nachbarn Vorbilder für das eigene politische Wirken.[6] In beiden Ländern verbanden die Agrarier das Bestreben nach Volksbildung und Selbstbestimmung der Bauern mit dem Kampf um nationale Souveränität. Jedoch hatte der Agrarismus keine durchgängig demokratische Ausrichtung, denn der ihm eigene Nationalismus und der spezifisch volkstümliche Antikapitalismus begünstigen auch in Polen den Antisemitismus.[7]Unter ihren Vorsitzenden war der in Polen legendäre Wincenty Witos, der bis zur Machtübernahme Józef Piłsudskis 1926 mehrmals Ministerpräsident war. Als offener Kritiker von Piłsudskis Sanacja wurde er 1930 verhaftet und in der Festung Brest interniert. Bei einem Prozess 1931 wurde er wegen eines angeblichen Umsturzversuchs zu anderthalb Jahren Gefängnis verurteilt, was ihn nach der Haft zur Emigration in die Tschechoslowakei veranlasste. Bis heute setzt sich die PSL für die volle historische Rehabilitierung ihres legendären Parteivorsitzenden mit der Bestrebung einer gerichtlichen Aufhebung des damaligen Urteils ein. Nach 1945 war die PSL unter der Führung von Stanisław Mikołajczyk die wichtigste Oppositionsgruppierung gegen die Kommunisten, sie wurde jedoch wenige Jahre später zerschlagen. Die Reste der noch legalen Strömungen der Bauernbewegung wurden in der Satellitenpartei ZSL (Zjednoczone Stronnictwo Ludowe, "Vereinigte Bauernpartei") zusammengefasst, die während der ganzen Zeit der Volksrepublik existierte.[8]Was ist die Parteibasis wert?Die PSL ist heute dank der von der ehemaligen Blockpartei ZSL ererbten Organisationsstrukturen vor allem auf dem Land gut verankert und mit nach eigenen Angaben 74.000 Mitgliedern[9] (2011 waren es noch 130.000 Mitglieder[10]) noch immer die mit Abstand mitgliederstärkste Partei Polens. In den 1990er Jahren bis etwa zum EU-Beitritt Polens 2004 galt die große Basis der PSL als Hindernis für einen Modernisierungskurs der Partei unter europäischen Vorzeichen. Vor dem Hintergrund der damaligen zersplitterten ländlichen Besitzstrukturen und einer verhältnismäßig geringen Produktivität der polnischen Landwirtschaft wurde die strukturkonservierende und besitzstandswahrende Politik der Partei stark kritisiert. Zudem glaubte man das Modell der Massenmitgliederpartei auch in westlichen Mediengesellschaften nach 1989 als überholt.[11]Doch wenn man heute langfristig wirkende Einflüsse im Parteienwettbewerb analysiert, so sieht man, dass ausgerechnet aus einigen der vermeintlichen Negativposten und Krisenfaktoren auf lange Sicht neue, manchmal erst spät bemerkte Vorteile erwachsen. Heute ist die PSL nach dem Niedergang der postkommunistischen SLD die einzige Partei Polens, die man als Mitglieder-, Apparat- und Funktionärspartei bezeichnen kann. Bei den Verhandlungen mit Polen 2050 um die Organisation des Wahlkampfes und die Aufstellung der Listen spielte die Schlagkraft der PSL durch die erhaltenen regionalen Strukturen und die Nähe zu wichtigen Vorfeldorganisationen, wie die Kreise der Landfrauen, der Bund der Landjugend und die Freiwillige Feuerwehr, eine nicht geringe Rolle. Der Präsident des Hauptvorstands der Freiwilligen Feuerwehren im ganzen Land ist seit 1992 Waldemar Pawlak, ein ehemaliger Ministerpräsident und Spitzenpolitiker der PSL. Gerade in den Wahlkampfwochen unmittelbar vor den Wahlen sind die lokalen Parteimitglieder unverzichtbar. Sie stellen sich mit den Wahlständen auf die Marktplätze, vor die Kirchen und die Supermärkte, sie sorgen für Sichtbarkeit und sie organisieren und zeigen Präsenz bei größeren Wahlveranstaltungen. Es wird berichtet, die strukturschwache Polen 2050 befürchte, die PSL-Funktionär*innen könnten trotz gemeinsamer Listen lediglich für ihre eigenen Kandidat*innen werben.[12]Die eigentliche Stärke der PSL zeigte die Partei aufgrund ihrer weit verzweigten Organisationsstrukturen bei den Wahlen zur territorialen Selbstverwaltung, bei denen in Polen auf Dorf- und Gemeindeebene auch viele parteilose Kandidaten antreten. Aufgrund der schwachen Verwurzelung anderer Parteien auf dem Land konnte die PSL viel höhere Ergebnisse einfahren als bei den Parlamentswahlen, bei den sie in der Regel Stimmanteile im einstelligen Bereich erreichte. Sie stellt in kleinen und mittleren Städten überdurchschnittlich viele Bürgermeister, in 8 von 16 Woiwodschaftssejmiks ist sie derzeit Teil der Mehrheitsgruppe. Sie profitiert von den Parteimultiplikatoren innerhalb der ländlichen Nachbarschafts- und Familiennetzwerke und der Verbundenheit mit der Katholischen Kirche im ländlichen Raum. Die PSL gibt sich betont katholisch und steht in der öffentlichen Verehrung des verstorbenen Papstes Johannes Paul II. der PiS kaum nach. Auch im Hinblick auf die Säkularisierung tritt der gesellschaftliche Wandel auf dem Land verlangsamter als in den polnischen Städten auf.[13]Landgewinne und Verdrängung durch die PiSZum mächtigen Wettbewerber um die Gunst der starken sozialstrukturellen Basis der PSL – immerhin leben 40 Prozent der Bevölkerung auf dem Land[14] – erwuchs in den letzten Jahren die PiS. Unter anderem setzte sie starke Anreize durch die finanzielle Förderung der ländlichen Organisationsstruktur. Jede Feuerwehr sollte einen neuen Feuerwehrwagen erhalten, die Landfrauen konnten niedrigschwellige Förderanträge stellen und auch Neugründungen wurden explizit unterstützt.[15] Die ehemaligen Wählerhochburgen der PSL im strukturschwachen Südosten des Landes gelten seit 2015 als PiS-Hochburgen. Sie profitiert vom Wegzug der Jüngeren, besser Gebildeten in die Städte, von der Überalterung der ländlichen Bevölkerung und ihrer Abhängigkeit von staatlichen Transferleistungen. Bei den Parlamentswahlen 2019 stimmten 56 Prozent der wahlberechtigten ländlichen Bevölkerung für die PiS. Derzeit ist auffällig, dass die PSL in Wahlumfragen kaum von den Bauernprotesten im Zusammenhang mit den überschüssigen ukrainischen Agrarprodukten und dem Preissturz für diese profitiert. Seit Wochen blockieren Landwirte Straßen und fordern Schutzzölle. Sie klagen, dass die Regierung zu lange untätig geblieben sei, während die Preise so stark gefallen seien, dass der Getreideanbau für sie unrentabel geworden sei.[16] Die PiS stellt sowohl den verantwortlichen Agrarminister in Polen wie auch den Kommissar für Landwirtschaft und ländliche Entwicklung in der Europäischen Kommission, Janusz Wojciechowski.FazitDie Prognosen der Wahlforschung, ob die Strategie der Entpolarisierung mithilfe der Besetzung der politischen Mitte durch das Wahlbündnis PSL/Polska 2050 tatsächlich aufgeht, fallen uneindeutig aus.[17] Für einen Einzug in den Sejm benötigt ein Wahlbündnis 8 Prozent der Stimmen. In den Umfragen der letzten Monate kommen die beiden Parteien gemeinsam auf 10 bis 17 Prozent. Ob eine vereinigte oder mehrere Wahllisten der demokratischen Opposition zum Wahlerfolg führen, wird - anders als der mediale Diskurs es vermuten lässt - auch 2023 nicht die alles entscheidende Frage sein. Wirft man einen Blick über die südliche Grenze Polens hinaus, so sieht man Folgendes: In Tschechien schien der populistische Ministerpräsident Andrej Babiš unschlagbar zu sein, doch mit zwei Wahllisten konnte sich die Opposition durchsetzen. In Ungarn, wo auf den Plakaten der vereinigten Opposition ein sozialistischer Kandidat neben einem nationalistischen Politiker der Jobbik-Partei zu sehen war, gelang es nicht, Fidesz an der Regierung abzulösen. Es bleibt vielmehr abzuwarten, ob das Wahlbündnis PSL/Polen 2050 es schafft, eine einigende und überzeugende Vision für die Zukunft Polens auszuarbeiten, die sowohl ihre Kandidat*innen als auch die Parteibasis im Wahlkampf und darüber hinaus tragen kann.

