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Until recently, Syria appeared to be locked in a stalemate, with few anticipating the rapid and dramatic turn of events unfolding. That is why many were caught off guard when, on 27 November, armed opposition groups launched a swift and coordinated offensive on Aleppo and other parts of the country. Less than two weeks later, during the night of 7-8 December, the rebel forces made their way into the Syrian capital, Damascus, putting an end to the Assad regime that had retained power for over 50 years. With the government forces offering no resistance, the Syrian President fled the country after being granted political asylum in Russia. Thus, led by the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – an Islamist group formerly linked to al-Qaeda – the rebels quickly took control of the country's main institutions. Such a fast-paced evolution in a scenario where many state and non-state actors have been involved since 2011 raises questions about Syria's political future and its implications for the Middle East regional equilibrium. On 7 December, the members of the Astana Process – Iran, Russia and Turkey – met in Doha to discuss the next steps. While Moscow and Teheran lost their historical ally in the region and appeared powerless to shape the events, Ankara is now seen as the regional winner. Certainly, its more active role could position it as the primary beneficiary of the Assad regime's downfall. However, the path ahead will be neither easy nor free of challenges. What is Turkey's actual role in Syria? What does it aim to achieve? And what are the implications for its domestic and foreign policies?Where does Turkey stand? The recent Doha meeting emphasised a commitment to United Nations Security Council resolution 2254, which states that Syria's sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence must be protected and calls for fundamental steps for a comprehensive political solution. Yet, much will depend on the intentions of the rebel groups and whether the international community will be able to create a cooperative dialogue with them. In this regard, Ankara surely has some cards to play. At the same time, aware of the volatility of a context where all actors' priorities are shifting, Turkey seems to be swinging between a "wait and see" and a "proactive approach". Although Turkish officials have denied all allegations of directly supporting the rebel operations, many observers pointed out how Ankara exerts some level of influence on the rebel groups and that their actions could not have started without Turkey's tacit consensus.[1] Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Turkey's policymakers could fully anticipate the magnitude of the revolts. This is because Ankara's relationship and leverage on the rebel groups is hard to discern. Indeed, the ideological orientations of the SNA and HTS put Turkey in a conundrum. The former, which emerged from the ashes of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), represents a heterogeneous entity that includes several Sunni groups and has been overtly backed by Turkey since 2017. While it is clear that the SNA could count on Ankara's economic and military support from the time of the first Turkish cross-border military operation in August 2016, HTS's position is more blurred. The latter figures in the ranks of transnational jihadism and is led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who now seems to be trying to soften the organisation's ideology in search of foreign legitimisation.[2] In this scenario, following a week of cautious statements by Turkish officials, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan demonstrated his increased confidence for positive outcomes: "It is our hope that, I will say that may this march in Syria continue without any accidents and troubles."[3] His words came just hours before Assad's fall, not only signalling Turkey's hope for a regime change but also its convergence of interest with the rebels' immediate objectives.Ankara's domestic agenda Indeed, one immediate development is the return of hundreds of Syrian refugees. Should this continue, Ankara would address one of its most pressing domestic challenges in recent years. Since 2011, Turkey has hosted over 3.5 million Syrians, an issue that has fuelled widespread public discontent, leading to a loss of votes for the ruling party. Compounded by a deep economic crisis, the issue of Syrian migrants was a focal point in the recent campaigns for the 2023 presidential and 2024 local elections. Both the incumbent and the opposition parties employed harsh rhetoric toward Syrians, pledging to repatriate hundreds of thousands.[4] At the same time, Turkey's strategic interests are deeply intertwined with the longstanding Kurdish issue. Recently, the Turkish government renewed domestic efforts to address the Kurdish issue. Both President Erdoğan and his ultranationalist ally Devlet Bahçeli recently made an unexpected overture toward the Kurdish cause, including a bold proposal to invite Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned founder of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), to parliament to declare the dissolution of the party.[5] This move by the government was surprising, especially considering that the PKK has been engaged in an armed struggle against Turkish forces since 1984, seeking Kurdish autonomy and self-rule within Turkey. This initiative might look primarily driven by domestic political calculations, specifically the need to amend the constitution and secure votes among the Kurdish electorate to enable Erdoğan's potential re-election bid in 2028. This might also come at the expense of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), which has been lately struggling to detach itself from the PKK completely. Indeed, the fall of Assad and the loosening of Russian protection over the strongholds of the People's Protection Units (YPG) – a US-backed Kurdish militia – open new avenues for Ankara to counter what it regards as a primary national security threat. To some extent, Syrian rebels have already pushed the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – a US-backed, Kurdish-led coalition of militias created in 2015 – and its affiliated armed groups out of Tel Rifaat, Manbij and Deir ez-Zor, while the destiny of Raqqa, Kobani and Tabqa remains uncertain.[6] On the whole, Turkey now has greater flexibility to either launch a military operation or support an offensive by the SNA to weaken Kurdish militias, especially those associated with the US-backed SDF. Thus, SNA and HTS have been functional in what Turkey has long sought to achieve: halting the Syrian government forces' relentless bombardment of Idlib, which frequently drove waves of Syrian migrants toward its borders; undermining Kurdish militias in the northeast; and – from a broader perspective – countering the regional influence of Russia and Iran.Regional triggers and outcomes Zooming out, it is worth noting how the timing of recent developments is tightly related to the broader regional and international dynamics. Indeed, this unravelling situation stems from the increasing instability in the Middle East, including the recent fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, Russia's and Iran's constrained capacity to support the Assad regime, and the deteriorated state of the Syrian government's military troops. At the international level, the transition to the new US presidency likely provided Ankara with greater room for manoeuvre. On the one hand, this could signal to Washington Ankara's ability to balance vis-à-vis Russia and Iran in Syria. On the other hand, since as mentioned the SNA has reportedly captured control over Manbij – a location of symbolic and strategic importance for Turkey and for the US-backed Kurdish militias – recent developments could also bring back to the surface one of the bones of contention between Ankara and Washington.[7] Indeed, since 2016, Ankara has launched multiple incursions into Syria. What was first aimed at countering the Islamic State in an international coalition led by the United States then transformed into a more unilateral modus operandi targeting the Kurdish "threat" along its south-eastern border.[8] In this context, although Turkish military operations against the SDF and the YPG put Ankara at odds with the US, they enabled Ankara to control a significant stretch of territory in northern Syria, including twelve military outposts in the rebel-held northwestern Idlib region.[9] Concurrently, the shifting power dynamics on the ground led to a balkanisation of Syria, where Turkey could secure its sway by balancing Russia and Iran through the framework of the Astana process. Now, the fall of Assad has exposed the inability of Moscow and Tehran to deliver the same level of military support and protection to the regime as in the past. While Turkey's exact next steps remain difficult to predict, current developments offer elements for informed speculation about its strategic direction. In the wake of Assad's fall and a potential Russian withdrawal, Turkey finds itself in a position of relative strength both on the ground and in shaping the regional set-up.Outside-in challenges ahead The fall of Assad presents Turkey with a pivotal moment to reshape its role in Syria, strengthen its regional and international position and address some of its domestic hurdles. Throughout the Syrian Civil War, Turkey's foreign policy suffered setbacks, straining relations with the US, tarnishing its regional reputation and making Ankara vulnerable to Russian leverage. However, now that Assad is gone, Turkey can sit in a stronger position at the negotiation table, as recent talks in Doha have already demonstrated. Domestically, the prospect of Syrian refugees returning home could resolve a critical issue that has eroded his support in recent elections. Additionally, business figures and building companies tied to Erdoğan's circle stand to benefit from Syria's reconstruction efforts, and a weakened YPG provides a chance for the President to bolster his nationalist credentials. The rapid evolution of events makes it challenging to predict the future of the Syrian Kurds. The Trump administration, despite appointing several pro-Kurdish figures, is likely to face a dilemma shaped by the complex realities on the ground and the involvement of regional actors. One factor influencing US policy is President Trump's desire to continue disengaging from the Middle East. Combined with the growing financial and political costs of supporting the Kurds, this could lead Washington to scale back or withdraw its support for