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Yes, I went back to the East Side Gallery my firstweekend, as it was not closed on Sunday most shopping is closed) I have been in Berlin for one week thus far, with nearly three months to go.  It has been a very busy week, and it did not just involve getting situated.  But, yes, that took some effort and time as well.  So, what have been up to in the shadow of the TV tower that is featured in any movie that wants to depict Berlin as a destination?  First, yes, getting situated.  I am staying near the Hertie School's Center for International Security, which is just off of Alexanderplatz.  The apartment has much of what I need, but I had to go out and get a pillow (made in Canada!), a printer, groceries, and a residence permit.  Yes, the country of Max Weber is very bureaucratic.  Because there is much demand these days for all kinds of paperwork, I was lucky to snare an appointment on the farthest southern edge of Berlin.   I got my paperwork stamped, so I can reside in Berlin officially.  woot!        President of Hertie, the Chinese former VM, and Tobias BundeSecond, it turns out that my timing is good and the Hertie School is a happening place.  Tobias Bunde, one of the researchers here, is also a/the organizer of the Munich Security Conference which happened the weekend I arrived.  So, he brought a former Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs to a packed room (the Hertie students are from all over and they are keeners) where she presented her take on what happened at Munich and what are the major trends in international relations.  I found her to be the best representative of the Chinese government: her English was great, she was not overly polemical, she knew her audience, and so forth.  She definitely presented a biased point of view, but a clear one that was well asserted.  She noted for instance that only four panels out of a hundred at the conference were on Gaza. She pointed that the discussions on that and on Ukraine were focused on problems, not solutions.  But she was not pressed to offer any solutions. She contrasted the threat to freedom of the seas--that it is a problem for commercial shipping in the Red Seas but only a threat to American warships in the South China Sea.  Hmmmm.  She talked about Asia's long peace, she seems to be omitting the occasional Indo-Pakistan conflict.  Speaking of omissions, she argued that occupation never works, and that this something the Americans should have known in 2003 and the Russians should have known two years ago.  I was tempted to ask about Tibet or perhaps Chinese intentions towards Taiwan, but the event was for students.  It was a great way to jump into things and meet a bunch of folks.No pics of Peter K, but of other important thinkersAnother event was a session with Peter Katztenstein--one of the most important scholars in both International Relations and Comparative Politics for the past fifty years.  Required reading, indeed.  He was presented his latest book project (no retirement yet) that is pretty complex, raising meta questions about our thinking and about our need to think about uncertainty.  It was similar to Debbi Avant's presidential address at the ISA a couple of years ago.  He gave us a few chapters, the crowded room had read it, and so it was mostly Q&A.  After the talk, he sat near me and we chatted a bit.  That he has written books comparing Germany and Japan was not lost on me given my latest projects.  Next week, there will be a conference I am crashing at Hertie on the state of Zeitenwende and whether other countries are experiencing it as well.  Huh?  Oh, this refers to a speech by Germany's Chancellor  Olaf Scholz shortly after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, that we live in a watershed moment, that we need to have a revolution in foreign and defense policy.  He committed to a lot more defense spending and ending German dependence on Russian energy.  The big questions are: how much of this has and is happening and whether other countries are rethinking their place in the world. I hope to find out next week.Third, I have been getting some work done.  I have started arranging interviews for the German case, finalizing the details for a trip to Finland in April to do that case study, doing the same for a research presentation at Central European University in Vienna in a few weeks (and, yes, nailing down the details for an Alps ski trip).  I also revised three chapters of the Steve/Dave/Phil book before Dave tries to find some interest at the ISA in April.  I hope to do my turn on the rest of the book in the next week.  Fourth, I have, of course, been touristing.  I spent last weekend and today walking around this part of Berlin.  I am far more familiar with west Berlin, as I have been largely based at hotels in west Berlin.  My first walks were more targeted as I was looking for grocery stores (and google maps kept lying about where they were).   Some observations, which may be due to change over time or may be due to East Berlin being a bit different than West Berlin:Less adherence to the guidance of the little green/red Ampelmännchen, as I saw more people walking despite the red signs.  Is this a sign that German society is breaking down?Or is that the walk signals in East Berlin are too damned short?  I can't tell you on how many streets I have been stuck in the middle (mostly where the trams go) as the light turns red very quickly.I don't remember this much graffiti all over the place last time.  On the bright side, when a store or something has nice wall art, the vandals or artists paint elsewhere.Lots of reconstruction and renovations going on.Lots more Five Guys burger places than I can recall.  I haven't tried them yet, as I am mostly doing my own modest cooking (this apartment's kitchen is not well equipped, so no baking and only basic dinners).  I did start off my time here with currywurst and chips, but I think my go-to cheap food will be kebabs/shawarma stuff.  I did happen to walk past an Indonesian place, so I will be returning to that neighborhood when I am tired of my own cooking.Today's walk was more random, as I would head in one direction and then find something interesting on the map.  Which took me to a memorial for those who the East German government killed at the Berlin Wall, which, yes, has been down longer than it has been up.  I learned a great deal:I should have realized how dynamic the interplay between Communist government and those seeking to escape would be.  The wall such as it was kept evolving as the government learned via the escapes and attempts.Part of the memorial showingwhere the house got built over by the wallIncluding tunneling!  57 people got out through one tunnel--amazing.The wall itself caused more people to want to leave as it signaled more repression.The evolution of the barrier included destruction of a church (one dedicated to Reconciliation!) and the movement of dead bodies from a graveyard, it involved boarding up and then destroying houses.   There were a fair amount of German tour groups going through this area, so yes, still much interest even as it recedes in our memories. The other new experience for me is a 21st century gym.  I have mostly exercised on ultimate fields, bike rides through neighborhoods, the treadmill in our basement, and the occasional hotel fitness center.  There is a spiffy, reasonable place near me that has the stuff I need (treadmills, space to stretch to try to fix my balky knee) and far more stuff.  The denizens are in much, much better shape than I am, doing all kinds of exercises that I would not attempt, so that has been a funky distraction while I sweat out the pastries I have been buying.  The bakeries here are good, and, yes, they like their donuts.  I have resisted mightily but not entirely.  Next week, I will report what I learned at zeintenwende-fest.    Some random pics from my walks: Vegetarian butcher?  Funky signs, not sure there is an actual cafe here.

This story was co-published with The Intercept.Students at Northwestern University, in the Chicago suburbs, woke up on October 25 to face an unexpected allegation. "Northwestern complicit in genocide of Palestinians," declared the school's venerable student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, in a front-page story.The students, however, weren't really looking at the Daily Northwestern. Instead, they had found the Northwestern Daily, a parody newspaper attacking the school's stance on Israel's war on the Gaza Strip. The mock front page featured fake quotes from school officials, accusations of Israeli war crimes, and a fake ad for Birthright Israel — the travel abroad program that sends young American Jews to Israel — with the tagline "One man's home is another man's former home!" Overnight, someone had pinned the mock papers on bulletin boards, spread them on desks in lecture halls, and even wrapped the false front pages around roughly 300 copies of the Daily Northwestern itself.The stunt quickly sparked a furor among Israel's supporters online. One writer, at the conservative National Review, said the fake newspaper included an antisemitic "blood libel." The university itself said the spoof "included images and language about Israel that many in our community found offensive."The parent company of the school paper, Students Publishing Company, or SPC, announced that it had "engaged law enforcement to investigate and find those responsible." The results of the inquiry are just now coming to light. Following the investigation, local prosecutors brought charges against two students for theft of advertising services. The little-known statute appears to only exist in Illinois and California, where it was originally passed to prevent the Ku Klux Klan from distributing recruitment materials in newspapers. The statute makes it illegal to insert an "unauthorized advertisement in a newspaper or periodical." The students, both of whom are Black, now face up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine."I have never seen anyone charged with theft of advertising," said Elaine Odeh, a lawyer who formerly supervised public defenders in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Evanston, where Northwestern is based.Jon Yates, a spokesperson for Northwestern, told The Intercept and Responsible Statecraft, "The Students Publishing Company, independent publisher of The Daily Northwestern, pursued a criminal complaint related to the publication of the 'fake Daily' this fall. As required by law, University Police pursued a criminal investigation, which led to a citation for violating state law that was issued to multiple students." (SPC is independent from the university, though several professors and students sit on its board of directors.)Some student staffers working for the actual Daily Northwestern are angry that charges are going forward, according to a former Daily Northwestern editor and current student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from school officials. "It's very clear that this is a discriminatory action," the student said. The Daily Northwestern's own editorial board wrote Monday that its publisher should formally request that the case be dropped, calling the investigation "unnecessary and harmful." (Disclosure: I am a graduate of Northwestern's journalism school but was never involved with the Daily Northwestern.)The Class A misdemeanor charges, the highest level short of a felony, represent an escalation in the battle over free speech and protest on college campuses as the war in Gaza drags into its fifth month. Pro-Palestine activism on campus has faced a severe crackdown due to what Israel's backers say is antisemitism and hate speech, with school administrations working closely with police.At American University, school officials enlisted the FBI to help investigate incidents in which students defaced pro-Israel posters. Several colleges have banned or suspended chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, a popular pro-Palestine group, including at Columbia University, which subsequently beefed up its police presence. And several dozen students at the University of Michigan are facing charges for trespassing after refusing police orders to leave a building.Graham Piro of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit specializing in free speech advocacy, said, "It's always a concern when colleges and universities appear to be disproportionately targeting one form of political speech.""Pursue it as a criminal act"At Northwestern, the criminal charges struck many as a serious escalation. One student, who requested anonymity to prevent backlash from family in Israel, said he found the parody "offensive" but felt the charges went too far.Stephanie Kollmann, the policy director of a Northwestern's law school clinic focused on criminal justice, questioned why SPC chose to go directly to the police rather than issuing a cease-and-desist letter to the students. Kollmann said colleges and affiliated institutions often seek to keep incidents out of the courts despite potential criminal conduct. The fact that charges were brought in this case means that SPC, university police, and the state's attorney's office all used their discretion to opt for the harshest response."The idea that multiple people in a chain of reaction to this incident repeatedly decided to not use any of the other tools of reproval available to them," said Kollmann, "but rather chose to pursue it as a criminal act is frankly remarkable."Many at the university are pushing back on the charges. Over 70 student organizations — including high-profile groups like Mayfest Productions, which sponsors an annual music festival on campus — have pledged to not speak with the Daily Northwestern until the charges are dropped. "Even students who have just been generally quiet on what's happening with Israel and Palestine, I've been seeing them speak out for the first time regarding this," said a student organizer, who requested anonymity due to fears of retaliation from the university.More than 5,000 people have signed a student-led petition calling on SPC to drop the charges and alleging that the incident represents "targeted over-policing of Black students." Students and lawyers expressed surprise that prosecutors chose to bring the hammer down using such a little-known law, especially one originally designed to target white supremacist groups. Chicago police have only ever arrested one person under the statute, according to the city's arrest database.The decision of whether to prosecute the charges now rests solely with the local prosecutor, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, which did not respond to a request for comment. SPC, however, can join students in asking prosecutors to drop the case, which could influence their decision-making going forward.SPC's board of directors, for its part, denies that political motivations had anything to do with its decision to report the incident to police. "This is not an issue of free speech or parody," the board said in a statement. "[J]ust as you cannot take over the airwaves of a TV station or the website of a publication, you also cannot disrupt the distribution of a student newspaper."The board includes several prominent journalists and media executives, including longtime ESPN personality J.A. Adande, CNN legal director Steve Kiehl, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Robert Samuels.The war in Gaza has created a litany of challenges for Northwestern. President Michael Schill initially drew backlash when, shortly after October 7, he said the school would not take a position on the conflict. Schill issued a second statement just a day later, in which he condemned Hamas's attacks as "barbaric acts" that are "clearly antithetical to Northwestern's values."Some faculty and students have loudly condemned the school, saying it's showed a bias against pro-Palestinian activists. However, pro-Israel advocates claim Schill has failed to protect Jewish students. Alums for Campus Fairness dropped a cool $600,000 on ads attacking Schill, including a 30-second spot that ran during Northwestern's bowl game. The ad alleged that student groups "resoundingly support" Hamas and called on the school to "take decisive action against individuals violating university policy."Evgeny Stolyarov, a Jewish student at Northwestern who supports a ceasefire in Gaza, said that the charges will have a "chilling effect on speech" related to the war. "If this was done about literally any other topic, there would not be this amount of blowback," Stolyarov said. "It also, in some ways, reinvigorates the student body," he added. "Hopefully this ends up bringing activists on campus together."

