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U.S. President Joe Biden's brief trip to the Middle East, comprising just a few hours in Tel Aviv, will be remembered in this tragic chapter in the recent history of the Middle East for two main reasons. Firstly, because of the almost exaggerated reaffirmation of the alliance with Israel, and secondly, because of the metaphorical slap he received for the abrupt cancellation of a summit in Amman that was organized and canceled within just a few hours, due to the heightened tension after the Ahli Hospital massacre in Gaza. (A rearranged conference was held in Cairo last Saturday; 31 countries were represented, as was the UN.) The cancellation was a humiliation for the president and American diplomacy, but also a sign of a change of direction, and the beginning of a new order in the power equation in the Middle East.Let's start with the reasons behind the American request to meet at short notice with Jordanian King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The purpose of the summit revolved around the idea of getting as many Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip as possible. This idea — which, in short, involves emptying the enclave to aid the military goal of eliminating Hamas and its infrastructure — came from Israel, but won the Biden administration's support in Washington. To begin carrying this out, Israeli authorities ordered more than a million Palestinians from Gaza's north to move to the south — primarily toward the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, Gaza's gateway to Egypt, which the authorities in Cairo have kept shut.Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli deputy foreign minister, made the following remarks in an interview with Marc Lamont Hill on Al Jazeera in English on Oct. 15: "[We're not telling Gazans to] go to the beaches, go drown yourselves, God forbid … There is a huge expanse, almost endless space in the Sinai desert, just on the other side of Gaza. The idea is … for them to leave over to [sic] the open areas where we, and the international community, will prepare the infrastructure … Tent cities, with food and with water … just like for the refugees of Syria that fled the butchering of [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad a few years ago to Turkey." To be refugees or fugitives: that is what Ayalon, and indeed Israel, is offering to 2 million Palestinians.The majority of Gaza's population is, in fact, composed of descendants of Palestinians who took refuge on the southern coast of Mandate Palestine, in the area of Gaza's commercial port, forced out of their homes in places like Jaffa, Majdal, and present-day Ashkelon. Even then, waiting for them — like nearly all the refugees of 1948 — were tents and tent cities. Anyone familiar with the name given to the Nakba's refugees, the "people of the tents," knows that to propose a tent city in Sinai is to remind them, as if necessary, of what they were forced to become."This proposal cannot be accepted, and not only by the Palestinians. It dives into the most significant change in the Middle East in the last century, the birth of the State of Israel and the Nakba. This change is etched in the history of neighboring countries, first and foremost Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The uprooting of Palestinians to Sinai would be a burden on the Arab countries' shoulders — a burden they cannot bear, as was declared loud and clear in the statements issued by all the Arab leaders after Blinken's visit. They all focused on the Palestinian refugee issue, rejecting any possibility of a new population transfer from Palestine.Hypothetically, even if Blinken had received suggestions from Israel to propose, during his diplomatic tour of the region, a transfer of the Palestinian population to Sinai, the firm stance of all Arab interlocutors would have convinced the U.S. administration that it could go no further. Blinken made clear in an interview with Randa Abul Azm of Al-Arabiya that the United States would not support a transfer. "We've heard, and I've heard directly from Palestinian Authority President Abbas and from virtually every other leader that I've talked to in the region, that that idea is a nonstarter, and so we do not support it. We believe that people should be able to stay in Gaza, their home." King Abdullah expounded on the reason for the refusal on Tuesday at a press conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, where he referred to refugees as "a red line." The next day, the Egyptian president said the same to Scholz at a journalists' gathering in Cairo. Finally, after his quick return from Amman to Ramallah after the attack on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, Abbas clarified that Palestinians will not leave their country. Abbas, a veteran refugee from Safed, has all the experience to determine that, for the Palestinians, Nakba 2.0 is the fear that has been hovering over them in recent months and years, and is a chapter in their history that they refuse to live again at all costs.Blinken's diplomatic whirlwind tour of major Arab capitals, from Cairo to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Amman, in which he attempted to formulate an exit strategy for the Israelis from Gaza, effectively failed even before the mass killings at Al-Ahli Hospital. From the very moment Al Jazeera began broadcasting the horrific images of the dead in the hospital compound, another element entered the game: the emotional and political reaction of the Arab street, of the people and societies looking at a story that is already etched in their personal biographies and national history.There were immediate, spontaneous demonstrations in the streets of Amman, Tunisia, Beirut, and Cairo. Governments were careful not to prohibit the protests, instead settling for restricting them, because they know very well that everything is different since the Arab Spring of 2011. Through the history of rebellions and revolutions, anyone who has gone out into the streets has internalized the following: a regime can fall. Everyone knows this, including the rulers.The surprising momentum of the events following the hospital bombing led to the hasty cancellation of the summit. For the Arab players, it was impossible to meet with the United States about the issue of refugees while the Americans are increasingly perceived as clinging to their alliance with Israel. On the other hand, the events shifted the discussion from the refugee question to an immediate demand for a ceasefire — not humanitarian corridors, but an immediate cessation of hostilities. The Arab states are demanding an end to the war, as is the UN.As has already happened in the region's history, the wind rising from Gaza blows beyond the narrow boundaries of the enclave, with all the dangers involved. For example, Sisi does not want to go down as the first president in the history of the Egyptian republic to allow Nakba 2.0, and certainly not before the Egyptian elections this December, which are supposed to consolidate his rule. King Abdullah heads a state with a significant Palestinian presence, not only numerically but also in terms of economic weight. And above all, relations between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hashemite Kingdom have always been chilly and at times very complicated. The question of preserving the holy sites of Islam and Christianity in the Old City of Jerusalem is, among other things, at the heart of a fierce diplomatic clash between Jordan and the Netanyahu-led extreme right-wing coalition that has unfolded in recent years.Even Saudi Arabia, although it has begun the process of normalizing its relations with Israel, is no longer the same country that offered a peace plan 20 years ago in exchange for security, out of sensitivity to its alliance with the United States. The deepening presence of China in the Middle East, which during the COVID-19 pandemic consolidated its economic ties with many of the Persian Gulf coastal countries, is one of the main factors in the game today, first and foremost because China has managed to mediate a surprising reconciliation between the two biggest competitors in the region, Saudi Arabia and Iran.In other words, the United States' leeway for action is shrinking. The role of Washington, which clings so closely to Israel, is in danger of being tested at a critical moment when the Middle East will no longer be what it was. It seems that the United States does not have a sufficient understanding of the region, just as the $100 million offered by Biden as aid to the Palestinians at the end of his visit to Israel certainly does not suffice: each of Gaza's reconstruction plans, after five Israeli military operations in the past 15 years, is estimated at billions of dollars.This article was republished with permission from +972 Magazine..

For the United States to commit itself in advance to take the side of some other country that becomes involved in an international conflict is an extraordinary step that is justified only under extraordinary circumstances. There needs to be a credible external threat to the country being protected. And there must be enough commonality of interests and values between the United States and the protected state that the difference between that state falling or not falling to external aggression is highly significant for U.S. interests.A possible standard for measuring the appropriateness of security commitments is the grandest such U.S. commitment, under the North Atlantic Treaty. Whatever one may think of NATO's later expansion and out-of-area activities, the circumstances justifying a U.S. security commitment were present when the alliance was created in the late 1940s. The Soviet Union's military had overrun Eastern Europe and converted its states into satellite communist dictatorships. If the then-fragile democracies of Western Europe experienced the same fate, the result would have been disastrous for U.S. interests.Nothing remotely resembling those circumstances exists today in the Persian Gulf region. No Red Army is poised to take over the region. No would-be regional hegemon exists. Certainly not Iran, weakened by sanctions, preoccupied with internal divisions, and facing the disadvantage of being an ethnic and religious minority in a region that is largely Arab and Sunni.Saudi Arabia is the state that has had the most recent go at something approaching regional hegemony. It has employed military force outside its borders to prop up an unpopular regime in Bahrain and, on a much larger scale, to try to impose its will on Yemen through a highly destructive air war. That attempt failed, and Riyadh evidently has come to realize that its security is better served through accommodation rather than a quest for domination.Nor is there anything in the region like the difference, in terms of values and interests, that there was in 1940s Europe between Western democracies and Soviet satellite dictatorships. The Gulf Arab states are absolute monarchies. The only thing in those states that sounds close to democracy is a mostly elected National Assembly in Kuwait, but whenever that body gets too noisy and difficult to suit the ruling regime, the emir simply dissolves it.Despite these circumstances, the Biden administration is extending security guarantees to Gulf states, most recently by signing a Comprehensive Security Integration and Prosperity Agreement with Bahrain. The agreement commits the United States, "in the event of external aggression or the threat of external aggression" against Bahrain, to "immediately meet at the most senior levels to determine additional defense needs and to develop and implement appropriate defense and deterrent responses as decided upon by the Parties, including in the economic, military, and/or political realms."An anonymous administration official took pains to point out that the agreement is not a treaty and therefore does not need approval by the U.S. Senate. But apparently seeking to have it both ways, the official also stated that the agreement is "legally binding."No effort was made to identify what external aggression the parties have in mind. Iran, of course, is the state that automatically gets mentioned as a supposed threat. But the image of Iran mustering a D-Day-like invasion fleet and crossing the gulf to conduct an amphibious invasion of Bahrain is so fanciful as to be absurd (whether or not U.S. warships were in the gulf).Bahrain certainly has had its differences with Iran, probably at least as much as does any other member of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Historical baggage in the relationship includes an old Iranian claim to Bahrain as the "14th province" of Iran, but in recent decades Iran has not tried to act on any such claim. The situation is quite unlike, say, the one involving Taiwan, in which China constantly declares to the world that it considers the island a part of China and periodically uses military saber-rattling to advertise the possibility of an invasion.To the extent the regime in Bahrain faces a security threat, it involves not external aggression but instead internal strife stemming from an unpopular Sunni regime repressing a largely Shia population. The Saudi military intervention in Bahrain in 2011 was intended to help the Bahraini regime suppress an Arab Spring-era popular uprising.The regime oppression and popular discontent continue. This year, Bahraini prisoners conducted a months-long hunger strike to protest harsh conditions in the prison. The hunger strike was suspended when the regime, on the eve of crown prince's trip to Washington to sign the new security agreement, eased some of the conditions. But Bahrain remains a serious violator of human rights.The unlikelihood of any external aggression against Bahrain means the clause in the new agreement that dictates the response to such aggression probably will not be invoked. The disadvantages of the agreement lie principally in two other areas. One involves getting more deeply in bed with an oppressive regime, with everything that implies regarding the U.S. image among, and relations with, the Bahraini population and Shia generally, among others. Many external and internal critics of Bahrain are reportedly angered and disappointed by the agreement. The director of the Britain-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy said that Bahraini authorities would interpret the agreement as a "green light" to increase political repression.The other main ill consequence of the agreement is that it runs counter to and undercuts a beneficial trend toward reducing international tensions in the Persian Gulf region. Bahrain's fellow GCC members have all been moving in the direction of warmer, less confrontational, relations with Iran. Kuwait and Oman have long had businesslike relations with Tehran and have at times served as diplomatic intermediaries for others. Similarly with Qatar, which shares with Iran exploitation of a huge gas field. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has been improving its relations with Tehran, and this month Saudi Arabia and Iran exchanged ambassadors as implementation of their agreement earlier this year to restore diplomatic relations.The issue of confrontation versus rapprochement with Iran gets into the larger game that the Biden administration is playing and of which the Bahrain agreement is only a part. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during the signing ceremony, "We're looking forward to using this agreement as a framework for additional countries that may wish to join us in strengthening regional stability, economic cooperation and technological innovation."The additional country the administration clearly has most in mind is Saudi Arabia, which has identified a security pact with the United States as part of the price it is demanding in return for upgrading its already significant relationship with Israel to full diplomatic relations. The administration evidently hopes the agreement with Bahrain can be a model for the kind of pact that would satisfy the Saudi demand while bypassing likely opposition on Capitol Hill.Despite the effort the administration is putting into brokering an agreement to upgrade relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, it still has not explained how any such agreement would serve either U.S. interests or the cause of peace and stability in the Middle East. In fact, it would do neither, and instead would only prolong and even increase confrontation and instability in the region. To understand why, note the principal Israeli objectives in seeking exchanges of embassies and ambassadors with the Persian Gulf Arab states, with which it is not at war.One objective is to intensify and institutionalize confrontation with, and fear and loathing of, Iran, thereby keeping it as a bête noire that can be blamed for all problems in the region and divert international attention from any problems that involve Israel's conduct. This means more, not less, tension and risk of escalation in the Persian Gulf region. And that is even before considering more of the Saudi regime's price for upgrading relations with the Israelis, including more unrestricted arms sales and help with a Saudi nuclear program.The other Israeli objective is to demonstrate that Israel can enjoy normal relations with regional states while continuing its occupation of Palestinian-inhabited territory. Far from being a "peace" agreement, an upgrading of relations with Saudi Arabia — like the earlier upgrading with Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE — would be about Israel not making peace with the Palestinians.Given the extreme right-wing nature of the Israeli government, led by a prime minister determined to keep his coalition intact and keep himself away from prosecution for corruption, any gesture toward the Palestinians that Riyadh and Washington could wring out of Israel would be little more than that — a gesture. It is inconceivable that the current Israeli government would do anything substantial that would bring closer a Palestinian state or any other resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.In short, the administration's project of buying an upgrade of Arab relations with Israel is not justified. And thus, neither is the agreement with Bahrain that is one part of that project.