[1] Podcast "Hołownia i Kosiniak" [https://open.spotify.com/episode/2aBbza1KowZG4SOaviYABb].
[2] Joanna Sawicka; Wojciech Szacki: Polska idzie na wieś, in: Polityka, 21.02.2023, S. 18-20, S. 18.


[3] Rafał Matyja: PSL – partia inna niż wszystkie, in: Marek Migalski (Hrsg.): Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, Toruń 2023, S. 25-41, S. 25ff.


[4] Brian Porter-Szücs: Całkiem zwyczajny kraj. Historia Polski bez martyrologii, Warszawa 2021, S. 108ff.


[5] Vgl. Klaudia Hanisch: Links in Polen: Krytyka Polityczna und die Tradition der osteuropäischen Intelligenz, Stuttgart 2013.


[6] Lech Rubisz: Trzecią Drogą w III RP. Tradycje i zasady ideowe Polskiego Stronnictwa Ludowego, in: Marek Migalski (Hrsg.): Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, Toruń 2023, S. 7-25, S. 12.


[7] Brian Porter-Szücs: Całkiem zwyczajny kraj. Historia Polski bez martyrologii, Warszawa 2021, S. 119ff.


[8] Klaus Ziemer: Das Politische System Polens, Wiesbaden 2013, S. 271.


[9] Joanna Sawicka; Wojciech Szacki: Polska idzie na wieś, in: Polityka, 21.02.2023, S. 18-20.


[10] Klaus Ziemer: Das Politische System Polens, Wiesbaden 2013, S. 271.


[11] Vgl. Peter Mair: Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London 2023, S. 42.


[12] Joanna Sawicka; Wojciech Szacki: Polska idzie na wieś, in: Polityka, 21.02.2023, S. 18-20, S. 20.


[13] Vgl. Krystyna Leśniak-Moczuk: Wieś współczesna w tyglu przemian społeczno-ekonomicznych, in: Jolanta Gretowska-Leder; Ewa Rokicka: Przemiany Społeczne w Polsce i ich konsekwencje. Perspektywa Socjologiczna, Łódź 2015, S. 141-157, S. 153ff.


[14] Zum Vergleich, in Deutschland gestaltet sich das Verhältnis der Stadt- und Landbewohner*innen 22,5 Prozent zu 77,5 Prozent, vgl. Ziemer, Klaus: Das politische System Polens. Eine Einführung, Wiesbaden 2013, S. 210.


[15] Regierungsprogramm zur Förderung der Landfrauen: [https://www.gov.pl/web/kobiety-gospodarne-i-wyjatkowe/co-zrobic-zeby-zalozyc-kolo].


[16] Solska, Joanna: Na polach kiełkuje złość, in: polityka.pl, 29.03.2023, [https://www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/rynek/2206700,1,na-polach-kielkuje-zlosc-protesty-rolnikow-rozlewaja-sie-po-kraju-wladza-nie-wie-co-robic.read], vgl. Frątczak, Norbert: Ziarna gniewu, in: Polityka, 12.04.- 18.04.2023, S. 29-31.


[17] Vgl. Łada-Konefał: Eins, zwei, drei … Mit wie vielen Listenverbindungen wird die Opposition zu den polnischen Parlamentswahlen 2023 antreten? [https://www.deutsches-polen-institut.de/blog/eins-zwei-drei-mit-wie-vielen-listenverbindungen-wird-die-opposition-zu-den-polnischen-parlamentswahlen-2023-antreten/].