Several members of Congress have created a caucus to support the Mojahedin-e Khalq, an exiled Iranian faction that once fought for Saddam Hussein and was formerly listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. The lawmakers' move comes as the MeK, long accused of cult-like abuses and shadowy foreign ties, faces legal problems in Albania over its Ashraf-3 compound.The MeK announced the creation of the Congressional ASHRAF Protection and Rights Advocacy Caucus in late December, calling it a "bipartisan" group that will be led by Democratic and Republican co-chairs. The current caucus chairman Lance Gooden (R–Texas), and the three other members who have signed on so far are Rep. Paul Gosar (R–Az.), Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R–N.Y.) and Hispanic Caucus chairman Raul Ruiz (D–Calif.).Gooden's legislative director Claire Alden stated that the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, a pro-MeK group, was lobbying Democratic offices to join the caucus. "OIAC is waiting to hear back from several Democrat[ic] members as I understand it," Alden wrote in an email to Responsible Statecraft on January 9.Gooden had sent out a letter on January 8, obtained by Responsible Statecraft, seeking other members of Congress willing "to support the humanitarian and democratic rights of Iranian dissidents living in Ashraf-3, Albania, and worldwide, fighting for regime change and freedom in Iran." It called the MeK "an opposition movement fighting for Iran's liberation from one of the most evil dictatorships of the contemporary era."The creation of a caucus "immediately gives you allies on [Capitol] Hill," says Ben Freeman, director of the Quincy Institute's Democratizing Foreign Policy Program and an expert on foreign lobbying. "They know they've got a receptive ear in Congress. They know that if they email [a caucus member's] office and have a request, at the very least, someone's going to pick up the phone"In addition to the members of Congress, two Trump cabinet officials — former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — have also recently thrown their weight behind the MeK.Last year, Saudi Arabia had reportedly agreed to cut its support for the MeK. A few months later, Albanian police raided Ashraf-3, the MeK's sprawling headquarters in Albania. The Albanian authorities accused the MeK of cybercrimes and other provocative activities in violation of the agreement allowing the exiles to stay in the country. The exiles accused Albanian police of killing an elderly man with tear gas during the raid.At the time, the U.S. State Department affirmed Albania's "right to investigate any potential illegal activities within its territory," and stated that the MeK is not "a viable democratic opposition movement that is representative of the Iranian people." Gooden, Malliotakis, Gosar, and Ruiz seem to disagree.Gosar's support for the MeK stands out as particularly unusual, given his other foreign policy stances. The congressman, an outspoken "America Firster," has previously denounced "proxy wars in the Middle East" and vowed to stop Washington's "nation-building, foreign aid giveaways, and bloody regime-change wars.""Congressman Gosar supports freedom in Iran. The Ashraf Caucus shares that goal," said Gosar's communications director Anthony Foti in an email to Responsible Statecraft. "The expectation is for peaceful change organically coming from the people of Iran. At no point has Congressman Gosar supported U.S. military intervention in Iran nor would he." The MeK is a left-wing faction that participated in Iran's 1979 revolution and was pushed out by its Islamist rivals. The group soon began promoting itself as an Iranian government-in-exile, and appealed to the Soviet Union for support. After the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980, the MeK's leadership relocated to Iraq and fought for Saddam Hussein's government. In retaliation, the Iranian government executed thousands of leftist prisoners in 1988, one of the most infamous massacres in Iran's history.During their collaboration with the Iraqi government, MeK fighters allegedly participated in the genocidal campaign against Iraqi Kurds. MeK leader Maryam Rajavi was said to have ordered her fighters to crush "the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards." The MeK now denies having any involvement in the anti-Kurdish campaign, and often cites a 1999 letter by a Kurdish fighter absolving Rajavi.Saudi Arabia, another rival of Iran, also allegedly began funding the MeK at the time. MeK defector Massoud Khodabandeh told Jordanian media in 2018 that a Saudi prince had given the group suitcases full of luxury goods and trucks of gold worth $200 million in 1989. Former Saudi intelligence chief Turki bin Faisal al-Saud has spoken at MeK conferences. The group denies receiving Saudi funds, claiming that it is "an independent movement, standing on its own feet both politically and financially."After the war, the Iraqi government kept the MeK in bases known as Camp Ashraf and Ashraf-2, considered by critics to be cult compounds. A report by Human Rights Watch in 2005 and a sweeping expose by The Intercept in 2020 confirmed rumors of the abuses that went on inside the camps. Defectors accused the MeK leadership of imprisoning, torturing, and even sterilizing its own members. The MeK again denied the allegations and denounced the "hit piece" against them.Other factions of the Iranian opposition, who often clash fiercely with each other, are unanimous in their rejection of the MeK. Anti-hijab activist Masih Alinejad has labeled the group a "cult." Iranian-American journalist Jason Rezaian, who was held hostage in prison on trumped-up charges by the Iranian government for over a year, has insisted that the MeK's brand is "toxic." Former crown prince Reza Pahlavi called the MeK "terroristic" in a Belgian parliament hearing last year."The fact that a documented cult-like organization with a history of terrorism, human rights abuses, and committing atrocities alongside Saddam Hussein can get endorsed by lawmakers in Washington is a testament to how much money and power is behind the pro-war with Iran infrastructure here," says Jamal Abdi, head of the National Iranian American Council.The National Union for Democracy in Iran and Iranian-Americans for Liberty, two pro-regime-change organizations that are often at odds with NIAC, have also publicly argued that most Iranians reject the MeK. Neither group responded to a request for comment about the caucus.For decades, the United States officially considered the MeK a terrorist organization due to its past attacks on American targets. The MeK had killed at least three U.S. Army officers and three American contractors in Iran before the 1979 revolution. When Iranian revolutionaries released their American hostages in 1981, the MeK complained that refusing to prosecute and execute the U.S. Embassy staff would "embolden and encourage the imperialists."After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the MeK's relationship with the West changed dramatically. In the 2000s, the MeK became an early source of information on Iran's nuclear program, which was allegedly fed to the group by Israeli intelligence services. Israel also reportedly teamed up with the MeK to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists.At the same time, the MeK embarked on a high-profile lobbying campaign to remove itself from the terrorist list. MeK supporters courted American officials from both sides of the aisle, and sympathetic politicians were offered speaking fees of up to $50,000 to appear at pro-MeK rallies. The MeK prevailed; the Obama administration lifted terrorism sanctions on the group in 2011, and spent $20 million resettling MeK members in a new Albanian sanctuary known as Ashraf-3.The resettlement deal came after Iraqi forces, some of them loyal to Tehran, launched deadly attacks on the original Ashraf camps. Daniel Benjamin, the U.S. State Department counterterrorism official who oversaw the delisting, later insisted that he wanted to get MeK members out of Iraq in a humane way, not to whitewash the MeK's "terrorist past."But "what that allowed them to do was to hire lobbying and PR firms," says Freeman, because the terrorist list is one of the few restraints on foreign lobbying under U.S. law. The MeK has several officially-registered lobbyists, and has continued to make large payments to American politicians. Pence, for example, took $430,000 from the group.Gooden, Malliotakis, Gosar, and Ruiz have all spoken at MeK rallies or conferences since the terrorism designation was lifted.Responsible Statecraft asked the four members, via their offices, if they have taken money from the MeK or MeK front groups. Foti said that Gosar has never been "paid for giving a speech" during his "congressional career." Gooden "has never been paid for any appearance," according to Micah Bock, his communications director. Neither answered the broader question of MeK funding. The other two offices have not answered as of press time.