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.

Structures, actors and processes make up the unifying thread of the diversity of themes specific work on the articles that make up this issue of the magazine. Several texts point to federalism as a structuring dimension of the Argentine state in its three jurisdictional levels and the tensions that arise between the level national jurisdictional and sub-national levels. Niembro, Aristimuño and Del Bello subject to scrutiny the effective scope of the federalization objective in income to the career of scientific and technological researcher at CONICET; prove the uneven achievement of the same and the risks of a return to academicism that marked moments precedents of the organism. Fernando Rubino compares two experiences of associativism intermunicipal in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires and its effectiveness as management tool. Piana and Patiño Jaramillo focus on the organizational structures of the Public Administration of the province of Buenos Aires during the government of María Eugenia Vidal (2015-19), highlight the contrast between the official privatization discourse, anti-political, downsizing of the state and cutting expenses, the reality of growth of the resources and responsibilities of the agencies taken into account and the increase in political positions without specific functional involvement. The effective validity of the policy glacier protection in the provinces of Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego allows Ana Paula Lucero to identify and explain the tensions that arise between a federal political norm of universal application and the provincial interests derived from their specific endowment of resources and their own development strategies. The coupling between federal political institutions and processes and provincial regimes is explicit in the analysis of the electoral coalition building strategy of the UCR in the province of Santa Fe ahead of the 2019 elections, carried out by Ariadna Gallo and Carolina Pérez Roux. Since the 1980s, organizations of unemployed workers and residents of precarious communities have witnessed rapid growth in magnitude organizational, assertive effectiveness and formulation of public policy proposals; they relativized the formal quasi monopoly of the articulation of interests by political parties and the trade union movement, contributed to reformulate the conventional articulation between state and civil society. Julia Nesprias explores the evolution of the villero movement in the City of Buenos Aires in its articulation with the predominant institutional policies. The article by Maneiro and Núñez describes the process of struggle of the organizations of workers of the popular economy around the Social Emergency law of 2016, their strategies for building alliances with a wide range of society and the system political, in an institutional political environment of ruling neoliberalism. Finally Feldman and Girolimo analyze the promotion policies of Industry 4.0 in a context of accelerated technological change, taking as a reference the experiences recent developments in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil in digitization and automation of Productive processes; draw attention to the need for peripheral economies and the need to face these challenges so as not to deepen the existing gaps with respect to to the core countries. An analysis of political and administrative capacities is published in the Documents section of the state, from the perspective of the State and Public Administration Commission of the Homeland. This document is included as a contribution to the political-academic debate around the role of the public sector in promoting development with social equity. With this number the RPPP reaches its first decade of existence. In these ten years 150 articles and 42 reviews were accepted and published, of the more than 600 originals received. 69 articles published are by female authorship (46%), 68 by authorship masculine (45%) and 13 of authorship gender sharing; one sixth comes from authors affiliated with academic institutions abroad. The variety of your content, according to the breadth of its call and the wide field of analysis of the State and public policies, combines academic quality according to standards with the commitment to the substantive values that inspire and guide the National University of Lanús. ; Estructuras, actores y procesos conforman el hilo unificador de la diversidad de temas específicos trabajados por los artículos que integran el presente número de la revista. Varios textos apuntan al federalismo como dimensión estructurante del estado argentino en sus tres niveles jurisdiccionales y a las tensiones que se suscitan entre el nivel jurisdiccional nacional y los niveles subnacionales. Niembro, Aristimuño y Del Bello someten a escrutinio el efectivo alcance del objetivo de federalización en los ingresos a la carrera de investigador científico y tecnológico del CONICET; demuestran el desigual logro del mismo y los riesgos de un retorno al academicismo que signó momentos precedentes del organismo. Fernando Rubino compara dos experiencias de asociativismo intermunicipal en el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires y su eficacia como herramienta de gestión. Piana y Patiño Jaramillo enfocan las estructuras organizativas de la Administración Pública de la provincia de Buenos Aires durante la gobernación de María Eugenia Vidal (2015-19), destacan el contraste entre el discurso oficial privatizador, antipolítico, de achicamiento del estado y recorte de gastos, la realidad de crecimiento de los recursos e incumbencias de los organismos tomados en cuenta y el incremento de los cargos políticos sin afectación funcional específica. La efectiva vigencia de la política nacional de protección de glaciares en las provincias de Santa Cruz y Tierra del Fuego permite a Ana Paula Lucero identificar y explicar las tensiones que se suscitan entre una norma política federal de aplicación universal y los intereses provinciales derivados de su dotación específica de recursos y sus propias estrategias de desarrollo. El complejo acople entre instituciones y procesos políticos federales y regímenes provinciales se explicita en el análisis de la estrategia de construcción de coaliciones electorales de la UCR en la provincia de Santa Fe de cara a los comicios de 2019, llevado a cabo por Ariadna Gallo y Carolina Pérez Roux. Desde la década de 1980, las organizaciones de trabajadores desocupados y habitantes de comunidades precarizadas han dado testimonio de un acelerado crecimiento en magnitud organizativa, eficacia reivindicativa y formulación de propuestas de política pública; relativizaron el cuasi monopolio formal de articulación de intereses por los partidos políticos y el movimiento sindical, contribuyeron a reformular la convencional articulación entre estado y sociedad civil. Julia Nesprias explora la evolución del movimiento villero en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires en su articulación con las políticas institucionales predominantes. El artículo de Maneiro y Núñez describe el proceso de lucha de las organizaciones de trabajadores de la economía popular en torno a la ley de Emergencia Social de 2016, sus estrategias de construcción de alianzas con un amplio arco de la sociedad y del sistema político, en un ambiente político institucional de neoliberalismo gobernante. Finalmente Feldman y Girolimo analizan las políticas de promoción de la industria 4.0 en un contexto de cambio tecnológico acelerado, tomando como referencia las experiencias recientes de México, Argentina y Brasil en digitalización y automatización de procesos productivos; llaman la atención sobre la necesidad de las economías periféricas y la necesidad de afrontar estos desafíos para no profundizar las brechas existentes respecto a los países centrales. En la sección Documentos se publica un análisis de las capacidades políticas y administrativas del estado, desde la perspectiva de la Comisión Estado y Administración Pública del Instituto Patria. Se incluye este documento como un aporte al debate político-académico en torno al rol del sector público en la promoción del desarrollo con equidad social. Con este número la RPPP alcanza su primera década de existencia. En estos diez años fueron aceptados y publicados 150 artículos y 42 reseñas, de los más de 600 originales recibidos. 69 artículos publicados son de autoría femenina (46%), 68 de autoría masculina (45%) y 13 de compartición autoral de género; una sexta parte proviene de autoras y autores afiliados a instituciones académicas del exterior. La variedad de su contenido, acorde a la amplitud de su convocatoria y al amplio campo de análisis del Estado y las políticas públicas, conjuga la calidad académica de acuerdo a los estándares convencionales con el compromiso a los valores sustantivos que inspiran y orientan a la Universidad Nacional de Lanús. Carlos Vilas.

