Suchergebnisse

Canada has blamed the Indian government over the assassination of a Sikh leader in British Columbia in June, sparking a diplomatic crisis between the two countries and confronting the Biden administration with a difficult choice. "Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen," said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Parliament on Monday. "Canada has declared its deep concerns to the top intelligence and security officials of the Indian government," he added. "Last week at the G20 I brought them personally and directly to Prime Minister Modi in no uncertain terms." India's Ministry of External Affairs denounced the allegations as "absurd and motivated," accusing Canada of harboring "Khalistani terrorists and extremists" who "continue to threaten India's sovereignty and territorial integrity." New Delhi expelled a Canadian diplomat on Tuesday in a tit for tat response to Canada's expulsion of an Indian diplomat the day before. The victim, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was a leading proponent of the Khalistan movement for the establishment of an independent Sikh state in India's northern Punjab region. His ethno-religious separatist activism did not earn him many friends in the Modi administration, with the Indian government accusing him in 2018 of being involved in multiple targeted killings."From the vantage point of India, he is a terrorist… the very fact that this guy had extreme political preferences, in the mind of the Indian government, would make him not only an extremist but a terrorist," Max Abrahms, Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Northeastern University and leading terrorism expert, told Responsible Statecraft. "Clearly India views his political preferences — an independent Khalistan — as extreme and also as ipso facto evidence of supporting terrorism…" The Khalistan issue has loomed over Canada-India relations for years. Canada, home to the largest Sikh community in the world, has been the site of previous Sikh-led protests that have invited sharp rebuke from Indian officials. New Delhi criticized the Canadian government for turning a blind eye to what it described as the "extremist" activities of Khalistan movement activists with Modi expressing concerns over previous Sikh protests to Trudeau on the sidelines of the G20 summit earlier this month. "They are promoting secessionism and inciting violence against Indian diplomats, damaging diplomatic premises and threatening the Indian community in Canada and their places of worship," the Indian government said in a statement at the time.The two sides have frozen negotiations over a proposed trade deal that both countries hoped would be finalized by the end of the year, with Indian officials reportedly citing "certain political developments." Beyond the ongoing fallout between Ottawa and New Delhi, Trudeau's Tuesday remarks have put many of Canada's closest allies in a difficult spot. On the one hand, the White House has made it a top strategic priority to court India amid its intensifying standoff with China. On the other hand, the Biden administration has built its foreign policy brand on the importance of marching in lockstep with its Atlantic partners — failing to publicly back Canada could deal at least a symbolic setback to the Biden administration's grand vision of a united Atlantic front. "The United States deeply values the bilateral relationship with India and has invested substantially in this relationship, evidenced most recently by the very public hosting of Modi at the White House as well as the very high-profile one-on-one meeting between Biden and Modi at the G20 a few weeks ago," said Abrahms. "Washington deeply values and is investing in this relationship and, therefore, I find it very unlikely that Biden will interject himself in a way that will create any meaningful friction with the development of relations with India, which are seen as essential in terms of containing China as well as taking a leadership stance in the global south," he continued, adding that U.S.-China trade ties and a desire not to alienate the domestic Indian vote could also be salient factors for the administration. Abrahms noted that the potential costs of not backing Canada are outweighed by the dangers of confronting India because New Delhi, unlike Ottawa is a geopolitical pivot player. "Canada doesn't have the option of moving away from the United States, nor would it want to, whereas with India, one of the reasons why we're courting it so much is because it has a history of independent foreign policy during the Cold War with respect to the Soviet Union," he said, adding that that Washington cannot take for granted New Delhi's support against Beijing. "It's not entirely clear that India will be the ally that the United States wants against China in the Indo-Pacific, so the U.S. is doing this charm offensive not just because India is rightfully seen as important but because, without it, there could be a real risk that India won't be the kind of ally that we need in any future direct conflict with China." Asked if the White House could possibly sanction the Modi government over Trudeau's assassination claims, Abrahms said he would be surprised even by "just a rhetorical dressing-down of India."It is an open question how Canada's leadership would respond if Washington does, in fact, choose to stand aside. Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly parsed the assassination claim more delicately than Trudeau, referring to the incident as an "allegation" that would constitute a "grave violation" of Canada's sovereignty "if proven true." It appears the door has been left ajar for de-escalation — how Ottawa chooses to proceed, and the full extent of the damage that the Khalistan assassination row will do to the Canada-India relationship, remains to be seen.

Zusammenfassung Der Iran besitzt zwölf UNESCO-Biosphärenreservate, die reich an einmaligen Natur- und Kulturschätzen und hohem menschlichen Potenzial aus verschiedenen ethnischen Gruppen sind. Die ersten neun Biosphärenreservate wurden frühzeitig mit den ersten Biosphärenreser-vaten der Welt im Jahr 1976 gegründet, die auch gleichzeitig andere Kategorien der Schutz-gebiete im Iran wie Nationalparks, geschützte Lebensräume für Wildtiere und Naturschutzge-biete beinhalten und bis heute unter ihrem alten Status verwaltet werden. Damit entsprechen sie nicht den aktuellen internationalen Anforderungen an Biosphärenreservate und besteht die Gefahr, dass diese Gebiete in baldiger Zukunft ihre natürlichen und kulturellen Werte verlie-ren und irreversibel beschädigt werden. Diese Studie untersucht und bewertet die zwei exemplarisch ausgewählten iranischen Bio-sphärenreservate Golestan und Dena unter Berücksichtigung der UNESCO-Kriterien, unter anderem die Ziele und Grundlagen der Sevilla-Strategie und der Internationalen Leitlinien für das Weltnetz der Biosphärenreservate (1995). Das Biosphärenreservat Golestan wurde im Jahr 1976 gegründet und ist somit eines der ältesten Biosphärenreservate des Irans. Bei dem im Jahre 2010 gegründeten Biosphärenreservat Dena, handelt es sich um das jüngste Biosphä-renreservat im Iran zu Beginn der Studie. Beide Schutzgebiete sind gebirgig und beinhalten die wichtigsten Waldökosysteme mit einer großen Biodiversität. Das Biosphärenreservat Golestan befindet sich im Nordosten des Irans im östlichsten Teil des Elburs-Gebirge und Dena liegt im zentralen Zagros-Gebirge im Westiran. Für den methodischen Ansatz dieser Studie wurde ein Methodenmix aus qualitativen Elemen-ten: Oral History, Interviews, offenen Fragen und Teilnehmender Beobachtung und quantita-tiven Elementen: SWOT-Analyse (engl. Akronym für Strengths (Stärken), Weaknesses (Schwächen), Opportunities (Chancen) und Threats (Bedrohungen) und Auswertung der Fra-gebögen mit Hilfe des statistischen Programms SPSS20 angewendet. Die untersuchten Gruppen bestanden gemäß der jeweiligen Analyse aus Experten des De-partments für Umwelt (DoE) in Teheran, den Provinz-Umweltschutzbehörden von Golestan und Kohgiluye und Boyer Ahmad, Akademikern, der Nationale Commission for UNESCO in Teheran, Zeitzeugen, lokaler Bevölkerung, Rangern, Umwelt-NGOs (engl. Non-Governmental Organization), dem Tourismus-Sektor und den Umwelt-Medien. Die Ergebnisse in dieser Studie zeigen, dass die Entwicklung der iranischen Biosphärenreser-vate seit ihrer Gründung 1976 bis heute von den Veränderungen der wirtschaftlichen, politi-schen und gesellschaftlichen Situation des Irans und demzufolge von den Veränderungen in der Organisationsstruktur des Departemants für Umwelt (DoE) und der Prioritätensetzung in Bezug auf die Gesetze zu Umwelt- und Naturschutz beeinflusst wurden. Überdies stellen die Ergebnisse dar, dass in den beiden untersuchten Biosphärenreservaten Golestan und Dena hinsichtlich der internationalen UNESCO-Kriterien und Richtlinien ver-gleichsweise ähnliche Defizite und Mängel bestehen: • fehlende nationale Rechtsstruktur für die Biosphärenreservate im Iran, • fehlender Managementplan für Biosphärenreservate und somit auch schwaches Mana-gementsystem der Biosphärenreservate, • Mangel an Kenntnissen über Biosphärenreservate, • beschränkte Beteiligung an den Angelegenheiten der Biosphärenreservate seitens aller untersuchten Gruppen – von der lokalen Bevölkerung bis hin zu den staatlichen Ent-scheidungsträgern und • ungenügende Zusammenarbeit zwischen Staat und Interessengruppen in diesen Gebie-ten. Ebenso wurde in dieser Studie versucht, konkrete Lösungsansätze zur Verwirklichung der Ziele der Biosphärenreservate bzw. der Verbesserung ihrer aktuellen Situation zu empfehlen. In diesem Zusammenhang ist es erforderlich, dass Gesetze für die Biosphärenreservate auf nationaler Ebene definiert und die vorhandenen Biosphärenreservate im Iran gründlich nach internationalen Kriterien untersucht und mit einem systematischen Managementplan auf wis-senschaftlicher Grundlage verwaltet werden. Des Weiteren benötigen diese Gebiete für ihre Funktionalität eine Erhöhung und Verbesserung der Kenntnisse über die Biosphärenreservate der aktiven Personen, sowie der Kooperation und Kommunikation zwischen allen zuständigen Behörden und Interessengruppen. Hiermit soll allen sozialen, kulturellen, geistigen und wirt-schaftlichen Anliegen der Interessengruppen, vor allem aber der lokalen Bevölkerung, Rech-nung getragen werden, entsprechend dem weltweiten Ansatz der UNESCO-Biosphärenreservate. ; Summary Iran consists of twelve UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, rich in unique natural and cultural treasures, with high human potentials of various ethnic groups. The first nine biosphere re-serves were established along with the world's first biosphere reserves in 1976. These reserves included other categories of protected areas in Iran, such as national parks, wildlife refuge and conservation areas, and are still managed under their old status. As a result, these areas do not comply with the current international requirements for biosphere reserves, while posing a risk of losing their natural and cultural values, and being irreversibly damaged in the near future. This study examines and evaluates the two exemplarily selected Iranian biosphere reserves Golestan and Dena, taking into account the UNESCO criteria, including the objectives and foundations of the Seville Strategy and the International Guidelines for the World Network of Biosphere Reserves (1995). The biosphere reserve Golestan was founded in 1976, and is thus one of the oldest biosphere reserves in Iran, while the biosphere reserve Dena, founded in 2010, was the youngest biosphere reserve in Iran when this study was initiated. Both of these protected areas are mountainous and rich in important forest ecosystems with a high biodiversity. The biosphere reserve Golestan is located in northeastern Iran, on the east of Alborz Mountain Chains; and the biosphere reserve Dena is located in Zagros Mountain Chains in western Iran. For the methodological approach of this study, a mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis was used. Qualitative elements include: oral history, interviews, open questions and partici-pant observation, while quantitative elements contain: SWOT analysis (Strengths -Weaknesses -, Opportunities and threats ) and evaluation of the questionnaires using the statistical program SPSS20. According to the analysis, the groups studied were experts from the Department of the Envi-ronment in Tehran (DoE), the Provincial Environmental Protection Authorities of Golestan and Kohgiluye and Boyer Ahmad, academics, the Tehran National Commission for UNESCO, eyewitnesses, local people, rangers, the environment NGOs (Non-Governmental Organization), the tourism sector and the environmental media. The results of this study show that the development of the Iranian biosphere reserves since its establishment in 1976, has been influenced by changes in Iran's economic, political and social situation, and consequently, by changes in the organizational structure of the Department of Environment (DoE) and the priorities of Environmental and Nature Conservation Legislation. Moreover, the results show that in the two biosphere reserves under review, Golestan and Dena, there are comparatively similar deficiencies as well as deficits regarding the Interna-tional UNESCO Criteria and Guidelines: • Absence of a national legal structure for the biosphere reserves in Iran; • Missing management plan and thus weak management system of biosphere reserves; • Lack of knowledge about the biosphere reserves; • Limited participation in the affairs of the biosphere reserves by all groups studied —from the local population to the state decision-makers; and • Insufficient cooperation between the state and interest groups in these areas. Likewise, this study attempts to recommend concrete solutions for achieving the goals of the biosphere reserves in order to improve their current situation. In this context, it is necessary for biosphere reserve laws to be defined at the national level and for existing biosphere reserves in Iran to be scrutinized according to the International Cri-teria and managed on a scientific basis using a systematic management plan. Furthermore, these areas need to improve their knowledge of biosphere reserves, increase their active persons, as well as the cooperation and communication between all competent authorities and stakeholders, in order to become more functional. This is intended to respond to the social, cultural, spiritual and economic concerns of stakeholders, and especially those of the local population, in line with the global approach of the UNESCO Biosphere Reserves.