Even if one were to take at face value Israel's declarations that its assault on the Gaza Strip and its two million residents is all about "destroying Hamas," the Israeli operation is too misguided for the United States or any other power to support or condone it. Hamas cannot be destroyed with bombs and a ground invasion, and even if it could, the operation is worsening, not enhancing, the future security of Israeli citizens.But the Israeli declarations should not be taken at face value in any event. Other motivations are also likely behind the Israeli assault. Almost two months into the Israeli offensive, the evidence is increasingly suggesting that Israel is engaged in nothing less than ethnic cleansing of Palestinians who live in the Strip.One is the sheer scale and indiscriminate nature of Israel's military attacks. The leveling of entire neighborhoods and the inflicting of civilian casualties far outnumbering any military ones, with little evidence of any positive result beyond the capture and display of some empty tunnels, can hardly be described as an operation sharply focused on destroying Hamas.Consider the following numbers. Israeli officials claim that their operation in Gaza has so far killed 5,000 Hamas fighters. The officials admit that this is a squishy estimate, and the outside world has no way of knowing whether it is even close to being true. But assume for the moment that it is. By the Israeli military's own estimates, Hamas' military wing numbered about 30,000 fighters at the start of this war, implying there are still 25,000 yet to be eliminated. The latest estimates of the fast-rising count of total Palestinian casualties from the war so far are 16,000 dead, including more than 5,000 children.Do the math. At the current pace and with Israel's current methods, finishing the supposed job of destroying the Hamas military wing would entail almost 100,000 dead Palestinians, including more than 30,000 dead children. And that does not include the damage from Israel going after the rest of Hamas besides its military wing, including the senior leadership whom Israel has vowed to kill, as well as the Hamas-run civil administration of the Gaza Strip, which Israel has vowed to eliminate. Nor does it consider that the rate of civilian casualties from Israeli military operations currently escalating in the southern part of the Strip — now crammed with those who had fled the north — is likely to be at least as high as from the previous operations in the north.These numbers are not only orders of magnitude greater than anything that could be justified as a response to the brutality Hamas committed in Israel in October. They strongly suggest that in addition to eliminating Hamas, killing civilians and pushing as many Palestinians as possible out of Gaza is an Israeli objective.The Israeli military's claim to have used warnings to try to reduce civilian casualties has become little more than a cruel joke. Residents are ordered to flee their homes but then are bombed anyway, either en route or at the location to which they were told to flee. Then they are ordered to move again — if there is any place at all they can go — and get bombed yet again. QR codes on leaflets promising information about safe zones are useless with communications knocked out and most Palestinians having no access to the internet. Israel is not even bothering to use its previous "knock on the roof" practice of using a small munition to warn occupants of a building that it was about to be destroyed — as if it ever were acceptable to bomb someone's home as long as they are advised a few minutes earlier that it is going to be bombed.Further evidence of Israel's objectives in Gaza comes from simultaneous events in the West Bank. For the last two months, Israeli settlers there, acting largely with the acquiescence of Israeli authorities, have been using violence and intimidation to drive longtime Palestinian residents out of their villages.Then there is the rhetoric of Israeli political leaders, which some observers have described as genocidal. Examples over the past two months abound. About Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, "we will eliminate everything." Meanwhile, deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi said of Palestinians in Gaza, "expel them all," while Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said, "we are now rolling out the Gaza nakba," (the original nakba, or catastrophe, being the forced displacement of 750,000 Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948). Heritage Minister Amachai Eliyahu suggested that Israel should consider dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza.Added to all this is evidence of planning within the Israeli government. A report in October revealed a proposal from the intelligence ministry to transfer the entire population of the Gaza Strip to Egypt's Sinai peninsula, to be housed first in tents and then in permanently constructed cities. This proposal did not explain how Israel would overcome Egypt's strong opposition to any such population transfer, but other reports confirmed that Israeli leaders and diplomats were quietly proposing to other governments the transfer of several hundred thousand Gazans to Egypt. The Israelis contended this would be a temporary movement for the duration of the current war, but their interlocutors rejected the idea given the likelihood that such a displacement, like earlier displacements of Palestinians, would become permanent.More recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reported to have tasked his U.S.-born Minister of Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer, with developing a plan to "dilute" the population of the Gaza Strip to a minimum. That story was broken by the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, which has supported and is considered to have good access to Netanyahu.As a possible reflection of such planning, other Israeli press reports that a proposal has already been quietly floated with members of the U.S. Congress to have two million Gazans move through Egypt for ultimate settlement both there and in Iraq, Turkey, and Yemen. The United States would be expected to use aid to those countries as leverage to pressure them into accepting the arrangement.Since the Hamas attack on October 7 demonstrated that the conflict with the Palestinians could not be removed from the regional equation, the Israeli government has rejected as forcefully as ever the only avenue for ending such troubles, which is to resolve the conflict through peaceful negotiations that permit Palestinian self-determination, whether through a two-state solution or equal rights in one state. Instead, it is increasingly looking like Israel is trying to remove the Palestinians themselves from the equation through death and displacement. Israel's apparent strategy is no more likely to bring peace to Israelis or anyone else than its earlier gambits, as long as there are dissatisfied exiles. For just one example, think of how Israel went after the exiled Palestine Liberation Organization beginning in the 1980s and how it led to multiple wars, the rise of Lebanese Hezbollah, and the loss of almost any hope for stability in Lebanon.The Biden administration has shown some signs of recognizing what is going on. Vice President Harris, speaking at the climate meeting in Dubai, stated that "under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank." And the United States has begun imposing visa bans on Israeli settlers guilty of violence in the West Bank.But those signs fall short of fully dissociating Washington from abhorrent policies and practices — a dissociation necessary to spare the United States from any more of the international opprobrium it already has incurred through its association with Israeli conduct.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!

With the failure of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive despite billions in armaments and months of training, the post mortems have begun.

They follow: The West was too slow in providing missiles and aircraft; Russia had too much time to prepare trenches and minefields; Ukraine needed more time to learn combined-arms tactics and employ Western armor effectively. Yet underlying all these excuses was a broader analytical failing that has yet to be acknowledged: flawed and often facile historical analogies led defense planners to underestimate Russia's resilience.

Even today, with the horrific costs of overconfidence plain to all and Ukraine at a crucial crossroads, the same flawed analysis of the Russian adversary persists.

Time and again, policymakers and commentators based their expectations of the war based on flawed historical parallels. One example is Russia's acceptance of mass casualties and use of "human wave" attacks where they lose three or more soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty.

Time and again — right up to the present — commanders and commentators cite this as a sign of severe Russian weakness. Whether discussed in the jargon of an "asymetrical attrition gradient," or simply referring to Russian soldiers as "cannon fodder," analysts frequently note that such profligacy with human lives is a legacy of ponderous Soviet and Tsarist armies.

But what they fail to note is that this tactic often brought victory. Tsarist armies took massive casualties in battles with Swedish, Persian and Turkish forces as they built the Russian empire. In defeating Napoleon, the Russians suffered as many casualties as the French despite the advantage of fighting on their home ground and their familiarity with the Russian winter.

Soviet Marshal Zhukov absorbed 860,000 casualties to the Germans' 200,000 at the Battle of Kursk in World War II. He also lost 1,500 tanks to the Germans' 500, yet Kursk is remembered as a great triumph that crushed Hitler's final hopes of victory. Can one imagine Germany celebrating its superior casualty ratio while being defeated by Stalin's hordes?

However shocking this tactic may be, it is a resource that Moscow has and Kyiv does not. Consider the battle for Bakhmut and the daily bulletins trumpeting Ukraine's success in killing thousands of Russians, right up to the moment that Bakhmut fell to Wagner Group mercenaries — weirdly reminiscent of the Pentagon's body-count bulletins in the Vietnam war.

At Bakhmut Ukraine lost the indispensable cream of its army to hordes of dispensable Russian convicts-turned-storm troopers in doomed defense of a strategically insignificant town that President Zelenskyy vowed would not fall. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is now 43.

Losing Bakhmut hurt Ukrainian morale, but it is Russian morale that pundits say is shot. And they remind us that military disasters sparked Russian uprisings in the past — in 1905 after defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, or the debacle of WWI that led to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917.

Given their hardships and suffering, why wouldn't Russians do it again and overthrow Putin? Pundits often ignore that, after a decade of economic chaos and global humiliation in the 1990s, Putin is respected for restoring stability and national pride. Tsar Nicholas II, by contrast, was rather more like Boris Yeltsin — weak and out of touch, reliant on hated advisers, presiding over chaos.

It's also likely that, unlike a distant debacle with Japan or European carnage triggered by an Austro-Serbian dispute, many Russians believe in this war because they see Crimea and Donbas as historically and culturally Russian.

Whether it stems more from deep-seated imperial attitudes or a decade of anti-Western propaganda, Russians still back Putin and even take pride in standing up to the best NATO can throw at them. An effort to appreciate the views of Putin and his people is not being "pro Russian" even if we find those views wrong or repugnant.

On the contrary, such an approach is key to "thinking in time" with accurate historical analogies, and vital to avoiding the conceit of assuming that Russian soldiers or citizens will behave as we would.

On the eve of Ukraine's counteroffensive, U.S. Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley declared that Russians "lack leadership, they lack will, their morale is poor, and their discipline is eroding." Of course, if your main historical lesson is that Russian armies crack under strain, then you look closely for signs of dissent and soon find a looming collapse.

This is how superficial history joins with confirmation bias to produce flawed analysis. Stymied by fierce Russian fighting, Ukrainians troops themselves told Milley he was wrong: "We expected less resistance. They are holding. They have leadership. It is not often you say that about the enemy."

As Kyiv's crisis deepens and recriminations spill out in public, commanders at all levels of the Ukrainian Armed Forces agree that they and their NATO advisers badly misjudged Russian tenacity: "This big counteroffensive was based on a simple calculation: when a Moskal [slur for ethnic Russian] sees a Bradley or a Leopard, he will just run away."

But what about taking the fight to Russia? Former CIA Director General David Petraeus predicted that Russian resolve could "crumble" in response to Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow. Such strikes "bring the war to the Russian people" and might convince Putin's regime that, like the USSR's Cold War quagmire in Afghanistan, Russia's current war in Ukraine is "ultimately unsustainable."

In fact the old Soviet elite did not see the Afghan war as unsustainable, nor were they much concerned about public opinion. It took both a generational transition and a bold new leader who prioritized improving ties with the West — Mikhail Gorbachev — to finally manage an exit.

The point is not that war isn't costly. The Afghan war was, and the Ukraine war is even more so. The point is that accepting defeat in a major war that was justified as a vital national interest is unlikely until there is both a new leader and turnover in the ruling elite.

As for "bringing war to the Russian people" by bombing Moscow, when did that ever work? NATO brought the Kosovo War to the Serbian people in 1999 by bombing Belgrade, and it only rallied them to the side of dictator Slobodan Milošević; 25 years later, Serbs remain strongly pro-Russian and anti-NATO. And when Chechen rebels bombed Moscow and other Russian cities in the early 2000s, it only rallied Russians around Putin and helped justify his increasingly authoritarian rule.
These aren't mere historical quibbles, but illustrations of flawed analogies that framed both strategic expectations and tactical decisions. And they have cost dearly, in both Ukrainian lives and now Western support. Confidence in Washington-Brussels elites falls even as officials still claim that Ukraine is winning and Putin "cannot outlast" the West.

In fact, as NATO empties its warehouses of equipment and misses deadlines for producing new munitions, it's hard to conclude otherwise unless one is trapped in another oversimplified WWII analogy: that of America as the "arsenal of democracy."

Many have contrasted America's innovative private arms producers with Russia's technology-starved state factories, predicting that Moscow would soon exhaust its munitions. Instead, Russia has consistently belied the "all brawn and no brains" narrative, not only outproducing the West in tanks, artillery and shells but defying sanctions to develop new precision-guided bombs, drones and missiles. Perhaps those discounting Russian ingenuity forgot the Katyusha multiple-rocket launcher, a legendary artillery weapon that both the Germans and Americans copied in WWII.
With a looming crisis in efforts to keep Kyiv supplied with munitions, it is useful to look closer at American arms production in WWII, when the "arsenal of democracy" was in certain respects more like Putin's economy than Biden's. But today Washington faces a complex set of institutional obstacles: "least-cost production models," contractor aversion to stockpiling, export restrictions, and environmental regulations the likes of which do not trouble Putin. A final lesson from WWII's "armaments race" is a caution against technological hubris such as that seen in today's gushing about the superiority of Western Leopard or Abrams tanks over the Russian T-72 and T-80. Germany's Tiger tank was clearly superior to the Soviet T-34 in WWII, but the latter was cheap, reliable, and easy to produce in numbers; at Kursk, Soviet tanks outnumbered German ones by 2:1. So as NATO planners and media pundits take up the "cannon fodder" refrain again with reference to the heavy losses Russians are taking as they advance in the battle for Avdiivka, these planners and pundits would do well to consider a quip famously attributed to Soviet wartime leader Josef Stalin: "Quantity has a quality all its own."