The city has been the political unit of organization in the international system for long periods of history. As actors in international society, cities have left irreplaceable classics: Athens, Imperial Rome, the Hanseatic League or Machiavelli's Florence. However, the dominant school of thought has diminished the role of the city on the international scene. The Westphalian model consolidated the nation-state as the axis and macro-political unit object and subject of study. Following this logic, cities' capacity for international action was limited and, as a field of study, was reduced to cultural activities or of little diplomatic relevance (e.g. twin cities). This state-centered approach, both in theory and practice, finds its place in the legal approach over the political one in the development of international society and international relations theories. However, the global dynamic has changed substantially, and it opens the door to new structures or vectors of transnational analysis. The Westphalian system loses weight in the face of the concatenation of phenomena and transformations of international society. Taking this to be the case, the current international structure opens avenues of research in the international political activity of the city, diplomatic practice, global and economic hub relations, or the rise of city brands as a marketing strategy. Of course, the nation-state will not disappear in the short term, but it does seem that new actors and dynamics are emerging in the construction of the post-liberal order. Above all, the city emerges as a new point of reference for solving globalization problems: climate change, migrations, diversity, or identity. The effect is relevant to the epistemological bases of a transversal discipline: the city is incorporated as a reference subject in the reformulation of the general theory of International Relations. The consensus around the liberal order, born after 1945, has been broken. The current theoretical doctrine only agrees on one element: there is no new consensus on the foundations of the international system. The global architecture of institutions, the effective capacities for the exercise of power, the decline of multilateral practices, or the difficulty in establishing a common economic agenda are symptoms of a change in global power structures. With or without legitimacy, cities act in the international sphere with the aim of influencing, modifying knowledge, behavior, or judgment. In this context, the institutionalization of the city as an actor in international relations is one of the most relevant fields for studying the new organizing principle of international society. The city lacks the normative and institutional instruments, but it does promote principles that later become public policy practices that affect the international order. The theoretical approach emphasizes the economic aspects of the global city, since the economic and industrial capacity has reinforced the ability to influence the transformation of the international system. From a methodological point of view, urban cosmopolitanism is not a theory closed by the very diversity of global cities. Therefore, the areas of interest of each city can vary from one to the other, as well as the global action repertoire. Working in collaborative networks and alliances of a political and economic nature is facilitated. In its relationship with the State, the global city poses agency problems that are relevant to the future of theory: will they be cooperative or competitive? In what disciplines? The asymmetry of interests can deepen dissonances and accelerate the theoretical basis of development. The proposed methodology affects the impact of climate change on the reformulation of the theoretical bases of international studies. It is theorized from practice. The institutionalization of urban diplomacy refers to the search for practical solutions of a collective nature. There are networks such as C40, the Clean Air Coalition or We are Still In that are led and organized from urban practice. The climate issue gives moral strength to the city as an international actor insofar as it does not deal with political borders, but with the consequences of climate change on the lives of residents. It fits in with the cosmopolitan tradition insofar as it affects all individuals, without discrimination of origin, gender, or nationality; and it is a matter of universal status, because it impacts all territories and human life conditions. There is no arbitrariness in Anthropocene reason. The article studies the succession of changes in the international political structure before the reconfiguration of the sources of power. It establishes three aspects in the theoretical bases of urban cosmopolitanism. The first indicates what the foundations of a theoretical elaboration should be. The international city contributes to the reconfiguration of the structure and the exercise of interstate power by occupying or creating new spaces that contribute to the plurality of international relations. The second aspect analyzed is the growth of the city as a unit of measurement in the global economy. Capital flows circulate and operate on a local basis with global destinations. It is the cities and their metropolitan areas that benefit from the economic system. Large pockets of internal inequality appear and, above all, with a rupture between cities within and outside the economic order, including the relational inequality that is generated in the least populated territories. Finally, anthropogenic reason is stressed, that is, the impact of human action on natural conditions and its consequences on the world order. Climate change changes the main substrate of international relations, which is the physical environment and geography. On these two tangible dimensions, the bases of power and the basic theory of international studies are ordered. By changing the strategic board, the city conquers positions of non-coercive power, facilitating collaboration through networks and structures. The military and security aspect are not relevant to urban diplomacy, which focuses on aspects of economic and social power. The results indicate that the new cosmopolitanism has urban bases and offers a framework for interpreting the tensions between the center and the periphery of foreign action, economic globalization, and new public policies in the fight against climate change. Urban cosmopolitanism emerges as a theoretical reference in the post-liberal order. The present work seeks to establish the foundations of urban cosmopolitanism, a theoretical approach to the current world organized around urban areas, be they cities, megacities, or metropolitan regions. Cities have become structural axes of international society with consequences in the political, economic, and social spheres. There is no closed conclusion, a kind of theory that replaces the previous ones. On the contrary, urban cosmopolitanism aspires to reflect a change in the paradigm of international relations. Thus, climate change is a transforming element of the global scene and opens new avenues for international politics, which can end with a substantial change in the modes of government, representation, and citizen participation. Be that as it may, this first paper addresses difficulties, raises research questions, and supports elements for change. ; El artículo estudia la sucesión de cambios en la estructura política internacional ante la reconfiguración de las fuentes de poder. Establece tres vertientes en las bases teóricas del cosmopolitismo urbano. La primera indica cuáles deberían ser los fundamentos de una elaboración teórica. La ciudad internacional contribuye a la reconfiguración de la estructura y el ejercicio del poder interestatal ocupando o creando nuevos espacios que contribuyen a la pluralidad de las Relaciones Internacionales. El segundo aspecto que se analiza es el crecimiento de la ciudad como unidad de medida en la economía global. Los flujos de capital circulan y operan sobre una base local con destinos globales. Son las ciudades y sus extensiones metropolitanas quienes se benefician del sistema económico. Aparecen grandes bolsas de desigualdad interna y, sobre todo, con una ruptura entre ciudades dentro y fuera del orden económico, incluyendo aquí la desigualdad relacional que se genera en los territorios menos poblados. Por último, se incide en la razón antropocénica, esto es, el impacto de la acción humana en las condiciones naturales y sus consecuencias en el orden mundial. El cambio climático cambia el sustrato principal de las Relaciones Internacionales, que es el medio físico y la geografía. Sobre estas dos dimensiones tangibles, se ordenan las bases del poder y la teoría básica de los estudios internacionales. Al cambiar el tablero estratégico, la ciudad conquista posiciones de poder no coercitivo, lo que facilita la colaboración mediante redes y estructuras. El aspecto militar y de seguridad no es relevante para la diplomacia urbana, que se centra en aspectos de poder económico y social. Los resultados indican que el nuevo cosmopolitismo tiene bases urbanas y ofrece un marco de interpretación de las tensiones entre centro y periferia de la acción exterior, la globalización económica y las nuevas políticas públicas en la lucha contra el cambio climático. El cosmopolitismo urbano emerge como referencia teórica en el orden postliberal.

The aim of this PhD project is to develop an understanding of how strategic spatial planning is expressed and delivered as a specific mode of governance, in response to the particular challenges facing Europe's second-tier cities. It is concerned with how planning, as a particular form of public policy and a form of governance-in-action, materialises at certain spatial scales and how it is influencing patterns of territorial development. In addition, the research interrogates the ways in which planning practice applies its basic principles through planning policy, decision making, and by exploring the normative basis of the profession's activities. The connecting theme relates to an interest in how planning is governed, how it is expressed as a specific mode of governance in urban settings and how decision-making around planning projects navigates through a variety of social, political and economic filters. These phenomena are explored in this thesis using a series of thematic empirical pieces, which relate broadly to the field of strategic spatial planning at city-region/metropolitan level. The PhD is presented as a series of discrete articles, submitted under University regulations as a publication-based thesis. These essays are concerned primarily with developing insights into the nature of contemporary strategic spatial planning and place-making as a mode of governance. The empirical work, which uses episodes of strategic spatial planning in Ireland and Cork as a master case study framework, addresses four core themes. Firstly, it confronts the issue of central-local dynamics as part of strategic spatial planning at the national scale, using the experiences of Ireland's second-tier cities as part of the national spatial planning agenda. Secondly, it is concerned with understanding how strategic spatial planning frames policy and practice for metropolitan areas and the way in which it operates as a framework for articulating urban governance strategies. The third theme explores the transformative capacity of strategic spatial planning as an instrument for the promotion of sustainable development practices. The fourth theme addresses methodological concerns around the particular challenges associated with scholarly inquiry within the realm of strategic spatial planning. The thesis outlines four sets of main findings relating to the core themes, which in different ways characterise the nature of change in strategic spatial planning in Ireland. First, there has been an important shift towards place-based approaches under Ireland's national planning regime, whereby the city/metropolitan region emerges as a spatial unit with the potential to integrate a variety of spatial and sectoral policy strands. This however has not created new territorial governance patterns or a rescaling of power within the state and around city-regions. Although the case of Cork presents a case whereby strategic spatial planning has emerged as a clearly recognisable form of territorial management with distinctive governance dimensions, this proves to be an exceptional case. The move towards placed-based spatial strategies in Ireland has been limited to new frames of reference rather than new forms of governance, and place-based spatial strategies largely emerged within the soft spaces of governance. The research has established an absence of clarity about governance needs at the city-region and metropolitan scales, particularly at the second-tier city level. Second, the analysis of these episodes of spatial planning illustrates the dynamic nature of governance as part of a rapidly evolving economic and social global order, which is characterised by flexibility, speed and innovation. Conversely, these episodes also illustrate the stability of established institutional and administrative structures and norms, and a degree of resistance to those emerging governance changes - particularly those expressed at the regional and metropolitan scales. In the absence of strong sub-regional or metropolitan governance structures, the rollout of spatial strategies at this scale in Ireland's second-tier cities was generally fragmentary and the kind of unified territorial, placed-based approach advocated in the National Spatial Strategy (NSS) never materialised. However, Cork exists as a particular exception in this regard; its experiences reflect a restructuring and rescaling of planning at metropolitan and sub-regional levels, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces are combining to produce a semi-formalised, nonstatutory planning regime. Third, the analysis of the post- NSS landscape in Ireland demonstrates clearly the limitations of strategic spatial planning as a transformative framework, with evidence of a divergence of economic and settlement patterns - with long-term sustainability implications. Recent experiences in Ireland's key gateway cities would suggest that although the 'soft spaces of governance' are a necessary feature of the urban decision-making landscape, they are not conducive to making hard decisions. However, the kinds of strategic planning initiatives deployed in Cork certainly resonate with the concept of transformative practice as outlined in the planning literature. The rail strategy, for example, can be interpreted as an attempt to transform completely the economic and environmental trajectory of development in the city-region, using a series of arguments around environmental and social quality based on what can be considered a grand place-making concept. However, such projects are unlikely to acquire socio-spatial transformative characteristics unless established modes of governance are moderated and if public policy considers more actively the political-institutional landscape in which these efforts are situated. Fourth, in the examination of national and sub-regional episodes of strategic spatial planning in Ireland, which evolved over the course of the four essays, it was necessary to adapt and extend the methodological framework. This involved extending the empirical investigations beyond the confines of an instrumentalist perspective, and engaging in a more comprehensive analysis of governance narratives. The research also relied on a mixed conformance-performance analytical mode of inquiry, based on the 'Dutch model' of planning assessment. Because of the complex and stratified research terrain, the analysis combined an instrumentalist conformance-based analysis with an assessment of its performance as mode of strategic spatial planning in practice. The evolution of analysis during the research process would suggest that a full understanding of the operation and impact of strategic spatial planning projects cannot be conducted without combining an assessment of both conformance and performance. In conclusion, the case of strategic spatial planning in Ireland and in Cork demonstrates the ways in which strategic spatial planning has penetrated policy and practice discourses, and has served to deliver a comprehensive transformation in planning as a discipline and within the broader arena of public policy. Overall, we can see a remarkable consistency in how planning episodes articulate their basic premise, which relates to an enduring focus on the arrangement of development in territories and with the idea of spatial order. Although there has been a general reluctance to institutionalise planning units like city-regions or metropolitan areas as formal government entities, they are being deployed increasingly as containers for strategic spatial planning. The research has also indicated that long term, coherent strategic spatial planning across administrative boundaries, based on consistent ideas about governing/planning spaces, can produce what may be understood as a metropolitan consciousness. This may be understood as a tacit project around an informal spatial construct, which, over time, gains legitimacy as a strong governance space (in which decisions are brokered) and as a metaphor (for articulating a collective vision for the urban area's long-term future). Strategic spatial planning also involves dealing with complexity, and as a result, deploys methods that encourage what may be termed spatial-thematic selectivity. This can be translated as the prioritisation of a limited number of high profile interventions that are spatially and sectorally integrative – manifesting in large-scale, geographically expansive and symbolic projects that are designed to reorient territorial trajectories and produce symbolic-political support across broad coalitions. The research would also suggest that in Ireland's post-economic crisis period, and in a broader neoliberal political setting in which the state appears to have shirked its responsibility for managing and sponsoring urban affairs, we see the emergence of strategic spatial planning as a proxy for urban governance. As formal urban governing competencies are reduced as part of a clear centralisation agenda, and with city-regions assuming greater economic responsibilities, strategic spatial planning becomes an arena in which urban governance capacity is exercised. Consequently, strategic and fundamental decisions about urban development, infrastructure programmes and public investment are increasingly considered within the realm of strategic spatial planning – which performs as a substitute for traditional urban government, and in turn, as a proxy for urban governance.