Lithuanian historical sources mentioned the divers for the first time in the 1990s. With intention to assist emerging national formations of the Department of National Defense of Lithuania, , Valerijus Krisikaitis reported to the local national defense department in Klaipeda in September of 1990. He was a certificated diver and karate instructor and expressed his desire to work in the national defense service. Also, he had displayed an unorthodox approach by offering to organize and train a squad, which would be prepared for combat self-defense and combat diving. These skills could be applied to protection of Klaipėda Seaport again possible attacks organized and executed by foreign hostile military forces. This was the beginning of the formation of combat divers' units in Lithuanian military. Currently, this combat capacity has increased significantly. Due to "Restricted" and "Secret" classification marks, the exact figures cannot be disclosed, but open sources indicate that there are two separate units, The Underwater Action Team, which is part of the Naval Forces and the Combat Divers Service, which is subordinated to the Special Operations Forces. These units have separate boat crews, maintenance and supply teams, individual explosive ordnance disposal experts, combat divers, rescue teams and much more. The structure of research in the master 's thesis consists of a summary in English, an introduction and three chapters. Also, it includes conclusions, list of literature and sources, recommendations and appendices. The first chapter analyzes the key aspects of formation and origins of the Lithuanian Army Combat Swimmer Squad in 1990-1992, the incorporation of combat swimmers into the Lithuanian Armed Forces and the squad contingent formation instructions, divers and possibilities of starting / financing / supplying the technical base. The second chapter is concentrated on the activities of the Lithuanian Combat Swimmers Squadron in 1993-2004. Separate chapters discuss the change of the Lithuanian Armed Forces 'leadership in terms of combat swimmers' platoon and the planning of the platoon employment, the genesis of the Lithuanian Armed Forces 'combat swimmers' platoon competence building system and its transformation. Also, evolution of the technical base of the Lithuanian Army combat swimmers' platoon: financing and supply. The third chapter examines the image of Lithuanian military divers in media in 1991–2004. The main aspects and narratives that need to be paid attention to: the Lithuanian society (media) in relation to Lithuanian combat swimmers are analyzed. It is examined why Lithuanian combat swimmers benefited from media attention. The goal of the research. The main goal of the research is the information analysis of the Lithuanian combat divers' activities during formation of the independent and modern Lithuanian military structure. This analysis includes available sources from the Lithuanian military and public media related with the topic. The methods of the research. The main research was performed applying combined study using both qualitative and quantitative methods of research. The main tools utilized in the research were the questionnaire and in-depth interviews. Statistic data processing and the content analysis methods had been applied in order to process the data collected. The target audience of the qualitative research were 7 individuals who had completed military service in the combat divers' unit in the past. The research was conducted according to the ethical standards. The results of the scientific research. The analysis of the data revealed that Lithuanian combat divers have been perfectly prepared to act as soldiers, both physically and psychologically, during the timeframe of this research embracing periods of 1990s to 2004. Their activities were limited only due to the financial constraints and lack of the reliable diving equipment and infrastructure. The importance of the combat divers in the Lithuanian Armed Forces has been significant since the beginning of their activities and was slowly increasing during the time period of the research. This was mostly attributed to their skills and abilities to perform demolition tasks underwater and this field of activities was equally high skilled in comparison to modern and highly equipped foreign military forces and their divers. The age and education of the potential candidates to the Lithuanian combat divers' unit also had a great significance. Because training and preparation process of the candidates could take years, only young soldiers from the professional military service units have been accepted to be trained as highly professional combat divers. According to the interviewees, the significance of the Lithuanian combat divers was definitely high in the Lithuanian military because a small unit of underwater subversive divers could cause a greater damage than an infantry battalion. Conclusions and recommendations. 1. The origins of formation of the Lithuanian combat divers' squad in 1990s. Back at that time, the leader and main instructor of the combat divers' unit Valerijus Krisikaitis had started to recruit the team and train the diver candidates. There was a clear vision at that time that independent Lithuanian Armed Forces would meet the demand of the highly trained combat divers. The problem of the incorporation of the unit into the structure of Lithuanian Military Forces has been addressed gradually. In the beginning the combat divers under the name of the diving club "Nautilius" were incorporated into the local SKAT department in Klaipėda. In 1992, after the establishment of the "Iron Wolf" brigade and the paratrooper regiment in Klaipėda, the combat divers became subordinated to the regiment commander. Due to insufficient funding during the period from 1990s to 1992, there were active efforts in order to find necessary funding from both private supporters and the government. 2. The position of the senior leadership of the Lithuanian Armed Forces towards the issues of the Lithuanian combat divers had improved since 1993. It was the beginning of the actual support and assistance. Orders had been issued to establish a squad of combat divers. The support has been growing ever since due to the fact that the necessity of this unit had been proved and there were no uncertainties about the quality of training. Overall formation of the Lithuanian Armed Forces and incorporation of the combat divers took more than a few years. Time was necessary for training of the candidates able to perform combat tasks, special operations, reconnaissance and demining tasks both underwater and on the surface. During the period of 12 years since 1992, the training system was implemented from the scratch. The heart of the diving training became the squad of combat divers in Klaipėda, led by Valerijus Krisikaitis. The Lithuanian Armed Forces during the period from 1993 to 2004 had become capable of training the combat divers and explosive ordnance disposal experts in their own local training centers. These locally trained combat divers have been internationally acknowledged as perfectly prepared to perform combat tasks and being able to train other soldiers to perform diving tasks. A positive change in Lithuanian legislative and executive powers' opinion towards the Lithuanian combat divers led to increase of both, reliance and funding. The undisputed importance of the only diving unit able to perform underwater countermining was the main reason that caused such a trust. Back in the period from 1993 to 2004, the territory of the Republic of Lithuania had been covered by unexploded ordnance items left after World War II and still causing threats to the local inhabitants. 3. After the restoration of the independence, Lithuanian media has been used effectively in order to create a positive public opinion about the activities of the combat divers. The soldiers who have been doing their service in the unit have been portrayed as brave and professional specialists doing underwater countermining and other secret military tasks. The main aspects and the common narrative in the media and the public eye were the combat training of the divers, also training in the public sectors, assistance to the rescue services and their contribution to the society. The content of the media publications has changed. In the beginning, the main topic was the issues of the combat divers' service, mostly the financial scarcity. Invitations to join the diving club "Nautilius" and information about private and commissioned diving tasks performed by the unit had been published. Since 1997, the media had changed earlier used kind of publications into information about the international military trainings attended by the Lithuanian combat divers and their autonomous training. The invitations for the civilians to join the combat divers' service disappeared from the media and were replaced by the publications about well-trained divers and their professionally carried out underwater tasks that demonstrate the competence equal to the modern foreign military divers.