the SDF. However, treading carefully is fundamental for Ankara, also to avoid any further escalations with Israel, another actor with strategic interests in Syria. Overall, much will depend on the capacity of HTS to garner international legitimacy. If the latter succeeds in gaining recognition, Turkey could enjoy a position as a key interlocutor with the international community. Thus, Turkey's potential gains come with leveraging the rebel forces. As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken travelled to Ankara to meet with President Erdoğan on 12 December, Washington seems willing to engage Turkey as a crucial player in shaping Syria's future. With European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also due to visit Ankara on 17 December, Europe is also trying to balance its position on the situation in Syria by keeping a dialogue open with Turkey. Sure, domestically, Syria looks like a strategic success for President Erdoğan. However, with Damascus now heading to a new but still unstable phase, Turkey should steer away from the hectic and unilateral actions that characterised its previous engagement in Syria. A more transparent and cooperative approach would not only help secure a smooth transition to a stable and functioning "friendly" government in Damascus but also elude the risk of new waves of sectarian policies that would undermine Syria's internal order, reinitiate the competition between external actors and prevent any peaceful solution of the Kurdish question. Without stability, Syria will remain a source of challenges, continuing to test Ankara's capacity and credibility to manage its domestic and regional interests without disruptive actions that could further destabilise the regional order.Riccardo Gasco is a PhD Candidate at Bologna University and Foreign Policy Programme Coordinator at IstanPol. Samuele Abrami is a Mercator-IPC Fellow, Istanbul.[1] Ömer Özkizilcik, "What Does Turkey Gain from the Rebel Offensive in Syria?", in MENASource, 5 December 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/?p=811798.[2] Jomana Karadsheh et al., "Syrian Rebel Leader Says Goal Is to 'Overthrow' Assad Regime", in CNN, 6 December 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/06/middleeast/syria-rebel-forces-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-al-jolani-intl-latam/index.html.[3] Turkish Presidency, President Erdoğan Performs Friday Prayer in Istanbul, 6 December 2024, https://www.tccb.gov.tr/en/news/542/155752/president-erdogan-performs-friday-prayer-in-istanbul; "Turkish President Says He Backs Rebel Advance on Damascus - Video", in The Guardian, 6 December 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/p/xx4adc; Ragip Soylu, "Turkey's Erdogan Backs Rebel Offensive in Syria", in Middle East Eye, 6 December 2024, https://www.middleeasteye.net/node/415041.[4] Yusuf Selman Inanç, "Turkey Elections: Politicians Vow to Send Syrians Back - But to Where?", in Middle East Eye, 13 May 2023, https://www.middleeasteye.net/node/288531.[5] Huseyin Hayatsever, "Erdogan Ally Makes Offer to Jailed PKK Leader Ocalan to End Conflict", in Reuters, 22 October 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/erdogan-ally-makes-offer-jailed-pkk-leader-ocalan-end-conflict-2024-10-22.[6] Pinar Dinç, "CMES Regional Outlook: The Fall of the Assad Regime: Challenges and Opportunities for Rojava", in CMES News, 10 December 2024, https://www.cmes.lu.se/node/1528.[7] Laura Pitel and Ayla Jean Yackley, "Turkey: Will Erdoğan Emerge as the Big Winner of the Syria Crisis?", in Financial Times, 9 December 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/74251ede-5441-4950-abc5-551944f767e0.[8] Burak Bir, "Turkey 'Cannot Wait Minute Longer' for Op. in Syria", in Anadolu Agency, 7 October 2019, http://v.aa.com.tr/1604934.[9] "Foreign Armies in Syria and How They Came to Be There", in Reuters, 6 December 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/foreign-armies-syria-how-they-came-be-there-2024-12-06.
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A "second-class woman […] who aspires to be like a man". As Miriam Coronel-Ferrer recalls, this is just one example of the antagonistic behaviours received by the women who were part of the panel of the Bangsamoro peace talks, which resulted in a peace agreement in 2014 ending the decades-long war between the Philippines government and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the majority-Muslim south.[1] Ferrer, who was the chief negotiator for the Philippines government (GoP), remembers that she was personally called a "traitor" and insulted on social media, with threats of physical and sexual violence and including demeaning comments such as calling her a "weak negotiator".[2] Unfortunately, this is only one instance of the difficulties women negotiators and mediators face across various conflict contexts.[3] Ferrer and her colleagues succeeded despite all the impediments and she became one of the few women signatories of a negotiated agreement. Like her, many other women develop strategies to deal with such barriers. Women who serve as negotiators and mediators (either at official talks or mediating local conflicts) constantly innovate ways to overcome various types of resistance to their inclusion in the talks. In previous research, I defined resistance to the inclusion of women as the behaviours of a particular person (or people) or group(s) that undermine women's inclusion in the peace or transition process, which can be categorised into three types of behaviour: implicit resistance, explicit resistance and coercive resistance.[4] The non-violent strategies used by women to react to these kinds of resistance can instead be grouped into two categories: contentious and non-contentious.[5] Contentious includes confrontational responses that do not refrain from escalating the verbal conflict with those who resist their participation; non-contentious include responses that address the resistance behaviour through dialogue and problem-solving approaches without escalating a conflict with the resisting actor.Contentious strategies Women negotiators use non-violent action to support their negotiating power vis-à-vis their opponents or competitors and to lobby for including accountability for conflict-related sexual violence as an action item in the negotiations. For example, in the negotiations over Kosovo with Serbia, Edita Tahiri, one of the Kosovar negotiators, organised the first Kosovar rally with more than 5,000 women against the occupation of Kosovo. This helped her to be nominated as a delegate for the convention to elect the presidency of the Democratic League of Kosovo (DLK) and secured her place as a member of the presidency, thus becoming the only woman in the leadership of the movement. Having a decision-making position enabled her to become the only woman negotiator at the Rambouillet Peace Conference in 1999. She also used non-violent action strategies like petitions to champion women's demands for justice concerning conflict-related sexual violence committed against Kosovar women during the conflict. Petitions and rallies were used by women in Sudan, too, to push the government actors to act in areas where they had promised to deliver on women's inclusion during the political transition talks and to hold them responsible for delaying implementation in this area. The second non-violent contentious strategy is creating alternative channels for information gathering in the negotiations. Women negotiators from different contexts have mentioned a lack of access to critical information in the negotiation process, especially if these women participate independently as part of civil society rather than as representatives of one of the central conflict parties. To overcome this problem, women across different contexts set up alternative channels to receive information about talks. In some cases, like the talks in Northern Ireland resulting in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC) relied on an influential woman politician who was informed about the process. In Sudan, women activists relied on social media networks to get more information. In these and other cases, women created their own information systems to ensure they were informed of what was happening in the negotiations. Thus, it is crucial for assigned mediators to hold special information sessions for women negotiators in the talks to make sure they are fully informed and have up-to-date information. As mentioned, this strategy was sometimes combined with women using leverage through powerful "friends" or allies in the negotiation process. These powerful friends can be women in high positions or men in influential positions who are friendly to the women's demands. In addition to alliances and leveraging with influential men, women reported other alliance-building strategies during the peace process in multiple contexts to leverage their influence. These include galvanising the support of international actors or countries supporting women's inclusion, coalition-building with other societal actors, and women supporting other women through women networks. Coalition- and alliance-building has been a strategy that women's groups have employed in various settings to overcome barriers, such as in Liberia: here, women allied with religious actors when their initial efforts to get through to the president and the leader of the armed group became unsuccessful.