Commander in Chief is een deelbiografie van president Franklin Delano Roosevelt waarin Roosevelts rol als opperbevelhebber van de gewapende strijdkrachten van de Verenigde Staten in de Tweede Wereldoorlog het hoofdthema is. Het boek concentreert zich op het jaar 1943: een jaar waaraan biografen van president Roosevelt tot nu toe weinig aandacht schonken, en waarin Roosevelt een militaire taak vervulde die door historici ernstig is onderschat. Het proefschrift begint in januari 1943 met de vliegreis van Roosevelt van Miami naar Noord-Afrika – daarmee was Roosevelt de eerste president van de Verenigde Staten die in functie vloog. Een nieuwe datering van Roosevelts voorbereiding voor de reis stelt ons in staat het doel van de president met deze reis opnieuw te onderzoeken, niet alleen in het als Amerikaans opperbevelhebber inspecteren van zijn troepen in het strijdperk, maar ook in het uitrollen van een nieuw militair doel voor alle westelijke geallieerden op de Conferentie van Casablanca: de 'onvoorwaardelijke overgave' van de asmogendheden, zonder mogelijkheid tot onderhandeling. Roosevelts beslissing om zijn eigen gezamenlijke Amerikaanse legerbevelhebbers (George Marshall, Ernest King, Henry Arnold) te overrulen en een Mediterrane veldtocht in 1943 uit te voeren, in plaats van een verplaatsing in gang te zetten van Amerikaanse strijdkrachten naar Groot-Brittannië voor een invasie door een oversteek van het Kanaal, zoals zij aanbevalen, wordt ook nader bekeken. In tegenstelling tot contemporaine en ook latere beweringen dat Roosevelt in Casablanca 'toegaf' aan Churchills strategie, maakt Commander in Chief duidelijk dat Roosevelt een duidelijk en onwrikbaar Amerikaans doel voor ogen had: dat de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten eerst in een 'veilige' omgeving de mogelijkheid zouden krijgen om te leren hoe ze de Wehrmacht in een oorlog konden verslaan, voordat zoiets ambitieus als een invasie door een oversteek van het Kanaal dat jaar ondernomen kon worden. De nederlaag van het Amerikaaanse leger in de Slag om de Kasserinepas, drie weken na de Conferentie, toonde de wijsheid van Roosevelts militaire stap-voor-stap-strategie aan – de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten konden daarop in mei terugslaan en de onvoorwaardelijke overgave afdwingen van meer dan een kwart miljoen manschappen van de asmogendheden in Noord-Afrika. "Husky", de Landing op Sicilië, vond twee maanden later op 10 juli 1943plaats, in overeenstemming met het tijdschema van de president: een reusachtige amfibische operatie door de geallieerde legers waardoor Hitler gedwongen werd Operatie Citadel, Duitslands twee miljoen man sterke offensief tegen de Sovjets aan het oostelijk front, af te breken om het zuidelijk front te kunnen verdedigen. Op dat moment hadden de geallieerden echter al de Middellandse Zee in hun macht, en de strijd leverde bevelhebbers (Patton, Bradley, Montgomery) en door strijd geharde legers (luchtmacht, marine, grondtroepen) op die noodzakelijk waren om in de lente van 1944 een succesvolle invasie (Overlord) op Noord-Frankrijk uit te voeren: met landingen die, zoals Hitler zelf verklaarde, de uitkomst van de oorlog zouden bepalen. Door in te stemmen met de militaire strategie van de president verwees de Britse premier Winston Churchill publiekelijk naar zichzelf als president Roosevelts 'vurige luitenant'. Commander in Chief werpt echter nieuw licht op hoe Churchill achter de schermen – gesteund door een klein leger van adviseurs – het hele jaar door probeerde Roosevelts militair-strategische beslissingen tegen te werken: hij reisde in 1943 tweemaal over zee naar Noord-Amerika – in mei en in augustus – om Roosevelt ervan te overtuigen Overlord af te blazen, of de landingen uit te stellen tot 1945 of 1946, om zo de operatie in het Middellandse Zee-gebied voort te kunnen zetten. Dit fundamentele verschil in militaire strategie tussen de twee belangrijkste westelijke oorlogsleiders, Churchill en Roosevelt, verklaart de ondertitel van het proefschrift: FDR's Battle With Churchill, 1943 (FDR's strijd met Churchill, 1943). Wanneer president Roosevelt niet zijn jongere Britse collega had teruggefloten, dan zouden de geallieerden de oorlog in Europa heel goed verloren kunnen hebben – zoals de ongelukkige geallieerde invasie van Zuid-Italië en de Ionische Eilanden in de herfst van 1943 ook lieten zien. Door het gebruik van nieuwe bronnen, vooral dagboeken, persoonlijke aantekeningen en andere egodocumenten, biedt Commander in Chief een radicaal nieuw perspectief op de militaire prestaties van zowel Roosevelt als Churchill tijdens strategische momenten in de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deze militaire reconstructie is ingebed in het grotere politieke kader van de door het Westen beoogde einddoelen van de oorlog, die Roosevelt, samen met Churchill, rechtstreeks met Stalin aan het einde van het jaar in Teheran wilde gaan bespreken. Het begrip 'turning point' als argument voor een deelbiografie (de bestudering van een moment of gebeurtenis in het leven van een persoon waardoor de daaropvolgende daden en handelingen van die persoon verregaand worden beïnvloed) fungeert hier als een belangrijk biografisch-methodologisch hulpmiddel. De introductie en epiloog (Biography As Corrective (Biografie als correctie) en Commander in Chief: Genesis, Process, Outcome (Commander in Chief: ontstaan, proces, resultaat)) analyseren en illustreren hoe dit begrip, gemunt door Hans Renders, een theoretische rechtvaardiging levert voor het belang van de deelbiografie. ; Command in Chief is a partial biography of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, examining his role as commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States in World War II. It focuses on the year 1943: a year that has hitherto largely been passed over by biographers of President Roosevelt, and a military role that has been seriously underestimated by historians. The thesis begins with Roosevelt's journey by air from Miami to North Africa in January 1943 – the first U.S. president ever to fly while in office. New dating of Roosevelt's preparation for the trip permits a re-examination of the President's purpose not only in inspecting his forces on the battlefield as American commander in chief, but in laying down the new military goal of all the western Allies at the Casablanca Conference: the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis powers, without possibility of negotiation. Roosevelt's decision to overrule his own joint U.S. chiefs of staff (George Marshall, Ernest King, Henry Arnold) and follow a Mediterranean campaign in 1943, instead of switching U.S. forces to Britain for a cross-Channel invasion as they recommended, is also reviewed. Counter to contemporary and later assertions that Roosevelt "gave way" to Churchill's strategy at Casablanca, Commander in Chief makes clear Roosevelt had a clear and unshakeable American aim: to ensure that U.S. forces could, in a "safe" area, learn how to defeat the Wehrmacht in battle before attempting anything such as ambitious as a cross-Channel landing that year. U.S. defeat in the Battle of Kasserine, three weeks after the conference, demonstrated the wisdom of Roosevelt's military step-by-step strategy – following which U.S. forces were able to spring back and take the unconditional surrender of more than a quarter million Axis troops in North Africa in May. "Husky," the invasion of Sicily, took place two months later, on July 10, 1943, in accordance with the President's timetable: a colossal amphibious operation by coalition forces that forced Hitler to abandon "Citadel," Germany's 2-million man offensive against the Soviets on the Eastern front, in order to defend his Southern front. By then the western Allies had won control of the Mediterranean seaway, however, and had gained in combat the commanders (Patton, Bradley, Montgomery) and battle-hardened forces (air, naval and ground) necessary to carry out a successful invasion ("Overlord") of northern France in the spring of 1944: landings that would, Hitler himself stated, decide the outcome of the war. In agreeing to the President's military strategy, the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, publicly referred to himself as President Roosevelt's "ardent lieutenant." Behind the scenes, however, Commander in Chief sheds new light on how Churchill - backed a small army of advisers - attempted all year to reverse Roosevelt's military decisions: traveling twice by sea to North America in 1943 - in May and yet again in August - to press Roosevelt to abandon Overlord, or delay the landings until 1945 or 1946, in order to pursue to a further Mediterranean strategy. This fundamental difference in military strategy between the two primary Western war leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt, explains the subtitle of the thesis: FDR's Battle With Churchill, 1943. Had President Roosevelt not overruled his junior British partner, the war in Europe might well have been lost by the Allies – as the unfortunate Allied invasion of southern Italy and the Ionian Islands was to show, in the fall of 1943. Through the use of new material, especially diaries, journals and other ego documents, Commander in Chief offers a radically new perspective on the military performances both of Roosevelt and Churchill, at the strategic crossroads of World War II. This military re-examination is framed within the larger political dimension of Western war aims, which Roosevelt, together with Churchill, intended to address directly with Stalin in Tehran at the year's end. The concept of a "turning point" as an argument for partial biography (the examination of a moment or event in a person's life that influences that person's subsequent deeds or actions) serves here as an important biographical-methodological aid. The introduction and epilogue (Biography As Corrective and Commander in Chief: Genesis, Process, Outcome) analyze and illustrate how this concept, coined by Hans Renders, is helping provide a theoretical justification for the importance of partial biography.