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.

The geopolitical repercussions from the war in Ukraine continue to reverberate across Eurasia.With global attention preoccupied by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan has been depriving the estimated 120,000 ethnic Armenian population in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh access to humanitarian aid in a blockade that has lasted over eight months and has recently intensified. Much to Armenia's consternation, the 2,000 Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in the enclave since the most recent round of fighting in 2020 have appeared ineffective in the face of increasing Azerbaijani pressure against the besieged Armenian population.As a result, Armenia is openly seeking to diversify its security relationship away from Russia, its longstanding ally, including conducting joint military drills with the United States in Armenia that began Monday and is set to end on September 20.Yerevan, Armenia's capital, has increasingly expressed a sense of betrayal at Moscow's inability, or unwillingness, to lend support to its treaty ally since last September when Azerbaijani armed forces attacked Armenia's internationally recognized territory and where they still occupy 10 square kilometers, according to Armenian officials.The Backdrop of Current TensionsThe two former Soviet Republics fought the First Nagorno-Karabakh War during the early 1990s after the indigenous Armenian majority in the autonomous oblast proclaimed their independence from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a full-scale war broke out between the two newly independent countries, eventually leaving tens of thousands casualties dead and hundreds of thousands displaced between 1992 and 1994. The war ended with a victory by Armenia.A Russian-brokered ceasefire resulted in Armenian control of Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent regions of Azerbaijan proper. The United Nations and international community, however, continued to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan.After over 25 years of unsuccessful negotiations under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chaired by the U.S., France, and Russia, Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, bolstered by the "brotherly" military support from NATO member Turkey and years of stockpiling Israel-supplied weapons, launched an all-out assault to recapture the disputed territory in September 2020. The 44-day war saw Azerbaijan secure a military victory with further territorial gains guaranteed under a Moscow-brokered ceasefire, leaving a rump self-governing Nagorno-Karabakh Republic alongside a Russian peacekeeping contingent as stipulated by the November 2020 ceasefire agreement. That agreement also guaranteed that a link between the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and Armenia, the Lachin Corridor, would be sustained and controlled by the Russian peacekeeping contingent. The status of Nagorno-Karabakh and its inhabitants remained unresolved. Last December, however, Baku effectively blockaded the Lachin Corridor and, five months later, it established a checkpoint on the road, formalizing the blockade. While the European Union, Russia, the U.S., and even the International Court of Justice have increasingly called for lifting the blockade, Azerbaijan remains defiant. The Azerbaijan foreign ministry insists that claims of a blockade are "completely baseless" and has accused Armenians of transporting arms into the territory, a claim Yerevan denies. Nevertheless, even the International Committee of the Red Cross struggles to continue its vital deliveries into the territory, resulting in what several United Nations Special Rapporteurs describe as a "dire humanitarian crisis." There were hopes the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, which has been at the heart of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, would be resolved by negotiations facilitated by a complementary EU and U.S. approach (although a separate track by Moscow also persists). However, the ongoing blockade has dimmed hopes for a viable negotiated settlement. Current TensionsThe war in Ukraine has drained the Kremlin's military resources and room for maneuver, especially in a region like the South Caucasus where Russia vies with Turkey for regional hegemony. Moscow's increased reliance on Ankara over the last 18 months to balance against the West diplomatically has resulted in its inability to fulfill its own obligations in the ceasefire agreement following the 2020 war. Given this new reality, Armenia has started to hedge against Moscow by actively searching for new military partners and security guarantors. The publicity surrounding Eagle Partner 2023, the Armenian-hosted joint military exercise with the U.S., clearly worries the Kremlin, which has said it would "deeply analyze" the latest events. However, these exercises are "narrowly focused on peacekeeping operations" and do not represent a "breakthrough in U.S.-Armenia defense cooperation," according to Benyamin Poghosyan, senior fellow at APRI, a Yerevan-based think tank. Nevertheless, the exercises follow Armenia's refusal in January to host Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization exercises on its territory, citing the organization's unwillingness to support Yerevan during last September's escalation by Azerbaijan. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, has recently made a distinctly public effort to distance itself from Russian actions in Ukraine and even from Moscow itself. In just the last weeks Yerevan has moved to ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and recalled its ambassador to the CSTO. Pashinyan said depending solely on Russia for security was a "strategic mistake." Pashinyan's spouse, Anna Hakobyan, traveled to Kyiv last week and delivered the first package of Armenian humanitarian aid to Ukraine. However, the fact remains that only Russia has sent peacekeepers to Nagorno-Karabakh, and that these peacekeepers are all that stands between the local Armenian population and Azerbaijani conquest, almost certainly leading to massacre and expulsion. As Poghosyan sees it, the driving cause behind a potential new attack is "Azerbaijan's desire to establish control over Nagorno Karabakh without providing any status or special rights to Armenians." This aligns with the view of Shujat Ahmadzada, a Baku-based researcher on foreign and security policies of the South Caucasus countries, who believes Azerbaijan is pursuing a "3D policy" with regard to Nagorno-Karabakh. The three D's stand for "De-internationalization, De-territorialization, and De-institutionalization." Such a process is intended to transform the status of the ethnic Armenians living there into a "purely 'internal matter' of Azerbaijan'' while "incorporating the self-governing institutions into the Azerbaijani political system in such a way that there is no single territorially defined unit for the ethnic Armenian community." While the deployment of over 80 U.S. troops on Armenian soil will hopefully guarantee against imminently anticipated Azerbaijani attacks on Nagorno-Karabakh or Armenia itself, Washington's move in a region Moscow has long viewed as a vital interest does not come without risk. Moscow views Washington's increased involvement as the Biden administration taking advantage of Russia's war in Ukraine in order to weaken or challenge its influence in the South Caucasus region, where Russia has a history of over 200 years of regional military domination. The latest American proposal for unblocking the Lachin Corridor plans to simultaneously open an alternative route to Nagorno-Karabakh through the Azerbaijani town of Aghdam. However, Armenians have regarded this proposal as a clear threat. Tigran Grigoryan, a Karabakh-born analyst and head of the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, a Yerevan-based think tank, assessed that, even if both the Lachin Corridor and the Aghdam route were to be opened, the potential remained for Baku to again close the corridor and create a "new status quo on the ground." Recent reports show that the first delivery of aid by the Russian Red Cross has entered Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan. However, the acute crisis in food, energy, and humanitarian supplies continues as the Lachin Corridor remains shut and Azerbaijan continues its buildup along the border regions.The Biden administration would do better to use its leverage over Azerbaijan to ensure an end to the Lachin Corridor blockade while simultaneously working to achieve a solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that would both recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty and provide enforceable guarantees for the future rights and security of the Armenian population there. For such an approach to work would likely require coordination with Russia. While such a scenario might be hard to imagine, Washington and Moscow have worked together in the past over Nagorno-Karabakh, even when relations were severely strained elsewhere. Such coordination is particularly compelling given the tens of thousands in the enclave who currently face famine. Rather than taking steps that Moscow views as threatening to its military presence in the South Caucasus (a process which led to disastrous consequences for neighboring Georgia 15 years ago), Washington, and the region itself, would be better off if American involvement instead demonstrated its commitment to ensuring human rights.

Stuck pigs on the Bossier City Council squeal, a recent
leaked audio clip reveals, that forecasts as a reactive attempt, its
origins likely illegal, to restrict public input and comment on Council
matters.

Over
the past six weeks a majority faction on the Council has taken a public
relations beating. Over a series of votes five of its members – Republicans David Montgomery,
Jeff Free,
and Vince
Maggio, and Democrat Bubba Williams
and no party Jeff Darby
– have on as many as four occasions voted in a manner to obstruct the placing
of term limits into the city charter, with two of those votes violating the
charter itself. The amendment would set a three term, lifetime and retroactive
limit that would prevent all but Maggio from running again in 2025.

Even if limits don't make it into the charter in
time to apply to that election – that majority bloc at the last Council meeting voted
to ask Bossier Parish Registrar Stephanie Agee to step outside the law to
decertify the voters' petition that the charter forces the Council to call for
an election on it, and also voted to pursue other legal action trying to derail
the petition, both over questions about the petition's format – extensive political
damage detrimental to their continuing their political careers has happened. Probing
and sometimes sharp-tongued citizen commentary when the items dealing with the
petition and related issue of term limits have come up, illuminating hypocrisy
and bad faith in the bloc's actions that raises unflattering public awareness,
not to mention producing visuals that beg to appear in negative campaign
advertising down the road.

So, it would appear the bloc wants to minimize its
bleeding. Internet podcasters/narrowcasters Bossier Watch, the duo of Rex Moncrief
and Duke Lowrie, obtained anonymously audio recordings
with the identifiable voices of Darby, Montgomery, and Council Clerk Phyllis
McGraw, with others not identified. The sparse information attached gave few
clues as to when and where it took place, but from the context of the remarks
likely it occurred nearby the Council chambers not long after the last, Sep. 5,
meeting where blistering comments occurred, in one instance prompting Montgomery
to ask for city marshals to remove from the premises local web site operator Wes Merriott.

Although Council Pres. Free himself interacted intemperately
with Merriott, he wisely declined given the troubling
current Council rules that leave it open to First Amendment violations if administering
these more than lightly. But that incident and other comments may lead to changes
to rein in the public's opportunity and ability to make comments.

The audio features Darby instructing McGraw to prepare
changes to those rules to group all comments at a period near a meeting's
start, instead of the current format where commentary may occur on each agenda
item and action. It also has Montgomery orally working out the mechanics of
passing the resolution McGraw apparently is to prepare, which would have to
occur during a Council meeting in public with comments permitted, where he
notes that Free will be absent and assumes the remainder of his bloc with vote
for it and the other two Councilors who have been supportive of term limits,
Republicans Chris
Smith and Brian Hammons,
won't.

Darby's rationale is that the volume and tone of
negative comments – being apparently oblivious or unwilling to admit that his
and others' actions spawn that – makes them "look bad" and terms the robustness
"out of control behavior," while Montgomery, egged on inappropriately by McGraw
who as clerk should remain neutral on matters of policy, complains about frequent
commenter David Crockett, alleging he's "repetitive" and goes over the three-minute
interval permitted for speakers. Never mind that the existing rules allow the presiding
officer to prevent both of these if committed, although it's far from certain Crockett
does either and enforcement easily could run afoul of the First Amendment. Both
the "look bad/out of control" complaint of Darby and the desire of Montgomery
to limit further speech rather than explore rules enforcement display thinly-disguised
arrogance and thin skins to any criticism.