Lithuanian historical sources mentioned the divers for the first time in the 1990s. With intention to assist emerging national formations of the Department of National Defense of Lithuania, , Valerijus Krisikaitis reported to the local national defense department in Klaipeda in September of 1990. He was a certificated diver and karate instructor and expressed his desire to work in the national defense service. Also, he had displayed an unorthodox approach by offering to organize and train a squad, which would be prepared for combat self-defense and combat diving. These skills could be applied to protection of Klaipėda Seaport again possible attacks organized and executed by foreign hostile military forces. This was the beginning of the formation of combat divers' units in Lithuanian military. Currently, this combat capacity has increased significantly. Due to "Restricted" and "Secret" classification marks, the exact figures cannot be disclosed, but open sources indicate that there are two separate units, The Underwater Action Team, which is part of the Naval Forces and the Combat Divers Service, which is subordinated to the Special Operations Forces. These units have separate boat crews, maintenance and supply teams, individual explosive ordnance disposal experts, combat divers, rescue teams and much more. The structure of research in the master 's thesis consists of a summary in English, an introduction and three chapters. Also, it includes conclusions, list of literature and sources, recommendations and appendices. The first chapter analyzes the key aspects of formation and origins of the Lithuanian Army Combat Swimmer Squad in 1990-1992, the incorporation of combat swimmers into the Lithuanian Armed Forces and the squad contingent formation instructions, divers and possibilities of starting / financing / supplying the technical base. The second chapter is concentrated on the activities of the Lithuanian Combat Swimmers Squadron in 1993-2004. Separate chapters discuss the change of the Lithuanian Armed Forces 'leadership in terms of combat swimmers' platoon and the planning of the platoon employment, the genesis of the Lithuanian Armed Forces 'combat swimmers' platoon competence building system and its transformation. Also, evolution of the technical base of the Lithuanian Army combat swimmers' platoon: financing and supply. The third chapter examines the image of Lithuanian military divers in media in 1991–2004. The main aspects and narratives that need to be paid attention to: the Lithuanian society (media) in relation to Lithuanian combat swimmers are analyzed. It is examined why Lithuanian combat swimmers benefited from media attention. The goal of the research. The main goal of the research is the information analysis of the Lithuanian combat divers' activities during formation of the independent and modern Lithuanian military structure. This analysis includes available sources from the Lithuanian military and public media related with the topic. The methods of the research. The main research was performed applying combined study using both qualitative and quantitative methods of research. The main tools utilized in the research were the questionnaire and in-depth interviews. Statistic data processing and the content analysis methods had been applied in order to process the data collected. The target audience of the qualitative research were 7 individuals who had completed military service in the combat divers' unit in the past. The research was conducted according to the ethical standards. The results of the scientific research. The analysis of the data revealed that Lithuanian combat divers have been perfectly prepared to act as soldiers, both physically and psychologically, during the timeframe of this research embracing periods of 1990s to 2004. Their activities were limited only due to the financial constraints and lack of the reliable diving equipment and infrastructure. The importance of the combat divers in the Lithuanian Armed Forces has been significant since the beginning of their activities and was slowly increasing during the time period of the research. This was mostly attributed to their skills and abilities to perform demolition tasks underwater and this field of activities was equally high skilled in comparison to modern and highly equipped foreign military forces and their divers. The age and education of the potential candidates to the Lithuanian combat divers' unit also had a great significance. Because training and preparation process of the candidates could take years, only young soldiers from the professional military service units have been accepted to be trained as highly professional combat divers. According to the interviewees, the significance of the Lithuanian combat divers was definitely high in the Lithuanian military because a small unit of underwater subversive divers could cause a greater damage than an infantry battalion. Conclusions and recommendations. 1. The origins of formation of the Lithuanian combat divers' squad in 1990s. Back at that time, the leader and main instructor of the combat divers' unit Valerijus Krisikaitis had started to recruit the team and train the diver candidates. There was a clear vision at that time that independent Lithuanian Armed Forces would meet the demand of the highly trained combat divers. The problem of the incorporation of the unit into the structure of Lithuanian Military Forces has been addressed gradually. In the beginning the combat divers under the name of the diving club "Nautilius" were incorporated into the local SKAT department in Klaipėda. In 1992, after the establishment of the "Iron Wolf" brigade and the paratrooper regiment in Klaipėda, the combat divers became subordinated to the regiment commander. Due to insufficient funding during the period from 1990s to 1992, there were active efforts in order to find necessary funding from both private supporters and the government. 2. The position of the senior leadership of the Lithuanian Armed Forces towards the issues of the Lithuanian combat divers had improved since 1993. It was the beginning of the actual support and assistance. Orders had been issued to establish a squad of combat divers. The support has been growing ever since due to the fact that the necessity of this unit had been proved and there were no uncertainties about the quality of training. Overall formation of the Lithuanian Armed Forces and incorporation of the combat divers took more than a few years. Time was necessary for training of the candidates able to perform combat tasks, special operations, reconnaissance and demining tasks both underwater and on the surface. During the period of 12 years since 1992, the training system was implemented from the scratch. The heart of the diving training became the squad of combat divers in Klaipėda, led by Valerijus Krisikaitis. The Lithuanian Armed Forces during the period from 1993 to 2004 had become capable of training the combat divers and explosive ordnance disposal experts in their own local training centers. These locally trained combat divers have been internationally acknowledged as perfectly prepared to perform combat tasks and being able to train other soldiers to perform diving tasks. A positive change in Lithuanian legislative and executive powers' opinion towards the Lithuanian combat divers led to increase of both, reliance and funding. The undisputed importance of the only diving unit able to perform underwater countermining was the main reason that caused such a trust. Back in the period from 1993 to 2004, the territory of the Republic of Lithuania had been covered by unexploded ordnance items left after World War II and still causing threats to the local inhabitants. 3. After the restoration of the independence, Lithuanian media has been used effectively in order to create a positive public opinion about the activities of the combat divers. The soldiers who have been doing their service in the unit have been portrayed as brave and professional specialists doing underwater countermining and other secret military tasks. The main aspects and the common narrative in the media and the public eye were the combat training of the divers, also training in the public sectors, assistance to the rescue services and their contribution to the society. The content of the media publications has changed. In the beginning, the main topic was the issues of the combat divers' service, mostly the financial scarcity. Invitations to join the diving club "Nautilius" and information about private and commissioned diving tasks performed by the unit had been published. Since 1997, the media had changed earlier used kind of publications into information about the international military trainings attended by the Lithuanian combat divers and their autonomous training. The invitations for the civilians to join the combat divers' service disappeared from the media and were replaced by the publications about well-trained divers and their professionally carried out underwater tasks that demonstrate the competence equal to the modern foreign military divers.