This dissertation examines the political tensions between metropolitan planning and immigrant incorporation in Miami over the past 50 years. I develop a planning history encompassing the transformation of metropolitan planning in Dade County from the early 1960's to the post-Cuban period in contemporary times. By combining the historical analysis of planning documents, data from interviews with different actors shaping planning practice - metropolitan planners, community development practitioners, residents and artists - and participant observations of charrettes and grassroots mobilizations of local residents, I analyze how immigrant empowerment influenced the work of metropolitan planners and currently yields political practices through the deployment of discourses that uphold cultural production as a place-making strategy. By developing the concept of spatial politics, I argue that an analysis of urban space is crucial to understand immigrant incorporation and empowerment in American Cities. I define spatial politics as the practices and tactics carried out by social groups to achieve political empowerment in the City. By tracing the effects of immigration in the history of metropolitan planning in Miami, I consider how spatial politics is exemplified by linkages between planning, community development, and political mobilizations carried out by social groups competing for political control in an urban context transformed by the status of immigrants as the social majority. In Chapter One, I introduce the physical context of metropolitan Miami. I provide a mapping of Miami's urban geography, government structure and socio-demographic composition. I continue by developing the narrative of a participant observation based on a contentious policy measure voted upon in 2010 that aimed to give control of planning decisions to local community groups: Amendment Four. The Amendment Four debate illustrates the underlying tensions of Miami's urban politics as it is defined by claims and counter-claims defined by ethnicity and the experience of immigration. I continue by explaining the need to explore the relationship between immigrant incorporation and urban planning through an analytical lens that considers the empowerment of immigrant groups. In Chapter Two I draw on archival evidence from Dade County's Department of Planning and Zoning and carry out a review of Miami's architectural, urban design and urban history literature to develop a history of metropolitan planning in Dade County. I argue that Miami's urban historiography has mostly emphasized developers, architects and entrepreneurs as the main actors of urban transformation. Due to this tendency, the relationship between social history, immigration and planning has remained mostly unexplored. By considering the work of metropolitan planners from the introduction of the "Home Rule" Charter and the Two-tier System of governance through the development of Miami's first set of comprehensive development master plans, I analyze how demographic change and immigrant influx were important factors in planning practice. From its inception, metropolitan planning was envisioned as a tool for regional management in behalf of the public interest. Its goal was to facilitate the management and distribution of resources through a centralized system of government exemplified by two tiers; an upper tier for regional issues and a lower tier for local issues. The two-tier governance structure, however, led to the political under-representation of residents of unincorporated areas, who did not have the direct representation of municipal representatives. This condition would have consequences in the following decades as demographic growth and immigrant political empowerment transformed the city's political status quo. The demographic growth of Hispanics resulting from immigration led to the political empowerment of Cuban Americans during the 1980's. In Chapter Three, I explore this particular period by combining archival evidences from Dade County's Department of Planning and Zoning, interviews with retired planners and practicing community development specialists, spatial analysis of demographic data, and a review of civil rights legal history. I consider how the work of metropolitan planners was influenced by the electoral empowerment of Cuban Americans at the municipal and county levels. I begin by reviewing of the existing literature on Cuban American incorporation in Miami to argue that it has remained a-spatial. The political, economic and cultural tensions that affect urban space have not been considered in the incorporation of Cuban Americans. I continue by arguing for the consideration of Cuban American spatial politics through three phases - crisis, community development and empowerment - and four types of practices - planning, electoral, discursive, and allied. During the refugee crisis of the Mariel Boatlift, metropolitan planners produced demographic data that facilitated the planning agenda of a burgeoning Cuban American community development system focused on public policy, economic development and housing. This planning apparatus facilitated the concentration of electoral voting blocs in Miami's ethnic enclave of Little Havana, which mobilized to elect Cuban Americans at the municipal and county levels by generating discourses upholding the positive economic contributions of Cuban Americans in Miami. A decade after the Mariel Boatlift the demographic changes brought forth by crisis and continuing immigration led Cuban American and African Americans to ally and join suit against Dade County in the Meek v. Metropolitan Dade County lawsuit. This coalition argued for a change in the composition and number of county commission seats given the socio-demographic make up of Dade County. The lawsuit's decision changed the numbers and re-drew commission district boundaries, establishing a new political order in Miami based on minority power. Metropolitan planners were protagonists in this process by providing demographic data and mapping alternatives for the new commission districts. In Chapter Four I connect archival data from the Dade County Planning Department and the Miami Herald - Miami's most prominent news daily - with interviews of retired planning practitioners to consider how communities of interest countered the empowerment of Cuban Americans. Beginning in 1991 with the municipality of Key Biscayne, a wave of grassroots incorporation efforts led by ultra-local neighborhood groups swept throughout unincorporated Dade County. These mobilizations were based on the perception of donor communities that metropolitan government was inefficient inadequately used taxes for the local service provisions of recipient communities - residents in unincorporated Dade County. Miami's Cuban American community considered the rebellion of municipal incorporations a backlash to their political gains. Fearing the prospect of political and economic fragmentation, metropolitan planners attempted to resolve the problem of political under-representation and economic imbalance embedded in the Two-Tier system by establishimg community councils. Community councils were envisioned as units of local government that would to bring government closer to the people by giving local residents control over zoning issues and budgetary decisions. Nevertheless, community councils became training grounds for ethnic leadership across unincorporated Dade County. As the decade of the 1990's ended the evolving process of spatial politics was defined by a new political geography exemplified by newly minted municipalities. In Chapter Five I turn to Miami's recent history to consider how the practices of cultural producers- developers, artists, art collectors, and community development specialists - offer a new field of spatial politics. I carry out participant observations between two sites - the District of Wynwood in the City of Miami and the Municipality of Opa-Locka in northwest Dade County - to explore how art is used as a tool of urban revitalization through the deployment of collective and individual discourses formed by notions of community, identity and multiculturalism. I develop the first part of this analysis in the art district of Wynwood where I consider the collective mobilizations of urban developers, gallery owners, artists and art collectors against big development as well as the individual practices of artists who negotiate their immigrant identity to access resources and social capital in Wynwood's artistic milieu. I continue by turning to Opa-Locka's, where a robust community development system led by African Americans uses a discourse of pan-african multiculturalism to revitalize impoverished areas of the municipality. I finalize the dissertation by providing a brief call for the need to consider the figure of the empowered immigrant to re-evaluate the role of urban planning in immigration debates. Urban planning practice has traditionally been defined by an assimilationist ideology underlined by the imperative of adaptation and incorporation into the mainstream of society. Because of this undercurrent, the political agency of immigrants in American cities remains under-studied and bound by a framework of identity politics, cultural rights, and national citizenship. The case of spatial politics in metropolitan Miami, however, offers an example of the urban citizenship that organized immigrant groups can develop through the claim, control and transformation of urban space.

*This series is the result of an adaptation of a paper presented as part of a seminar on "Theories and Research in International Relations" at Hebrew University, July 2012. Commentaries are welcome to daniel.wajner@mail.huji.ac.il In the first article of this series we have introduced the debates on the ontology of power and the ways in which these debates have influenced the theoretical divisions in International Relations (IR). In this second article we will present the main epistemological approaches of the different paradigms, leading to controversies on the mechanisms involved in the activation of power and its dimensions.Mechanisms of Power: different theoretical approachesOur first step is to address the questions "how power is activated" and "how power proceeds once it is activated". Scholars of diverse backgrounds proposed different approaches to answer those questions, leading us to the possibility of dealing with the controversies around the epistemology of power.According to the realist tradition, as explained previously, the regular way by which actors operate to assert control over the others and the system is coercion. Through the manipulation of material resources (either via sanctions or inducements), an actor could generate changes in the other's actor conduct even in contrary of their interests. As main representatives of the neo-realist paradigm, Waltz and Mearsheimer went one step forward when they affirmed that the distribution of military capabilities constitutes the best measurable expression of power1; and consequently, that the display of alterations in capabilities is what explains the main changes in decision-making.However, most of the neo-realists tend to accept another way to activate power that is based on the concept of socialization. Although renowned for being "mentioned" by Waltz himself, the concept is in fact developed by other scholars, among them Ikenberry and Kupchan, who move large away from Waltz. They explain the mechanisms and conditions of socialization using the neorealist scheme but, unlike Waltz, Ikenberry and Kupchan incorporate the "normative" element as "a different aspect of power" which guides the state's behavior.2 Moreover, they assume a pseudo-liberal perspective on the role of specific agents (elites) in providing systemic change, undermining the unitary actor assumption and thus abandoning the structuralist approach that neo-realists have usually adopted.Ikenberry and Kupchan seek to describe how hegemonic powers have a tendency to activate processes of socialization, through which secondary countries internalize the norms of the hegemon. According to them, socialization occurs primarily when countries suffer the fragmentation of internal coalitions (especially after wars and political crisis), stimulating certain elites to embrace the norms that the hegemon is articulating. If the receptivity and realignment of the elites is linked with coercive power, norms could be consolidated as well as the policies in line with them (albeit this order may vary depending on whether the socialization is carried through normative persuasion, external inducement or internal reconstruction).3 It is important to note that this is a "one-player" argument; the authors say little about "real" cases - where there are many candidates to hegemony and the socialization processes are "in competition". This appears as a very interesting research agenda for the future.The eighties and nineties developed other interesting realist approaches who explore ideational elements in power analysis. One of them is the Krasner's approach on institutional power, which consists of a "metapower" that has indirect control over outcomes by changing the setting of the confrontation.4 Baldwin went also in that direction by embedding what he called the paradox of unrealized power, in which the will of using the power is a resource by itself.5 Likewise, Walt´s theory about the balance of threat adds aggressive intentions as a main variable, what makes power not a function of material resources but of inter-subjective factors.6 The three went clearly beyond neorealist assumptions.Of course the incorporation of normative elements to analyze power relationships did not only emerge in the realist tradition, but also in the liberal one, the natural candidate. The most famous liberal twist came recently from Nye's soft power concept.7 Accepting coercion" and inducement as two relevant forms of displaying power, Nye suggests co-opting as "a third dimension of power" which affects behavior without being commanded through threats or payments, but through attracting with indirect resources (such as values, culture and policies). This "soft" version of power, argues the prestigious scholar, becomes crucial in a global information era in which "winning hearts and minds" matters more and more; an era in which hard sower and soft power are required to be connected (in what he calls smart power) in order to enable the legitimate use of power, as the war in Irak showed to the United States.Is not casual that Nye writes from a (North)American perspective in a period of time in which their legitimacy was so questioned; anyhow, his concept was rapidly attributed to other situations. Despite the popularity of Nye's scheme, the theoretical contribution is still weak. As Guzzini argued years before, it is clear that "power alone is not what we are looking for"8- what is lacking is an approach that could address the causal mechanisms of the different types of power and could identify their devices once they are activated.Guzzini himself will provide an answer to that challenge, by recommending the separation of the two types of power structural power and interactionist power in two different concepts: governance and power.9 Citing economical-rationalist terms, this new dyadic conceptualization examines the interactions between systemic rules (market constraints) and the decisions of the agents (strategic behaviors), in a power analysis. As a constructivist, Guzzini sustains that in this (inter-subjective) relationship of power, the actors change interests and identities, stressing the value of legitimate power (authority) in enabling "a widing realm of possible (in political action)".10 Despite Guzzini paved the way to other constructivist approaches11, he still leaves us with the confusion between the two different stages of the argumentative chain: the first one based on the agent-structure distinction, and the second one on the material-ideal division.Barnett and Duvall would release us from that confusion by presenting their taxonomy of four dimensions of power.12 It combines the two variables presented above with different names; on one side, the expression of the power (actor's interactions vs. structural constitution), and on the other side the specificity of the power relations (direct connection vs. diffuse relation).13 The analytic combination leads us to four types in which power operates: compulsory, institutional, structural and productive. Therefore, while in a simultaneous power analysis, one side would explain what is "possible" (closer to the Compulsory corner), the other one would explain what is "legitimate-desirable" (closer to the Productive corner).14Once this has been approached, the next challenge consists of transferring these theoretical understanding to a methodological scheme for power analysis in IR. This will be addressed on the next and last part of the series.1 John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great power Politics (NYC: Norton, 2001); Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics. (NYC: McGraw-Hill, 1979)2 John G. Ikenberry and Charles A. Kupchan, "Socialization and hegemonic power", International Organization 44, No3 (Summer 1990), p. 284.3 Ibid., p. 290-2914Stephen D. Krasner, "Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables", International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), 497-5105 David A. Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (NYC: Basil Blackwell, 1989).6 Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987)7 Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power- The Means to Success in World Politics.8 Stefano Guzzini, "Structural power: the limits of neorealist power analysis", International Organization 47, No3 (Summer 1993), p.478.9 Ibid.,, p.471.10 Stefano Guzzini, "Structural power: the limits of neorealist power analysis", p.477.11 In that sense, Hurd presents a similar conclusion to pose legitimacy as an ordering principle at IR, building also on Weber´s approach at the beginning. Another concept that might be reminded in constructivist literature is Risse´s "normative power", that although lacks the "material side", it contributed to highlight the devices of the "logic of truth-seeking arguing" (considered as "the power of the better argument").12 Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, "Power in International Politics", 48-57.13 Although is true that Barnett-Duvall do not present this as hard power vs. soft power, with the examples given it is possible to infer that applies a similar logic.14 Ibid., p.44. Fabian Daniel Wajner is a Research and Teaching Assistant at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Department of International Relations) and a Fellow of the Liweranth Center for Latin America Studies.