Policy makers in developing countries, including India, are increasingly sensitive to the links between spatial transformation and economic development. However, the empirical knowledge available on those links is most often insufficient to guide policy decisions. There is no shortage of case studies on urban agglomerations of different sorts, or of benchmarking exercises for states and districts, but more systematic evidence is scarce. To help address this gap, this paper combines insights from poverty analysis and urban economics, and develops a methodology to assess spatial performance with a high degree of granularity. This methodology is applied to India, where individual household survey records are mapped to "places" (both rural and urban) below the district level. The analysis disentangles the contributions household characteristics and locations make to labor earnings, proxied by nominal household expenditure per capita. The paper shows that one-third of the variation in predicted labor earnings is explained by the locations where households reside and by the interaction between these locations and household characteristics such as education. In parallel, this methodology provides a workable metric to describe spatial productivity patterns across India. The paper shows that there is a gradation of spatial performance across places, rather than a clear rural-urban divide. It also finds that distance matters: places with higher productivity are close to each other, but some spread their prosperity over much broader areas than others. Using the spatial distribution of this metric across India, the paper further classifies places at below-district level into four tiers: top locations, their catchment areas, average locations, and bottom locations. The analysis finds that some small cities are among the top locations, while some large cities are not. It also finds that top locations and their catchment areas include many high-performing rural places, and are not necessarily more unequal than average locations. Preliminary analysis reveals that these top locations and their catchment areas display characteristics that are generally believed to drive agglomeration economies and contribute to faster productivity growth.

The year in foreign policy was marked by bloody conflict, humanitarian catastrophe, and grief, plus political failures and missteps. Let's take a look at the most notable ones as we approach 2024.Losers in major conflicts and geopolitical shiftsUkraine: The bravery and endurance of the Ukrainian people and its military forces have been extolled time and again. But the failure of its counteroffensive in the spring and the summer of 2023 has led in part to a loss in confidence that the country can ever hope to expunge the Russians from all of its territories. This of course has been not only the goal of President Volodymyr Zelensky, but of his Western supporters. Many of those allies, including the mainstream press, are now suggesting that not only will Ukraine have to find a way to end the war diplomatically — which critics including contributors at RS and at the Quincy Institute have been saying all along — but may have to make territorial compromises.The goal of Ukrainian NATO membership seems like a faraway dream now, and as of the end of the year, the flood of weapons and money from Washington and Western capitals has slowed immensely. Zelensky, now being pegged as increasingly isolated and unrealistic, has seemingly fallen from grace. Unfortunately for him, this is not the first time in U.S. foreign policy history that Washington has turned its favor elsewhere, to the grave detriment of its former beneficiaries.Israel, and the Palestinian people: The government of Israel, blind-sighted by a brutal Hamas attack that left 1200 Israelis dead and 240 hostages whisked away on Oct. 7, has retaliated with such force in Gaza strip that it is squandering much of the rest of the world's goodwill and sympathy. Israelis, as wracked by grief and anger as they are, are not confident that their government has a plan for Gaza after the war, but are steadfast (at least according to polls) that the Netanyahu regime can destroy Hamas, and that care to avoid Palestinian civilian suffering should not be a consideration in executing that.Meanwhile, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza as of this week was well over 21,000. Israel claims to have killed 7,000 Hamas fighters but, according to the New York Times, does not explain how it came to that number. This has created a situation in which Israel (and its U.S. supporters) are increasingly isolated, whether it be at the United Nations or in public opinion across the globe. Furthermore, the Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from catastrophic hunger and a lack of healthcare (there are reportedly no functioning hospitals left in northern Gaza). Nearly 90% have been displaced due to Israeli military bombardments, and infectious diseases are ripping through the traumatized population.Joe Biden: The president of the United States has been backed into a corner on two major fronts this year. On Ukraine, his framing of the war as a Manichaean battle — and a struggle for freedom that will have global repercussions if America doesn't help Zelensky "for as along as it takes" — is coming back to bite his administration. Calls are increasing to begin diplomatic talks in earnest with a government that Washington had relegated to Hitler-like status. Meanwhile, Congress is pushing back on giving Ukraine the billions more in weapons and cash it needs to survive.Biden's team looks indecisive and vulnerable as it moves into what promises to be a brutal re-election. This has only been compounded by the administration's complete inability to rein in the military excesses of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank too. While supposedly making "it clear" to Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. wants civilians protected, Biden's administration did all it could to water down the UN Security Council ceasefire at the Israelis' behest, and even a resolution to institute humanitarian "pauses" has, as of this writing, not been put into effect.Biden has also greased the skids for all the weapons the Israelis have asked for, with American-made "dumb bombs" responsible for the multitude of deaths and property destruction in the Gaza strip today. Not only is Washington viewed as having no influence over the Israelis (despite the enormous sums of money and weapons sent there annually); it looks duplicitous when it comes to grand assertions about upholding the "rules-based order." Losers we might have missed ...The Armenian people: Every single Armenian — some 100,000 — was pushed out of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory by Azerbaijan in October. Earlier this year, Azerbaijan and Armenia had pledged to work toward peace after decades of conflict. But hopes waned as Azerbaijan continued a crushing blockade of goods and humanitarian aid to Armenians in the region. An Azeri military operation, launched in September, led to the ultimate takeover of the disputed land and the expulsion of Armenians within days back to Armenia.African coup and civil war victims: West Africa saw a continued rash of coups with two more in Niger and Gabon this year. In Niger, the military overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum in July and put him and his family in the palace basement where they remain today. Niger joins Burkino Faso and Mali as what Quincy Institute non-resident fellow Alex Thurston calls "the epicenter of mass violence and displacement in the region, and one of the worst conflict and humanitarian disaster zones in the world." The military seized power in Gabon in August, ousting President Ali Bongo after he had just won re-election. Meanwhile, a bloody civil war broke out in Sudan in April and soon became a proxy fight involving regional interests, with the Sudanese people, of course, caught in the crossfire. The conflict involves General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan (himself a coup leader), pitted against his deputy and head of the Rapid Support Forces, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as Hemedti. By June, fighting in the capital city of Khartoum had left scores dead, massive property damage, and an exodus of some 100,000 to points abroad. Fighting not only continues, but is spreading, imperiling millions of civilians and throwing the entire country into a humanitarian disaster. The U.S appears to have little left, diplomatically, to offer.Sweden: The Northern European nation wants into NATO. But what seemed to be a no-brainer — its accession was linked to regional security and Western unity in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — has become a victim of cross-state politics and recrimination. Though as of this writing Sweden seems one step closer to joining Finland as a new member of the alliance, Turkey continues to use its leverage as a NATO member to get F-16s from the U.S. and force Sweden to amend its anti-terrorism laws. Hungary has been slow walking its vote too, accusing Sweden of telling "blatant lies" about the condition of Hungary's democracy.The American taxpayer: Before Congress left for the holidays, it passed $886 billion in defense spending as part of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). These funding levels are the highest since World War II and, as the Quincy Institute's William Hartung points out, they are mostly directed toward "costly, dysfunctional weapons systems that are ill-suited to addressing current challenges."Aside from a pay increase for personnel, the 3% hike over last year represents a boon for the defense industry (which was accused this year in an important 60 Minutes report of gouging taxpayers) and the members of Congress who love them. As RS has reported many times, the defense budget does not reflect sound military strategy or even the national interest, but a wish list by contractors and politicians who benefit from funding expensive programs that in some cases, like the Osprey aircraft, put American troops in real danger. To make it worse, the Pentagon still can't pass an audit.And these guys ...Jake Sullivan: Biden's National Security Advisor penned a Foreign Affairs article entitled "The Sources of American Power," a 7,000-word attempt to put the best sheen on the Biden Administration's handling of current geopolitical events. Unfortunately, like much of the White House foreign policy approach over the last three years, it was out of step. Acknowledging "perennial challenges" in the Middle East, Sullivan said "the region is quieter than it has been for decades" and that "(we) have deescalated tensions in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties." The article was sent to print on Oct. 2, five days before the Hamas attacks on Israel. "Nobody can be expected to predict the future, but the essay offers a rare insight into how the United States misread an explosive situation in the Middle East," wrote the New York Times, which pointed out that the embarrassing comments were later scrubbed from the online edition of Foreign Affairs. However, Sullivan had been making public comments to the same effect all fall.American Generals: This year the retired generals and admirals who had been talking a big game about the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the failures of the Russian military have been forced to eat their words. Special attention should be given to all these four stars and flags (Petraeus, Stavridis, Keene, McCaffrey, Hodges, etc.) who make incessant rotations on major media and provide wrongheaded strategic assessments that are never corrected. They just pop up again in the next conflict.Malcolm Nance: One of the most visible pro-Ukraine commentators on major cable and on Twitter, the former Navy cryptologist left MSNBC in 2022 to help train the International Legion of foreign volunteers in Ukraine. His videos and tweets boasted his mission — as he was typically beefed up in uniform and weapons, ostensibly reporting from the combat zone — and drew a massive following of pro-Ukraine partisans.Then a New York Times expose dropped the bomb: Nance was enmeshed in a climate of petty squabbling and chaos and among those outsiders in Ukraine who were "fighting with themselves and undermining the war effort." He left the country and is still a commentator — on his paid subscription-only Substack. He's shifted to the Gaza War now, including a (week-long) visit to the Gulf States in October, penning posts like, "Ask Yourself, Are You Really for Palestine or Do You Just Hate Jews?" and, very much like his pro-Ukraine Twitter persona of 2022, accusing critics of Israel of "misguided ill informed myopia & latent antisemitism."

Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace



This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 






World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)







What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.



A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')



My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.



In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.



Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.



The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.



Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.





How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?



Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.



My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.



Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.



Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.



My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.



Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.



In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.



As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.



Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.



I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.



When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.



I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.



One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.



I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.



This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.

                                    



What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.



Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.



The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.





Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?



Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.



The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.



This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.



The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.





Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?



Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).



This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.



But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.

                                                                                                                

Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).



For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.



What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.





You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?

                                                                                                          

The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.



While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.



By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort.  There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.



Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.





You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?



When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.



Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.



Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.



When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.



Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.



An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.



Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.





Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?



Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.



In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.



Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.



A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics. 



My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.



But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.

                                  

Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.





Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?



The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.



Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.



Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.





My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?



American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.



The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.



Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.



The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.



It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.



Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'





Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.





Related links



Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) 
Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) 
Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf) 









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to meet next month for a summit in San Francisco. The anticipated sit-down comes amid a renewed White House push to stabilize relations with Beijing as the U.S. juggles crises in the Middle East, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. Though the face-to-face meeting has not yet been formalized, U.S. officials are projecting confidence that a Biden-Xi summit has been agreed to in principle. It's "pretty firm" that there will be a meeting, an official told the Washington Post, adding that details pertaining to the summit have yet to be ironed out by the two sides. The planned Biden-Xi summit comes on the heels of a bipartisan Senate delegation to China that kicked off in Shanghai last week. The delegation's leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, presented a list of grievances in a press conference on Monday, including longstanding U.S. concerns over "unfair" Chinese trade practices, deadly fentanyl inflows into the U.S., and China's close relationship with Russia. The delegation does not appear to have yielded any substantive points of agreement, possibly presaging the course of the upcoming Biden-Xi talks. Schumer expressed disappointment to Xi that China did not condemn the Hamas attacks against Israel on stronger terms. The Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry released a statement denouncing "all violence and attacks on civilians" later that day, earning Schumer's praise. "I'm gratified the Foreign Ministry issued a new statement that did condemn the loss of civilian life," he said. Yet the new Foreign Ministry statement neither explicitly named Hamas nor blamed it for the attacks. The only statement to that effect came from the Chinese embassy in Israel, reflecting a tactical decision to allay specific audiences rather than an overall shift in messaging. Criticisms over the tone struck by Chinese officials belie a wider and more serious divergence on the Israel conflict: China, like many major non-Western players including Turkey, Russia, and Saudi Arabia along with much of the Middle East, has not echoed the shared western position of "steadfast and united support" for Israel accompanied by "unequivocal condemnation of Hamas and its appalling acts of terrorism."Indeed, Beijing is unlikely to take any actions that could diminish its posture as a potential broker between the Israel and Palestine. "China is trying to take a position of greater neutrality than the United States and to be seen in the world as a more neutral, or honest broker, and not necessarily aligned with Israel as the United States. And I think that's consistent with a desire to gain influence in a lot of the developing world," Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, told VOA Mandarin. The upcoming summit appears aimed less at finding venues for cooperation and more at setting the tone for the mounting global competition between the world's two largest economies. The Biden administration is expected to roll out updated export controls intended to further tighten the screws on China's access to semiconductor equipment as early as next week, Axios reported on Saturday. The White House, in keeping with its efforts to establish a model of consistent and predictable competition with Beijing, has warned Chinese officials to expect the new control measures in October. Implementing the updated controls on the one-year anniversary of the original export restrictions, introduced in October 2022, establishes a "clear cadence," an official told Reuters. Beijing has denounced the export controls as a cynical ploy to hobble China's economic growth. "China firmly opposes the U.S.'s overstretching of the national security concept and abuse of export control measures to wantonly hobble Chinese enterprises," said the Chinese embassy in Washington. China has responded by signaling its intention to grow its semiconductor business in the face of mounting U.S. restrictions, with Chinese tech giant Huawei unveiling a smartphone powered by an advanced, domestically produced 7-nanometer chip during Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo's visit to the country. Yet the Chip War is only one instance in a slew of bilateral disputes that are unlikely to be ameliorated by the Biden-Xi summit. China has staked out a persistently neutral position on the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, bolstering its trade ties and other venues for cooperation with Moscow much to the continued frustration of U.S. policymakers. "Deepening Russian-Chinese cooperation against the United States is not the product of ideological affinity; it is their shared perception that Washington has been attempting to subvert their security, perhaps fatally," said George Beebe, Quincy Institute's Director of Grand Strategy. "The United States is in no position to drive a wedge between the two states, but it can and should refrain from gratuitously driving them together to our detriment."There are even fewer prospects for a meeting of minds regarding Taiwan, with the diplomatic framework in place since the 1970's for managing differences over the self-governing island — particularly the key concepts of strategic ambiguity and agreeing to disagree on how best to resolve Taiwan's status — all but dashed against the rocks. To be sure, there is a substantive policy basis for the kind of stabilization sought by the White House. China, faced with serious demographic challenges and anemic growth, is interested in at least partial economic rapprochement with Washington. The Biden administration, for its part, wants to restore the channels for military communication that were severed by Beijing following former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, dial down military tensions in the Asia-Pacific, and to work with China on implementing its climate change agenda. There is room for targeted cooperation on these areas that, though well short of the reset or thaw in relations previously envisioned by Biden, could advance the administration's goal of upgrading China-U.S. ties from their present state of spiraling hostilities to a sustainable model of managed competition. But that requires a degree of goodwill and flexibility that, so far, has been lacking in the bilateral relationship.As with the uneventful senate delegation to China, the Biden-Xi summit will surely provide a stage for both leaders to relitigate established concerns and restate the same positions; achieving anything else will be an uphill climb.