Lithuanian historical sources mentioned the divers for the first time in the 1990s. With intention to assist emerging national formations of the Department of National Defense of Lithuania, , Valerijus Krisikaitis reported to the local national defense department in Klaipeda in September of 1990. He was a certificated diver and karate instructor and expressed his desire to work in the national defense service. Also, he had displayed an unorthodox approach by offering to organize and train a squad, which would be prepared for combat self-defense and combat diving. These skills could be applied to protection of Klaipėda Seaport again possible attacks organized and executed by foreign hostile military forces. This was the beginning of the formation of combat divers' units in Lithuanian military. Currently, this combat capacity has increased significantly. Due to "Restricted" and "Secret" classification marks, the exact figures cannot be disclosed, but open sources indicate that there are two separate units, The Underwater Action Team, which is part of the Naval Forces and the Combat Divers Service, which is subordinated to the Special Operations Forces. These units have separate boat crews, maintenance and supply teams, individual explosive ordnance disposal experts, combat divers, rescue teams and much more. The structure of research in the master 's thesis consists of a summary in English, an introduction and three chapters. Also, it includes conclusions, list of literature and sources, recommendations and appendices. The first chapter analyzes the key aspects of formation and origins of the Lithuanian Army Combat Swimmer Squad in 1990-1992, the incorporation of combat swimmers into the Lithuanian Armed Forces and the squad contingent formation instructions, divers and possibilities of starting / financing / supplying the technical base. The second chapter is concentrated on the activities of the Lithuanian Combat Swimmers Squadron in 1993-2004. Separate chapters discuss the change of the Lithuanian Armed Forces 'leadership in terms of combat swimmers' platoon and the planning of the platoon employment, the genesis of the Lithuanian Armed Forces 'combat swimmers' platoon competence building system and its transformation. Also, evolution of the technical base of the Lithuanian Army combat swimmers' platoon: financing and supply. The third chapter examines the image of Lithuanian military divers in media in 1991–2004. The main aspects and narratives that need to be paid attention to: the Lithuanian society (media) in relation to Lithuanian combat swimmers are analyzed. It is examined why Lithuanian combat swimmers benefited from media attention. The goal of the research. The main goal of the research is the information analysis of the Lithuanian combat divers' activities during formation of the independent and modern Lithuanian military structure. This analysis includes available sources from the Lithuanian military and public media related with the topic. The methods of the research. The main research was performed applying combined study using both qualitative and quantitative methods of research. The main tools utilized in the research were the questionnaire and in-depth interviews. Statistic data processing and the content analysis methods had been applied in order to process the data collected. The target audience of the qualitative research were 7 individuals who had completed military service in the combat divers' unit in the past. The research was conducted according to the ethical standards. The results of the scientific research. The analysis of the data revealed that Lithuanian combat divers have been perfectly prepared to act as soldiers, both physically and psychologically, during the timeframe of this research embracing periods of 1990s to 2004. Their activities were limited only due to the financial constraints and lack of the reliable diving equipment and infrastructure. The importance of the combat divers in the Lithuanian Armed Forces has been significant since the beginning of their activities and was slowly increasing during the time period of the research. This was mostly attributed to their skills and abilities to perform demolition tasks underwater and this field of activities was equally high skilled in comparison to modern and highly equipped foreign military forces and their divers. The age and education of the potential candidates to the Lithuanian combat divers' unit also had a great significance. Because training and preparation process of the candidates could take years, only young soldiers from the professional military service units have been accepted to be trained as highly professional combat divers. According to the interviewees, the significance of the Lithuanian combat divers was definitely high in the Lithuanian military because a small unit of underwater subversive divers could cause a greater damage than an infantry battalion. Conclusions and recommendations. 1. The origins of formation of the Lithuanian combat divers' squad in 1990s. Back at that time, the leader and main instructor of the combat divers' unit Valerijus Krisikaitis had started to recruit the team and train the diver candidates. There was a clear vision at that time that independent Lithuanian Armed Forces would meet the demand of the highly trained combat divers. The problem of the incorporation of the unit into the structure of Lithuanian Military Forces has been addressed gradually. In the beginning the combat divers under the name of the diving club "Nautilius" were incorporated into the local SKAT department in Klaipėda. In 1992, after the establishment of the "Iron Wolf" brigade and the paratrooper regiment in Klaipėda, the combat divers became subordinated to the regiment commander. Due to insufficient funding during the period from 1990s to 1992, there were active efforts in order to find necessary funding from both private supporters and the government. 2. The position of the senior leadership of the Lithuanian Armed Forces towards the issues of the Lithuanian combat divers had improved since 1993. It was the beginning of the actual support and assistance. Orders had been issued to establish a squad of combat divers. The support has been growing ever since due to the fact that the necessity of this unit had been proved and there were no uncertainties about the quality of training. Overall formation of the Lithuanian Armed Forces and incorporation of the combat divers took more than a few years. Time was necessary for training of the candidates able to perform combat tasks, special operations, reconnaissance and demining tasks both underwater and on the surface. During the period of 12 years since 1992, the training system was implemented from the scratch. The heart of the diving training became the squad of combat divers in Klaipėda, led by Valerijus Krisikaitis. The Lithuanian Armed Forces during the period from 1993 to 2004 had become capable of training the combat divers and explosive ordnance disposal experts in their own local training centers. These locally trained combat divers have been internationally acknowledged as perfectly prepared to perform combat tasks and being able to train other soldiers to perform diving tasks. A positive change in Lithuanian legislative and executive powers' opinion towards the Lithuanian combat divers led to increase of both, reliance and funding. The undisputed importance of the only diving unit able to perform underwater countermining was the main reason that caused such a trust. Back in the period from 1993 to 2004, the territory of the Republic of Lithuania had been covered by unexploded ordnance items left after World War II and still causing threats to the local inhabitants. 3. After the restoration of the independence, Lithuanian media has been used effectively in order to create a positive public opinion about the activities of the combat divers. The soldiers who have been doing their service in the unit have been portrayed as brave and professional specialists doing underwater countermining and other secret military tasks. The main aspects and the common narrative in the media and the public eye were the combat training of the divers, also training in the public sectors, assistance to the rescue services and their contribution to the society. The content of the media publications has changed. In the beginning, the main topic was the issues of the combat divers' service, mostly the financial scarcity. Invitations to join the diving club "Nautilius" and information about private and commissioned diving tasks performed by the unit had been published. Since 1997, the media had changed earlier used kind of publications into information about the international military trainings attended by the Lithuanian combat divers and their autonomous training. The invitations for the civilians to join the combat divers' service disappeared from the media and were replaced by the publications about well-trained divers and their professionally carried out underwater tasks that demonstrate the competence equal to the modern foreign military divers.