The global tobacco control movement is more than three decades old, but its impact is inconsistent. For every city or nation that takes strong action to reduce tobacco use, there is another where little if anything has been done to help people stop smoking or to establish tobacco control policies opposed by powerful tobacco industries. Tobacco continues to kill and cause debilitating illnesses, severely retarding progress in improving local, national, and global health and economic conditions. Recent data indicate that smoking is the leading cause of deaths from cardiovascular diseases (1.69 million deaths annually), cancer (1.4 million deaths), and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (970,000 deaths). About 1.25 billion people smoke cigarettes, representing more than one-sixth of the Earth's population. According to reports from the World Cancer Congress and the 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health, held in Washington, D.C., in July 2006, if current trends hold, tobacco will kill a billion people in the 21st century, 10 times the toll it took in the 20th century. These sobering statistics are counterbalanced by some good news. In numerous countries, public health officials, civil society organizations, and various other advocacy groups have joined forces to initiate policies and programs designed to reduce tobacco use. Most comprehensive efforts have included a mixture of awareness raising; restrictions on the sale, promotion, and place of use of tobacco products; and taxes and laws that affect the price and availability of these products. A major milestone was achieved when the landmark Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), a global treaty initiated by the World Health Organization (WHO), entered into force on February 27, 2005. As of the end of March 2007, a total of 168 countries had signed the treaty, and 146 of those had ratified it. Parties to the FCTC are expected to create national action plans to meet the treaty's minimum requirements in areas such as tobacco advertising, access to smoking cessation programs, the size of warnings on cigarette packs, and the creation and enforcement of smoke-free public spaces. Wealthier countries have more potential resources at their disposal to implement tobacco control policies, yet there are plenty of examples—some of which are examined in this report's case studies—of innovative and increasingly successful tobacco control efforts in resource-limited places. Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, however, remain in dire need of more extensive tobacco control. According to the World Health Organization, tobacco related diseases kill more than 700,000 people a year in the region and nearly 40 percent of middle-aged men die prematurely as a result of tobacco use. In some Eastern European countries, lung cancer mortality rates in men are the highest ever recorded anywhere in the world. The WHO has concluded that tobacco use is the major preventable cause of poor health in the region—and that comprehensive tobacco control is the best investment in health reform. Policymakers have been listening. By 2006, all Central and Eastern European countries and a majority of those in the former Soviet Union had enacted some tobacco control legislative and policy measures. However, many legislative regulations and national tobacco control programs, especially in the less developed countries farther east, are not effectively enforced and still have serious loopholes that prevent them from meeting WHO standards. One common thread has been the leadership of civil society groups in devising, implementing, and demanding the enforcement of tobacco control policies and regulations. Local nongovernmental organizations often have been among the first entities of any kind to advocate for tobacco control in their countries, including accession to the FCTC. Many of these civil society groups have received support from the Open Society Institute (OSI), which first provided grants for tobacco control in 2002. Among OSI's most successful grantees is Poland's Health Promotion Foundation (HPF), which since 1991 has played a leading role in lowering the burden of smoking-related diseases through tobacco control in its home country. Recently, HPF began planning the development of a regional center for tobacco control to enable the sharing of information and expertise on tobacco control throughout the region. Based in Warsaw, the Regional Tobacco Control Network and Center (RTCNC) is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2007. The case studies in this report document the advocacy efforts of NGOs in four countries expected to participate significantly in such regional engagement. The nations—Kazakhstan, Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine—are at different stages in tobacco control. The activities of these civil society groups represent a range of strategies reflecting the opportunities, obstacles, and expectations unique to their own nations and circumstances. Taken together, though, the case studies offer important lessons for future tobacco control efforts anywhere in the world. No matter where they live, committed activists generally are able to utilize even a small amount of funding to initiate a process of change; the success of their efforts is multiplied many times over with each increase in resources and capacity. Local leadership of this sort is essential to reversing the current trends in tobacco use, illness, and death that place millions of people at risk. Among the notable lessons are the following: Civil society is crucial to successful tobacco control efforts. The Polish experience in the early 1990s is instructive. After restrictions were lifted on civil society, groups pushed for greater openness about all political, economic, and social issues—including health. Tobacco control efforts gained momentum and policy reforms soon followed, including tobacco control legislation and improved public- and private-sector services designed to raise awareness and promote healthy lifestyles. Experience elsewhere reinforces the strong correlation between comprehensive tobacco control and engaged, fully independent civil societies. Effective tobacco control efforts require comprehensive, multipronged approaches and strategies. Given the power and influence of the tobacco industry in most countries, tobacco control advocates must continually seek to broaden the ways in which they raise awareness of tobacco's negative medical, social, and financial consequences. Important strategies include extensive media campaigns; expanding coalitions within civil society and with government partners; directly challenging policymakers to publicly justify their opposition to tobacco control or reluctance to make it a priority; and collecting and disseminating solid health data, such as the number of deaths and hospitalizations due to tobacco-related illnesses. Economic research is an important, yet often neglected, component of effective advocacy. Policymakers and the general public are often unaware of the massive financial costs to society of tobacco use. Tobacco-related sickness and premature death reduce economic productivity in ways that can be quantified through rigorous data collection. Disabling tobacco-related conditions also force a redirection of individual and public resources from investment and savings—needed to help grow economies and raise living standards—to health care. Tax policies can be used to raise revenues for health promotion activities that lead to a reduction in tobacco-related health care costs. For example, several European countries and U.S. states have raised cigarette taxes and earmarked a portion of the higher revenues specifically for tobacco control activities, such as education and media campaigns. Enshrining health promotion earmarks in laws or government policies improves the likelihood of withstanding tobacco industry pressure to counter comprehensive tobacco control efforts. Media can be a powerful tool for and ally of tobacco control advocates. Tobacco control advocates in Kazakhstan invited members of the media on several tours of Almaty, pointing out violations of the national antitobacco law. The resulting newspaper articles and television coverage helped prompt local officials to introduce the "Smoke-free Almaty" initiative. Such effective use of media is relatively rare in the region. Civil society groups need to train in media advocacy and to share successful strategies and experiences more consistently. Tobacco control regulations and affordable "quit smoking" services are equally important in reducing tobacco use. Restrictions are far more effective in reducing tobacco use when accompanied by health promotion campaigns and accessible, affordable services to help people quit smoking. Incentives for changing behavior must be based on recognition of the medical and psychological elements of tobacco addiction. On their own, punitive measures rarely make an impact on complex behaviors that require extensive treatment and support. Expanded regional learning and cooperation offer clear benefits to local tobacco control efforts. Strategies used successfully in one country or context can have similarly positive impacts elsewhere. Expertise should be tapped more effectively through greater sharing of information and resources across the region, down to the grassroots level. Regional cooperation will also help sustain and expand civil society advocacy that has already shown great promise for improving health. The creation of the Regional Tobacco Control Network and Center should help facilitate such efforts.