Montgomery also was captured on audio making a
comment that "… all I can say to the people of Bossier City is 'welcome to
Shreveport,' 'cause that's what's going to happen." That appears to be an
attempt to cast aspersions on Shreveport city council governance, for motives
and meaning only guessable. Possibly he opines that the more robust exercise of
citizen commentary of recent vintage makes the city less governable; i.e.
shifts power out of his hands and a few others towards more democratic practice.

Actually, in many ways the Shreveport
model is more restrictive than the one currently in use in Bossier City. Section
1.11 of its City Council Rules of Procedure requires prior registration at the
meeting or online to speak at a point early in the agenda, specifying which
agenda item is the subject. The chairman or vice chairman then decides the
ordering of who speaks when, with commentary limited to three minutes unless unanimous
council approval extends that (or suspends the rules by a two-thirds vote). An
exception is made logically enough when an agenda item is to be added, when
speaking can occur without prior notification. However, during administrative
conferences, held the day prior to the regular meeting that reviews the agenda
(a practice once followed by Bossier City's), the public can bring up anything
about which to speak.

Yet it's difficult to see how a change to
frontloaded commentary by itself would discourage citizen input, unless other
rules are changed. Existing rules limit to four speakers of three minutes on each
item with no more than 45 minutes total, and apparently with no mechanism for
extensions beyond the three or 45 minutes. Shunting commentary to upfront only
removes on-the-fly commentary from discussion by the Council prior to the comment
period on each item.

But other changes really could stifle citizen
input, given Louisiana
statute puts almost no brakes on how far government can go to limit
expression, with the law merely establishing that any rules be "reasonable" and
requiring all bodies to provide a period before business as a whole or before
each item except for school boards which have to have comment on each item. This
can accommodate extremely restrictive regulations such as prior registration
and presiding officers selection liberties, limitation to agenda items, short
time limits for each item and in total,
and vague "niceness" parameters.

Therefore, the Council majority at its most extreme to
squelch potential criticism could take the Shreveport model putting comments
before business but remove the general commentary option, keep the number of speakers
per item restrictions, add the registration requirement, and shorten the total
time period, and likely this would pass state constitutional muster. Thus, the
public can expect a resolution incorporating some or all of these changes to
appear at the Sep. 19 meeting, with Free expected to be absent. That would leave
Smith as vice president in charge, creating an interesting situation as he is anticipated
to be against this change.

As disappointing, yet illustrative of the majority's
bloc's contempt for and fear of the public, as an extreme model would be, worse
is how the closed-door meeting of at least two councilors likely violated
statute. Public officials of collective decision-making bodies cannot circumvent
quorum or transparency requirements by deciding official business by
intentional arrangement (meaning on premises in a facility used for official
business, or off premises if prearranged, or by outreach such as electronic
communication including voice) even if the group in on the discussion contains
less than a quorum. Possibly as many as two councilors in addition to Darby and
Montgomery were present when they concocted their game plan – at least one
other unidentified voice is audible that appears to come from another councilor
– but the mentions of Free and two dissenting votes unlikely means any more were
present. Even if only two or three had been present, discussion of the matter and
vote-counting would violate the law if either or both of Darby and Montgomery
subsequently brought up the matter to and polled other councilors on how they
would vote.

To Darby, Montgomery, and their ilk, closed
government and its unflattering aspects allowed to fester by this opaqueness increases
their power and privilege and they must remain as inoculated as possible from
criticism for the rot to continue and spread. Any attempt to increase restrictions
on Council public commenting illuminates their escalating concern over the
advent of burgeoning democratic discourse.

Emily Ekins and Jordan Gygi


The Supreme Court again attracted much attention in June when it struck down Harvard's and University of North Carolina's use of racial preferences in admissions, a practice known as affirmative action. President Biden expressed anger over the decision and said "We cannot let this decision be the last word. The court can render a decision, it cannot change what America stands for." But what does the American public think of affirmative action?Polls do not produce a clear picture of where Americans stand on the issue. Question wording strongly influences if people say they support or oppose considering racial background in college admissions. Research has long shown that question wording impacts how people answer survey questions. However, patterns do emerge that give insight into how Americans are thinking about affirmative action. In short, questions that ask if Americans support "affirmative action" but don't describe the policy find a majority support it. In contrast, surveys that don't use the phrase but rather describe what affirmative action is find most Americans oppose it.













We examined nearly two dozen recently conducted surveys that asked about affirmative action (See Appendix A). In almost every survey question that uses the words "affirmative action," a majority of Americans express support for the policy. For example, when NPR asked, "Do you think affirmative action programs in hiring, promoting, and college admissions should be continued or should be abolished," 57% of Americans said they should be continued, while 38% said they should be abolished.1
However, survey questions that did not use the phrase "affirmative action" but rather described how the policy is implemented consistently found a majority opposed to the practice. For example, the Economist/​YouGov asked, "Do you think colleges should or should not be allowed to consider an applicant's race, among other factors, when making decisions on admissions?" In response, 64% of Americans said they do not think colleges should be allowed to consider race in admissions decisions, while only 25% said this should be allowed. Every survey that omitted the words "affirmative action" revealed majority opposition. Specifically, phrases such as "racial preferences" and "consider race as a factor" in admissions tended to elicit opposition.
Opposition to affirmative action policies in college admissions declined somewhat when the question mentioned its intent to increase the racial diversity of the school. In contrast, Americans expressed much greater opposition if they were asked if race should be a factor, among other factors, in college admissions decisions without explicitly mentioning its goal.
Survey questions that described affirmative action without mentioning the purpose of the policy found about 7 in 10 Americans oppose it:
Colleges should…
"…be able to use race as a factor in admissions…" 69% opposed (YouGov)
"…consider an applicant's race as part of their admissions policies" 70% opposed (CBS/​YouGov)
"…be able to use race as a factor in admissions" 74% opposed (YouGov)
"…be allowed to consider an applicant's race, among other factors…" 65% opposed (Economist/​YouGov)
Survey questions that mentioned the intention behind affirmative action policies as well how they are implemented found about 5 to 6 in 10 Americans oppose it:
Colleges should…
".…be allowed to use race as one of the factors in admissions to increase diversity…" 58% opposed (Quinnipiac)
"…giv[e] Black and other minority college applicants preference in college admissions to make up for the past and present inequalities" 55% opposed (YouGov)
"…take into account…race and ethnicity…as one of the factors…in order to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of the school…" 50% opposed (Pew Research Center)
These data suggest that Americans may not know what affirmative action actually is. They may have a vague idea that these programs are intended to help increase diversity–a cause worth supporting. However, they disapprove of the way colleges go about doing it. The majority of Americans appear uncomfortable with the idea of using someone's race as a factor in college admissions decisions. It's likely that the practice of giving some applicants preference over others because of their race violates a sense of fairness that is important to many people, even if the idea of increased diversity remains important to them.
Black Americans have diverse opinions about affirmative action.
Black Americans tend to express majority support when the words "affirmative action" are used in the question. However, when the words are omitted and the policy is explained as colleges using race as a factor in college admissions, Black Americans tend to express greater opposition to the idea. Across different question wordings, data show that many African Americans oppose affirmative action, many support it, and many have mixed feelings about it.













For instance, when asked in a CBS/​YouGov poll, "In general, do you think affirmative action programs in hiring, promoting, and college admissions should be continued, or do you think these affirmative action programs should be abolished," 78% of Black Americans said they should be continued and only 22% said they should be abolished.
But in some surveys, a majority of Black Americans opposed affirmative action policies. For example, YouGov asked, "Some people think that public colleges and universities should be able to use race as a factor in admissions. Other people think that they should not be able to. What do you think?" Nearly two‐​thirds (64%) of Black Americans said public colleges should not be able to use race as a factor in admissions, while only 36% said they should be able to.
The Pew Research Center found ambivalent support among Black Americans when the survey question mentioned both the policy and its intention. The survey found that less than half (47%) of Black Americans approved of "selective colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions in order to increase the racial and ethnic diversity at the school." But 53% either opposed it (29%) or weren't sure (24%) if they approved or disapproved.
Although African Americans are more supportive of affirmative action compared to Americans overall, there is a great deal of variation and diversity in their views.
Most Americans don't differentiate between public and private universities when forming opinions about affirmative action
The Court's decision extends to both public universities and private institutions that accept federal funds. However, some point out that private colleges and universities should be treated differently since they are not run by the government and should thus be allowed to use race as a factor in their admissions policies.
However, the Court did not make this distinction, and it appears that most Americans do not either. A June YouGov poll asked respondents two separate questions about if private and if public universities "should be allowed to use race as a factor in admissions." In both cases majorities of Americans oppose the use of affirmative action policies: 69% oppose for private universities and 74% oppose for public universities. Nevertheless, Americans were about 5 percentage points more likely to oppose affirmative action in public colleges than private ones. This means that some Americans do make the distinction. (Some of this difference could also be due to measurement error.) But overall, these results show that most Americans do not make a distinction between private and public universities when it comes to employing affirmative action policies.













Implications
Recent polls about affirmative action do not paint a clear picture. When simply asked whether they support "affirmative action," a majority of Americans stand by the policy. However, when asked whether some racial groups should be given preference in college admissions, the implementation of affirmative action, a majority of Americans are opposed. Likely, Americans support the basic principle that guided the adoption of affirmative action, namely that college campuses should be diverse and that racial minorities should be more fully embraced in these spaces. But also it's likely that many Americans feel the practice of using race as a factor in college admissions violates the value of fairness. The perception of these two values being in conflict may help explain why Americans' opinions of affirmative action are highly sensitive to how the policy is framed in survey questions.
1 We found one exception to this pattern in which a question that mentioned affirmative action also found most Americans opposed. However, this question from Reuters/​Ipsos also described the policy as "admitting students based on race or ethnicity" which found 60% opposed.
Appendix

Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett


Congress is in the midst of debating the annual defense spending bill and chances for completion before the August recess look bleak. The multitrillion‐​dollar increase in the debt limit, which Congress passed in early June following months of negotiations, established budget levels for defense and nondefense appropriations for the next two years. The parties remain divided on the details.
Spending debates that are contentious now will likely get worse in future years, as the current fiscal trajectory will place inevitable constraints on America's military. Without reforms to health care and retirement benefits, other domestic and defense priorities will be increasingly squeezed. As debt levels and associated interest costs rise, economic growth will suffer. And as the share of the budget dedicated to autopilot entitlement spending expands, reduced fiscal capacity will further increase budgetary conflict over the shrinking portion of discretionary spending that Congress allocates each year.
Congress only debates 28 cents of every dollar it spends; the vast majority of federal spending goes out without congressional deliberation, primarily funding programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, among other entitlements. A new mechanism is needed to reform entitlement spending and avoid a future fiscal crisis before it's too late.
Erosion of economic power
According to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO's) latest long‐​term budget outlook, publicly held debt will grow from 98 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 181 percent of GDP by 2053. Most economic research finds that excessive public debt reduces economic growth, with dampening effects kicking in around debt reaching 78 percent of GDP.
There are many benefits of a robust economy including a higher standard of living. A strong domestic economy is also critical for supporting national security. Prominent national security leaders, including former Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, and Homeland Security across eight Republican and Democratic administrations, were recently gathered by the Peterson Foundation's Coalition for Fiscal and National Security. They argue that:
"[L]ong-term debt is the single greatest threat to our national security…This debt burden would slow economic growth, reduce income levels, and harm our national security posture. It would inevitably constrain funding for a strong military and effective diplomacy, and draw resources away from the investments that are essential for our economic strength and leading role among nations."