This paper deals with tracing the origins of Eurocentrism, as well as its consolidation in the form of an Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, as the dominant views in the study of International Relations (IR). These approaches have influenced not only the academic discipline but also the very political structure of the international system, ignoring the voices of the peripheral regions outside the European/Anglo-Saxon center. Larry Buzan and Richard Little have thoroughly documented five problems in the study of IR: Eurocentrism, Presentism, Anarchophilia, State-centrism and Ahistoricism. Upon their examination, some scholars have suggested that the geotemporal perspective should be broadened to address the fact that, within our discipline, history has long been viewed as an exogenous, if not superfluous, tool. At best, as Nick Vaugham-Williams argues, it has only served as a quarry from which to extract the facts that have helped shape the theories of the present. If history has been an instrument, used by the dominant ideology to contribute to this Eurocentric paradigm, it is also valid to use it to give voice to all regions of the world, especially those overlooked by the mainstream. Eurocentrism has been deemed a historical epiphenomenon that arose at a time when the great European powers dominated the world almost in its entirety, and that emerged from a very particular point of view around the concepts of modernity that related the birth of the international system with the conditions in which the modern world originated. The theoretical discussion of International Relations, according to Celestino Del Arenal, begins with the first interpretations of international life embodied in classic documents such as Thucydides'Peloponnesian War. However, it will be in the Christian and hegemonic Renaissance of 15th century Europe with its political, philosophical, legal, economic and sociological thought along with the modernization processes, first, and then, the conformation of the current international society when the world scenario opens for the theory of International Relations. Both social reality and theory were conditioned by a civilizing reasoning from the beginning where capitalism and the State were central to the foundation of Westernization. The "founding myth" of the origin of the international system was also conceived as a linear progression of history that moved in successive events and stages until it reached a civilizational apogee. The consolidation as an epistemological paradigm comes from a second historical process: the dominance of the American academy in the study of International Relations at the same time that the hegemony of the United States in world politics was achieved. Stanley Hoffman attributed to the United States the development of the scientific discipline, appropriating it for three causes that came together in the wake of World War II and its rise to world power: an intellectual predisposition based on a realistic academic community, the political context of a democratic government reinforced by sound and critical foundations, and the strength of its institutions, and the "check and balance" system. From this perspective, the discipline suffered a bias towards the political concerns of the United States and the fact of ensuring that the theories available to study these issues were theories that conformed to the American definition of what a social science should be. In addition, we examine the reasons why this ideology is still in force by proposing an all-encompassing alternative that allows the elaboration of "home-made" theories. This document recovers the theory of continuity envisioned by André Gunder Frank, Robert A. Denemark and Barry K. Gills within the hypothesis of the 5,000 year-old international system to propose a humanocentric approach. Such perspective would allow the broadening of our discipline's analytical framework, as suggested by Jacques Derrida, not with the aim of dissolving or destroying it but rather to review the structures on which the discursive elements are based, the way we think, and how we conduct our research. A starting point to enrich this vision is to look into the history of each of the regions of the world trying to find the origins of human interactions and learn from the experience of each one of them in order to answer what truly constitutes the"international". With this comprehensive vision we can rightly build a global and inclusive discipline, improving the dominant conception. The methodology of this article is based on analyzing various documents, focusing particularly on those written outside the traditional European academic center, such as the works of Deniz Kuru, from Turkey, Melody Fonseca, from Puerto Rico, and the opinions of academics from various research centers in Latin America. From this starting point I analyze the differences, similarities and convergences of Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism, then I look at what is considered the consolidation of Eurocentrism into an Anglo-saxon ethnocentric mentality. Consequently, I explore the possibility of a new humanocentrism and propose a new historiography of International Relations in which the historian is able to differentiate between significant and accidental causes. To achieve this, academics must act from their own perspectives, setting aside ideology, any supremacist epistemology, and the conditioned mindset to emancipate their research from these. Therefore, dominant theories such as realism are not the only theoretical framework to understand the history of the international system. Constructivist and Reflexive perspectives that illustrate how other regions contributed to this configuration and of what we know today as the modern civilization should also be taken into account. I conclude that we as researchers must begin to design new forms to collect the historical information coming from all corners of the globe, as Peter Frankopan posits, to deconstruct the IR discipline, expanding regional and inter-regional dialogues, training students to develop a critical eye that can challenge the vision of the mainstream, in order to transform the system towards a better, and more truly global, IR. ; El objetivo en este trabajo es analizar los orígenes del eurocentrismo, así como de su consolidación en la forma de un etnocentrismo anglosajón, como las visiones dominantes en el estudio de Relaciones Internacionales. De igual manera, se revisan las razones por las que esta ideología continúa vigente y por qué estos enfoques han influido no solo en la disciplina académica sino también en la misma estructura política de la sociedad internacional pasando por alto las voces de las regiones periféricas de este centro europeo-anglosajón. Al respecto, en él se hace un análisis introductorio sobre el papel que la Historia ha fungido dentro de la disciplina y la forma en que la corriente principal de esta la ha utilizado, muchas veces, como la cantera desde donde extraer los hechos que han apoyado a conformar las teorías y los paradigmas del presente. La Historia ha sido una herramienta exógena, si no superflua, por mucho tiempo, utilizada por la ideología dominante, que ha contribuido al paradigma eurocentrista. Por lo que en este trabajo se aboga por la ampliación de la perspectiva geotemporal en el análisis y la diversificación de las temáticas en Relaciones Internacionales para darle voz a todas las regiones del mundo. A partir del análisis documental de diversos textos, con especial atención a aquellos escritos fuera del centro académico tradicional europeo, como los trabajos de Deniz Kuru, de Turquía, Melody Fonseca, de Puerto Rico, y las opiniones de académicos de diversos centros de investigación en América Latina, se propone en este artículo reconstruir la disciplina, como lo sugiere Jacques Derrida, no con el objetivo de disolverla o destruirla, sino el de analizar las estructuras sobre las que se basa el elemento discursivo, la manera en la que pensamos, la perspectiva desde donde analizamos. Un punto de partida para enriquecer esta visión es la de buscar en la historia de cada una de las regiones del mundo los orígenes de las interacciones humanas, qué nos puede decir la historia de cada región sobre su propia experiencia internacional para así darnos cuenta que, como Aristóteles lo dijo, el ser humano es por naturaleza, un ser político y que lo internacional está intrínsecamente ligado a la naturaleza humana. Con esta visión humanocentrista, podemos reconstruir acertadamente una disciplina global e inclusiva, sumándola a la concepción dominante y perfeccionándola en unas Relaciones Internacionales con un conocimiento holístico de la sociedad internacional, dando pauta a elaboraciones teóricas "hechas en casa".