[6] The third non-violent contentious strategy is direct verbal confrontation and assertive pushback. Such confrontation sometimes occurs as a "friendly reminder" but other times can be quite antagonistic. Verbal confrontation results in escalation when the type of resistance is more direct and intentional, as in the case of Afghan women negotiators during various talks they were involved with. In one case, in negotiations with an Islamic armed group operating in parts of Afghanistan, the resistance of the representatives of the armed group to the Afghan woman negotiator from the Afghan government who was meant to read the final statement to the press was only overcome after her male colleagues in the delegation took a solid position in her support. Her team insisted that either she read it, or no one did; only then did the resistors back down.Non-contentious strategies The most frequently mentioned strategy, cited by more than two-thirds of the women interviewed, alludes to the importance of "being an expert" or "gaining expertise" as a key leverage for meaningful inclusion in a high-level official negotiation or a local mediation process. Expertise in multiple contexts helped women enter the negotiations and sustain their presence on the teams when they met with suspicion and resistance. Some women suggested that they purposefully introduce themselves, emphasising the "Ph.D." in their title, after they realised that this prompted more respect and acceptance from others in the talks and enhanced their legitimacy. Other women initially involved in the talks in an administrative or support capacity, such as legal assistant, managed to climb up in the negotiation team and took a central position when their specialised lawyer skills were needed, and they became indispensable in drafting documents and agreements. In another context, a high-level mediator reported how the request for her involvement always started with "support" or "help" and later became a significant mediation role for her but only after her performance was seen or, in her words, "expertise is proven". Others mentioned that they purposefully educated themselves on issues women were excluded from, such as economic and security topics. In the Northern Ireland context, women were prepared for all the issues in the peace talks, like the release of prisoners, addressing the grievances of conflict victims, economic measures, etc., in the working groups the NIWC had formed. This was instrumental in empowering them in the talks, not just on women's issues but also building alliances on specific topics with other political parties and increasing their leverage. Similarly, in the Libyan context, preparation helped empower women to achieve parity and act more confidently around powerful men. The second most frequently mentioned non-contentious strategy is using various dialogue and negotiation skills to overcome resistance behaviour. Almost all the women interviewed highlighted good listening skills in overcoming unsympathetic behaviours toward women or in overcoming tensions in their communication with some traditional authorities, like religious figures or tribal leaders. Many women interviewed thought they had better listening skills than their male colleagues, and listening to marginalised groups or armed groups without any judgment was something these people experienced only with them. Some women gave examples of how specific mediation skills, like reframing, were used effectively to address challenging behaviours, especially objections to gender-specific text in the agreements.[7] Women used reframing to move from an adversarial and zero-sum understanding to a non-zero-sum and consensual frame. For example, in the Bangsamoro negotiations, the Liberation Front delegates were not comfortable with the term "non-discrimination based on sex", as the term "sex" was found offensive by the group referencing Islamic practice. They then reframed it to "gender" in the text,[8] which read as "non-discrimination on the basis of religion, class, gender", which was acceptable. The Liberation Front argued that "men and women are different biologically and cannot be the same". This objection was overcome when Ferrer reframed the concept as "parity of esteem", meaning "equal does not mean being the same biologically but that each sex receives the dignity it deserves equally", which had a similar meaning but a different semantic articulation and was indeed acceptable to all parties. In another reframing example, a Yemeni local mediator faced pushback when she presented herself as a mediator; she reframed her role and presented herself as "helping to fix the road problem and assisting the community", which allowed her to be accepted as a woman. Women also used goodwill gestures and humour as part of effective communication skills. Sometimes, women used gestures in a tit-for-tat manner, reciprocating a behaviour they found offensive. Other times, women used gestures to break ice and initiate fun that they thought would help communication. In Northern Ireland, women used jokes to deflect humiliating comments about their presence in the negotiations. For example, one of the women negotiators in the talks in Northern Ireland was told by a Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) member to go home and have babies. She responded by singing, "Stand by Your Man".[9] In the Bangsamoro talks, Ferrer and her colleagues offered a box of chocolate to the Liberation Front representatives on Valentine's Day.[10] The third most frequent and most innovative strategy concerns various trust-building methods women use. Women from different contexts mentioned taking additional risks that pushed safety limits, which their male colleagues refrained from taking. Going the extra mile at women's own risk helped establish trust with conflict parties and facilitated their continued presence in the peace process. The idea of an "unarmed woman taking exceptional risks to her life but determined to pursue peace" had an impact in disarming or convincing the belligerent party and building trust with them. The parties later explicitly demanded these women as mediators or negotiators.Changing the behaviour to change the attitude A final strategy that taps into many of the already-mentioned ideas is "if you can't change the attitude, change the behaviour first, even in a minor way". Women reported this usually creates a ripple effect for a more significant and sustained impact. For instance, when a woman enters the process, even in a minor support role or as a technical expert, even though resistance occurs initially, it often subsides in time. It even changes the attitudes of those against her presence. It is more difficult to openly oppose someone's presence to her face, so when behaviours change, people usually adjust their attitudes accordingly. For example, because there were women negotiators on the GoP team in the Bangsamoro talks, the Liberation Front also brought a woman legal expert to reciprocate that. The same dynamic happened in the negotiations over Aceh between the armed group GAM and the Indonesian government. One woman's presence, which was opposed at the beginning of the talks, first triggered the inclusion of another woman in reciprocation and then, over time, turned into acceptance of their expertise. This dynamic has happened in many different contexts. A minor behavioural change may result in a ripple effect and snowball into an attitude change. These are only a few examples of how innovative women mediators and negotiators have become to overcome resistance to their inclusion in the negotiation processes. Although facing resistance is a distressing challenge to their presence and meaningful participation, it presents an opportunity, too, as resistance also pushes women to carve a role for themselves and leads to the development and innovation of new and cutting-edge negotiation techniques. This results in an added value for the negotiation and mediation processes as it equips women with specific features like being more adaptable and better-skilled mediators and negotiators compared to male mediators who hardly face such resistance while doing their work.Ç. Esra Çuhadar is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University and Head of Research of the Ottawa Dialogue, University of Ottawa. Çuhadar is a member of the Mediterranean Women Mediators Network (MWMN) and former UN standby team mediation adviser on process design and inclusion. Published with the support of the Mediterranean Women Mediators Network (MWMN), an initiative launched by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and implemented by Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) and Women In International Security (WIIS) Italy. The views expressed in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Network or the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.[1] Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, "WOMAN at the Talks", in Kababaihan at Kapayapaan, No. 1 (March 2014), p. 3-7 at p. 5, https://peace.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Kababaihan-at-Kapayapaan-Issue-No-1.pdf.[2] Interview with Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, Washington DC, June 2018.[3] This article is based on in-depth interviews with 30 women negotiators and mediators around the world. Informed consent was obtained for the interviews. The project was supported by the Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship granted to the author by the United States Institute of Peace to study resistance to inclusion in peace processes. For more information and further reading on the topic see Esra Çuhadar, "Understanding Resistance to Inclusion in Peace Processes", in Peaceworks, No. 159 (March 2020), https://www.usip.org/node/133636.[4] See ibid., p. 4-5, for more information.[5] Conflict transformation strategies were first categorised as contentious and non-contentious by Louis Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts. From Escalation to Resolution, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.[6] Leymah Gbowee, Mighty Be Our Powers. How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. A Memoir, New York, Beast Books, 2011; Julie Xuan Ouellet, "Women and Religion in Liberia's Peace and Reconciliation", in Critical Intersections in Education, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 2013), p. 12-20, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cie/article/view/17063.[7] Reframing in a mediation setting is changing how a situation is presented or perceived semantically by changing the language used to describe it, in order to create a new perspective on the situation and open the way for problem-solving. For more information on reframing see Brad Spangler, "Reframing", in Beyond Intractability, November 2003, https://www.beyondintractability.org/node/665.[8] Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, "WOMAN at the Talks", cit., p. 4.[9] Esra Çuhadar, "Understanding Resistance to Inclusion in Peace Processes", cit., p. 25.[10] Miriam Coronel-Ferrer, "WOMAN at the Talks", cit., p. 5.