This article explores the Scottish character of Groundskeeper Willie in the American animated sitcom The Simpsons with a pragmatic and social-psychological approach. It firstly introduces Willie's linguistic and visual features, the sample of three episodes the analysis is based on, Scottish stereotypes in Lindsay's (1997) sociological research, and Searle's (1976) taxonomy of illocutionary acts (representatives or assertives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations). Secondly, the turns uttered by the groundskeeper in the sample are classified by applying Searle's taxonomy, and his illocutionary acts are examined in their contexts and compared with the list of national-ethnic Scottish stereotypes compiled by Lindsay. This study demonstrates that Willie's illocutionary acts and the stereotypes they convey depict him as a figure characterised by positive traits; nevertheless, the responses his illocutionary acts are met with not only counter his pleasant aspects, but also ultimately represent the Scottish groundskeeper as a ludicrous victim of his American fellow townspeople. ; University of Cagliari, Italy ; Daniela Francesca Virdis is an Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Cagliari. She is a steering group member of the International Ecolinguistics Association. She is the author of Serialised Gender: A Linguistic Analysis of Femininities in Contemporary TV Series and Media (2012), which was awarded the Italian Association of English Studies Book Prize 2013. Her current research interests include ecostylistics and metaphor theory. ; dfvirdis@unica.it ; 16 ; 32 (1/2021) ; 35 ; Aitken, A. J. & McArthur, T. (eds.). 1979. Languages of Scotland. Edinburgh: Chambers. ; Alberti, J. (ed.). 2003. Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ; Armstrong, N. 2004. Voicing The Simpsons from English into French: A story of variable success. The Journal of Specialised Translation 2: 97-109. ; Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ; Barra, L. 2008. Springfield, Italia. Processi produttivi e variazioni di significato nell'adattamento italiano di una serie televisiva statunitense. Observatorio (OBS*) Journal 4: 113-136. ; Beard, D. S. 2003. Local satire with global reach: Ethnic stereotyping and cross-cultural conflicts in The Simpsons. In: J. Alberti (ed.), Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, 273-291. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ; Brown, A. & Logan, C. (eds). 2006. The Psychology of The Simpsons. Dallas: BenBella Books. ; Cantor, P. A. 1999. The Simpsons: Atomistic politics and the nuclear family. Political Theory 27.6: 734-749. ; Cohen, E. A. 1998. Homer Simpson: Classic clown. The Simpsons Archive, available at http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/other/papers/eac.paper.html, last accessed December 2020. ; Dossena, M. 2005. Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary: Like Runes upon a Standin' Stane?. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers. ; Ferrari, C. 2009. Dubbing The Simpsons: Or how Groundskeeper Willie lost his kilt in Sardinia. Journal of Film and Video 61.2: 19-37. ; Fusari, S. 2007. Idioletti e dialetti nel doppiaggio italiano de I Simpson. Quaderni del CeSLiC: Occasional Papers, Centro di Studi Linguistico-Culturali (CeSLiC), Bologna, available at http://amsacta.cib.unibo.it/archive/00002182/01/Fusari_OP_COMPLETO.pdf, last accessed December 2020. ; Gray, J. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. London/ New York: Routledge. ; Groening, M. 2001-2010. The Simpsons. Seasons 1-20 (home video releases). Fox Broadcasting Company ; Grundy, P. 2008. Doing Pragmatics, 3rd edition. London: Arnold. ; Hopkins, N. & Reicher, S. 1997. Constructing the nation and collective mobilization: A case study of politicians' arguments about the meaning of Scottishness. In: C.C. Barfoot (ed.), Beyond Pug's Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, 313-338. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi. ; Horowitz, J. 1999. Mmm . television: A study of the audience of The Simpsons. The Simpsons Archive, available at http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/other/papers/jh.paper.html, last accessed December 2020. ; Hughes, A., Trudgill, P. & Watt, D. (eds). 2005. English Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles. London: Arnold. ; Lamont, C. 1997. The stereotype Scot and the idea of Britain. In: C. C. Barfoot (ed.), Beyond Pug's Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, 339-350. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi. ; Levinson, S. C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Lindsay, I. 1997. The uses and abuses of national stereotypes. Scottish Affairs 20: 133-148. ; Mazzon, G. 1994. Le lingue inglesi: Aspetti storici e geografici. Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica. ; McCrum, R. et al. 1987. The Story of English. London: Faber and Faber/BBC Books. ; Mullin, B. 1999. The Simpsons, American satire. The Simpsons Archive, available at http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/other/papers/bm.paper.html, last accessed December 2020. ; Puddu, N. & Virdis, D. F. 2014. Dalla Scozia alla Sardegna: Stereotipi e tratti bandiera di Groundskeeper Willie/Willie il Giardiniere dei Simpson. In: A. Dettori (ed.), Dalla Sardegna all'Europa: Lingue e letterature regionali, 338-354. Milan: Franco Angeli. ; Rodaway, P. 2003. Space, character and critique: South Asian identity in The Simpsons. In: T. Shakur and K. D'Souza (eds.), Picturing South Asian Culture in English: Textual and Visual Representations, 162-175. Liverpool: Open House Press. ; Sbisà, M. 2009. Speech act theory. In: J. Verschueren & J.-O. Östman (eds.), Key Notions for Pragmatics, 229-244. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ; Searle, J. R. 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5.1: 1-23. ; Stangor, C. (ed.). 2000. Stereotypes and Prejudice: Essential Readings. Philadelphia: Psychology Press. ; Tomaiuolo, S. 2007. Translating "America's most nuclear family" into Italian: Dubbing and cultural adaptation in The Simpsons. Translation and Interpreting Studies 2.2: 43-73. ; Turner, C. 2005. Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation. Cambridge (MA): Da Capo Press. ; Turpin, A. 2005. The strange world of oor grown-up Wullie. The Sunday Times 23rd October. ; Verschueren, J. & Östman, J.-O. (eds.). 2009. Key Notions for Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ; Waltonen, K. 2000. We're all pigs: Representations of masculinity in The Simpsons. The Simpsons Archive, available at http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/other/papers/kw.paper.html, last accessed December 2020. ; Weinstein, D. 1998. Of mice and Bart: The Simpsons and the postmodern. In: C. DegliEsposti (ed.), Postmodernism in the Cinema, 61-72. New York: Berghahn Books. ; An earlier version of this article was published as: Virdis, D. F. 2012. Friendliness, aggressiveness and coarseness: Scottish Groundskeeper Willie's linguistic features in The Simpsons. NAWA: Journal of Language and Communication 6.1: 127-150.

The article proposes a methodological approach to constructing landmine signature model for specific aerial reconnaissance equipment, which allows determining sectors of the spectral range of both reflected and emitted signals from mines and the landscape on which they are installed, passing through the "transparency windows" of the atmosphere and can be detected specific technical means of reconnaissance of an unmanned aerial vehicle.An analysis of mine reconnaissance assets in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the State Border Guard of Ukraine showed that the disadvantages of the land-based technical means of engineering mine reconnaissance armaments should be considered their obsolescence under the global trend of the creation and use of robotic systems and systems in the military sphere. Modern means of remote aerial reconnaissance of mines using specialized UAVs are absent. This leads to the loss of personnel of engineering and sapper units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. During the execution of tasks in the areas of the ATO / OOS from 2014 to April 2019, these losses depots 125 people, of whom 36 died, and 89 were injured of a different nature.The aim of the article is to substantiate a methodological approach to constructing a model of mine signatures for specific technical aerial reconnaissance equipment for unmanned aerial vehicles.The term "signature" in military affairs should be understood as a set of characteristics of the signal emitted or reflected by the target (object), as well as the landscape on which the signal's target (object) is located, recorded by technical means of reconnaissance (observation).It is proposed to understand the model of mine signatures when conducting mine reconnaissance using specific technical means of UAV reconnaissance as a set of spectral characteristics of emitted (intrinsic) or reflected by a mine, or landscape, where the mine is installed, of received signals of various types of technical means of UAV reconnaissance.Using the proposed methodological approach to constructing landmine signature model for specific aerial reconnaissance equipment, it is possible to determine the sectors of the spectral range of both reflected and emitted signals from mines and the landscape on which they are installed, passing through the "transparency windows" of the atmosphere and can be registered with species technical means of reconnaissance of an unmanned aerial vehicle, will allow developing technical requirements for an unmanned aerial vehicle of reconnaissance of mines and its payload in the form of equipment for intelligence reconnaissance in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the State Border Guard of Ukraine. ; В статье предложен методический подход к построению модели сигнатуры мин для видовых технических средств воздушной разведки, позволяет определять сектора спектрального диапазона как отраженных, так и излучаемых сигналов от мин и ландшафта, на котором они установлены. Сигналы, проходя через "окна прозрачности" атмосферы, могут быть зарегистрированы видовыми техническими средствами разведки беспилотного летательного аппарата.Анализ средств разведки мин в ВС Украины и ГПС Украины показал, что недостатком, имеющихся на вооружении наземных технических средств инженерной разведки мин, следует считать их моральную устарелость в условиях мировой тенденции создания и применения роботизированных комплексов и систем в военной сфере. Современные средства дистанционной воздушной разведки мин с применением специализированных БПЛА отсутствуют. Это приводит к потерям личного состава инженерно-саперных подразделений ВС Украины. За период выполнения задач в районах проведения АТО/ООС с 2014 по апрель 2019 эти потери составили 125 человек, из которых погибли ‑ 36, получили ранения различного характера ‑ 89.Целью статьи является обоснование методического подхода к построению модели сигнатур мин для видовых технических средств воздушной разведки беспилотных летательных аппаратов.Под термином "сигнатура" следует понимать набор характеристик излучаемого или отраженного целью (объектом), а также ландшафтом, на котором расположена цель (объект) сигнала, который регистрируется техническим средством разведки (наблюдения).Под моделью сигнатур мины при ведении разведки понимается набор спектральных характеристик излучаемых или отраженных миной, или ландшафтом принимаемых сигналов, которые регистрируются различными по назначению видовыми техническими средств разведки БПЛА.Использование предложенного методического подхода позволяет определять сектора спектрального диапазона как отраженных, так и излучаемых сигналов от мин и ландшафта, на котором они установлены. Практическое применение заключается в возможности получения исходных данных для разработки технические требования к БПЛА разведки мин и его полезной нагрузки в виде аппаратуры видовой разведки в интересах ВС Украины и ГПС Украины. ; У статті запропоновано методичний підхід до побудови моделі сигнатури мін для видових технічних засобів повітряної розвідки, що дозволяє визначати сектори спектрального діапазону як відбитих, так і випромінюваних сигналів від мін і ландшафту, на якому вони встановлені, що проходять через «вікна прозорості» атмосфери та можуть бути зареєстровані видовими технічними засобами розвідки безпілотного літального апарату.Аналіз засобів розвідки мін у ЗС України й ДПС України показав, що недоліком наявних на озброєнні наземних технічних засобів інженерної розвідки мін слід вважати їх моральну застарілість в умовах світової тенденції створення та застосування роботизованих комплексів і систем у військовій сфері. Сучасні засоби дистанційної повітряної розвідки мін із застосуванням спеціалізованих БПЛА відсутні. Це призводить до втрат особового складу інженерно-саперних підрозділів ЗС України. За період виконання завдань у районах проведення АТО/ООС із 2014 р. по квітень 2019 р. ці втрати склади 125 осіб, з яких загинули 36, отримали поранення різного характеру 89.Метою статті є обґрунтування методичного підходу до побудови моделі сигнатур мін для видових технічних засобів повітряної розвідки безпілотних літальних апаратів.Під терміном "сигнатура" у військовій справі слід розуміти набір характеристик випромінюваного чи відбитого ціллю (об'єктом), а також ландшафтом, на якому розташована ціль (об'єкт) сигналу, що реєструється технічним засобом розвідки (спостереження).Під моделлю сигнатур міни при веденні розвідки мін із застосуванням видових технічних засобів розвідки БПЛА пропонується розуміти набір спектральних характеристик випромінюваних (власних) чи відбитих міною або ландшафтом, де встановлена міна, сигналів, що приймаються різними за призначенням видових технічних засобів розвідки БПЛА.Використання запропонованого методичного підходу до побудови моделі сигнатури мін для видових технічних засобів повітряної розвідки, що дозволяє визначати сектори спектрального діапазону як відбитих, так і випромінюваних сигналів від мін і ландшафту, на якому вони встановлені, що проходять через "вікна прозорості" атмосфери та можуть бути зареєстровані видовими технічними засобами розвідки безпілотного літального апарату, дозволить розробити технічні вимоги до безпілотного літального апарату розвідки мін та його корисного навантаження у вигляді апаратури видової розвідки в інтересах ЗС України й ДПС України.