Lithuanian historical sources mentioned the divers for the first time in the 1990s. With intention to assist emerging national formations of the Department of National Defense of Lithuania, , Valerijus Krisikaitis reported to the local national defense department in Klaipeda in September of 1990. He was a certificated diver and karate instructor and expressed his desire to work in the national defense service. Also, he had displayed an unorthodox approach by offering to organize and train a squad, which would be prepared for combat self-defense and combat diving. These skills could be applied to protection of Klaipėda Seaport again possible attacks organized and executed by foreign hostile military forces. This was the beginning of the formation of combat divers' units in Lithuanian military. Currently, this combat capacity has increased significantly. Due to "Restricted" and "Secret" classification marks, the exact figures cannot be disclosed, but open sources indicate that there are two separate units, The Underwater Action Team, which is part of the Naval Forces and the Combat Divers Service, which is subordinated to the Special Operations Forces. These units have separate boat crews, maintenance and supply teams, individual explosive ordnance disposal experts, combat divers, rescue teams and much more. The structure of research in the master 's thesis consists of a summary in English, an introduction and three chapters. Also, it includes conclusions, list of literature and sources, recommendations and appendices. The first chapter analyzes the key aspects of formation and origins of the Lithuanian Army Combat Swimmer Squad in 1990-1992, the incorporation of combat swimmers into the Lithuanian Armed Forces and the squad contingent formation instructions, divers and possibilities of starting / financing / supplying the technical base. The second chapter is concentrated on the activities of the Lithuanian Combat Swimmers Squadron in 1993-2004. Separate chapters discuss the change of the Lithuanian Armed Forces 'leadership in terms of combat swimmers' platoon and the planning of the platoon employment, the genesis of the Lithuanian Armed Forces 'combat swimmers' platoon competence building system and its transformation. Also, evolution of the technical base of the Lithuanian Army combat swimmers' platoon: financing and supply. The third chapter examines the image of Lithuanian military divers in media in 1991–2004. The main aspects and narratives that need to be paid attention to: the Lithuanian society (media) in relation to Lithuanian combat swimmers are analyzed. It is examined why Lithuanian combat swimmers benefited from media attention. The goal of the research. The main goal of the research is the information analysis of the Lithuanian combat divers' activities during formation of the independent and modern Lithuanian military structure. This analysis includes available sources from the Lithuanian military and public media related with the topic. The methods of the research. The main research was performed applying combined study using both qualitative and quantitative methods of research. The main tools utilized in the research were the questionnaire and in-depth interviews. Statistic data processing and the content analysis methods had been applied in order to process the data collected. The target audience of the qualitative research were 7 individuals who had completed military service in the combat divers' unit in the past. The research was conducted according to the ethical standards. The results of the scientific research. The analysis of the data revealed that Lithuanian combat divers have been perfectly prepared to act as soldiers, both physically and psychologically, during the timeframe of this research embracing periods of 1990s to 2004. Their activities were limited only due to the financial constraints and lack of the reliable diving equipment and infrastructure. The importance of the combat divers in the Lithuanian Armed Forces has been significant since the beginning of their activities and was slowly increasing during the time period of the research. This was mostly attributed to their skills and abilities to perform demolition tasks underwater and this field of activities was equally high skilled in comparison to modern and highly equipped foreign military forces and their divers. The age and education of the potential candidates to the Lithuanian combat divers' unit also had a great significance. Because training and preparation process of the candidates could take years, only young soldiers from the professional military service units have been accepted to be trained as highly professional combat divers. According to the interviewees, the significance of the Lithuanian combat divers was definitely high in the Lithuanian military because a small unit of underwater subversive divers could cause a greater damage than an infantry battalion. Conclusions and recommendations. 1. The origins of formation of the Lithuanian combat divers' squad in 1990s. Back at that time, the leader and main instructor of the combat divers' unit Valerijus Krisikaitis had started to recruit the team and train the diver candidates. There was a clear vision at that time that independent Lithuanian Armed Forces would meet the demand of the highly trained combat divers. The problem of the incorporation of the unit into the structure of Lithuanian Military Forces has been addressed gradually. In the beginning the combat divers under the name of the diving club "Nautilius" were incorporated into the local SKAT department in Klaipėda. In 1992, after the establishment of the "Iron Wolf" brigade and the paratrooper regiment in Klaipėda, the combat divers became subordinated to the regiment commander. Due to insufficient funding during the period from 1990s to 1992, there were active efforts in order to find necessary funding from both private supporters and the government. 2. The position of the senior leadership of the Lithuanian Armed Forces towards the issues of the Lithuanian combat divers had improved since 1993. It was the beginning of the actual support and assistance. Orders had been issued to establish a squad of combat divers. The support has been growing ever since due to the fact that the necessity of this unit had been proved and there were no uncertainties about the quality of training. Overall formation of the Lithuanian Armed Forces and incorporation of the combat divers took more than a few years. Time was necessary for training of the candidates able to perform combat tasks, special operations, reconnaissance and demining tasks both underwater and on the surface. During the period of 12 years since 1992, the training system was implemented from the scratch. The heart of the diving training became the squad of combat divers in Klaipėda, led by Valerijus Krisikaitis. The Lithuanian Armed Forces during the period from 1993 to 2004 had become capable of training the combat divers and explosive ordnance disposal experts in their own local training centers. These locally trained combat divers have been internationally acknowledged as perfectly prepared to perform combat tasks and being able to train other soldiers to perform diving tasks. A positive change in Lithuanian legislative and executive powers' opinion towards the Lithuanian combat divers led to increase of both, reliance and funding. The undisputed importance of the only diving unit able to perform underwater countermining was the main reason that caused such a trust. Back in the period from 1993 to 2004, the territory of the Republic of Lithuania had been covered by unexploded ordnance items left after World War II and still causing threats to the local inhabitants. 3. After the restoration of the independence, Lithuanian media has been used effectively in order to create a positive public opinion about the activities of the combat divers. The soldiers who have been doing their service in the unit have been portrayed as brave and professional specialists doing underwater countermining and other secret military tasks. The main aspects and the common narrative in the media and the public eye were the combat training of the divers, also training in the public sectors, assistance to the rescue services and their contribution to the society. The content of the media publications has changed. In the beginning, the main topic was the issues of the combat divers' service, mostly the financial scarcity. Invitations to join the diving club "Nautilius" and information about private and commissioned diving tasks performed by the unit had been published. Since 1997, the media had changed earlier used kind of publications into information about the international military trainings attended by the Lithuanian combat divers and their autonomous training. The invitations for the civilians to join the combat divers' service disappeared from the media and were replaced by the publications about well-trained divers and their professionally carried out underwater tasks that demonstrate the competence equal to the modern foreign military divers.