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The ceasefire agreement regarding the Gaza Strip can be welcomed as a modest reprieve from the immense suffering that the residents of that territory have endured for the past 15 months. The Israeli military assault on the Strip has inflicted deaths that according to the official count has passed more than 46,600. This tally likely undercounts actual deaths by more than 40 percent, with the majority of fatalities being women, children, and the elderly. This is in addition to all the other suffering from continuing military operations. There have been more than 111,265 reported injuries, including life-changing disabilities in an environment in which Israel has largely destroyed the healthcare system.The agreement also commits Israel to allowing an increased number of trucks bearing badly needed humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. Other benefits include the release of a number of Israeli hostages that Hamas took in its attack in October 2023. Also to be released are several hundred Palestinians whom Israel has imprisoned. The Palestinians can be considered hostages, too. Although some of those to be released have been given sentences of imprisonment, many of the Palestinians Israel incarcerates are held indefinitely without charge, incommunicado, and without legal representation.Beyond those positive measures, there is little in the agreement just reached on which to hang much hope for significant progress toward peace and stability in that part of the world. Although a cessation of military operations interrupts some of the immediate suffering, it does not reverse the enormous damage that has turned what was already an open-air prison into a largely uninhabitable wasteland. The agreement reportedly provides for an Israeli withdrawal from major population centers and the Netzarim Corridor, in principle allowing families from the northern portion of the Gaza Strip to return to their homes, but many will be returning only to rubble.The agreement has the earmarks of only a temporary pause. The ceasefire is for six weeks, with any extension dependent on the success of future negotiations. A second and third phase are envisioned that would see the release of more hostages by each side and further withdrawals by the Israeli military, along with a reconstruction plan, but so far those phases are just outlines of objectives and not a real coming to terms. In short, the negotiators reached a short-term bargain while punting more difficult issues.There is little reason to be optimistic that follow-on negotiations will succeed and that the bombs will not resume falling. Hamas has been sufficiently battered that its leadership almost certainly sees an indefinite extension of the ceasefire as in its interests, but it will continue to resist giving up all its bargaining chips in the form of the remaining Israeli hostages without gaining more Israeli concessions in return. The biggest impediments to extending the ceasefire are on the side of Israel, where the political and policy trends are in the direction of indefinitely continued warfare.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had personal and political reasons to keep Israel at war. Continued warfare has delayed his having to face fully the consequences of corruption charges against him and the inevitable official inquiry into policy failures that may have contributed to the October 2023 attack by Hamas. His hold on power also depends on maintaining a coalition with extreme right-wingers whose only idea about policy on Gaza is complete elimination of the Palestinian community there.The most prominent of the hard right, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, has threatened to quit the government because of his opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza. Netanyahu probably believes he can finesse the conflicting pressures he is under with a combination of the boost in support he will get from a return of some of the Israeli hostages and the reaching of private understandings with Ben-Gvir and his fellow right-wing extremist, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Part of any such understanding would be the prospect that, after the temporary ceasefire that succeeds in repatriating some of the hostages, the Israeli military assault on Gaza will resume.Resumption of the assault may come after the six-week ceasefire expires and negotiations over phases two and three fail to reach an agreement. Or, Israel may find excuses to resume the assault sooner. Netanyahu has a long history of reneging on international agreements, dating back to the Wye River Memorandum reached during his first term as prime minister in 1998, which provided for partial withdrawals in the West Bank that Israel never implemented. More recently, Israel has repeatedly and extensively violated the Lebanon ceasefire agreement reached last November.Although both protagonists in the drawn-out Gaza negotiations will continue to spin the story to their own advantage, the change in position that permitted an agreement to be reached now but not a few months ago has mainly been on the Israeli side. Netanyahu had repeatedly insisted that Hamas must be "destroyed" for the war in Gaza to end. Negotiating with somebody one has vowed to destroy has always been oxymoronic, but now Netanyahu's government has reached a negotiated agreement with a Hamas that is very much not destroyed.U.S. politics, Israeli-U.S. relations, and the coming change of administrations in Washington explain the Israeli posture. The scenario that played out is the latest chapter in the political alliance between Netanyahu and Donald Trump, and between the Israeli Right and the Republican Party. Netanyahu aided Trump — his favored candidate in the U.S. election — by keeping the Gaza war boiling and thereby hurting the chances of the Democratic ticket, and then, with Trump safely elected, taking the boiling pot off the stove shortly before Trump himself takes office. The past incident this scenario most brings to mind is Wiliam Casey's striking a deal with Iran to keep holding American hostages until after Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.Trump's declaration a week ago that "all hell will break out" if Hamas did not release Israeli hostages was unlikely to change any negotiating positions, given that hell is a good description of what everyone in the Gaza Strip, including Hamas, was already living in. Notwithstanding this fact and the effort of the outgoing Biden administration to take credit for the ceasefire agreement, Trump will be able to claim that he is the one who made the deal happen.There remains the possibility that a renewed war in Gaza will, beginning a few weeks from now, become a problem for Trump just as it was for Biden. But two main factors will incline President Trump not to exert any pressure on the Israeli government to turn away from renewing its devastation and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. One is Trump's relationship with his domestic evangelical political base, with its unconditional support for most anything Israel does. The other is that his ally Netanyahu has done him a big favor with his handling of the ceasefire negotiations, and now Trump owes Netanyahu favors in return. Consistent with this, Trump's incoming national security adviser is exclaiming an all-in-with-Israel, "Hamas must be destroyed" position.This prospect for the months ahead underscores how the new ceasefire agreement does nothing to curtail long-term strife in Gaza's part of the world as long as the residents of the Strip and other Palestinians are denied self-determination.
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Last week brought us the news that Dr. Craig Steven Wright, an eccentric Australian who has long claimed to be Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, was bench-slapped by the High Court, where Mr. Justice Mellor ruled at the conclusion of the proceedings that Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto, not the author of the Bitcoin white paper, not the author of its software and, by extension, not the creator of Bitcoin.This bench ruling comes after years of litigation and weeks of hearings around the question of the provenance of the Bitcoin white paper and software. Full details of the court's findings on these points will be provided in a written judgment at a later date so I refrain from offering my own conclusions on the evidence, or an assessment of correctness of the ruling, here.As is public knowledge, I was one of the first lawyers – if not the first lawyer – to represent a client on the business end of Wright's years-long litigation campaign, when, in 2019, a Twitter user I know was the first crypto community member to receive legal threats from Wright's lawyers for claiming that Wright was not Satoshi, the very conclusion Mr. Justice Mellor also reached today. A short time later, an acquaintance of mine, Peter McCormack, dared to say the same thing. Peter was promptly sued by Wright in England. Wright won his case against Peter, albeit winning only nominal damages of £1 due to certain deficiencies in Wright's case.In my view, Wright's legal team chose to bring these claims in England for one reason, and one reason only: England is, and long has been, the easiest place in the English-speaking world to win a defamation action, because in England, the playing field is tilted so to the advantage of a claimant that even weak claims can win.This is not a new problem, and its roots go deep. Defamation is an ancient tort with its origins in the landed aristocracy seeking to protect their names and reputations from lesser men. The Anglo-Saxon tort of scandalum magnatum, a "fake news" tort for defaming great men of the realm (and thus not a tort capable of being inflicted on lesser men), was used as early as the 13th century. In later years, various other torts like seditious libel were used to punish political dissent – even where that dissent should be substantially true – and the imposition of these ancient rules in the Thirteen Colonies, most famously in the John Peter Zenger trial of 1735, served as focal points around which a new, young nation, the United States of America, began to develop its fledgling judicial system which led, eventually, to its free speech doctrine embodied today by First Amendment jurisprudence.In the modern formulation, defamation is the publication of a statement of fact to a third party, which is false, which is likely to cause serious harm to their reputation. In this respect it differs little from the tort in the United States. However, in England, the history of the tort – protecting the powerful from the powerless – has never been fully written out of its bones, because the burden of proof in a defamation action rests not with the claimant but with the defense. Not with the Saxon noble with the ear of the King, but with the humble pamphleteer who dared to speak out about his abuses. Not with the Member of Parliament accused of some lecherous or disreputable conduct, but the journalist who reported on it. Not with a person claiming to be Bitcoin's creator, offering nothing approaching definitive proof that he or she is (being a transaction or message signed with one of Satoshi's private keys), and armed with institutional financial backing, but the humble Twitter user who simply observed what appeared to be true, based on a cold assessment of the facts, and dared