Over the past two decades authoritarian regimes in many parts of the developing world, as well as in East/Central Europe, have been replaced by democracies. This paper looks at the issue of democratization from a gender perspective. While many of the problems afflicting the 'new democracies' (such as the elitist character of political parties, and the failure of the state to guarantee civil and political rights or make a significant dent in poverty) affect all citizens, they are manifested and experienced in gender-specific ways. Women's persistent exclusion from formal politics, in particular, raises a number of specific questions about how to reform democratic institutions, since these institutions are not automatically gender-equitable. In a democratic polity citizens are presumed to have equal rights, opportunities and voice in the governance of the public domain. All versions of liberal democracy link the right to vote with the right to stand for office. Yet women are hugely under-represented in national assemblies and governments. Women's political invisibility is particularly striking in those countries where their political mobilization contributed to the demise of authoritarianism and the transition to democracy. The suppression of the conventional political arena under authoritarian rule very often shifts the political centre of gravity to 'movement-type activities' and gives prominence to women's political mobilization. What very often unites the disparate groups constituting the women's movement in these contexts is their commitment to bringing about a change in government. Nevertheless, social, political and ideological heterogeneity of women's groups, tensions between the feminist and the feminine streams, and divisions over strategy foreshadow future difficulties in forging political coalitions and aggregating interests to effect change in more 'normal' times. The new wave of democratization has not had a feminizing affect on the parliaments and the governments of the new democracies. Deeply entrenched barriers exclude women from meaningful participation in political parties. In the post-transition period, the more established political parties in countries like Brazil and Chile have remained remarkably resistant to women's participation. Newly formed parties of the left have been more accessible to women, though participation in these smaller parties may arguably produce more symbolic than real benefits. The masculine construction of political authority makes it extremely difficult for women to be elected into office without some form of electoral engineering, such as quotas or reserved seats. The adoption of quotas and reserved seats for women by the South African ANC and the Ugandan NRM, which dominate politics in their respective countries, has produced a significant increase in women's political profile. But given the lack of any realistic political options for women outside these two parties, women's political leverage vis-à-vis the party hierarchy remains strictly limited. Besides the issue of political equality and democratic justice, the argument for increasing women's representation in decision-making bodies also hinges very often on an implicit assumption that women can, more effectively than men, contribute to the formulation of woman-friendly policies because they are somehow better able to represent women's interests. But this is a controversial assumption. Questions continue to be raised about how such a diverse group as 'women' can find meaningful representation in the polity in the absence of procedures for establishing what the group wants or thinks, and in the absence of mechanisms for keeping the 'representatives' accountable to their constituents. Questions have also been raised as to why the growing presence of women in politics (in some contexts) is not translating into substantive change toward policies capable of making a positive impact on the lives of ordinary women. Given the limited success to date in feminizing political parties and getting women elected, it is not surprising that other strategies are also needed for bringing women's interests into the policy-making process. One such strategy is to enter and work directly through the public administration. Democratic transitions, however restricted, represent propitious moments for making interventions because the state is potentially more fluid than at other times. But this space is often limited because of the top-down, elitist nature of the transition. Moreover, the ability of those working on the 'inside' to push for change on a sustained basis depends less on having an institutional space per se, and much more on the relationships with autonomous women's organizations on the 'outside' that they are able to establish and exploit. But it is very often difficult to establish effective inside-outside relationships-popular women's movements and groups, in particular, may feel alienated from the 'women's machineries' in the public administration and from the women who staff these units. They may also deliberately distance themselves from public authorities because of recent experiences of corruption and co-optation. Moreover, the creation and staffing of women's spaces within the state may in itself weaken the women's movements outside the state. Although in some contexts the state has incorporated the participants and the banners of the women's movements, it has been extremely difficult for those on the 'inside' to translate even the watered-down goals of the movement into concrete policies capable of making a positive impact on the lives of female citizens. The efforts to induce change have been patchy and, in the realm of public expenditure decisions, extremely difficult. This is in part due to the lack of effective pressure from an organized women's constituency (noted above) that can articulate a coherent set of issues and priorities for policy attention, and monitor its adoption and implementation by state agencies. It is also due to the disabling environment in which women bureaucrats find themselves. The deliberate attempt to create insulated technocracies, as is currently occurring in some countries and some areas of policy, has serious implications for democratic consolidation. While gender bureaucrats well-versed in economic analytical skills may be able to contribute to what goes on inside insulated technocracies (in ministries of finance, for example), this can hardly substitute for open public debate enabling women's groups and networks, along with other social groups, to scrutinize economic decisions and policies that affect the well-being of their constituents. But women's machineries and women parliamentarians have had more significant impact in some critical areasraising the legitimacy of violence against women as a political issue; enhancing women's awareness of their existing rights through civic education; and facilitating social legislation on highly significant issues such as divorce, child custody, domestic violence, and reproductive health and rights, which address very fundamental aspects of women's oppression. But here again, success in raising these controversial issuesand maybe even legislating for themhas gone hand in hand with a failure of the state (the judiciary and the police, in particular) to guarantee such important individual civil rights across national territories and for all social strata. One cross-cutting concern in the post-transition period is that the national women's movements have been stripped of their most competent cadres, as leaders and key organizers have been drawn into the new state institutions representing gender issues, into political parties and into parliament. Another common concern is the 'NGO-ization' of women's movements, especially through donor-driven, poverty alleviation programmes. Together, it seems, they have contributed to the weakening of both national women's movements and the cross-class alliances that some had managed to forge. The formalization provoked by the proliferation of NGOs and the competition for funds has several problematic implications. Self-reliance and self-help, which characterize this model of social provisioning, can be euphemisms for reliance on the unpaid work of women (who are recruited by NGOs in voluntary and secondary positions). Moreover, politically these projects seem to have taken away the advocacy and campaigning element of local participation. The perennial issue of feminist autonomy continues to preoccupy members of women's movements-whether 'in' or 'out' of the mainstream institutions. Given the dangers of co-optation by the state or party in power, there is a distinct need for maintaining some autonomous space for interest articulation and aggregation. But at the same time, by taking an autonomous path, women's groups and movements also run the risk of becoming politically isolated-hence the need for a politics of engagement with the mainstream. Ultimately, the long-term viability and effectiveness of the women's movement depends on its ability to work at different levels and in different arenas-both 'inside' and 'outside' the mainstream-forging strategic insider-outsider alliances. This message is sometimes lost on advocates of 'mainstreaming' who see the process of institutional change as a purely technocratic exercise of tinkering with institutions in a political vacuum. To be effective and sustainable, the two sets of strategies need to go hand in hand.

Over the past decade, decentralization of fiscal and policy-making authority has become a cornerstone of development organizations' recommendations for good governance. Yet the institutional design of multilayered government can create tensions as new elites attempt to fill governing spaces long occupied by traditional patrons. This paper uses the case of post-conflict Sierra Leone to explore the power-sharing dynamics between traditional hereditary chiefs and newly elected community councilors, and how these dynamics affect the provision of local public goods. The paper uses data on several measures of local service provision and finds that councilor/chief relationships defined by competition are associated with higher levels of public goods provision as well as greater improvements in these goods between council areas over time. Relationships defined by frequent contact in the absence of disputes as well as higher frequencies of familial ties between the two sets of actors are associated with worse local development outcomes. This evidence suggests that greater competition between elite groups is beneficial for local development, whereas collusion or cooption between old and new elites harms the provision of local public goods.

The purpose of this issues note is to review the experience in and outside the World Bank of using different diagnostic tools in fragile state situations. It will identify trends in the use of such tools, lessons learnt, and arrive at suggestions for the future. Because governance has continued to be a major concern in the international community, over the years this has led to a growing diversity in the application of the concept. With this diversification the types of assessment in use have also increased, a process that reflects two things. First, each agency tends to design an assessment to meet its own program needs. Second, diagnostic tools have often fallen short of expectations leading agencies to develop new ones, including more recently political economy studies that go beyond what was at least until recently mainstream types of assessing governance. Accepting the diversity of definitions and assessments, this note does not intend to review the whole field. A diagnostic tool here refers to the approach and methodology used in assessing governance. Choice of tool has a direct bearing on how an activity is designed and carried out. Making the right choice, therefore, is important. A tool may become 'main stream' and the original rationale for its use disappears. It is applied because everyone else is using it or there is pressure to use the same tool as others. A shift to other tools, however, may become necessary because existing tools do not deliver. Such a shift is occurring in the governance field where a focus on institutions is being increasingly complemented, if not replaced, by a studies of underlying political economy factors. This Note tries to trace this process by highlighting both specific and more general experiences with tools used to assess governance. Fragile states or situations are not typical but they give rise to governance challenges that more than other contexts test the limits of particular tools. This becomes an especially important issue given that what works in countries that are not fragile seems to fall short of the same achievement in fragile situations.

This article was co-published with The New Arab.Close watchers of Israel's war in Gaza have faced a question in recent months: If the U.S. is rushing weapons to Israel, then why hasn't the public heard of any arms sales besides two relatively small transfers late last year?The Washington Post delivered an answer last week. Reporter John Hudson revealed that the Biden administration has approved over 100 smaller weapons packages for Israel since Oct. 7 that fell under the $25 million threshold for formally notifying Congress — and thus the public — about the transfers. In total, these mini sales could add up to more than $1 billion worth of U.S. military aid.The decision to deliver U.S. aid in smaller packages is far from unusual. The U.S. government has done so in the past for practical and nefarious purposes alike; only about 2% of weapons transfers occur above the threshold to notify Congress, according to former officials. But what is abnormal is the fact that many of those weapons were likely pre-positioned on Israeli territory before the war. Unlike other countries, Israel has a stockpile of American weapons on its soil to which it has privileged access. When a U.S.-made bomb slams into Gaza, there's a real chance that it started the day in an American facility, managed by American soldiers and governed by American law."It's clear that it's been a major source of arms for Israel," said Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest of U.S. support for Israel's war. Unfortunately, Paul added, "it's an opaque process, so it's hard to say exactly what weapons they're getting" from the stockpile.This cache of arms is just a small piece of the puzzle. Taken as a whole, U.S. efforts to shield Israel from human rights restrictions and guarantee its access to continued military aid go further than for any other country, according to experts and former senior U.S. officials. These advantages include modified human rights vetting, special access to U.S. weapons, and a veto on American arms sales to Israel's neighbors. Up to this point, the State Department hasn't carried out a formal assessment of Israel's compliance with the law in its Gaza war.Experts claim these arms transfer cutouts have continued or, in some areas, been expanded since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza, which has left over 31,000 Palestinians dead and much of the strip's population in famine or famine-like conditions. Even last month, as war crime accusations mounted, the U.S. reportedly gave Israel at least 1,000 precision-guided munitions and artillery shells."The bottom line is that either you have human rights standards and legal standards or you don't," Paul said. When U.S. officials fail to hold Israel accountable for alleged abuses, "it not only creates an exception for Israel, but it also undermines your diplomacy with other countries," he told Responsible Statecraft/ The New Arab."I have serious concerns that the continued transfer of weapons to Israel is facilitating indiscriminate bombing that may violate international humanitarian law," Rep. Joaquin Castro told Responsible Statecraft/ The New Arab in a statement. "Congress needs to push the Biden administration to hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for any use of U.S. security assistance that violates international law."State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told Responsible Statecraft/ The New Arab that all transfers to Israel since Oct. 7 have followed U.S. law and policy, including notifications to Congress. "We have followed the procedures Congress itself has specified to keep members well-informed and regularly brief members even when formal notification is not a legal requirement," Miller said in a statement, adding that claims that the U.S. has cut up weapons packages in order to avoid public scrutiny are "unequivocally false."The White House did not respond to a request for comment.Exceptions make the rulesWhen a Middle Eastern country asks the U.S. for weapons, American officials' minds go straight to Israel. Would Tel Aviv approve of the transfer? Could new fighter jets give Egypt an edge over Israel on the battlefield if their peace deal fell apart? Would Israeli officials come around if we offer them better weapons to sweeten the pot?This line of reasoning doesn't have anything to do with the personal opinions of U.S. officials. In fact, U.S. law explicitly states that the U.S. must give Israel a "qualitative military edge" over its neighbors to counter a threat from "any individual state or possible coalition of states or [...] non-state actors."U.S. partners are starkly aware of — and unhappy about — this reality, according to a former senior U.S. military official in Cairo who requested anonymity to speak freely about his experience. Egyptian officials would sometimes request high-tech weapons just to "watch us squirm and come up with some way to say 'no' without saying the Israelis won't approve it," the former official recalled."This is another place where it's very explicit that Israel has a special status that no other country enjoys," said John Ramming-Chappell of the Center for Civilians in Conflict.This qualitative advantage is enforced by the quantitative side. Since World War II, Israel is far and away the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. Washington's funding for the Israeli military, which now totals $3.8 billion per year, makes up about 16% of its total budget, according to the Congressional Research Service. Israel, which can spend part of its U.S. aid on Israeli weapons, gets this cash in an interest-bearing account in New York, making it one of only two states that get a multimillion-dollar tip on top of baseline U.S. support.When it comes to human rights, Israel also gets special protections. Take the Leahy law, a statute that prevents specific units of foreign militaries from receiving U.S. aid if American officials have evidence they've committed "gross violations of human rights." For most countries, Leahy vetting happens before aid is disbursed. Israel gets the equipment first, and the ensuing vetting process looks different than for other countries. Lower-level State Department officials have found multiple cases in which Israeli units should lose access to American weapons under U.S. law, but those cases are consistently blocked by higher-ups in government who usually don't weigh in on such cases for other countries, according to Paul.The result is that, unlike Egypt and other U.S. partners in the Middle East, no Israeli unit has ever been sanctioned under the Leahy law despite numerous credible allegations of human rights abuses, a fact that the statute's namesake has loudly railed against. The State Department has previously justified this disparity by pointing to Israel's judicial system, which U.S. officials believe is capable of handling human rights violations internally.In recent weeks, congressional attention has focused on whether Israel is violating a U.S. law that prevents countries from receiving American weapons if they block U.S. humanitarian aid in whole or in part. While the statute has rarely been enforced, the Biden administration promised to hold states accountable to the law in a recent memorandum.At this point, many experts and lawmakers believe Israel is in clear violation of this law given how little aid now enters Gaza. Yet the White House has still not offered a reason — or a formal waiver — to justify its failure to enforce its own commitment."I really haven't heard a good response to the question of why we should not apply existing U.S. law [...] to ensure that U.S. military assistance is used in accordance with our values," said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md."Given the evidence that Israel is intentionally blocking the passage of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the Biden administration has an obligation to enforce Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act and move towards limitations on further offensive aid to Israel as long as the aid blockade continues," Rep. Castro said.'As supportive as possible'When the White House moved to expedite weapons transfers to Israel after Oct. 7, it faced an unusual problem. The president already had more than enough authority to make this happen, but officials wanted to signal that they were being "as supportive as possible." The solution was to further loosen laws around U.S. arms transfers, according to Paul, who still worked in government at the time.