The article identifies the features of intercultural communication in the context of European regulations. Based on an analytical review of scientific research of European and domestic scientists, the authors have identified the essence of the concept of "intercultural communication" in the European educational space and European documents in particular; clarification of the difference between the concepts of intercultural and cultural communication. The set of theoretical methods made it possible to identify the leading trends in European policy in the field of intercultural communication, ways to implement the main tasks and provisions of such policy and outline its main priorities and difficulties in modern socio-political conditions characterized by instability and uncertainty.It is established that intercultural communication in the European scientific and educational dimension is understood as a way of cooperation and cultural exchange, which provides for the establishment of understanding between representatives of different countries, nationalities, religions, etc.The priority goals of intercultural communication according to the provisions of European documents in this direction are: to foster intercultural understanding, tolerance, mutual respect and ethics of global citizenship and shared responsibility; development of intercultural empathy and education, training of representatives of different nations, ethnic groups and peoples to consider, analyze and solve problems related to cultural differences; to cultivate in the representatives of different states intercultural attitudes, including the manifestation of tolerance, respect, curiosity and receptivity to other cultures; to ensure the acquisition by representatives of different cultures and states of cultural knowledge, both general and specific to a particular culture, paying special attention to contextual and subtextual cultural elements; to recognize the natural and cultural diversity of the world, to recognize that all cultures and civilizations can contribute to sustainable development and are its decisive factors.Analysis of the functioning of various structural organizations of the EU revealed that their professional and social activities are directed in two directions: conceptual (dissemination of information on new laws and regulations of the European Union in the field of intercultural communication), which ensures the implementation of the value component of intercultural communication; functional (organization of various cultural events, events aimed at cooperation between representatives of different nations, ethnic groups, social strata, etc.), which ensures the implementation of basic tasks by means of direct communication and various forms of intercultural communication (festivals, creative weeks, days of European culture in education and public cultural institutions, thematic exhibitions in museums, various choreographic and theatrical performances for children and adults, etc.).It is determined that the most relevant trends in the development of European educational policy in the field of intercultural communication are: the establishment of broad communication and partnership in various spheres of life, especially - education, culture, politics and economics; expansion of public interaction and partnership for peace with the countries of the Eastern region; search for permanent means of influencing public opinion on the rule of human rights and freedoms in relation to the will, cultural affiliation, recognition and acceptance of intercultural diversity; establishing cooperation between the Ministries of Culture, Education and Science, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs; development of the existing network of cultural, public and public organizations for the dissemination of knowledge and competencies in intercultural communication; further financial assistance and encouragement of exchange between scientific circles and practices in the field of international cultural relations.Among the barriers to the implementation of intercultural communication, the authors distinguish: creating and maintaining a comfortable psychological atmosphere for each representative of different cultures; ensuring tolerant interaction and cooperation; optimal organization of group cooperation and ensuring the implementation of the principle of diversity. ; У статті визначено особливості забезпечення міжкультурної комунікації в контексті європейських нормативно-правових документів. На основі аналітичного огляду наукових досліджень європейських та вітчизнянихвчених авторами визначено сутність поняття «міжкультурна комунікація» у європейському освітньому просторі та європейських документах зокрема; здійснено уточнення щодо різниці між поняттями міжкультурна такультурна комунікація. Комплекс теоретичних методів уможливив визначення провідних тенденції розвитку європейської політики у сфері міжкультурної комунікації, шляхи імплементації основних завдань таположень такої політики та окресли-ти її основні пріоритети і труднощі реалізації в сучасних суспільно-політичних умовах, що характеризуються нестабільністю та невизначеністю.Встановлено, що під міжкультурною комунікацією в європейському науково-освітньому вимірі прийнято розуміти такий спосіб спікування та культурного обміну, який забезпечує налагодження порозуміння міжпредстав-никами різних країн, національностей, релігій тощо. Пріоритетними цілями міжкультурної комунікації за положеннямиєвропейських документів у цьому напрямі є: виховувати міжкультурне взаємо-розуміння, толерантність, взаємоповагу та етику глобального громадянства та спільної відповідальності; розвиток міжкультурної емпатії та освіченості, навчання представників різних націй, етнічних груп та народів розглядати, аналізувати та вирішувати проблеми, пов'язаних з культурними відмінностя-ми; виховувати у представників різних держав міжкультурні установки, що включають прояв толерантності, поваги,допитливості та сприйнятливості до інших культур; забезпечувати набуття представниками різних культур та держав культурних знань, як загальних, так і специфічних для певної культури, приділяючи особливу увагу контекстуальним та підконтекстним культурним елементам; визнати природне та культурне різноманіття світу, визнати, що всі культури тацивілізації можуть сприяти сталому розвитку та є його вирішальними чинниками.Аналіз функціонування різних структурних організації ЄС дозволив, установити, що їхня професійна та суспільна діяльність спрямована два напрямки: концептуальний (розповсюдження інформації щодо нових законівта положень Європейського Союзу в сфері міжкультурної комунікації), що забезпе-чує реалізацію ціннісної складової міжкультурної комунікації; функціональний (організація різноманітних культурних заходів, заходівспрямованих на коопе-рацію між представниками різних націй, етнічних груп,соціальних прошарків тощо), що забезпечує імплементацію основних завдань засобами безпосередньої комунікації та різних форм організації міжкультурної комунікації (фестивалі, творчі тижні, дні європейськоїкультури в освітніх та громадських закладах культури, тематичні виставки в музеях, різні хореографічні та театральні постановки для дітей та дорослих тощо). Визначено, що найбільш актуальними є такі тенденції розвитку європейської освітньої політики у сфері міжкультурної комунікації як:налагодження широкої комунікації та партнерства у різних сферах життя,насамперед – освіта, культура, політика та економіка; розширення суспільної взаємодії та партнерства в цілях миру з країнами Східного регіону; пошук постійних засобів впливу на суспільну думку щодо верховенства прав тасвобод людини щодо її волевиявлення, культурної приналежності, визнаннята прийняття міжкультурної різноманітності; налагодження співпраці між міністерствами культури, освіти та науки, міністерствами закордонних справ; розвиток існуючої мережі культурних, громадських та публічнихорганізацій для розповсюдження знань та компетентностей у міжкультурнійкомунікації; подальше фінансове сприяння та заохочення обміну між науковими колами та практиками в галузі міжнародних культурних відносин. Серед бар'єрів імплементації міжкультурної комунікації авторивиокремлюють: створення та підтримка комфортної психологічної атмосфери для кожного представника різних культур; забезпечення толерантної взаємодії та кооперації; оптимальна організація групової співпраці та забезпечення реалізації принципу різноманітності.

The article proposes a methodological approach to constructing landmine signature model for specific aerial reconnaissance equipment, which allows determining sectors of the spectral range of both reflected and emitted signals from mines and the landscape on which they are installed, passing through the "transparency windows" of the atmosphere and can be detected specific technical means of reconnaissance of an unmanned aerial vehicle.An analysis of mine reconnaissance assets in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the State Border Guard of Ukraine showed that the disadvantages of the land-based technical means of engineering mine reconnaissance armaments should be considered their obsolescence under the global trend of the creation and use of robotic systems and systems in the military sphere. Modern means of remote aerial reconnaissance of mines using specialized UAVs are absent. This leads to the loss of personnel of engineering and sapper units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. During the execution of tasks in the areas of the ATO / OOS from 2014 to April 2019, these losses depots 125 people, of whom 36 died, and 89 were injured of a different nature.The aim of the article is to substantiate a methodological approach to constructing a model of mine signatures for specific technical aerial reconnaissance equipment for unmanned aerial vehicles.The term "signature" in military affairs should be understood as a set of characteristics of the signal emitted or reflected by the target (object), as well as the landscape on which the signal's target (object) is located, recorded by technical means of reconnaissance (observation).It is proposed to understand the model of mine signatures when conducting mine reconnaissance using specific technical means of UAV reconnaissance as a set of spectral characteristics of emitted (intrinsic) or reflected by a mine, or landscape, where the mine is installed, of received signals of various types of technical means of UAV reconnaissance.Using the proposed methodological approach to constructing landmine signature model for specific aerial reconnaissance equipment, it is possible to determine the sectors of the spectral range of both reflected and emitted signals from mines and the landscape on which they are installed, passing through the "transparency windows" of the atmosphere and can be registered with species technical means of reconnaissance of an unmanned aerial vehicle, will allow developing technical requirements for an unmanned aerial vehicle of reconnaissance of mines and its payload in the form of equipment for intelligence reconnaissance in the interests of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the State Border Guard of Ukraine. ; В статье предложен методический подход к построению модели сигнатуры мин для видовых технических средств воздушной разведки, позволяет определять сектора спектрального диапазона как отраженных, так и излучаемых сигналов от мин и ландшафта, на котором они установлены. Сигналы, проходя через "окна прозрачности" атмосферы, могут быть зарегистрированы видовыми техническими средствами разведки беспилотного летательного аппарата.Анализ средств разведки мин в ВС Украины и ГПС Украины показал, что недостатком, имеющихся на вооружении наземных технических средств инженерной разведки мин, следует считать их моральную устарелость в условиях мировой тенденции создания и применения роботизированных комплексов и систем в военной сфере. Современные средства дистанционной воздушной разведки мин с применением специализированных БПЛА отсутствуют. Это приводит к потерям личного состава инженерно-саперных подразделений ВС Украины. За период выполнения задач в районах проведения АТО/ООС с 2014 по апрель 2019 эти потери составили 125 человек, из которых погибли ‑ 36, получили ранения различного характера ‑ 89.Целью статьи является обоснование методического подхода к построению модели сигнатур мин для видовых технических средств воздушной разведки беспилотных летательных аппаратов.Под термином "сигнатура" следует понимать набор характеристик излучаемого или отраженного целью (объектом), а также ландшафтом, на котором расположена цель (объект) сигнала, который регистрируется техническим средством разведки (наблюдения).Под моделью сигнатур мины при ведении разведки понимается набор спектральных характеристик излучаемых или отраженных миной, или ландшафтом принимаемых сигналов, которые регистрируются различными по назначению видовыми техническими средств разведки БПЛА.Использование предложенного методического подхода позволяет определять сектора спектрального диапазона как отраженных, так и излучаемых сигналов от мин и ландшафта, на котором они установлены. Практическое применение заключается в возможности получения исходных данных для разработки технические требования к БПЛА разведки мин и его полезной нагрузки в виде аппаратуры видовой разведки в интересах ВС Украины и ГПС Украины. ; У статті запропоновано методичний підхід до побудови моделі сигнатури мін для видових технічних засобів повітряної розвідки, що дозволяє визначати сектори спектрального діапазону як відбитих, так і випромінюваних сигналів від мін і ландшафту, на якому вони встановлені, що проходять через «вікна прозорості» атмосфери та можуть бути зареєстровані видовими технічними засобами розвідки безпілотного літального апарату.Аналіз засобів розвідки мін у ЗС України й ДПС України показав, що недоліком наявних на озброєнні наземних технічних засобів інженерної розвідки мін слід вважати їх моральну застарілість в умовах світової тенденції створення та застосування роботизованих комплексів і систем у військовій сфері. Сучасні засоби дистанційної повітряної розвідки мін із застосуванням спеціалізованих БПЛА відсутні. Це призводить до втрат особового складу інженерно-саперних підрозділів ЗС України. За період виконання завдань у районах проведення АТО/ООС із 2014 р. по квітень 2019 р. ці втрати склади 125 осіб, з яких загинули 36, отримали поранення різного характеру 89.Метою статті є обґрунтування методичного підходу до побудови моделі сигнатур мін для видових технічних засобів повітряної розвідки безпілотних літальних апаратів.Під терміном "сигнатура" у військовій справі слід розуміти набір характеристик випромінюваного чи відбитого ціллю (об'єктом), а також ландшафтом, на якому розташована ціль (об'єкт) сигналу, що реєструється технічним засобом розвідки (спостереження).Під моделлю сигнатур міни при веденні розвідки мін із застосуванням видових технічних засобів розвідки БПЛА пропонується розуміти набір спектральних характеристик випромінюваних (власних) чи відбитих міною або ландшафтом, де встановлена міна, сигналів, що приймаються різними за призначенням видових технічних засобів розвідки БПЛА.Використання запропонованого методичного підходу до побудови моделі сигнатури мін для видових технічних засобів повітряної розвідки, що дозволяє визначати сектори спектрального діапазону як відбитих, так і випромінюваних сигналів від мін і ландшафту, на якому вони встановлені, що проходять через "вікна прозорості" атмосфери та можуть бути зареєстровані видовими технічними засобами розвідки безпілотного літального апарату, дозволить розробити технічні вимоги до безпілотного літального апарату розвідки мін та його корисного навантаження у вигляді апаратури видової розвідки в інтересах ЗС України й ДПС України.