to repeat what he thought was true in writing. Put simply, at any time, in any defamation claim, the deck is always stacked against speakers and favors those who are most likely to be spoken about.On a practical level, this means that it is conceivable that a future plaintiff in England seeking to conceal certain truths or propound certain falsehoods, but with knowledge of the totality of the circumstances concerning that conduct, confidence that he or she can control those variables, and possessing the resources to reasonably predict that he or she will be able to use lawfare to intimidate others from discussing it, can stifle freedom of speech by using the threat of defamation litigation and, in some cases, being less than forthright with the courts. We need not look back to the Saxons to find a proven example of this: see, e.g., Jeffrey Archer, Baron Archer and former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, who famously won a defamation case against the Star newspaper over a visit to a prostitute whose life was ruined by the case in the late 1980s, only to be sent to prison a decade and a half later, when his testimony was discovered to have been false.The point is not that Archer lied, or that he was punished for a lie. The point is that his initial case was so weak that he should never have won a civil action in the first place, or assumed that victory was possible, but the structure of English defamation law made a victory possible if not inevitable, thus incentivizing Archer to bring it anyway. Requiring a defendant to prove the truth of his statement, particularly where seeking to prove a negative, can be nearly impossible. It is far fairer and in the interests of justice to require a claimant, who starts the dispute, seeks the remedy, possesses direct knowledge of all of relevant facts about his past conduct, and is the party asking the state to intercede on his or her behalf with the full might of its power, to prove the truth under these circumstances.I offer no view on the truth or falsity of Wright's statements or evidence in this case. That is a matter for the High Court to address in its fuller ruling. What I do know is that the question of the truth of his claims should have been addressed years ago in Wright v. McCormack, but it was not dealt with because the burden of proof was on the defense and the cost of going through the exercise COPA - a coalition of very well-funded corporations - just went through was likely too much for an individual defendant like Peter to bear. In future, it is possible to make England a fairer place for speakers and help the English marketplace of ideas be a home for the truth. Ask claimants in a defamation action to bear the burden of proving their case. It's a simple change. Parliament should make it.
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The gulf between the United States and the rest of the world — in particular the Global South — on the Israel-Palestine conflict remains sharp and wide. This was demonstrated yet again at The Hague last week, where the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is hearing a case triggered by a U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) resolution in December 2022 seeking an advisory opinion on the "legal consequences" of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.The case has taken on even greater significance in the current context of Israel's military action in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli assault (in response to Hamas's October 7 attack) has led to around 30,000 Palestinian deaths and widespread destruction of homes, mosques, churches, hospitals, and community centers with seemingly no end in sight. A BBC investigation at the end of January found that between 50% and 61% of the Gaza Strip's buildings had been destroyed or damaged in the war, while over 80% of the population had been displaced.This case also comes on the heels of last month's ICJ hearing in a separate case brought by South Africa alleging serious violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention by Israel in its current assault on Gaza. In that case, the ICJ issued a provisional order that Israel's actions in the current war against the Palestinians could plausibly be considered genocide. Other Global South states have initiated measures at the International Criminal Court. Overall, states representing close to 60% of the Global South's population have either directly or indirectly backed international legal action on Palestine, as our previous analysis showed.Last week's proceedings were the early stage of the UNGA-triggered case, in which the oral arguments focused on whether the court has jurisdiction over the matter. Of the 49 countries and three international organizations (the League of Arab States, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the African Union) that argued before the court's judges — the most of any case in the ICJ's history — only four argued that the court lacked jurisdiction and should therefore not render an opinion: the United States, the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Fiji.Although this round of argumentation centered around the question of the court's jurisdiction, the representatives who spoke on behalf of their respective countries presented their view of Israel's occupation as well as current and past military activity in Palestine. Cuba went as far as to explicitly argue that Israel's military aggression in the current war amounts to a "genocide." Several others, including Bolivia and Chile, argued that the occupation violates international law, and should therefore end.The extent to which this issue resonates across the Global South is evident in the fact that Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country and a U.S. partner, so strongly supports the Palestinian cause that the country's foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, left the G20 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Brazil to personally present Indonesia's argument before the court. She argued that Israel's "unlawful occupation and its atrocities must stop and should not be normalized or recognized." Indonesia sees Palestine as the last unresolved issue of decolonization, which it is mandated to oppose according to its constitution. Bangladesh spoke of violations of three basic tenets of international law: the right to self-determination; the prohibition to acquire territory by force; and the prohibition of racial discrimination and apartheid. Namibia also cited apartheid in its arguments, while The Maldives spoke of appropriation of water resources for Palestine, among other things. The African Union, collectively representing 54 African states, described "an asymmetrical situation in which an oppressed people is confronted with an occupying power."Other Global South states arguing in favor of the ICJ's jurisdiction in this case even called out the United States by name. Guyana, for example, said that the U.S.'s argument fails because the U.S. wrongly claims that there is an ongoing peace negotiation between Israel and Palestine, therefore leaving no legal authority for the ICJ to deliver an opinion on this issue.Algeria also explicitly said that this case not only stains Israel's image, but also hurts that of the United States, as the U.S. government continues to support Israel despite its continued violation of international law.Fiji was the only Global South state in the hearings to broadly align with Israel and the United States in its arguments. It argued that a two-state solution could only come about when (Palestinian) terrorism ended. It also stated that Israel had not agreed to the case, the ICJ approach circumvents the Oslo process, and the information available to the court was one-sided. Additionally, Zambia struck a cautious tone, supporting a two-state solution but also saying that a solution should not "squarely blame one party."The deep opposition to U.S. and Israeli positions was not just confined to the Global South. Most core U.S. allies in the Global North were also opposed. For example, France argued that Israel's settlements in Palestine are illegal. France also asked the court to render an opinion on the extent to which the Palestinians have suffered damages, and asked that the court consider how much restitution or compensation is appropriate for the damages suffered by Palestinians under Israeli occupation.Even the United Kingdom — the lone core U.S. ally aligned with American and Israeli positions in the case — called out Israel's occupation. The country's representative stated that although the UK opposes ICJ jurisdiction in this case, in part because the scope of a fact-finding mission would be too broad in the context of an ongoing conflict, Israel's continued and expanding occupation of Palestine is illegal under international law.China and Russia, the two great power rivals of the United States, both supported the majority opinion, arguing in favor of the ICJ's jurisdiction in the case and against Israel's occupation of Palestine.This comes as growing security, economic, and political ties are being formed by the Chinese and Russians with states across the Global South. The Russian mercenary group known as the Wagner Group — recently rebranded as Africa Corps — has tapped into strong anti-Western sentiment to form military and security ties with states across central and west Africa, largely replacing unpopular and outdated U.S. and French security projects in the area. Meanwhile, China continues to promote its Belt and Road Initiative globally, connecting with countries across the world, claiming to meet their economic demands and support development projects. China and Russia's positions against the Israeli occupation of Palestine have only hardened in recent months.Both China and Russia are also leading members of BRICS, in which they are in a de facto coalition with leading middle powers of the Global South looking to plug existing and major gaps in the current international system as well as prominently project their voice on the global stage.Washington's isolation on Palestine may not have mattered much if we were still in a unipolar world. But with relative power slowly diffusing away from Washington, the United States may benefit from shifting its policies and bridging its position with the rest of the world on the highly emotive issue of Palestine that is causing enormous human suffering and already beginning to destabilize the wider region.