Delaying responsible fiscal reforms in the face of growing federal debt invites economic and national decline. High and rising U.S. federal debt leads to suppressed private investment, reduced incomes, and increased risk of a sudden fiscal crisis. A weaker economy and growing concerns by international bondholders of U.S. treasuries about the government's ability and willingness to service its debt—without resorting to high inflation—will drive up interest costs and eventually impact America's international standing negatively.
While investors continue to gobble up U.S. debt, which now exceeds $25 trillion, the $114 trillion in additional deficits CBO projects over the next 30 years pose serious questions about whether there will be enough appetite for markets to absorb such high levels of government debt. Troubling too is how much productivity‐​enhancing private investments will suffer because of crowding out. The prudent choice is to restore fiscal sustainability during times of peace and economic strength, reversing America's unsustainable debt crisis while it's still possible.
National defense is a core responsibility of the federal government. To maximize Americans' safety and prosperity, prudence should guide both strategy and the budget. A dire fiscal crisis would erode the economic foundation of America's strength, limiting U.S. capacity to defend its vital interests at home and abroad.
Crowding out of defense spending as a budget priority
Entitlements are increasingly dominating the federal budget. Since 1962, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other income security programs such as food stamps have grown four times larger as a share of GDP and consume more than half of the federal budget. By comparison, defense spending declined by a factor of three as a share of GDP, from 9 percent of GDP in 1962 to 3 percent of GDP by 2022. Defense spending makes up less than one‐​fifth of the budget, despite growing in real, inflation‐​adjusted terms as entitlement spending has claimed an increasing share of the taxpayer burden. In real terms, annual defense spending has increased by nearly $200 billion between 1962 and 2022. Meanwhile, annual entitlement spending has grown by $3.3 trillion over the same timeframe. The graphic below shows how entitlements have grown to consume a greater share of total non‐​interest spending over time.











As entitlements consume a larger share of the budget, this exerts downward pressure on other budget priorities. Former Principal Research Scientist for Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program Cindy Williams explains,
"Absent significant reform or a major expansion of the total federal budget, the rising costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will continue to crowd out defense spending. In the extreme, if federal budgets are held near today's levels as a share of GDP, nondefense discretionary spending is not reduced significantly, and mandatory spending is not brought under control, there will soon be no money left for defense."
Defense has also been a prime target for cuts across several congressional efforts to reduce government spending. The Manhattan Institute's Brian Riedl examined 14 major deficit‐​reduction negotiations since 1980. More than any other category, legislators tend to reduce defense spending during fiscal consolidation periods. Cuts to defense discretionary spending produced the largest savings in four of six deficit‐​reduction deals. Despite entitlements primarily driving rising deficits, mandatory spending reforms in these deals were modest at best. It seems politically easier to keep targeting discretionary spending for cuts than to tackle the key driver of rising spending: entitlements.
For those in favor of restraining the scope of U.S. military engagement, a fiscally restrained government may have some upside. Cato's Justin Logan and former Cato research fellow Ben Friedman argue that depressed economic growth and rising interest rates driven by high debt could make the defense budget an increasingly likely target for cuts. Logan and Friedman write,
"The U.S. military of the 2010s and 2020s will likely have a moderately less ambitious strategy and smaller budget than that of last decade. But the ambitions will still be hegemonic and the budget massive, hardly those of a normal country concerned chiefly with its own affairs. Unfortunately, the old Bolshevik saying, ''the worse, the better'' may apply for those seeking to rein in American military ambition. Ironically, we are left to push for military restraint while rooting against the conditions liable to produce it."

In this way, a smaller U.S. defense budget would put real limits on unnecessary and self‐​defeating American military activities overseas by, constraining American legislators. Paradoxically, some level of defense budget constraints could improve U.S. national security by reducing our involvement in military conflicts that are not in America's national interest.
Apply a defense savings mechanism to the broader budget
The United States' unsustainable fiscal trajectory is almost entirely driven by rising interest expenses and entitlement spending. Legislators must work together to reform the major entitlement programs to avoid a potential debt crisis, massive tax increases, and lagging economic growth. One idea gaining traction is a debt commission to assist legislators with adopting budget reforms to stabilize the growth in the debt.
The 1988 Base Realignment and Closure Act (BRAC) successfully addressed the politically thorny issue of closing military bases and can serve as a model for Congress's debt commission. BRAC established an independent commission to select military bases for closures, with recommendations that were approved by the President being adopted by default in Congress unless legislators successfully passed a resolution of disapproval. BRAC successfully bypassed special interest politics and congressional gridlock to free up funding for more essential defense priorities. Congress should consider establishing a BRAC‐​like, independent fiscal commission to recommend changes to stabilize the debt at no more than 100 percent of GDP over the next 10 years.
A well‐​designed commission will be composed of a diverse group of experts, guided by clear goals established by Congress, and whose recommendations will be self‐​executing after Presidential approval; benefitting from so‐​called fast‐​track authority. Asking members of Congress to affirmatively vote for entitlement reforms recommended by such a commission will most likely undermine the debt commission's recommendations from becoming law. Few legislators are willing to stick their necks out in support of necessary and yet unpopular changes to Medicare and Social Security.
Unsustainable fiscal policy imperils American economic and military strength. By reforming entitlement programs and reducing spending, legislators can prevent high debt from undermining America's prosperity and security. A well‐​designed debt commission can help Congress to see this through.

ABSTRAKSaat ini wisata syariah yang biasa dikenal dengan wisata religi sedang menjamur, khususnya di Jawa Timur. Sosok yang dianggap wali oleh sebagian orang itu berada di Surabaya, Gresik, dan Tuban, namun saat ini berkembang di kabupaten Jombang, yakni makam Presiden ke-4 Abdurrahman Wahid yang disebut Gus Dur. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pemahaman masyarakat dalam memanfaatkan peluang wisata religi makam Gus Dur dalam meningkatkan perekonomian masyarakat sekitar pondok pesantren Tebuireng khususnya di dusun Jalan Seblak gang III. Penelitian ini dapat dicermati melalui perubahan kehidupan ekonomi, pemanfaatan peluang usaha dan faktor penghambat bagi kepentingan usaha. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif dengan teknik pengumpulan data wawancara dan dokumentasi. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa masyarakat setempat mengalami perubahan ekonomi dengan memanfaatkan peluang untuk membangun warung di atas tanah mereka dan menyewakannya kepada pedagang luar. Ini memberikan nilai ekonomi tambahan. Namun, penjualan warung-warung tersebut dinilai tidak mencukupi, sehingga mengharuskan mereka untuk membuka usaha sampingan. Terdapat peluang yang sangat baik bagi masyarakat untuk memilih menyewakan lapaknya karena faktor penghambat yaitu keluarga, tenaga kerja, permodalan, dan rasa empati yang tinggi terhadap pedagang pendatang. Saran bagi Pemerintah Kabupaten Jombang adalah memfasilitasi masyarakat dengan pengetahuan kewirausahaan dengan mengadakan seminar agar memiliki pengetahuan dan motivasi yang tinggi untuk menjalankan bisnis.Kata Kunci: Wisata Religi Makam Gus Dur, Peningkatan Ekonomi, Peluang Usaha. ABSTRACTCurrently, sharia tourism, commonly known as religious-friendly tourism is proliferating, especially in East Java. The figure, who is considered a guardian by some people, is located in Surabaya, Gresik, and Tuban but currently developing in the Jombang district, namely the tomb of the 4th President Abdurrahman Wahid, who is called Gus Dur. This study aims to determine the understanding of the community in taking advantage of religious tourism opportunities in Gus Dur's tomb in improving the community's economy around the Tebuireng Islamic boarding school, especially in the hamlet of Street Seblak street alley III. This study can be observed through changes in economic life, utilization of business opportunities and inhibiting factors for business interests. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method with interview and documentation data collection techniques. The results of this study show that the local community is experiencing economic changes by taking advantage of the opportunity to build a warung on their land and rent it out to outside traders. It provides added economic value. 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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.