The research aim of this thesis is to analyse the integration process of skilled immigrant women in Denmark. Special attention is paid to the labour integration dimension as an important part of the global process of social integration. The perspectives are those of the host society and of the originating societies of the immigrant population being studied. Gender perspective is also analysed. The unit of analysis is the immigrant women, of different origins and ages, and that has in common their high school education. It is assume that the Danish state has to resolve other immigration-related issues considered to be of greater importance: the problems related to the low-skilled immigrant population, which is difficult to integrate. The research is undertaken in the social context of the 2001 to 2008. The fieldwork focuses on Copenhagen and the Capital area. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND The objectives are ascertaining the extent of integration of skilled immigrant women in Denmark, knowing the obstacles immigrants high skilled women face in the process of entering the Danish labour market, determining the strategies they develop for the sake of achieving integration. Knowing where the immigrant society and Danish society meet, knowing the role of private and public organisations (such as the Kvinfo network of mentors that connects professional immigrant women with professional Danish women who act as mentors of the former in the labour market) in the social integration process of the skilled female immigrant population in Denmark. The hypotheses are, on the one hand, that there is a tendency among highly skilled immigrant women to try to recover their occupational status. This decision tends to hold a very secondary place in the integration process of the family unit, to the extent that it can be completely overshadowed as a result of the passage of time. The second hypothesis is that the increase of immigrant groups in Denmark will provoke a revision of the current concept of the "welfare state" due, among other reasons, to the role played by civil society via the volunteer figure of professional women. The third hypothesis, is that immigrants who are less skilled and more dependent on the Danish welfare system appear to be more likely to remain in the host country. One of the main objectives of this research is to extol the role of high-skilled immigrant women with the goal of recovering their professional status lost or undermined in the migration process. The final integration process of immigrants is understood as the result of the encounter between the aspirations and strategies of immigrants, and the characteristics and conditions occurring in the host country. The economic dimension determines the immigrant integration process in the host society, but there is also interdependence with the cultural and social dimensions. The integration strategies developed by highly skilled immigrant women depend on the immigrant's available resources; the rights and duties of the host countries; and immigration social networks. METHODOLOGY The methodology applied consists on a qualitative and quantitative analysis. There have been used both primary and secondary data to meet the objectives of this research. The primary data has come from open individual interviews; the secondary data comes from a series of document sources and specialised official statistics, including the 2013, 2012, and 2006 Reports on Data and Figures on Immigration Matters, and the Data Report on Integration, Welfare and Development, from December 2012. The Kvinfo Mentor Network has been used for the interviews, as allows access to immigrants who had spent a short period of time in Denmark. Later on the snowball sampling technique was used. CONCLUSIONS The Danish integration policies have been designed in a completely one-way manner. They are measures designed for immigrants, but without involving the efforts of the labour market Danish system representatives. Among the Danish values most admired by immigrants, it is equality of opportunities among citizens, equality of gender-related conditions and, as a result of all this, the security that this entails. However, there is also a side of the Danes that is somewhat criticised by immigrants: the certain coldness character, superficiality, and materialism when socialising. As a result, there is total unanimity among immigrants when asserting that they did not feel socially integrated in Denmark. This is also the reason they defend the need to participate in associations or organisations where it is easier to meet or relate to the Danes. The best strategy to solve the reservations of the Danes towards immigrants has the following ingredients: respect towards Danish norms and values; learning the language; and finding employment. The most important conclusion deduced from this research is that all women interviewed have an essential objective: to recover their professional lives or professional identities, accepting the need to adapt to the new demands of the labour market of Denmark. Additionally, given the natural tendency of Danish people towards associationism, immigrants quickly learn that the best way to make contacts is through organisations or associations. BIBLIOGRAPHY Boswell, Ch. (2003): European Migration Policies in Flux. Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion. The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Blackwell. Castles, S. (2002): "Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalization". International Migration Review, Vol. 36, págs. 1143 – 1168 Freeman, G.P. (2004): "La incorporación de inmigrantes en las democracias occidentales", International Migration Review, monográfico dedicado al diálogo transatlántico, 38 (3), p. 945 – 969. Jiménez Juliá, E. (1998): "Una Revisión Crítica de las Teorías Migratorias desde la perspectiva de género", Revista Estudios Migratorios del Consello da Cultura Galega. Centre d ́Estudis Demogràfics. Liebig, Th. (2007): The Labour Market Integration of Immigrants in Denmark, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, DELSA/ELSA/WD/(2007) 5. Liversage, A. (2009): "Vital conjunctures, shifting horizons: high-skilled female immigrants looking for work"; SFI The Danish National Centre for Social Research. Portes, A. (1979): "Illegal Immigration and the International System: Lessons from Recet Legal Mexican Immigrants to the United States", American Sociological Review No 34; pp: 505-518. Sassen, S. (1994): Cities in a World Economy. Pine Forge Press (Thousand Oaks, Calif.). Tapia Ladino, M. (2011): "Género y Migración: Trayectorias investigativas en América Latina", Revista Encrucijada Americana; Pp: 115-147.

Debido a una coyuntura internacional que analiza la concepción real de lo que debería ser uno de los intereses supremos de la política –la libre determinación de cada ser humano de este mundo- mientras procura su práctica de muy diversas formas, me interesa particularmente reflexionar sobre un fenómeno que ilustra, y preocupa, el futuro de la libertad en el mundo: cómo las democracias liberales, mientras se aferran con convicción a su sistema de valores, permiten, a su vez, la deslegitimación de todos esos esfuerzos.En otras palabras, en qué medida la dependencia del petróleo y la búsqueda de nuevas fronteras económicas inciden en el gradual deterioro de la esencia de la "libertad" a la vez que posibilitan su pisoteo.Este artículo busca analizar dicho fenómeno, trayendo a la luz algunos hechos y procesos ilustrativos.En primer lugar, debe ser analizada la indiferencia que por décadas enmudeció al planeta entero sobre las atrocidades cometidas en distintas zonas del ahora cambiante mundo árabe. La gran mayoría de los líderes en dicha región han faltado a los derechos individuales de sus gobernados por mucho tiempo y de forma muy grave, y, salvo esporádicos reclamos, Occidente siguió no sólo conviviendo con ellos sino que también coexistiendo: han ido desarrollado una cantidad innumerable de tratados comerciales con ellos a la vez que basado su industria en la dependencia del petróleo, recurso que aquéllos poseen grandemente. Deberíamos agregar a esta lista a otros países como ser Venezuela, Irán o Rusia. Igualmente, vale aclarar, la importante exportación de petróleo y la libertad interna no son incompatibles (1).Según Thomas L. Friedman (2), esta relación entre exportación de petróleo y libertad se puede entender como la financiación indirecta de la limitación de la libertad.Para este autor, cuanto más petróleo se consuma en Occidente menos libertad habrá en el mundo, ecuación que llama la "Primera Ley de la Petropolítica". En síntesis, durante gran parte de los últimos cuarenta años, el mundo considerado libre, mientras promovía la democracia, la transparencia y la libertad de prensa en cada parte del globo, al comprar más y más petróleo y al generar más y más tratados comerciales con estos mandatarios, estaba siendo su propia piedra en el zapato. Estaba poniendo en peligro a la libertad en aquellos países debido a la necesidad, a la obsesión por el crecimiento económico y a la ausencia de nuevas estrategias con visión de futuro –por ejemplo, de desarrollar nuevas fuentes de energía- que lograsen, por fin, disminuir su dependencia del petróleo.Vale agregar que esta dependencia ha permitido no sólo limitar la libertad en cuanto ellos quisiesen, sino también fortalecer sus narrativas sobre dicha palabra, las cuales, creo, nada tienen que ver con el avance hacia la modernidad y la justicia o hacia el liberalismo y el futuro.Siguiendo, la tergiversación de la palabra libertad es alimentada, además, por los afianzamientos en las relaciones bilaterales entre países violadores de los derechos individuales y democracias liberales.Por último, hay un organismo que se ha convertido en la institución de la tergiversación de la libertad: el Consejo de Derechos Humanos de las Naciones Unidas. Éste, lejos de funcionar bajo las pautas de su Carta –o sea, por aquellos estados ejemplo en materia de derechos humanos (3) - tiene, entre sus miembros, a países como China, Bahréin, Rusia, Jordania, Arabia Saudita o, hasta que saliera en la televisión amenazando la salud de sus civiles, Libia (4), y su labor ha sido tan poco creíble como el respeto de las libertades en cada uno de dichos países.Este consejo ha sido ciego de una enorme cantidad de conflictos mundiales, desde Chechenia y Darfur hasta las masacres en China y en Siria, y, salvo en las ocasiones en que condenó a Israel, ha servido nada más que para potenciar la indiferencia hacia las atrocidades cometidas en tantos lugares del planeta, y para reforzar el desprecio de la libertad en la comunidad internacional.No obstante, los sucesos en el mundo árabe han ilusionado a quienes entienden a la libertad como un valor humano relevante. Pero aún queda mucho por hacer. Las democracias deben unificar su discurso con sus estrategias de futuro; deben hacer corresponder su mensaje de libertad con el ejemplo de sus políticas -a lo que Joseph S. Nye (5) denomina la "tercera cara del poder", perteneciente a la categoría de soft power primero, y de smart powerdespués (6); deben, también, desarrollar nuevas alternativas energéticas que les permitan autoabastecerse en este campo así como también disminuir los intercambios comerciales con los países en donde la libertad es obstruida; en adición, deben desarrollar criterios educativos a la vez que incentivar la creación de asociaciones voluntarias basadas en la confianza que, en su conjunto, lleven el significado de la libertad desde el interior del individuo crítico hacia el activismo social, en pos de mantener la esencia de la libertad y de asegurar los avances en materia de derechos fundamentales en el mundo gracias al entendimiento común de la sociedad; y, por último, deben generar instancias de cooperación a nivel global que logren efectivizar dicha búsqueda.Por lo tanto, las democracias no deben dejar de lado sus intereses nacionales inmediatos, pero sí construir estrategias a futuro que permitan alcanzarlos de distintas formas y a plazos más largos. No es un tema de idealismo; es una estrategia mucho más significativa para alcanzar los propios intereses de quienes creen que la naturaleza de la libertad debe ser la condición necesaria para las democracias del mañana.(1) Los casos de Canadá, de Noruega o de Brasil son ejemplos sobresalientes.(2) FRIEDMAN, Thomas. Caliente, plana y abarrotada. Editorial Planeta. 2008-2009.(3) Díez de Velasco, Manuel. Instituciones de derecho internacional público. Decimocéptima edición. Editorial Tecnos. 2009.(4) UN Human rights council. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/membership.htm(5) NYE, Joseph. S. The future of power. Public affairs. 2011.(6) Y si los realistas lo tachan de idealista, vale decirles que nada tiene esto de herramienta puramente moralizadora, sino que, además, es una estrategia política tan importante para el avance de las democracias en el mundo como para el interés de Occidente en general. * Estudiante de la Licenciatura en Estudios Internacionales. Depto de Estudios Internacionales. FACS - ORT Uruguay