The Chameleon Literary Journal has served as Norwich University's arts and creative writing magazine since 1961. Under the mentorship of its advisor Professor Sean Prentiss, third-year student Lydia Brown analyzed all past publishings in order to understand the extent to which Norwich University students represented LGBTQ+ members, people of color, and women throughout the years. This internship also allowed her to explore the overall history of The Chameleon Literary Journal, including its distinct differences from era to era. As the final product, such findings were accumulated over the course of a single semester and comprised into the following written report. ; Winner of the 2022 Friends of the Kreitzberg Library Award for Outstanding Research in the University Archives category. ; Brown 1 Looking Back on the Representation of LGBTQ+ Members, People of Color, & Women An Analysis of The Chameleon Literary Journal, 1961 — Present Lydia Brown Department of English & Communications, Norwich University EN 415: English Internship Professor Sean Prentiss Fall 2021 Brown 2 Abstract The Chameleon Literary Journal has served as Norwich University's arts and creative writing magazine since 1961. Under the mentorship of its advisor Professor Sean Prentiss, third-year student Lydia Brown analyzed all past publishings in order to understand the extent to which Norwich University students represented LGBTQ+ members, people of color, and women throughout the years. This internship also allowed her to explore the overall history of The Chameleon Literary Journal, including its distinct differences from era to era. As the final product, such findings were accumulated over the course of a single semester and comprised into the following written report. Brown 3 The Chameleon | 1961 - Present Brief Historical Background Founded in 1961, The Chameleon Literary Journal continues to serve as Norwich University's arts and creative writing magazine under a team of student editors. Norwich University undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to submit various pieces for review, such as visual arts, drama, poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. Sean Prentiss, a published author and professor of creative writing, was selected to be the advisor of the journal when he arrived on campus in 2012. Since his arrival, he has assisted the journal in becoming multilingual by translating students' creative writing pieces into multiple languages. In addition, three-four creative writing awards are issued annually to writers who distinguish themselves amongst the rest of the student body. Brown 4 Introduction Significance of Representation Representation is a system for unambiguously organizing values, ideas, and conduct — all of which enable communication and social exchange amongst members of a particular group or community. From birth onward, an individual's self-c 1 oncept and values are affected by the surrounding environment. Adolescence is an especially critical period for identity development as the classroom serves as the primary site of socialization, although the American K-12 and college school systems have previously marginalized students who were perceived as different. Women are also encouraged from an early age to adhere to the traditional role of a homemaker, rather than pursue vocational training, higher education, and careers in STEM. As the reader will observe in the following excerpts from The Chameleon Literary Journal, Norwich University is no stranger to marginalization as women were not officially admitted for enrollment prior to the mid-1970s. Telltale signs found in the language used by Norwich student contributors indicate that slurs, stereotypes, and insults used against minorities and women were normalized for much of the Chameleon's history. It was not until the early 2000s that there appears to be a significant social shift within the student body due to the increasing presence of minorities and women on campus. Based on these findings, American society seemed to finally be becoming more inclusive, allowing minority Norwich students to express themselves freely, develop social stability, and gain a sense of acknowledgment through positive identity formation as well as representation. 1 "APA Dictionary of Psychology." American Psychological Association, https://dictionary.apa.org/social-representation. Brown 5 Baby Boomers | 1946 - 1964 Brief Historical Background Following World War II and the Great Depression, a significant spike in birth rates occurred throughout the United States. Approximately 76.4 million babies were born over the course of these nineteen years. Most historians claim that this phenomenon stems from the general population's desire to establish their own families — an undertaking that was previously postponed due to World War II. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act also gave soldiers an additional reason to have larger families as the G.I. Bill granted stipends for college tuition, job-finding assistance, and housing expenses. During this time period, economic growth began to increase and the majority of Americans had an optimistic outlook for the future. This encouraged families to relocate from the sparse countryside to the bustling atmospheres of nearby cities. Once these cities were overcrowded by newcomers, plans for large residential communities were undertaken by housing pioneer William Levitt who created the suburbs as a result.2 However, those with xenophobic tendencies followed quickly relocated to the suburbs as cities became miniature melting pots of integrated immigrants with various political, social, and economic backgrounds. This sparked disputes among the American people as legalized statutes remained persistent in enforcing segregation at both the state and local capacity.3 2 Nohria, Nitin, Anthony Mayo, and Mark Benson. "William Levitt, Levittown and the Creation of American Suburbia." Harvard Business School Case 406-062, December 2005. (Revised March 2010.) 3 The first three years of the Chameleon were released during the Baby Boomers generation but were mostly written by students who were born during the Silent Generation (1928-1945). Brown 6 Baby Boomers Overview of Significant Events • Brown v. Board of Education becomes a landmark Supreme Court case (1954). • Civil Rights Movement begins (1954). • Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a public bus (1955). • Montgomery Bus Boycott tackles segregation on the public transit system (1955). • Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American, is lynched in Mississippi (1955). • 1956 Sugar Bowl becomes the first integrated college football game in the South (1956). • Civil Rights Act becomes the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875 (1957). • Little Rock Crisis prevents students from enrolling in a racially segregated school (1957). • Greensboro sit-ins initiate protests regarding the South's policy of segregation (1960). • Nashville sit-ins initiate protests regarding the South's policy of segregation (1960). • Gay Liberation Movement begins (1960). • Alliance for Progress initiates improved economic cooperation with Latin America (1961). • Katherine Johnson assists NASA's 1962 Friendship 7 Mission (1962). • Civil Rights Act establishes federal inspection of voter registration polls (1960). • Children's Crusade addresses segregation within the school system (1963). • Martin Luther King Jr. leads the March on Washington (1963). • Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique (1963). • President Johnson proposes the Great Society to combat poverty and racial injustice (1963). • Civil Rights Act outlaws discrimination based on race, religion, and sex (1964). Brown 7 Baby Boomers The Chameleon Highlights "A young woman driving a truck!? That was unusual, no doubt about it…Stupid woman, all guts, and no brains! … Maybe you can imagine what went on inside the young man when an officer stopped him and hurriedly said; Never mind, mister, there's nothin' you can do, she's dead, just some dirty n***** woman truck driver" (1963). 4 —- An excerpt from "The Wanderers" by R. Reid The use of profanities towards both people of color and women appears to be a commonality amongst Norwich student contributors from the Chameleon's founding in 1961 through much of the decade. In this short story, "The Wanderers," terms such as stupid and dirty are used to target a woman of color for being a trucker. The author continues to expand the character's description by using calling the woman the N-word. Deriving from the Spanish word negro, the N-word is now considered taboo as its connotation has been predominantly used by white people to demean those of color. Black social identity has been especially damaged by the usage of this word as it severs their overall sense of national belonging. 5 4 Complete usage of the word is censored in respect of the black community. 5 Pryor, Elizabeth Stordeur. "The Etymology of N*****: Resistance, Politics, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North." Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War, 2016, https:// doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628578.003.0002. Brown 8 "…I saw everything. The city has been purified, swept clean, and now fosters only the black scars and in glorious moments of the past…You liar! You had to see the city die! You had to see it spill its false entrails out in the rotten streets to be devoured by the cleansing fires. This place is no longer dirty…" (1961). —- An excerpt from "The Dream Monger" by Anonymous In this short story, "The Dream Monger," the phrase cleansing fires reveals itself to be the cause of death and destruction. Like the Holocaust, mass genocides often surround ideologies associated with ethnic cleansing. This allows for a geographical area to become ethnically homogeneous under an establishment of power. In 20th-century America, for example, Anglo- American colonialism constituted the genocide of countless Natives in America and around the world. Such events will never be widely coined as genocide, however, due to the number of those who survived exploitation, disease, malnutrition, and neglect. 6 The term black scars also leads to further speculation that this short story may involve post-slavery events of America's racial segregation system. One of which included the Tulsa race massacre, decimating the Black business ecosystem and killing 6,000 community members. 7 Many other excerpts were found focusing on a more negative portrayal of the BIPOC community and women, although there was no mention of LGBTQ+ members.8 6 Anderson, Gary C. Ethnic Cleansing & the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America. University Of Oklahoma Press, 2015. 7 Kapadia, Reshma. "The Tulsa Massacre Left a Lasting Impact on Wealth." Trade Journal, vol. 101, no. 22, 31 May 2021. 