This article reconceptualizes the history of the capitalist world-ecology through the enclosure of the Great Frontier. Conceptualizing capitalism as a world-ecology of power, profit and life, the author argues that the underlying source of capitalism's success has been its capacity to "put nature to work" — as cheaply as possible. This Cheap Nature strategy combines capitalization (the logic of capital) with extra-economic appropriation, including the socially-necessary unpaid work of humans. At the core of every great wave of capitalist development has been the Four Cheaps: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. Those Cheap Natures were appropriated — through the dynamics of imperialism and militarized accumulation — through great waves of planetary enclosure, what I call the Great Frontier. These enclosures allowed imperial bourgeoisies to win the worldwide class struggle; to reduce the costs of production and therefore to advance the rate of profit; to resolve the surplus capital problem; and to sustain labor productivity growth. Today, the continuation of these four great bourgeois accomplishments are in question. The climate crisis represents the biospheric contradiction of the worldwide class struggle in the web of life. The enclosure of the atmospheric commons is a pivotal moment in the epochal crisis of capitalism — understood through the dialectic of planetary life and world accumulation. The more that capital and the imperialist forces seek to subordinate the biosphere to the logic of endless accumulation, the more that webs of life find creative and non-linear ways to defy and resist the planetary dictatorship of capital. This dialectic prefigures the Great Implosion. The Great Implosion thesis contends that the dynamics of non-linear change attributed to the climate crisis apply also to capitalism's unfolding epochal crisis. The geohistorical transition now underway is an epochal inversion of capitalism's defining relation with and within the web of life. This is the transition from the web of life as a cost-reducing and productivity-advancing dynamic to a cost-maximizing and productivity-reducing one. Its early signs are now widely grasped as the Great Stagnation. But this is only the beginning; we might call it a signaling crisis. The Great Stagnation signals the first moments of the Great Implosion. The author constructs the rise and ongoing demise of the Great Frontier in three parts, focusing successively on environmental history, Civilizing Projects, and today's climate crisis. In Part I, I reprise the historical-geographical outlines of the Great Frontier in the rise of capitalism. The author revisits core elements of the commodity frontier argument, developed to interpret the epochal shift in world environmental history after 1492. From this historical-geographical sketch of the rise of capitalism, I unpack a twofold argument. One is that commodity frontiers are not strictly about commodities or commodification. They are about imperialism, which is always the world bourgeoisie's favored mode of class formation. Imperialism is the world politics of the tendency (and countertendency) of the rate of profit to fall. It is premised not only on armed force but also on the geocultural hegemony and violence of Civilizing Projects. This is the focus of Part II. To be sure, commodification is in play; but to reduce the story to market forces replays a neo-Smithian error. It fails to grasp the centrality of imperialism and its mechanisms of class power in forging capitalism's major commodity frontiers. Capitalist relations of Nature — I use the uppercase to underscore the real abstraction — are always politically-mediated by states that pursue the creation and reproduction of a "good business environment." The (geo)political project of managing and securing webs of life for capital depends upon a geocultural project that makes possible the practical violence of commodity fetishism on the Great Frontier. This is civilizational fetishism. Its expressions are found the successive and overlapping Christianizing, Civilizing, and Developmentalist Projects of great empires, given intellectual expression over the longue durée by figures ranging from Francisco de Vitoria to Walt W. Rostow. These projects reproduce and reinvent the ruling abstractions of Civilization and Savagery. After 1949, this was President Truman's "Point Four" declaration on the divide between the "developed" and "undeveloped world." A second argument foregrounds the connective tissues binding our historical-geographical assessments of capitalist frontier-making and today's climate crisis. In Part III, I frame the planetary crisis as joining two fundamental moments: an unfolding crisis in life-making, registered widely in the climate and biodiversity literatures; and an unfolding crisis in profit-making, registered widely in the Great Stagnation discourse. Those two moments are unevenly combined in the geohistorical character of climate crisis, one in which the geophysical turning point finds expression in the destabilization of a trinity born in the seventeenth century: the climate class divide, climate patriarchy, climate apartheid. The seventeenth-century's climate crisis hothoused the Great Frontier as accumulation strategy, assuming its modern form between 1550 and 1700 as a climate fix to the era's "general crisis": an era of interminable war, endemic political crisis, and economic instability. In this era we find the maturation of capitalism's Planetary Proletariat, joining socially necessary "paid" and "unpaid" work by humans and the rest of nature: the differentiated unity of Proletariat, Femitariat, and Biotariat The blossoming of the Great Frontier as a full-fledged productivist revolution — the Plantation Revolution — inaugurated the Great Cheapening, a long-run secular decline in the price (value composition) of the Big Four inputs: labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials. A specifically capitalist historical nature was born, and its epoch-making service to world accumulation was to allow the systematic reduction of re/production costs for capital. Today we are witnessing that strategy's implosion. The web of life is rapidly moving from a source of Cheapness to an unavoidable vector of rising costs. The Biotariat is in open revolt. In place of the "limits to growth," the world-ecological alternative offers an alternative: Not only is "Another world possible" — the unofficial slogan of the World Social Form — but: Another class struggle is possible. We have in the Great Stagnation the revolt of the Biotariat — whose contribution to the revolutionary destabilization of capitalism has been underestimated by Environmentalists and Marxists alike. Although easily romanticized, grasping the web of life through the oikieos — the creative, generative, and multilayered pulse of life-making — asks us to reexamine human solidarity with the rest of nature in ways that challenge the Promethean domination of life and that explore the communist possibilities for liberation: "the creatures too should become free." Foregrounding the oppressive and exploitative dynamics of work, life, and power, Planetary Justice prioritizes the abolition of the Proletarian-Biotarian-Femitarian relation created through the Great Frontier after 1492. This is the challenge of the planetary class struggle in the last days of the Holocene. ; Este artículo vincula dos grandes acontecimientos histórico-mundiales: el auge del capitalismo tras 1492 y su crisis epocal actual, al final del Holoceno. El autor sostiene que la interminable acumulación de capital ha sido, desde el principio, posibilitada por la interminable conquista de la Tierra: la Gran Frontera. La ecología-mundo capitalista es un tipo peculiar de sociedad de clases que combina la acumulación monetaria con la apropiación excepcionalmente rápida del trabajo humano y planetario. La Gran Frontera es la zona de la Naturaleza Barata, uniendo dialécticamente la valorización del capital y la desvalorización ético-política de los humanos y del resto de la naturaleza, así, el racismo, el sexismo y el prometeísmo revelan ser pilares ideológicos fundamentales de la acumulación de capital. De manera crucial, la Gran Frontera ha permitido a las burguesías imperialistas avanzar en la productividad del trabajo, reducir los costes de los insumos y resolver las recurrentes crisis de sobreacumulación del capitalismo. Hoy en día, estamos asistiendo a la inversión geohistórica de la estrategia de la Naturaleza Barata del capitalismo. Se trata de la transición de la red de la vida como una dinámica de reducción de costes y aumento de la productividad a otra de maximización de costes y reducción de la productividad. La clase dominante y los economistas marxistas han entendido sus primeros signos como el "Gran Estancamiento". Pero esto es sólo el principio; podríamos llamarlo una "crisis de señalización". El Gran Estancamiento indica los primeros momentos de la Gran Implosión. Al igual que el cambio climático se entiende como un proceso no lineal que confunde los modelos biosféricos, la Gran Implosión es una dinámica no lineal a través de la cual las contradicciones del capitalismo en la red de la vida confunden los modelos lineales del cambio histórico. El capitalismo, frente a este panorama, es mucho más vulnerable de lo que creemos, y, sobre todo, lo es a la revuelta que el Proletariado Planetario está cociendo a fuego lento.