Hacia fines de Septiembre tendrán lugar en Venezuela las elecciones legislativas para su Asamblea Nacional. Como resultado de la fallida estrategia abstencionista adoptada por las fuerzas opositoras durante las legislativas de 2005, este órgano de gobierno se encuentra ampliamente dominado por el Chavismo. Aquella derrota dejó su enseñanza y los opositores se reorganizaron logrando la mayoría para el "No" en el plebiscito lanzado por Chávez durante 2007; plebiscito que tenía la intención de lograr una reforma constitucional que posibilitara su reelección indefinida. Este objetivo, sin embargo, sería alcanzado por Chávez en Enero de 2009, al tiempo que se hacía evidente la siguiente situación: en tanto ninguna fuerza opositora logre erigirse como legítima representante de un proyecto reformista, democrático y popular, las bases del chavismo seguirán respondiendo al llamado de su líder. Esto pese a la decadente situación económica, social y política que afecta al conjunto de la sociedad venezolana. Ocurre que habiendo visto postergadas las respuestas a diversas problemáticas durante tanto tiempo, las clases pobres y sectores de la estrecha clase media venezolana no son permeables al discurso opositor, elaborado, básicamente, en torno a la condena al estilo antidemocrático del gobierno de Hugo Chávez. Para peor, las credenciales democráticas de muchos de estos críticos se vieron seriamente afectadas por su participación o apoyo al frustrado golpe de Estado de 2002. En tal contexto: a) el progresivo recorte de las libertades individuales y políticas, b) el avance sobre la propiedad privada, c) el estricto control de los medios de comunicación, d) el creciente uso de la intimidación y la violencia, e) la estigmatización de imaginarios enemigos externos, y f) la depredación de la otrora eficiente industria petrolera, son los fundamentos en que se apoya el régimen Chavista. Son comprensibles entonces las expectativas depositadas por distintos actores domésticos e internacionales en las próximas elecciones. De acuerdo a las razones antes enumeradas, el caso de Venezuela puede comprenderse empleando el concepto de illiberal democracy introducido por Fareed Zakaria. (1) El chavismo puede autodefinirse formalmente democrático por celebrar elecciones, pero ha hecho a un lado el conjunto de garantías y libertades propias de la tradición liberal, sin las cuales no es posible organizarse efectivamente para la competencia democrática. Chávez ha demostrado gran capacidad para controlar a la sociedad venezolana operando sobre distintas variables en el nivel doméstico. Sin embargo, el futuro de Venezuela está tan atado al mercado mundial del petróleo como lo estuvo su pasado, y en este mercado no existen artilugios retóricos, políticos, legales o militares capaces de alterar cuestiones tan objetivas como el volumen de petróleo exportado, la inversión requerida, la ubicación geográfica de las refinerías que procesan el petróleo extra-pesado y ácido de Venezuela, o el rol de Arabia Saudita al interior de la OPEC. Recientemente se ha re-abierto el debate en torno a los motivos del fracaso del proyecto industrial-nacional venezolano que tuvo por corolario el Caracazo de 1989.(2) Durante años la tesis de la "paradox of plenty" presentada por Terry Karl (3) explicó el destino venezolano a partir de una causalidad entre la abundancia de petróleo y el surgimiento de aparatos estatales centralizados, corruptos e ineficientes que daban lugar a luchas facciosas por la captura de la renta. De acuerdo a esta tesis fueron tales luchas las que descompusieron el sistema de partidos venezolano hasta hacerlo colapsar. Jonathan Di John, en su reciente libro,(4) ha enfatizado el rol que juegan las estrategias políticas de desarrollo, de modo tal que puedan comprenderse las diferencias en la performance venezolana previa a la década del 80' y con posterioridad a esta. Sin profundizar este debate, basta destacar aquí que Venezuela es altamente dependiente de su industria petrolera y que la misma se encuentra en un profundo estado de decadencia.DependenciaLa dependencia venezolana respecto del petróleo se expresa tanto en el plano doméstico como en el internacional. Fronteras adentro, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) es la mayor empleadora de fuerza de trabajo venezolana. Es responsable de dos terceras partes del PBI, del 50% de los ingresos gubernamentales, y del 80% de las exportaciones nacionales. (5) No resulta exagerado decir que lo que sucede en PDVSA se refleja inexorablemente en la sociedad venezolana. La exportación de petróleo ha sido en el pasado, y es en la actualidad, lo que hace posible el financiamiento de toda política gubernamental. En el mercado mundial del crudo, cuya elevada integración comercial ha dado lugar a la expresión "todo el petróleo proviene del mismo barril," Venezuela no sólo es dependiente del mercado estadounidense, sino que no puede escapar de las dinámicas globales que determinan el precio del crudo o el tipo de combustible demandado. Los volúmenes de petróleo importado por los EE.UU. proveen a Venezuela el 80% de sus divisas. Además, es en este país en donde se encuentran instaladas las refinerías y distribuidoras Venezolanas Citgo, creadas durante la década del 60'. Este complejo es capaz de procesar el pesado y ácido petróleo venezolano que llega al país luego de navegar por mar tan sólo cinco días. Si bien Chávez ha publicitado pomposamente los acuerdos comerciales con China, el país asiático aún no posee instalaciones para refinar el crudo. Mientras que la construcción de éstas supone una empresa billonaria. Por otra parte, las transacciones con China son encarecidas por el costo que implica trasportar durante seis semanas el crudo desde costas caribeñas al oriente asiático. DecadenciaEn respuesta a la huelga que los trabajadores de PDVSA llevaron adelante en 2002, Chávez despidió a 19.000 de los entonces 39.000 empleados. Entre los despedidos se encontraban dos tercios de los operarios más calificados: ingenieros y directores formados en la empresa durante décadas.(6) Los conflictos gremiales no han concluido y la expertise perdida no ha sido recuperada. Las estimaciones más confiables calculan que los volúmenes exportados por PDVSA han sufrido una reducción del 42% en el período que se extiende de 1997 a 2008, habiendo exportado 2,95 y 1,71 millones de barriles diarios respectivamente.(7) Mientras los EE.UU no han tenido inconvenientes para reemplazar el petróleo venezolano por petróleo nigeriano, el país de Chávez ha experimentado una pérdida neta de sus ganancias por exportación. Tan grave como el hecho de haberse reducido sus volúmenes de producción y exportación es que la empresa nacional venezolana se encuentra trabajando en su máxima capacidad; viéndose desprovista de lo que representa en el mercado mundial del petróleo el mayor atributo de poder de un productor: la capacidad ociosa instalada. Si bien las posibilidades reales que posee la OPEC para actuar como un cartel regulando el precio del crudo a partir del control de los volúmenes que ingresan al mercado son objeto de debate, no caben dudas de que en ciertas coyunturas Arabia Saudita ha demostrado tener ese poder, así como la voluntad política para utilizarlo. Este país posee las mayores reservas comprobadas, y dada su dotación de recursos, su política petrolera consiste en la venta sostenida y estable de grandes volúmenes en el largo plazo. Un jugador así en un mercado tan integrado representa un obstáculo formidable para actores como Chávez, que sin preocuparse por los volúmenes producidos buscan realizar ventas al mayor precio posible especulando durante coyunturas geopolíticas o alzas de precios traccionadas por la demanda. Si Brasil ingresara a la OPEC en el futuro cercano con una política afín a la de Arabia Saudita, la decadencia de Venezuela sería puesta aún más en evidencia. El pico alcanzado por el precio del petróleo en 2008 debido a la pérdida de capacidad ociosa a nivel global fue un fenómeno pluricausal: 1) los mercados de países desarrollados exigen cada vez más combustibles altamente refinados generando un cuello de botellas en las refinerías, 2) las crisis políticas en países productores como Iraq, Venezuela, Irán y Nigeria resultaron en ansiedad y reducciones reales, 3) durante el periodo 2004-2006 la creciente demanda de China e India se hizo sentir en los mercados.(8) El boom ha pasado y la experiencia histórica demuestra que al repuntar la demanda, esta nunca alcanza niveles previos dado que los consumidores introducen medidas de reducción del consumo.Hugo Chávez se vio beneficiado por un boom petrolero que le permitió contar con cuantiosas sumas de dinero y financiar así sus políticas internas. Sin embargo, la industria petrolera que proveyó dicho bienestar se encuentra en profunda decadencia y revertir tal proceso implicaría un proyecto de inversiones billonarias y trabajo sostenido en el largo plazo. Chávez y sus acólitos no parecen querer dedicarse a dicha iniciativa. Las compras millonarias de armamentos a Rusia o los ruidosos vínculos con el régimen iraní, no contribuyen en nada para alterar estos hechos, sino que anegan cada vez más al gobierno venezolano en el lodo de la confrontación a nivel internacional. Las reservas de petróleo venezolano se cuentan entre las principales del mundo y por tal motivo seguirán pesando en el mercado global. En la actualidad, los países consumidores y las compañías privadas han aprendido a vincularse con Venezuela de manera cautelosa, adoptando estrategias adaptativas. Trágicamente, la sociedad civil venezolana se encuentra en una disímil situación: tiene que enfrentar un constante deterioro de su calidad de vida y convivir con la reducción de las divisas que sostienen a un gobierno incrementalmente antidemocrático.(1) Zakaria, Fareed, ¨The Rise of Illiberal Democracy¨, Foreign Affairs, Noviembre-Diciembre de 2007. (2) Con este nombre se conoce a la serie de protestas cívicas que estallaron en Febrero de 1989 durante el gobierno de Carlos Andrés Pérez en respuesta a su plan de reformas estructurales conocido como ¨el paquetazo.¨ Aun hoy se desconoce el número de muertos, pero se lo estima en cientos.(3) Karl, Terry. The Paradox of Plenty, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.(4) Di John, Jonathan, From Windfall to Curse?: Oil and Industrialization in Venezuela, 1920 to the present. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.(5) Sam, Fletcher; "PeMex, PDVSA, PetroBras: How strategies results differs", Oil and Gas Journal, 3 Agosto de 2009, Vol. 107.29(6) Espinasa, Ramon; "The Performance of the Venezuelan Oil Sector 1997-2008: Official vs. International and Estimated Figures," Energy Cooperation and Security Task Force, 26 de Febrero de 2009.(7) Ibidem.(8) Maugeri, Leonardo, ¨Understanding Oil Price Behavior through an Analysis of a Crisis¨, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2009, 3:2, pp 147-166.*Sociólogo, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)Maestría en Estudios Internacionales, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Tesista) Schusterman Center for Israel Studies Fellow, Brandeis University