8 Many other excerpts were found focusing on a more negative portrayal of the BIPOC community and women during this time. However, there was no mention of LGBTQ+ members. Brown 9 Generation X | 1965 - 1980 Brief Historical Background Those who grew up during this time were accustomed to having a sense of independence from an early age. This was caused by the increased divorce rates throughout the United States, the unique dynamics of single-parent households, and dual-income parents who were not able to spend as much time at home. Most parents found a life-long career in computers, business management, construction, or transportation. Although routinely working long hours, they still managed to find a healthy balance between exhibiting their creative freedoms within the workplace and maintaining personal relationships with their children. Also referred to as latchkey kids, Gen Xers often spent their downtime conversing with friends via email, channel surfing on the television, or playing video games. They also seemed to have a deep interest in musical genres associated with social-tribal identities, including punk rock and heavy metal. This meant that music became an important self-identifying factor, even influencing the type of attire an individual wore on a daily basis. In the 1960s and 1970s, a countercultural movement known as the hippie era catalyzed other self-identifying factors — especially for those who identified as members of the LGBTQ+ community. American writer Allen Ginsberg formed the core of the movement as he openly opposed all military efforts, sexual repression, and capitalism.9 Ginsburg also identified as gay, serving as positive a role model for members of the LGBTQ+ community and allies alike. 10 9 Silos, Jill Katherine. "Everybody Get Together: The Sixties Counterculture & Public Space, 1964-1967." University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2003. 10 Eleven years of Chameleon issues were released during Generation X but were mostly written by students who were born during the Baby Boomers generation (1946-1964). Brown 10 Generation X Overview of Significant Events • Selma to Montgomery marches promote voting rights for African Americans (1965). • Thurgood Marshall becomes the first African American Supreme Court Justice (1965). • Immigration & Nationality Act outlaws de facto discrimination against immigrants (1965). • Voting Act outlaws racial discrimination in voting (1965). • Malcolm X is assassinated (1965). • Watts Riots occur in light of Marquette Frye's arrest (1965). • Nation Organization for Women is established (1966). • American Indian Movement is founded (1967). • Detroit Riot sheds blood between black residents and the Detroit Police Department (1967). • Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated (1968). • Fair Housing Act outlaws discrimination regarding housing (1968). • Shirley Chisholm becomes the first black woman elected to Congress (1968). • East Los Angeles Walkouts are organized by Mexican American students (1968). • Stonewall Riots call for LGBTQ+ members to respond to police raids (1969). • Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg becomes a landmark Supreme Court case (1971). • AIM protests against injustice under law enforcement towards Native Americans (1972). • Roe v. Wade becomes a landmark Supreme Court case (1973). • Billie Jean King wins the "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match (1973). • Beverly Johnson becomes the first black model on the cover of Vogue (1974). Brown 11 Generation X Relevance to The Chameleon "The pedestrian Walks, talks, and discriminates On such vital and valid criteria as Color, breeding and religion. Sees sex, and is offended. Grows indignant. Has a firm conviction that freedom of speech sometimes goes too far When it lets Martin Luther King "cause trouble" and "incite" riots" (1965). —- An excerpt from "The Pedestrian" by Jacob Sartz Unlike most pieces of writing from the 1960s publishings, this free verse poem seems to call out the discriminatory tendencies of others. The author especially targets any person whose ideologies are rooted in racism, sexism, and other gateways leading to unequal treatment. By labeling them as the pedestrian, such subtlety creates an effect where anyone can be the principal character and thus the reader may begin to question their own actions. As the author begins to shift towards a more political ambiance, African American activist Martin Luther King Jr. is mentioned. From the pedestrian's perspective, however, King is known to overstep the principle of free speech with the exception of cases where it benefits the white majority. Brown 12 "He had gone through a variety of different girls in the next six years, and he had accumulated an assortment of different names in his address book, including a few of the local sweethearts that he'd called up in dire sexual emergencies… When he had heard that his little "streetlight girl" had been married, he put a check next to her name in the book as he had done for several other old flames that had been put out of commission for one reason or another. He thought of her a little while after that, but closed the book as he had always done" (1970). —- An excerpt from "The Street Light" by Paul LeSage Unlike our example directly above, there are several alarming factors sprinkled throughout this short story, revealing how a man uses the sexual objectification of women to his advantage. The man's use of an address book further proves this implication as the women he has been sexually involved with are jotted down in writing. Visually speaking, the reader may think of a grocery list or an inventory of stock goods when it comes to the address book's description. The man proceeds to check off the women who no longer sexually benefit him all while refusing to use their real names, ultimately dehumanizing them in the process. This allows the reader to further explore the harmful effects of sexual objectification, pushing them to decipher the differences between sex and sexualizing.11 11 Many other excerpts were found focusing on a more negative portrayal of the BIPOC community and women during this time. However, there was no mention of LGBTQ+ members. Brown 13 Generation Y | 1981 - 1996 Brief Historical Background Many of those who were either born into this generation or lived through it prioritized their careers and personal interests above marriage. This means that they were having fewer children than their predecessors. Like Gen Xers, Millenials were known to be tech-savvy with a specific preference to communicate through email or text. MTV brought them further reason to enjoy screen time when the cable channel was launched in 1981. Originally created to showcase music videos, MTV quickly moved to television personalities. Michael Jackson, for example, served as the precedent for television personalities and leading artists, topping the charts throughout the duration of the 1980s. He eventually became one of the most well-loved television personalities who dedicated much of his offscreen time to charitable efforts. Prince, Whitney Houston, Diana Ross, and many others followed closely behind. Based on the increased media representation of minority artists, it's safe to say that this particular time frame allowed for people of color to debut their own music videos for the first time. This urged the public to gravitate towards soul music and R&B, marking the start of this generation's willingness to embrace black creators. Alongside music, technological advances in STEM were budding with breakthroughs. Women paved the way towards many of these breakthroughs under large startups and federal organizations, inspiring younger girls to do the same through higher education. 12 12 Eighteen years of Chameleon issues were released during Generation Y but mostly written by students who were born during Generation X (1965-1976). Brown 14 Generation Y Overview of Significant Events • Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Week is implemented in May (1979). • Boston African American National Historic Site is established (1980). • AIDS Epidemic begins, causing numerous deaths in the LGBTQ+ community (1981). • Sandra Day O'Connor is nominated as the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981). • Federation of Survival Schools leads legal education seminars for Native students (1984). • Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian-American in space, dies in the Challenger disaster (1986). • Minneapolis AIM Patrol refocuses on protecting native women in Minneapolis (1987). • Sally K. Ride becomes the first American woman in space (1983). • Susan Kare made typeface contributions to the first Apple Macintosh (1983). • Michael Jordan is named the NBA's "Rookie of the Year " (1985). • Nadia Perlman invents the spanning-tree protocol (1985). • Carole Ann-Marie Gist becomes the first African American to win Miss USA (1990). • Freddie Mercury dies from AIDS (1991). • Rodney King is brutally beaten by LAPD officers (1991). • AIM revives the Sun Dance ceremony in Pipestone, Minnesota (1991). • Los Angeles Riots result in numerous deaths and $1 billion in damage (1992). • Mae Jemison becomes the first African American woman in space (1992). • National Coalition in Sports & Media Forms is established by native leaders (1992). • "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" bars the LGBTQ+ community from military service (1993). Brown 15 Generation Y Relevance to The Chameleon "I slowly adapt myself to another man's world, But I soon realize that my character is a reflection Of a foreign spectrum I see myself through another man's eyes, My words come from another man's mouth, And my ideals are relocated from another man's mind" (1980). —- An excerpt from "A Nostalgic Experience" by Noble Francis Allen America's social construction has continued to uphold whiteness throughout the duration of its history, while people of color must condition themselves to that of the norm. In this case, the author speaks in the first person, signifying their position as the principal character who is faced with having to mirror the way others perceive the world. This implies that the narrator may have had a weakened sense of self-identity at the time this poem was written. Self-identity is an especially important feature as it consists of the traits, characteristics, social relations, and roles that define who one is. An individual's racial and ethnic 13 background is also included within the same realm due to the distinguishment of their given group's cultural values, kinship, and beliefs.14 13 Oyserman, Daphna, and George Smith. "Self, Self-Concept, and Identity." Handbook of Self and Identity, edited by Kristen Elmore, 2nd ed., The Guilford Press, New York, NY, 2012, pp. 69–104. 