La presente tesis doctoral nace de la necesidad de pensar otras formas de ejercer la clínica con pacientes pediátricos ingresados en psiquiatría. Durante las últimas décadas, se advirtió un significativo incremento en la prescripción de psicofármacos y una reducción alarmante en los tiempos de las consultas psicológicas. En España, desde la crisis del año 2008, los hospitales públicos han sufrido recortes estructurales por parte del gobierno central y autonómico para la dotación de recursos humanos e institucionales. La sobrecarga laboral de los profesionales, unida a un incremento en la demanda de los servicios, estimulan el ejercicio de una clínica basada en la urgencia de la remisión sintomática y no en el abordaje de los pacientes como sujetos-parlantes. Los pacientes de psiquiatría acaban por recibir tratamientos farmacológicos que no interpelan las lógicas del malestar; sino que anestesian el sufrimiento. Si bien, la psiquiatría actual intenta abandonar los dispositivos disciplinarios descritos por Michael Foucault; termina por abrazar nuevos dispositivos que ejercen un borramiento de la subjetividad. En los primeros, el control se ejercía desde la coerción; en los segundos, el control ostenta un semblante amigable, pero se convierte en enajenante. Así, la píldora remplaza a la camisa de fuerza y se arriba a una violencia velada a la que no se le interpone resistencia. En este contexto, es fundamental plantear otros escenarios hospitalarios alejados de la industria farmacológica y de la burocracia del sistema sanitario, para un ejercicio más humano de la clínica. Con la intención de introducir una tecnología que aloje la palabra del sujeto-corporal, se diseñó un dispositivo capaz de facilitar la narrativa de los textos de los pacientes y de contemplar la corporalidad como espacio de escritura subjetiva y colectiva. Para poder crear una pausa a las inercias hospitalarias, se construyó un dispositivo de teatro dentro del ingreso a psiquiatría en un hospital público y pediátrico de la Comunidad de Madrid. El teatro ofrecía, como característica principal, la posibilidad de que los participantes pudieran decir lo que quisiesen y nada sería vetado. Podían expresar cualquier idea sin que las mismas se expusieran al tamiz de la censura. Este dispositivo permitió vencer las barreras del sistema médico e implantar una clínica disidente frente a los protocolos del hospital. De esta manera, el dispositivo de teatro que se propuso fue pensado para ser implementado en un microespacio temporal y su instrumentalización en la clínica no fue concebido como universalista. En esta investigación, se considera al teatro como una tecnología del yo capaz de ofrecer un andamiaje para la construcción discursiva de la subjetividad. La forma de entender la tecnología teatral, como estructura estructurante, fue nombrada tramoya; la manera de ejercer la clínica, desde la concepción del sujeto corporal, psíquico, socio-cultural y político, fue llamada transclínica. En la investigación se trabajó con una población de niños y adolescentes entre 8 y 18 años con diagnóstico de trastorno de la conducta alimentaria (TCA), anorexia y bulimia. Los participantes se encontraban ingresados en el servicio de psiquiatría de un hospital público de la Comunidad de Madrid. Durante el período 2014 y 2018, años en los que se realizó el trabajo de campo, asistieron 236 participantes y se impartieron 160 sesiones de teatro. Todos los participantes del espacio habían sido previamente derivados por su psiquiatra tratante. Como metodología de investigación, se utilizó el método etnográfico; como unidad de análisis, se construyó la escena. Debe ser entendida la escena como la unidad básica a la que se arribó para el estudio cualitativo de los datos; ya que conforma un constructo artificial que posibilitó aislar las variables intervinientes en la implementación del dispositivo transclínico de la tramoya. Para el análisis de los datos, se seleccionaron aleatoriamente ocho escenas sucedidas en el trabajo de campo. El análisis se realizó desde una mirada interdisciplinar, cuya aproximación consistió en un análisis semiológico del texto y en la interpretación de la participación activa de los cuerpos. De esta manera, no se analizó solo la hermenéutica del texto y de sus autorías; sino, también, los gestos y las expresiones corporales de los autores. Las escenas revelaron los efectos de incorporar el dispositivo de la tramoya en la construcción discursiva de los pacientes ingresados en psiquiatría. Al crear espacios donde la palabra del paciente pudiera circular sin censura, se estableció un corte transversal en el continuum del tratamiento psiquiátrico. Durante las sesiones de teatro se observó que los pacientes adquirían mayor ductilidad en la expresión verbal y mayor movilidad de sus cuerpos. La implementación de la metáfora teatral favoreció la construcción de textos para ser pronunciados por las voces de los pacientes desde el rol del personaje. Este juego dialéctico posibilitó plantear nuevas vías creativas y colectivas para alojar el malestar. ; The following doctoral thesis aims the need to find different ways to practice the clinic with pediatric patients admitted to psychiatry. In the last decades, psychotropic prescription increased significantly, and psychological consultations times decreased alarmingly. Since the 2008 crisis, public hospitals have suffered structural cuts by the central and regional Spanish governments. Professionals' work overload, in conjunction with higher demand for services, stimulates the practice of a clinic based on the urgency of symptomatic remission rather than on the patients' approach as speaking-subjects. Hence, psychiatry patients receive pharmacological treatments that, instead of questioning the logic of the ailment, anesthetize the suffering. Although current psychiatry tries to abandon the disciplinary devices determined by Michael Foucault, it ends up embracing new mechanisms that exert a blurring of subjectivity. In the previous ones, coercion exercised the control; in the seconds shows a friendly face, but it becomes alienating. Thus, the pill replaces the straitjacket and leads to veiled violence, where there is no resistance. In this context, more humane practice of the clinic needs to propose hospital settings far from the pharmacological industry and the health system bureaucracy. An artifact was designed to introduce a technology that accommodates the word of the subject-body. It facilitates the narrative of the patients' texts and of contemplates corporality as a space for subjective and collective writing. A theater device was built within the entrance to psychiatry in a public and pediatric hospital in the Community of Madrid to create a pause to hospital inertias. As a central feature, the theater offered the possibility that the participants could express any idea without any objection. This device controls the barriers of the medical system and implements a dissident clinic against hospital protocols. Thus, the proposed theater device intended to be implemented in a micro-space-time and not conceived as universalist when used in the clinic. In this investigation, the theater offers a technology of the self-capable of providing scaffolding for the discursive construction of subjectivity. The way of understanding theatrical technology, as a structuring structure, was named tramoya. The style of exercising the clinic, from the conception of the subject-body, psychic, socio-cultural, and political, was called transclinical. This research encompasses a population of children and adolescents between 8 and 18 years old with an eating disorder (TCA), anorexia, and bulimia diagnosis. Participants were admitted to the psychiatry service of a public hospital in the Community of Madrid. Fieldwork carried out between 2014 and 2018 lead to the 236 participants attended, and 160 theater sessions taught. Their treating psychiatrist has previously referred all participants in the space. The ethnographic method was the research methodology, and the scene was constructed as a unit of analysis. The scene understood as the basic unit for the qualitative study of the data due to its artificial construct that made it possible to isolate the variables involved in the implementation of the transclinical device of the tramoya. For data analysis, eight scenes that occurred in the fieldwork were randomly selected. The analysis was performed from an interdisciplinary perspective, whose approach consisted of a semiological analysis of the text and the interpretation of the active participation of the bodies. Thereby not only the hermeneutic of the text and its authorships were analyzed but also authors' gestures and body expressions. The scenes revealed the effects of incorporating the tramoya device into the discursive construction of patients admitted to psychiatry. By creating spaces where the patient's word could circulate uncensored, a cross-section was established in the continuum of psychiatric treatment. During theater sessions, it was observed that patients acquired higher ductility in verbal expression and greater mobility of their bodies. Theatrical metaphor implementation favored the construction of texts pronounced by the patient voices from the character's role. This dialectical game made it possible to propose new creative and collective ways to accommodate the discomfort. ; Programa de Doctorado en Humanidades por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ; Presidente: Julio Enrique Checa Puerta.- Vocales: Fernanda María Álvarez Chamale.- Secretario: José María Álvarez Martínez

En este trabajo se estudia uno de los mecanismos de control desplegados por la monarquía hispánica para combatir la corrupción y aplicar reformas a las instituciones. En concreto, el objeto de estudio ha sido la visita de Juan de Góngora a la Casa de la Contratación y Consulado de Sevilla despachada en 1642, que concluyó en la ciudad hispalense en 1648, y cuyas sentencias fueron pronunciadas por el Consejo de Indias entre 1654 y 1659. La visita vino determinada por un contexto de altos niveles de fraude en el comercio indiano debido, entre otros factores, al periodo de incremento fiscal que se produjo durante el valimiento del conde-duque de Olivares. A su vez, la visita se enmarca en un periodo de cambios en la administración de la monarquía que varió las relaciones entre la corona y el comercio sevillano tras la pérdida del favor real de las políticas olivaristas en relación al comercio y las posiciones ganadas por el presidente del Consejo de Indias, el conde de Castrillo, más proclive a reducir la presión fiscal para restaurar el trato mercantil y perseguir el fraude con mayor rigor. Por todo ello, amén de profundizar en el estudio de los cambios que se dieron en la Corte en relación al modo de relacionarse con el comercio sevillano en las vísperas de la caída en desgracia de Olivares, se ha estudiado en profundidad el contexto en que se encontraban ambas instituciones antes de ser visitadas. En relación a los oficiales que ocupaban los cargos de la Casa de la Contratación cuando se produjo la visita, se analiza la influencia que tuvo la venalidad de oficios de la institución sevillana para generar vínculos entre los hombres del comercio y los oficiales de la Casa que más tarde iban a supervisar sus tratos y negocios, subrayando la responsabilidad de estos nexos en el aumento del fraude en el comercio en esta coyuntura. Además, se estudia el ámbito de decisión política en que se decretó despachar una visita y designar a Juan de Góngora como visitador. Para ello se ha profundizado en la figura del visitador pues, en buena medida, también encarnaba y determinaba los objetivos que perseguía la inspección. A partir de esos presupuestos, se analizan los procedimientos del visitador en sus labores indagatorias sobre la Casa de Contratación y Consulado. El estudio parte de los momentos iniciales de este mecanismo de control, con la publicación en Sevilla y en el área de influencia de la Casa de la Contratación de los edictos de la visita, y las resistencias mostradas por los visitados a ser inspeccionados, para seguidamente analizar los procedimientos inquisitivos del visitador en todas las labores y competencias de las instituciones de la Carrera de Indias. Este análisis nos ha permitido detallar, además de cómo se desarrolló la visita, el funcionamiento de todas las parcelas de las instituciones que fueron visitadas, cómo eran percibidos los grandes males que aquejaban al comercio con las Indias, y el grado de responsabilidad de los oficiales de la Casa en el incremento del fraude en el comercio indiano en esta coyuntura. Como parte integrante de la Casa de Contratación, pues también fue objeto de inspección, se estudia además el juzgado de Indias de Cádiz, encargado del despacho de las embarcaciones que comerciaban con las Indias desde el puerto gaditano. A través del análisis del proceso burocrático de la visita al juzgado de Cádiz, se destaca la importante presencia del fraude en el comercio gaditano, así como el mal gobierno del juez oficial de la Casa en aquella ciudad, quien desde su puesto de servidor regio formaba parte activa del comercio con las Indias. El estudio de los resultados de la visita constituye el epílogo de la investigación, abordándose las condenas firmes y demás consecuencias que tuvo este mecanismo de control sobre los oficiales de la Casa y del Consulado, así como las reformas que, emanadas de la acción del visitador, fueron aplicadas en ambas instituciones para que los abusos, excesos o, directamente, prácticas corruptas, que salieron a la luz en la visita, no se perpetraran en lo sucesivo con tanta facilidad. Résumé: Ce travail se penche sur l'un des mécanismes de contrôle déployés par la Monarchie hispanique pour lutter contre la corruption et mettre en œuvre des réformes des institutions. Plus précisément, l'objet de l'étude est la visite de Juan de Góngora à la Casa de la Contratación et au Consulat de Séville, visite expédiée en 1642 et conclue dans la ville de Séville en 1648, et dont les sentences furent prononcées par le Conseil des Indes entre 1654 et 1659. La visite fut déterminée par un contexte de forte fraude au sein du commerce indien due, entre autres facteurs, à la période du valimiento du comteduc d'Olivares qui conduisit à une augmentation des taxes. La visite s'inscrivit par ailleurs dans une période de changements dans l'administration de la Monarchie qui avaient modifié les relations entre la Couronne et le commerce sévillan, après la perte du privilège royal des politiques olivaristes concernant le commerce et les positions acquises par le président du Conseil des Indes, le comte de Castrillo, plus enclin à réduire la pression fiscale pour rétablir les conditions du commerce et afin de lutter contre la fraude avec plus de rigueur. Pour toutes ces raisons, en plus d'étudier les changements intervenus au sein de la Cour concernant la manière de traiter le commerce de Séville à la veille de la chute d'Olivares, le contexte dans lequel se trouvaient les deux institutions avant d'être visitées, a lui aussi été étudié en profondeur. En ce qui concerne les fonctionnaires qui occupaient les offices de la Casa de la Contratación au moment de la visite, nous analysons l'influence exercée par la vénalité des offices de l'institution sévillane, sur la création de liens entre les hommes de commerce et les fonctionnaires de la Casa qui allaient, plus tard, superviser leurs transactions et leurs affaires, d'où il convient de souligner la responsabilité de ces liens dans l'augmentation de la fraude dans le commerce à cette époque. Nous étudions par ailleurs le domaine de décision politique dans lequel l'expédition de la visite d'inspection fut décrétée ainsi que la nomination comme visiteur de Juan de Góngora. À cette fin, la figure du visiteur est analysée de manière approfondie, puisque, dans une large mesure, ce dernier a incarné et déterminé les objectifs poursuivis par l'inspection. Sur la base de ces données, sont étudiées les procédures suivies par l'inspecteur dans son travail d'investigation au sujet la Casa de Contratación et du Consulat. L'étude remonte aux premiers moments de ce mécanisme de contrôle, avec la publication à Séville et dans la zone d'influence de la Casa de la Contratación des décrets de la visite, et la résistance manifestée par les personnes visitées à être inspectées. Elle analyse ensuite les procédures d'investigation du visiteur dans tous les travaux et domaines de compétence des institutions de la Flotte des Indes. Cette analyse nous a permis de détailler, en plus du déroulement de la visite, le fonctionnement de toutes les parcelles des institutions visitées, la manière dont étaient perçus les grands maux qui affligeaient le commerce avec les Indes, et le degré de responsabilité des fonctionnaires de la Casa dans l'augmentation de la fraude dans le commerce indien à ce moment. En tant que partie intégrante de la Casa de Contratación, puisqu'elle fut elle aussi inspectée, la Cour des Indes de Cadix, chargée de l'expédition des navires qui commerçaient avec les Indes depuis le port de Cadix, est également à l'étude. L'analyse du processus bureaucratique de la visite à la Cour de Cadix met en évidence la présence d'une fraude importante dans le commerce de Cadix, ainsi que le mauvais gouvernement du juge officiel de la Casa de cette ville, qui de par sa position de serviteur royal faisait activement partie du commerce avec les Indes. L'étude des résultats de la visite d'inspection constitue l'épilogue de cette enquête. Y sont abordées les condamnations fermes et autres conséquences qu'eut ce mécanisme de contrôle sur les fonctionnaires de la Casa et du Consulat, ainsi que les réformes qui émanèrent de l'action du visiteur et qui furent appliquées dans les deux institutions dans le but d'éviter que les abus, les excès ou encore plus directement, les pratiques de corruption qui furent mises en évidence à l'issue de la visite, ne soient aussi facilement perpétrés à l'avenir.