"It's not that those were things that we'd been previously thinking about," Paul said. "The previous position within government had been [that] Israel already has more than you could possibly want in terms of authorities and funding."
Now, the Senate's supplemental spending package for Israel has provisions that would dramatically expand the secretive U.S. stockpile on Israeli soil while loosening public reporting requirements about transfers from it. A bill with similar changes passed the House as well, signaling broad support for the proposal in Congress.
Alongside already existing loopholes, these new restrictions weaken America's case that it is committed to protecting human rights on the world stage, according to Ramming-Chappell.
"The exceptional status that Israel enjoys in U.S. arms transfer policy and law, when taken in conjunction with the devastating effects of Israel's current campaign in Gaza, really undermines U.S. leadership and claims to moral authority in the international sphere," he said.

The Iraqi army captain who assassinated King Faisal II and his family in 1958 claimed, "All I did was remember Palestine, and the trigger on the machine-gun just set itself off." Although Iraqi historians refute this assertion and maintain the officer was a delusional madman, in the days leading up to the massacre of the royal family, the Iraqi opposition had been emboldened by growing anti-Israel sentiment and a perception that the Iraqi monarchy leaned too heavily toward Western nations which enabled Israeli aggression toward Arab states. Six decades later, the Palestinian question still enrages the "Arab Street." The war in Gaza raises concerns of violent regional spillover and Iraq would not be not immune from the consequences. Unlike the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, however, it is unlikely that armed conflict will come to Iraq as sympathy for the Palestinians will not trump war fatigue. Yet, there are reasons to fear the indirect costs of war. Chief among those concerns revolve around neighboring Iran being involved in a wider conflict, but no less significant could be the effects on the internal politics of Iraq, its economy, and its international relations. Much will depend on the skills of Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani to balance the pressure from his political opponents and the armed militias.Internal politicsAll politics are local, and in Iraq they are often armed. Unlike the dictatorships, dynasties, and monarchies surrounding it, Iraq remains a parliamentary democracy, generally responsive to public sentiment but also coercion from armed militias outside of government control.Iraq's recent history shows the best and worst of democracy, free speech, and the right to assemble. In October 2019, widespread street protests over corruption, unemployment, inadequate services, and poor living conditions brought down the government of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi. The Tishreen ("October") protesters demanded the resignation of Abdul-Mahdi, commitments to reform, and early elections. While authorities responded with a relatively heavy hand, the government fell within two months. Abdul-Mahdi's replacement, Mustafa al Kadhimi, enjoyed a full term in office but the process of replacing him with the current prime minister, Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani came after Iraq went through the longest period without a formal government in its modern history. Among other factors, his appointment was fiercely opposed by the powerful rabble-rousing Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr when Sadr was unable to form a government. Sadr's party resigned en masse from Parliament but not before his followers stormed the Council of Representatives in July 2022 twice, and occupied the Presidential Palace the following month. The departure of the Sadrists from the palace led to a deadly firefight in the Green Zone which soon spread to Iraq's southern provinces. Against this backdrop of violence and turmoil, the Sudani government came to power in October 2022 fully understanding the need to remain sensitive to public opinion and well armed political opponents. The Sudani government also remains under pressure from militias, a delicate balancing act for a country beholden to the accomplishments of these groups in the fight against Daesh, or ISIS. These militias enjoy quasi-political influence on the Iraqi body politic and are closely tied to Iran. Sudani's political opponents have been closely watching for a misstep (common to all opposition parties worldwide), not least Sadr, who has already called on his supporters to join "peaceful" demonstrations in protest of Israel's war on Gaza. Rarely are Sadrist demonstrations peaceful as shown by the sit-ins in 2021 and the violent attacks into the protected Green Zone in 2022.Against this backdrop, Sudani maintains a careful reading of internal politics. While he may not be ousted by demonstrations like Abdul-Mahdi or fend off assassination attempts as did Khadimi, participating in internal politics remains a risky business in Iraq; so is international diplomacy.External relations While Prime Minister Sudani has demonstrated strong skills in managing Iraq's internal politics, external relations with Iran and the United States could provide the missteps his opponents seek. Despite strong condemnation of the attacks into Gaza, Iran-backed militias have significantly ramped up their drone and rocket attacks on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria.In response, a parade of U.S. officials from CIA Director William Burns to Secretary of State Antony Blinken (adorned in body armor) have visited Iraq since October 7 persuading, cajoling, and warning Sudani of the consequences of continued attacks on U.S. personnel. Sudani issued stern warnings that Iraqi territory should not be used as a proxy battlefield, and that continued attacks by these groups may provoke U.S. action against Iran even in the absence of proof that these attacks were "explicitly ordered" by Tehran. Arresting a small number of suspects in the attacks has, for the moment, kept the diplomatic situation somewhat calm. Sudani seems to have found a way to acquiesce to Washington's demands while placating Iran and the militias. Keen on maintaining positive relations with both Iran and the U.S., while remaining attentive and in tune to sentiments on the street, Sudani cannot risk being perceived as cowering to Western pressures at a time when public opinion is overwhelmingly in support of Gaza. But that balancing act will require continued statesmanship to uphold Iraq's sovereignty without being labeled by detractors as a puppet of any hegemon, whether Iran or the U.S. A tipping point, however, may be if the war in Gaza continues. The recent outcry against the December 25 airstrikes by the U.S. military in response to a rocket attack which seriously injured an American soldier is the most recent example. Not only did Sudani call the rocket attack an act of terrorism, but also condemned the American strike as a serious violation of Iraqi sovereignty and announced that "the Iraqi government is heading towards ending the presence of international coalition forces."Economic effectsWhile Iraq's economy has shown some signs of recovery in recent months — 25 percent of Iraqis reportedly live below the poverty line — unemployment is forecasted to reach 40 percent, and climate change has contributed to water scarcity. There is little appetite for yet another war in Iraq when average Iraqis are battling to get by.In the event the Gaza conflict expands, Iraqis could be affected by events such as the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. Blocking maritime traffic through the Suez Canal and rerouting traffic around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa could affect the relatively modest inflation rate in Iraq at a time when the Iraqi dinar has also gone through a significant depreciation. While the economic situation in Iraq is far better than regional neighbors such as Iran, Turkey, and Egypt, expectations from consumers used to relatively stable prices are high and even a small amount of economic turbulence on top of anger at the situation in Gaza could challenge the Sudani government. As former Iraqi Energy Minister Luay Al Khateeb puts it, "If the Gaza war engulfs Iran, this will lead to major consequences on Iraq's political and economic stability. The ramifications will force Iran to prioritize its needs to meet local demand on power sector and gas supplies and cut natural gas electricity exports to Iraq."Iraq currently imports electricity and gas from Iran that total close to 40 percent of its power supply. "Iran's force majeure cuts will compromise Iraq's national grid to disable 50 percent of Iraq's service sectors and investment projects, affecting the country's revenue; [it will have a] negative impact on GDP and will most certainly ignite unprecedented populous protests against the government and the political system at large," says Al Khateeb. "For Iraq to avoid such a situation, a quick short term resolution will come at a major cost to compensate for the losses by importing expensive diesel and securing more financial allocation for power generation maintenance that will eventually increase the budget deficit beyond control."Iraq's former Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Dr Ali Allawi concurs."A war certainly would lead to Iranian cutbacks of gas supplied to Iraq," he says, adding, "It would also be used to pressure Iraq to drop its public neutrality between the U.S. and Iran. The Iraqi public is decidedly in favor of Palestine, and the Gaza war has made the Iranian connection less contentious than before."While international actors seek to contain the violence inside of Israel and Gaza, regional actors seem intent on expanding the war well beyond those borders. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Iran-backed militias seem hell-bent on spreading the flames. The United States blames Iran as the source of regional provocations and even if inaccurate, the U.S. has put its forces on war footing, sending aircraft carriers and increased intelligence and other combat capabilities into the region, ostensibly to deter and contain the conflict — moves that inadvertently increase the dangers.of that very conflagration either by mistake, miscalculation, or misstep. The recent American-led maritime mission, Operation Prosperity Guardian, will increase the number of international warships in the Red Sea and should a Houthi missile sink a commercial tanker or a U.S. warship, the responses and counter-responses may make the war in Gaza seem minor.The Middle East has not seen this level of instability in decades and Iraq is not immune from that instability. Even if, to date, it has not been directly affected by the Gaza war or a wider regional conflict, Iraq it is already feeling its indirect effects through increased tensions between the U.S. and Iran, large scale street protests in support of Palestine, Iranian -backed militias attacking U.S. personnel, domestic political opponents, and impacts on the Iraqi economy. While Prime Minister Sudani has deftly managed those challenges to date, it remains problematic whether he, or Iraq, can weather the storms blowing in from Gaza for much longer.