"Ser cosmopolita no significa ser indiferente a un país, y ser sensible a otros, no. Significa la generosa ambición de querer ser sensible a todos los países y a todas las épocas, el deseo de eternidad." Jorge Luis Borges, Homenaje póstumo a Victoria Ocampo. "El que está en el extranjero vive un espacio vacío en lo alto, encima de la tierra, sin la red protectora que le otorga su propio país, donde tiene a su familia, sus compañeros, sus amigos y puede hacerse entender fácilmente en el idioma que habla desde la infancia". Milan Kundera, "La insoportable levedad del ser". En la primera parte de este artículo nos introdujimos en los orígenes del Cosmopolitismo a través de la obra de Kant, e indagamos en las implicancias que esta corriente de pensamiento presenta como proyecto político. Ahora, como segunda parte de esta breve introducción, nos adentraremos en los desafíos que el Cosmopolitismo plantea desde un punto de vista moral. Nos centraremos especialmente en las diferencias con respecto a las corrientes comunitaristas. La moral cosmopolita y sus desafíos De esta manera, e independientemente del atractivo que para muchos tiene el cosmopolitismo a través de formulaciones actuales – como los derechos humanos y sus pretensiones universalistas –, las justificaciones morales que dan sustento ha esta idea siempre tendrán al nacionalismo y su respaldo comunitarista como temible adversario. En una de sus clases en la Universidad de Harvard, el profesor Michael Sandel introduce las dificultades implícitas en la moral cosmopolita de la siguiente forma. Si el cosmopolitismo implica el igual valor moral de todos los seres humanos y nosotros, como tales, no podemos darle mayor valor a unos que a otros, cómo actuaríamos en el caso de que, supongamos, dos personas se estén ahogando, una de las cuales es nuestro hijo. No hay dudas de que, cualesquiera sean nuestras convicciones filosóficas, la respuesta está contestada de antemano. Pero, si ningún padre dudaría en salvar primero a su hijo, no es esa la más clara confirmación de que en última instancia todos le damos mayor relevancia moral a nuestras lealtades más cercanas en detrimento de una hipotética humanidad compartida, como sostienen los cosmopolitas. Y más aun, dicen los comunitaristas, ¿no es que tenemos una obligación de actuar de esa forma? La emergencia de duras críticas comunitaristas al universalismo cosmopolita generó una inevitable reacción intelectual para dar justificación a estas aparentes inconsistencias. ¿Es cierto, como dicen los comunitaristas, que quitarle valor a las lealtades más cercanas en pos de actuar en beneficio de la humanidad constituye una especie de crimen moral? El ejemplo expuesto por Sandel busca demostrar el inevitable sentimiento de lealtad y solidaridad que un padre puede sentir con respecto a un hijo, pero podría decirse al respecto que solo un cosmopolitismo radical podría concebir una moral impersonal al punto de desconocer los lazos padre-hijo. En otras palabras, y desde el punto de vista de las relaciones internacionales, no es en lealtades cercanas como la familia o la comunidad donde surgen los problemas que el cosmopolitismo pretende abordar, sino especialmente en la lealtad a la nación1. Veamos otro ejemplo menos comprometedor propuesto por Sandel. A principios de la década de 1980, una terrible hambruna golpeó a Etiopía, matando aproximadamente a un millón de personas y dejando a la población del país en una situación crítica que se agravó por la lenta reacción de la comunidad internacional y las dificultades encontradas para llegar a las personas afectadas. En 1985, el Gobierno israelí anunció, a través del entonces primer ministro Simón Peres, que intentaría repatriar a todos los judíos negros etíopes como forma de colaborar en la reducción de los daños. "No cejaremos hasta que todos nuestros hermanos y hermanas de Etiopía se encuentren a salvo en su patria"2 dijo Peres en aquel momento. El argumento de Israel era claro. Ante la imposibilidad de salvar a todos los etíopes de la fatal hambruna, se inclinaría por rescatar de unos 12.000 "hermanos", con los que los unen creencias religiosas y un pasado común. Ahora, ¿cómo evaluaríamos esta decisión desde una mirada cosmopolita? Ciertamente, el Gobierno israelí hizo prevalecer sus lealtades más cercanas (por cuestiones étnicas y religiosas) ante el deber de igualdad para con todos los habitantes del planeta que reclama el cosmopolitismo. Y es esta la principal disputa con los comunitaristas, que dirían al respecto que Israel no solo hizo bien en rescatar a los judíos, sino que además era su obligación moral, teniendo en cuenta no solo los lazos que los unen con ellos sino además lo que los separa del resto. La objeción del cosmopolitismo es también clara y tiene sus orígenes no solo en la moral kantiana, sino además en la filosofía política rawlsiana. ¿Cuál es, se preguntan los cosmopolitas, la importancia del hecho absolutamente arbitrario de haber nacido en una determinada familia, país o momento histórico? ¿Es realmente esa casualidad, de la que no podemos hacernos moralmente responsables, una justificación para salvar nuestra vida o condenarnos a morir? La decisión del Gobierno israelí y sus argumentos son para el cosmopolitismo totalmente inaceptables, y no porque renieguen de la existencia de las lealtades cercanas y de ciertos sentimientos de membrecía, sino porque rechazan por completo la existencia de las fronteras y las características de la nación como barreras para el efectivo cumplimiento de su ideal de justicia, que tiene su piedra fundamental en la idea de ciudadanía mundial, por la cual no tenemos mayores deberes con unas personas que con otras. Nuestra humanidad compartida se impone ante las identidades nacionales y al supuesto deber de solidaridad que deberíamos tener con determinados grupos en detrimento de otros. Pero debemos darle la razón a Sheffler cuando asegura que la ambigüedad de la noción de ciudadanía mundial puede causar ciertos problemas a la construcción del ideal cosmopolita. Comenta el autor al respecto: "For the root idea of cosmopolitanism is the idea that each individual is citizen of the world, and owes allegiance, as Martha Nussbaum has put it, 'to the worldwide community of human beings'" (1999, 258). Y luego se cuestiona: "What is ambiguous is the way in which one is to understand the normative status of one's particular interpersonal relationships and group affiliations, once one is thought as citizen of the world. More specifically, the question is what kind of reason one can have, compatibly with one's status as a world citizen, for devoting differential attention to those individuals with whom one has special relationships of one kind or another – either relationships that are personal in character or ones that consist instead in co-membership in some larger group" (1999, 258-259). La respuesta a esta pregunta puede ser atendida, en gran medida, por las posturas conciliadoras de Nussbaum y Appiah con respecto a la necesidad de reconocer la importancia de ciertos lazos, especialmente de las relaciones de familia, amistad o incluso comunitarias, pero sin dejar de reconocer, en todo momento, que todos los seres humanos son, tanto como yo, ciudadanos del mundo. Nussbaum se encarga de aclarar, incluso, que no es "malo" darle a "lo local" un mayor grado de importancia, aunque con un matiz nada despreciable con respecto a las posturas comunitaristas. La única forma de hacerlo, dice, es teniendo siempre presente que esto no se justifica en la falsa asunción de que lo local es mejor "per se", sino en el hecho de que atender a nuestras lealtades más cercanas es la única forma "sensata que los seres humanos tenemos de hacer el bien" (1999). "Los estoicos no cesan de repetir que para ser ciudadano delmundo uno no debe renunciar a sus identificaciones locales, que pieden ser una gran fuente de riqueza vita. Por el contrario, lo que sugieren es que pensemos en nosotros mismos no como seres carentes de filiaciones locales, sino como seres rodeados por una serie de círculos concéntricos" (…) "Alrededor de todos los círculos está el mayor de ellos, la humanidad entera. Nuestra tarea como ciudadanos del mundo será atraer, de alguna manera, esos círculos hacia el centro" (1999, 19-20). Appiah, por su parte, va más allá incluso de las concesiones realizadas por Nussbaum y reconoce la existencia de un patriotismo cosmopolita que, a pesar de su nombre provocador, representa un fuerte argumento no solo en favor de la idea de ciudadanía mundial, sino en contra de aquel callejón sin salida al que nos empujó Sandel cuando nos preguntó a que niño salvaríamos. "The favorite slander of the narrow nationalist against us cosmopolitans is that we are rootless (…)". "The answer is straightforward: the cosmopolitan patriot can entertain the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of one's own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people. The cosmopolitan also imagines that in such a world not everyone will find it best to stay in their natal patria, so that the circulation of people among different localities will involve not only cultural tourism (which the cosmopolitan admits to enjoying) but migration, nomadism, diaspora" (1997, 618). El patriotismo cosmopolita de Apphia es además un tipo de cosmopolitismo plenamente liberal en tanto se erige sobre la noción de tolerancia y en función de las virtudes que la pluralidad puede significar para cualquier sociedad que aspire a los valores del liberalismo. "Cosmopolitanism values human variety for what it makes possible for free individuals, and some kinds of cultural variety constrain more than they enable. In other words the cosmopolitan's high appraisal of variety flows from the human choices it enables, but variety is not something we value no matter what" (1997, 635) . Lo que el autor busca desterrar, en cierta forma, son algunas de las ideas relacionadas con el cosmopolitismo que hemos mencionado a lo largo del presente trabajo. Antes que nada, Apphia niega de manera rotunda la crítica según la cual el cosmopolitismo pretende un mundo homogeneizado sin diferencias culturales que destruyan las identidades locales y culminen en una especie de monolítica cultura mundial. Por el contrario, la diferencia es la clave para la existencia del cosmopolitismo, dado que sin ella éste no tendría razón alguna de ser. Es más, podríamos aventurarnos a decir incluso que sin la existencia del Estado-nación poco sentido tendría esta discusión. Pero la sentencia de Appiah es clara. La diferencia no puede ser asegurada a cualquier precio. Según su visión, unánimemente compartida por los cosmopolitas liberales, es innegable la existencia de ciertos valores universales; derechos y libertades que deberían ser asegurados a todos y cada uno de los habitantes del planeta por el simple hecho de serlo. Esta no es una discusión nueva. Francia, como muchos países europeos receptores de inmigrantes, conoce bien los problemas de las diferencias culturales. El debate acerca del uso del velo islámico, e incluso la deportación de gitanos, se enmarcan dentro de esta discusión. Pero también podemos encontrar otros temas más complejos, como el lugar de la mujer en las culturas islámicas, o la extendida práctica de la ablación de clítoris por razones culturales y religiosas en África. ¿Hasta dónde debemos ir para asegurar la diferencia? ¿Y hasta donde para detenerla cuando es ya intolerable? Estas son preguntas a las que no encontraremos una respuesta clara, mucho menos aun si reducimos la búsqueda al debate entre cosmopolitas y comunitaristas. Es por eso que el cosmopolitismo moderado y especialmente liberal de Appiah y Nussbaum expresa su respeto por la diferencia siempre y cuando esta no se convierta en una fuente de injusticia que permita a los Estados tiranizar a propios y ajenos como si la diferencia fuera una especie de cheque en blanco. A este respecto es interesante el aporte de Amartya Sen, cuando rechaza aquella vieja pero persistente crítica que pretende tirar por tierra los valores liberales universalistas acusándolos de ser occidentales y por ende etnocéntricos. Dice el autor en respuesta a un artículo de Gertrude Himmelfarb: "La afirmación de Himmelfarb de que la importancia de cosas tales como la justicia, el derecho, la razón y el amor a la humanidad no son 'valores de la humanidad en su conjunto' (lo que sería mucho decir) no me plantea una gran dificultad. Sin embargo, sí me resulta problemática su creencia de que estos valores son, 'predominantemente, quizá incluso exclusivamente, valores occidentales'" (1999, 141)3. Es justamente allí donde radica una de las mayores dificultades del cosmopolitismo frente a la amenaza nacionalista. La tentación que representa el refugio en las identidades locales ante las abrumadoras diferencias culturales, sumada a la dificultad para la identificación de lazos compartidos con los habitantes de lejanos países, convierten al cosmopolitismo en una empresa de difícil realización. Los derechos humanos, que bien podrían ser entendidos como el mayor triunfo de los valores universalmente compartidos se encuentran constantemente jaqueados por la política de la diferencia, que relega su cumplimiento, casi exclusivamente, al ordenamiento interno de casa Estado. Y lo que es peor aún, la última década ha presenciado la emergencia de una preocupante corriente que, encabezada por países como Rusia y China, – y haciendo usufructo de lo que antes nos advertía Sen – pretende "adaptar" los derechos humanos y las libertades fundamentales a los "valores tradicionales" de las diferentes culturas. En este caso, y si los países "defensores" de la universalidad de los derechos humanos guiaran su política internacional a través de valores cosmopolitas, deberían hacer todo lo posible para evitar el sufrimiento de los ciudadanos de terceros países, porque entre ellos comparten una esfera superior que los convierte también en conciudadanos del mundo. Finalmente, podríamos decir que el cosmopolitismo puede ser entendido como un proyecto político, pero su carácter moral es a su vez independiente de dicho proyecto, especialmente en cuanto a los desafíos y dificultades que plantea al momento de llevarlo a la práctica. Hemos visto aquí algunas de las principales dificultades abordadas por críticos y defensores, y es necesario advertir que la profundidad de la discusión podría ser aun mayor. Por lo demás, el objetivo de estas páginas es cumplir apenas con una función introductoria. Conclusiones A modo de conclusión, sería bueno realizar algunas precisiones acerca de las diferentes concepciones del cosmopolitismo que existen en la actualidad y que el presente trabajo no aborda en profundidad. Nos referiremos en este caso a dos grandes debates existentes en la academia y que no han sido aquí abordados como tales. Primero en cuanto a quienes conciben al cosmopolitismo como doctrina política en contraposición a quienes lo interpretan tan solo como una especie de proyecto moral (Dallmayr, 2003 ). Podríamos decir, brevemente, que la doctrina política pretende generar cambios en el ordenamiento del Sistema internacional que apunten a cumplir con los postulados del ideal cosmopolita. En cuanto al proyecto moral, deberíamos quedarnos con los desafías planteados por los comunitaristas (como Sandel) y las respuestas que aquí hemos intentado estructurar a través de los aportes de Martha Nussbaum y Kwame Anthony Appiah, además de algunos otros autores relevantes en la discusión, como es el caso de Amartya Sen. La discusión gira en torno a cómo se articulan lo local y lo universal en la moral cosmopolita. El segundo debate refiere a quienes creen que el cosmopolitismo se trata de una concepción de justicia global frente a los que la reclaman como una doctrina "sobre la cultura del ser" (Sheffler, 1999). Como concepción de la justicia global, el cosmopolitismo se opone a la idea de que las normas de justicia que rigen a los seres humanos deban verse limitadas por las fronteras estatales. Por el contario, para esta corriente, las normas de justicia deberían recaer sobre todos los seres humanos sin distinción alguna. Por ejemplo, y este es un tema muy debatido, tienden a creer que los principios de justicia distributiva enfocados en la generación de bienestar social deberían aplicarse al total de la población mundial. En sus variantes más radicales, este cosmopolitismo colisiona de frente con los principios del liberalismo.Por último, el cosmopolitismo que se erige como una doctrina sobre la cultura del ser se opone a la idea de que la identidad y el bienestar de los individuos dependen de la membrecía a un determinado grupo enmarcado dentro de las fronteras de un Estado o asegurado por lazos étnicos o religiosos. Las culturas se mantienen en constante flujo y el cambio es su estado natural, por lo que el sincretismo y la diversidad cultural no son una amenaza a las identidades ni a las "nación". Sin embargo, e independientemente de los debates que hemos introducido aquí a modo de advertencia, el ideal cosmopolita consiste, en su forma más básica, en la noción de ciudadanía mundial y la idea de que, a pesar de todo los que nos diferencia, la existencia de valores universales compartidos por todos como integrantes de la humanidad nos aseguran un sentimiento de pertenencia global que rompe con las fronteras del Estado-nación. 1 - No es está la idea de Charles Taylor, uno de los principales autores comunitaristas, que en respuesta a un artículo de Martha Nussbaum dice lo siguiente: "En ciertos momentos, Nussbaum parece proponer la identidad cosmopolita como alternativa al patriotismo. Si ello es así, creo que comete un error. Y ello se debe a que en el mundo moderno no podemos hacer nada sin el patriotismo" (1999, 146).2 - EL PAÍS, Madrid, 8/1/1985.http://elpais.com/diario/1985/01/08/internacional/473986823_850215.html 3 - En cuanto a esta idea de de justificar atrocidades por medio de la "diferencia", Sen agrega: "La libertad con la que crecientemente se prodigan rápidas generalizaciones sobre la literatura antigua de los países no occidentales para justificar los gobiernos autoritarios asiáticos, parece tener parangón en la igualmente rápida creencia occidental según la cual los pensamientos sobre la justicia y la democracia solamente han florecido en occidente, dando por supuesto que el resto del mundo tendría serias dificultades para equipararse a occidente. Quizá el mundo no esté condenado a ese punto." (1999, 143)BibliografíaAppiah, Kwame Anthony. "Cosmopolitan Patriots". Critical Inquiry, (23,3): pp-421-442, 1997;Beitz, Charles. "Social and Cosmopolitan Liberalism". International Affairs, (75,3): pp.515-529, 1999;Boobio, Norberto: "Democracia y sistema internacional". RIFP (4): pp. 5-21, 1994;Canto-Sperber, Monique. "The Normative Foundations of Cosmopolitanism". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, (Vol. 106): pp. 267-283, 2006.Cohen, Joshua. Prefacio. En: Nussbaum, Martha. "Los límites del patriotismo: identidad, pertenencia y ciudadanía mundial". Paidós Ibérica, Barcelona, 1999.Dallmayr, Fred. "Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political". Political Theory, (31,3): pp. 617-639 2003;Doyle, Michael. "Kant, liberal legacies and foreign affairs". Philosophy and Public Affairs, (12, 3): pp.205-235, 1983;Esposito, Carlos & Peñas, Javier. "La justicia como equidad y el derecho de los pueblos: Dos posibles lecturas de un ensayo de John Rawls". Revista de Estudios Políticos (Nueva Época), (87): pp. 221-237, 1995;Falk, Richard. "Una versión del cosmopolitismo". En: Nussbaum, Martha. "Los límites del patriotismo: identidad, pertenencia y ciudadanía mundial". Paidós Ibérica, Barcelona, 1999.Frechero, Jorge Ignacio."La Paz Democrática: Repaso y reflexiones sobre una 'verdad' debatible en las Relaciones Internacionales" .Letras Internacionales, (124), 2011;Kant, Immanuel. "La paz perpetua". Bureau Editor, Buenos Aires, 2000;Kundera, Milan. "La insoportable levedad del ser". Tusquest Editores, Buenos Aires, 2005.López de Lizaga, Luís. "Rawls, Habermas y el proyecto kantiano de paz perpetua". Daimon, (40): pp. 91-106, 2007;Naticchia, Chris. "Human rights, liberalism, and Rawls's Law of Peoples". Social Theory and Practice (24,3): pp. 345-374,1998;Nussbaum, Martha. "Los límites del patriotismo: identidad, pertenencia y ciudadanía mundial". Paidós Ibérica, Barcelona, 1999.Bravo, Pilar & Paoletti, Mario. "Borges Verbal". Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, 1999.Scheffler, Samuel. "Conception of Cosmopolitanism". Utilitas, (11,3), 1999;Sen, Amartya. "Humanidad y Ciudadanía". En: Nussbaum, Martha. "Los límites del patriotismo: identidad, pertenencia y ciudadanía mundial". Paidós Ibérica, Barcelona, 1999.Taylor, Charles. "Por qué la democracia necesita el patriotismo". En: Nussbaum, Martha. "Los límites del patriotismo: identidad, pertenencia y ciudadanía mundial". Paidós Ibérica, Barcelona, 1999.Velasco Arroyo, Carlos. "Ayer y hoy del cosmopolitismo kantiano", Isegoría, (16): pp. 91-77, 1997.*Estudiante de Licenciatura en Estudios Internacionales Universidad ORT-Uruguay. * Este artículo fue presentado en la 16° sesión el Seminario Interno de Discusión Teórica 2013, organizado por el Departamento de Estudios Internacionales de la Universidad ORT-Uruguay.