La tesis presentada para optar al grado del doctor en Patrimonio tiene por objeto la obra juvenil de Raúl Porras Barrenechea (1897-1960), historiador, diplomático, educador, periodista y político peruano. Raúl Porras es una de las principales figuras de la intelectualidad y de la cultura de su país en el siglo XX. El trabajo analiza los inicios de la actividad cultural de Porras Barrenechea, que corresponde al período 1915-1930. Su primera labor intelectual -a la par de sus estudios universitarios- la representó el periodismo y, posteriormente sus investigaciones académicas en el campo de la literatura y de la historia. Este período cubre dos hitos de su biografia intelectual: la publicación de Alma Latina, revista cultural de la que fue codirector, y la presentación de su tesis doctoral en la Universidad de San Marcos en Lima consagrada al Congreso de Panamá de 1826. La perspectiva adoptada correlaciona la vida y obra de Porras con la de su generación, y la ubica en el contexto histórico del Perú en las tres primeras décadas del siglo XX. La investigación se sustenta en el empleo de fuentes documentales archivísticas e impresas, publicaciones periódicas y bibliografía. La tesis se estructura en cinco capítulos. En el primero se relata la biografia de Raúl Porras Barrenechea, destacándose los aspectos de su trayectoria vital: la familia, los estudios escolares; sus años de estudiante en las facultades de Letras y Jurisprudencia en la Universidad de San Marcos (1912- 1920); su actividad en la docencia escolar y universitaria; su obra como historiador, en la que destacaron sus múltiples estudios sobre la integridad de etapas de la historia del Perú; sus aportaciones a la cultura nacional en diferentes ámbitos; su labor en el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, donde asumió diversos cargos y responsabilidades que incluyeron misiones diplomáticas en el extranjero; el rol de Porras en el Senado de la República, del que asumió la presidencia en 1957; y finalmente su gestión como Canciller del Perú entre 1958 y 1960 durante el gobierno de Manuel Prado Ugarteche. En el capítulo II se traza el contexto histórico del Perú entre 1895 y 1930, analizando aspectos políticos, sociales y económicos. Este lapso comprende dos etapas de la política peruana, conocidas como la "República Aristocrática" (1895-1919) y el "Oncenio de Leguía» (1919-1930). Tras esbozar el panorama histórico, se estudia la generación de Porras, bautizada como "Generación del Centenario", apuntando sus notas dominantes en un intento_ de caracterización intelectual. Se estudia, también, dos acontecimientos de la vida académica y cultural del país con los que nace a la vida pública dicha pléyade de intelectuales en 1919: la Reforma Universitaria y el Conversatorio Universitario. El tercer capítulo explora la obra periodística de Porras entre 1915 v 1930. Después de presentar un paisaje de la prensa peruana en los tres primeros decenios del siglo XX, se analizan las contribuciones de Porras en el periodismo cultural y la crónica periodística. Sus artículos, crónicas y reseñas se publicaron en la revista Alma Latina (1915-1916). Su trabajo periodístico continuó en los años veinte en dos importantes revistas ilustradas de la época: Mundial y Variedades, donde escribió con asiduidad sobre temas históricos y literarios, además de comentarios sociales y crónicas costumbristas. El cuarto capítulo examina las aportaciones académicas de Porras en la investigación histórica y literaria; se trata de artículos y opúsculos (la mayoría de éstos publicados en la revista cultural Mercurio Peruano), además de su tesis de bachillerato dedicada a la vida y obra del escritor Felipe Pardo y Aliaga en sus años de juventud. Se analiza la concepción de la historia en Porras y las principales influencias en su formación histórica; y se revisa y pondera sus ensayos biográficos sobre ilustres figuras civiles del siglo XIX. El quinto y último capítulo indaga sobre el desempeño de Porras como jefe del Archivo de Límites del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores entre 1926 y 1930. Los tópicos tratados se refieren a las investigaciones histórico-jurídicas que emprendió y que fueron la base de la Exposición peruana en el arbitraje de las provincias Tacna y Arica, que se hallaban bajo ocupación chilena desde 1883, territorios en los que estaba prevista la realización de un plebiscito que decidiría su futuro. Además, se revisan dos obras históricas, para cuya elaboración Porras hubo de explorar los fondos documentales de la Cancillería peruana: Historia de los límites del Perú (1926, 1930) y El Congreso de Panamá de 1826 (1930), que fue la tesis con la que obtuvo el doctorado en Letras. ; The dissertation presented to opt for the doctoral degree in Heritage has the object of the early work of Raul Porras Barrenechea (1897- 1960), a Peruvian historian, diplomat, educator, journalist and politician. Raul Porras is one of the main intellectual and cultural figures in his country during the XX century. This paper analyses the beginning of Porras Barrenechea's cultural activities, which correspond to the period between 1915 and 1930. His first intellectual endeavour-during his university studies­ was pursued through journalism, and, subsequently, through academic research in the fields of literature and history. This period covers two milestones of his intellectual biography: the publication of Alma Latina (Latin Soul for its name in Spanish}, a cultural magazine which he co-directed, and the presentation of his doctoral dissertation at the University of San Marcos in Lima, dedicated to the Congress of Panama of 1826. The perspective adopted relates the life and works of Porras to his generation, which is set in the historical context of Peru in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Research is based on the employment of archival and printed documentary sources, journalistic publications and bibliography. The thesis is structured in five chapters. The first chapter addresses the biography of Raul Porras Barrenechea, prominently, aspects of his life traject ory: his family, schooling, his years as a student at the Faculty of Arts and Jurisprudence at the University of San Marcos (1912-1920); his school and university teaching; his works as a historian, primarily, his many studies regarding the integrity of the stages of Peruvian history; his contribution to the national culture in different fields; his work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he assumed several positions and responsibilities, which included diplomatic missions abroad; the role of Porras in the Peruvian Senate, in which he was president in 1957; and, finally, his labour as Foreign Minister of Peru between 1958 and 1960, during the government of Manuel Prado Ugarteche. Chapter II traces the historical context of Peru between 1895 and 1930, analyzing political, social and economic aspects. This period comprehends two stages of Peruvian politics, known as the "Aristocratic Republic" (1895-1919) and the"Oncenio of Leguía" 1 (1919-1930). After outlining the historical landscape, the generation of Porras is studied, baptized as the "Centennial Generation", aiming their prevailing notes in an attempt of intellectual characterization. Two academic and cultural events are also studied, which gave birth to this prestigious group of intellectuals in 1919: The University Reform and the University Discussion. The third chapter explores the journalistic work of Porras between 1915 and 1930. After presenting a landscape of the Peruvian press in the first three decades of the XX century, the contributions of Porras to cultural journalism and chronicles are analyzed. His articles, chronicles and reviews were published in the magazine Alma Latina (1915-1916). His journalistic work continued during the 1920's in two important illustrated magazines of the time: Mundial and Variedades, in which he frequently wrote about historic and literary subjects, as well as social commentary and traditional chronicles. The fourth chapter examines the academic contríbutions of Porras in historic and literary research through articles and booklets (most of them published in the cultural magazine Mercurio Peruano), as well as his Bachelor's degree thesis, dedicated to the life and works of the writer Felipe Pardo y Aliaga during his youth. The chapter analyses the conception of history in Porras, and the main influences in his historical education; and it reviews and ponders biographical essays regarding civil figures of the nineteenth century. The fifth and final chapter explores the performance of Porras as chief of the Archive of Limits of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 1926 and 1930. The topics examined refer to the historical and juridical research he undertook, which was the basis of the Peruvian Exposition for the arbitration of the Tacna and Arica provinces, which were under Chilean occupation since 1883, territories where a referendum would be held to decide their future. Furthemore, two historical papers are reviewed; for their development, Porras had to explore documentary funds from the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Hist01y of the Limits of Peru (1926, 1930), and The Congress of Panama of 1826 (1930), which was to be his doctoral thesis in Arts.