End Of Mission Statement Of The Special Rapporteur On The Negative Impact Of Unilateral Coercive Measures On The Enjoyment Of Human Rights To The Syrian Arab Republic ; 6/3/2018 OHCHR | End of mission statement of the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights t… http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23094&LangID=E 1/4 English > News and Events > DisplayNews English | Français | Español Go to navigation | Go to content | русский | العربية | 中文 WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS? DONATE HOME ABOUT US ISSUES HUMAN RIGHTS BY COUNTRY WHERE WE WORK HUMAN RIGHTS BODIES NEWS AND EVENTS PUBLICATIONS AND RESOURCES End of mission statement of the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights to the Syrian Arab Republic, 13 to 17 May 2018 Arabic End of mission statement 17 May 2018 Preliminary observations and recommendations I would like to begin this briefing by expressing my gratitude to the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic for the invitation to visit the country and for the openness and readiness with which it facilitated the meetings for my mission. I would also like to thank the office of the Resident Coordinator, the members of the UN country team and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for their invaluable support. I have been entrusted by the Human Rights Council with the task of monitoring, reporting and advising on the negative impact on the enjoyment of human rights of unilateral coercive measures. The United Nations has repeatedly expressed concern that the use of such measures may be contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the UN Charter and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States . During my visit, I had the honour of being received by Ministers, Deputy Ministers and senior officials of the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, Economy and Foreign Trade, Local Administration and Environment, Social Affairs and Labour, Transport, Agriculture and Agrarian Reform, Electricity and Health. I also met with the leadership pf the Planning and International Cooperation Commission, the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Chamber of Commerce, and with the Governor of the Central Bank. I was b riefed by staff from civil society, humanitarian organizations and by independent experts. Last but not least, I am also grateful to the numerous diplomatic missions that shared their views with me during my visit. I very much appreciate the briefings I received from the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia in Beirut prior to my visit. The purpose of this mission was to examine to what extent unilateral coercive measures targeting the Syrian Arab Republic impair the full realization of the rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments. I will present my full report to the Human Rights Council in September 2018. My present statement contains my preliminary observations on the outcome of my visit. I have examined the situation of the Syrian Arab Republic as a target of unilateral coercive measures 1 134K 118K 2290 6/3/2018 OHCHR | End of mission statement of the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights t… http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23094&LangID=E 2/4 I have examined the situation of the Syrian Arab Republic as a target of unilateral coercive measures by a number of source States. I have examined relevant evidence and endeavoured to assess the actual impact of such measures on the Syrian people. One source country has applied unilateral coercive measures since 1979, and they were strengthened in subsequent years. A larger group of States began applying similar measures in 2011. The collective measures call for a trade ban on the import and export of multiple goods and services. It also includes international financial transfers. The superimposition of different packages of collective sectoral measures, together with the across­the­board implementation of financial restrictions, are tantamount in their global impact to the imposition of comprehensive restrictions on Syria. Additional measures targeting individuals by virtue of their alleged relationship with the government have also been applied. Because of their comprehensive nature, these measures have had a devastating impact on the entire economy and the daily lives of ordinary people. This impact has compounded their suffering resulting from the devastating crisis that has unfolded since 2011. Singling out the impact of the unilateral coercive measures from that of the crisis is fraught with difficulty, but this does in no way diminish the necessity to take measures to restore their basic human rights as a whole. It is clear that the sufferings imposed by the unilateral coercive measures have reinforced those that were caused by the conflict. Indeed, it seems ironic that these measures applied by source States out of a concern for human rights are actually contributing to the worsening of the humanitarian crisis as an unintended consequence. The dramatic increase in the suffering of the Syrian people The Syrian economy continues to decline at an alarming rate. Since the application of coercive measures in 2011, and the beginning of the current crisis, the total annual GDP of Syria has fallen by two thirds. Foreign currency reserves have been depleted, and international financial and other assets remain frozen. In 2010, 45 Syrian Liras were exchanged for one dollar; by 2017 the rate fell to fell to 510 liras per dollar. Inflation has dramatically increased since 2010, reaching a peak of 82.4% in 2013; the cost of food items rose eight­fold during this time. This combination of factors visited further devastation on the living conditions of the population that were already degraded by the conflict. This has hit the half of working Syrians living on fixed salaries particularly hard. The unintended consequences of unilateral coercive measures This damage to the economy has had predictable effects on the ability of Syrians to realize their economic, social and cultural rights. Syria's human development indicators have all tumbled. There has been a staggering increase in the rate of poverty among ordinary Syrians. While there was no food insecurity prior to the outbreak of violence, by 2015 32% of Syrians were affected. At the same time unemployment rose went from 8.5% in 2010 to over 48% in 2015. Banking restrictions The most pervasive concerns I have heard during my mission relate to the negative effect that comprehensive financial restrictions have had on all aspects of Syrian life. Restrictions on the Central bank, state­owned and even private banks, and transactions in the main international currencies have comprehensively damaged the ability of anyone seeking to operate internationally. Despite nominally including "humanitarian exemptions" they have proven to be costly, or extremely slow, to access in practice. The uncertainty around what transactions do, or do not violate the unilateral coercive measures, have created a "chilling effect" on international banks and companies, which as a result are unwilling or unable to do business with Syria. This has prevented Syrian and international companies, non­governmental actors (including those operating in purely humanitarian fields), and Syrian citizens from engaging in international financial transactions (including for goods which are legal to import), obtaining credit, or for international actors to pay salaries or contractors in Syria. This has forced Syrians to find alternatives, such as hawala, which result in millions of dollars flowing 6/3/2018 OHCHR | End of mission statement of the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights t… http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23094&LangID=E 3/4 y , , g through high cost financial intermediaries, who are alleged at times to be owned by terrorist organizations. These channels which are not transparent, cannot be audited, and increase transaction costs remain the only avenue for smaller companies and Syrian civil society actors to operate internationally. Medical care Syria practices universal, free health care for all its citizens. Prior to the current crisis, Syria enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region. The demands created by the crisis have overwhelmed the system, and created extraordinarily high levels of need. Despite this, restrictive measures, particularly those related to the banking system, have harmed the ability of Syria to purchase and pay for medicines, equipment, spare parts and software. While theoretical exemptions exist, in practice international private companies are unwilling to jump the hurdles necessary to ensure they can transact with Syria without being accused of inadvertently violating the restrictive measures. Migration and 'brain drain' While the security situation was a central factor which led to migration flows from Syria, it should be emphasized that the dramatic increase in unemployment, the lack of job opportunities, the closure of factories unable to obtain raw materials or machinery or to export their goods have all contributed to increasing the emigration of Syrians. Some receiving States have selected skilled migrants, while pressuring the less fortunate to return to Syria. This "brain drain" has harmed the medical and pharmaceutical industries in particular, at the worst possible time for Syria. The anticipated end of the current conflict will not put an end to the flows of migrants, especially to Europe, in view of the saturation of neighbouring countries. These flows are likely to continue so long as the Syrian authorities are prevented by unilateral coercive measures from addressing the pressing problems related to their social and economic infrastructure, in particular the restoration of energy and water supplies. Ban on equipment and spare parts The ban on the trade in equipment, machinery and spare parts has devastated Syrian industry. Vehicles, including ambulances and fire trucks, as well as agricultural machinery suffer from a lack of spare parts. Failing water pumps gravely affect the water supply and reduce agricultural production. Power generation plants are failing, and new plants cannot be purchased or maintained, leading to power outages. Complex machinery requiring international technicians for maintenance are failing, damaging medical devices and factory machinery. Civilian aircraft are no longer able to fly safely, and public transit buses are in woeful condition. Whatever rationale source countries may have for restricting so­called dual use goods, greater effort is needed to ensure that goods that are clearly intended for civilian use are permitted, and that they can be paid for. Ban on technology As a result of unilateral coercive measures, Syrians are unable to purchase many technologies, including mobile phones and computers. The global dominance of American software companies, technology companies, and banking and financial software, all of which are banned, has made it difficult to find alternatives. This has paralyzed or disrupted large parts of Syrian institutions. Education Shortages of inputs, energy and water supply as well as of teaching material causing delays in the rebuilding of schools have kept 1.8 million children without access to their classrooms. The ability of Syrians to participate in the international community has been sharply affected. Syrians have been excluded from international educational exchange programs, and the tremendous difficulties involved in obtaining a visa have prevented many from studying or travelling abroad, upgrading their training and skills, or participating in international conferences. By removing consular services from Syria, countries have forced people including the poorest, to travel to neighbouring countries for such applications, which are also placing onerous restrictions on entry for Syrians. 6/3/2018 OHCHR | End of mission statement of the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights t… http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23094&LangID=E 4/4 Conclusion I am profoundly concerned that unilateral coercive measures are contributing to the ongoing suffering of the Syrian people. Claims that they exist to protect the Syrian population, or to promote a democratic transition, are hard to reconcile with the economic and humanitarian sufferings being caused. The time has come to ask whether these unintended consequences are now more severe than can be reasonably accepted by democratic States. Whatever their political objectives, there must be more humane means by which these can be achieved in full compliance with international law. In view of the complexity of the system of unilateral coercive measures in place, there needs to be a multi­stage approach to addressing the dire human rights situation prevailing in Syria. This would imply a sequenced approach involving addressing the crucial humanitarian needs of the population throughout the whole of Syria, without preconditions, when these touch on issues of life and death. A first stage could include addressing the urgent needs of the food insecure, which represent nearly one third of the population. The second stage is to translate at the ground level effective measures to fulfil the commitment of source States to meet their obligation to allow humanitarian exemptions, particularly for financial transactions. Finally, there must be a serious dialogue on reducing unilateral coercive measures, starting with those that have the most egregious effect on the population, along with those that will promote confidence building between the parties, with the ultimate aim of lifting the unilateral coercive measures. I hope that my report and my future work can contribute in this end. Thank you. Note: 1. More information on this prohibition can be found in the reports and resolutions on the website of the Special Rapporteur. Home CONTACT US Frequently Asked Questions OHCHR on Social Media OHCHR Memorial Employment Mobile App Site Map © OHCHR 1996­2018