14 Woo, Bongki, et al. "The Role of Racial/Ethnic Identity in the Association Between Racial Discrimination & Psychiatric Disorders: A Buffer or Exacerbator?" SSM - Population Health, vol. 7, 7 Apr. 2019, p. 100378., https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100378. Brown 16 "Across his back is a deerskin quiver, and in the quiver, there are seven feathered arrows. Gripped in his sweaty palm is an oak bow. A golden-handled sword, whose blade is as long as a man's leg, hangs from his waist. Its once binding shine has been replaced by a thick coat of blood. His skin is the color of golden honey, and his hair is the reflection of yellow sunshine… A woman emerges from the foliage of the wildwood. Warm sunshine gleams off of browned skin. Raven-black hair drops over a slender neck, and ends upon soft shoulders. Unsuspecting almond-eyes gaze wildly at the sky. She is nude. Her breasts are round, full, and tipped with chocolate nipples. A thin waist gives way to broad hips, and eventually slender legs" (1980). —- An excerpt from "A Blind Odin" by Mitchell T. Kubiak This short story, "A Blind Odin," depicts a deep contrast between the description of a man and the description of a woman. The man embodies characteristics associated with a skilled hunter, such as strength and courage. The woman, however, is only described based on her physical features, all of which seem to align with the male gaze. For those who are not familiar with feminist theory, the male gaze is perceived from a masculine heterosexual perspective with aspects of voyeurism, objectification, fetishism, and scopophilia attached.15 Further descriptions of the woman's bodily proportions also suggest clues about the author, although it is crucial for the reader to understand that Norwich University had very few female candidates at the time this short story was written. 16 15 Snow, Edward. "Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems." Representations, vol. 25, 1989, pp. 30–41., https:// doi.org/10.2307/2928465. 16 Many other excerpts were found focusing on both positive and negative portrayals of the BIPOC community and women during this time. However, there was no mention of LGBTQ+ members. Brown 17 Generation Z | 1997 - 2009 Brief Historical Background Gen Zers are the first to experience technological advances from birth onward. Once the majority reached adolescence, it became evident that there was a growing demand for portable devices. Although the first smartphone was released by IBM during the early 1990s, its overall bulkiness and poor battery life were not ideal for communication lines. Apple has since become the most popular phone brand in the United States. It also helped that the company released the iPod, a portable music device with, at the time, the ability to store over 200 songs. The same year also marked the events of several terrorist attacks on September 11th. Two jet airliners shattered the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in a series of terrorist attacks, killing nearly 3,000 people and injuring twice as many. Those responsible were later identified as members of al-Quaeda, a militant Islamist organization led by Saudi Arabian terrorist Osama bin Laden. Life became all the more difficult for Muslim Americans as they continuously experienced the dangers of Islamophobia on a daily basis. Such dangers surrounded an ongoing spike in hate crimes, ranging from cold-blooded murder to vandalism of places of worship. Even when there was a slight decline in hate crimes years later, Muslim Americans continued to struggle with employment discrimination. Many of those who practiced Islam were either laid off or turned away during the hiring process for reasons directly relating to their religion. By the end of Generation Z, religion no longer served as a determining factor during the hiring process and diversity became a primary focus in the workplace. 17 17 Thirteen years of Chameleon issues were released during Generation Z but were mostly written by students who were born during Generation Y (1977-1995). Brown 18 Generation Z Overview of Significant Events • Gary Locke becomes the first Asian American governor of a mainland state (1996). • Kalpana Chawla boards Columbia as the first woman in space of Indian origin (1997). • Serena Williams wins the U.S. Open Women's Singles Tennis Championship (1999). • Maurice Ashley becomes the world's first black Grandmaster in chess (2000). • Permanent Partners Immigration Act is introduced to Congress (2000). • Equality Mississippi is founded as an LGBT civil rights organization (2000). • Millennium March on Washington raises awareness of LGBT issues (2000). • Elaine Chao is selected as the first Asian American to be Secretary of Labor (2001). • Patriot Act allows the indefinite detention of immigrants and warrantless searches (2001). • Cincinnati-based riots spark unrest following Timothy Thomas' death (2001). • Balbir Singh Sodhi's death is deemed the first fatal act of violence as a result of 9/11 (2001). • Dennis Archer becomes the first African American to be President of the ABA (2002). • Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health becomes a landmark Supreme Court case (2003). • Grutter v. Bollinger becomes a landmark Supreme Court Case (2003). • Same-sex marriage is first legalized in the state of Massachusetts (2004). • Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon are wed, becoming the first legal same-sex marriage (2004). • Condoleezza Rice is named the first black woman to be Secretary of State (2005). • Nancy Pelosi becomes the first female Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (2007). • Barack Obama is elected as the first African American to hold office (2009). Brown 19 Generation Z Relevance to The Chameleon "You called me a fa***t and said no one would love me But I am here to say what goes around comes around And now it's your turn to get knocked down" (2004). —- An excerpt from "The Bastard Son" by James A. Hoffman Now used as a slur in reference to homosexual men and boys, the term fa***t has its own unique origin. The term's former use in the Norwegian dialect was originally emplaced to describe a bundle of firewood. Because these bundles were large in size, the term eventually moved towards describing heavyset women who were often seen as slovenly and thus placing them near the bottom of all social classes. When British English ha 18 d made a far greater influence on the Scandinavian languages, the term was combined with bugger, also known as a person who engages in anal or oral sex. Premodern Europe was known to persecute heretics during this time, including homosexuals, as they did not conform to the belief systems of the Church. 19 This short story, "The Bastard Son," is one of the first positive representations of LGBTQ+ members found in the Chameleon as the narrator gains the courage to speak against negative attitudes and feelings surrounding the LGBTQ+ community. 18 Johansson, Warren. "The Etymology of the Word 'Fa***t'." William Percy. 19 Karras, Ruth Mazo. "The Regulation of 'Sodomy' in the Latin East & West." Speculum, vol. 95, no. 4, 2020, pp. 969–986., https://doi.org/10.1086/710639. Brown 20 Generation Z Relevance to The Chameleon "Mother, you are the greatest woman I know. I have based my life upon yours, all the great things you have done and all the obstacles that you were able to overcome; the thing that I admire most about you is the fact that you were a single mother of four and didn't need a man's help, but I always knew that was a great challenge for me, in this world that is much too different from the one that you grew up. To me, that was the greatest obstacle that you conquered" (2004). —- An excerpt from "Mother's Love" by A.M.T Lebron In this dedication, "Mother's Love," the author retrieves past memories in writing to celebrate their mother. It is not often that Norwich student contributors write about the entailments of motherhood. Although it remains unclear whether the author's mother was divorced, widowed, or remained unmarried, the family has a relentless source of love for one another and proceeds to use their shared affection to overcome challenges. Such challenges include economic hardships and increased states of stress as a single mother often relies on one source of income. There is also reason to believe that those raised in similar households develop a sense of independence resembling that of their mother. Some may even develop additional 20 internal resources that will allow them to construct their own identity far from the gender roles typically seen within the American household. 21 20 Kinser, Amber E. Motherhood & Feminism. Seal Press, 2010. 21 Many other excerpts were found focusing on both positive and negative portrayals of minority communities and women. Brown 21 Generation Alpha | 2010 - Present Brief Historical Background Many of those who are either born into this generation or currently living through it witness technological advances at an accelerating rate to the extent of replacing the previously known means of childhood entertainment with mobile devices and streaming services. The dawning of this generation also brought Instagram, the most frequently preferred social media platform to date. The thought of having children was generally delayed across the United States following the economic crisis of 2008, while young adults reportedly dealt with increasing stress from education debt. Following the economic crisis of 2008, it is not uncommon for young adults to deal with increasing stress from education debt. Many Gen Zers who previously planned on extending their families during this time were also affected as financial worries prevented them from having children. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused further economic turmoil when small businesses had to close down to prevent the spread of the virus. Those who were employed under larger corporations, however, moved their offices to home. Between dual-career families and remote work, the boundaries separating professional and personal life became blurred. 22 Such challenges have proved that the young faces of Generation Alpha are capable of resilience, utilizing their own diverse backgrounds to tackle the more difficult questions. This includes advocating for fairness in all aspects of society and questioning the validity of gender. 22 Jha, Amrit Kumar. "Understanding Generation Alpha ." OSF Preprints, 20 June 2020. Brown 22 Generation Alpha Overview of Significant Events • Apple's iPad is released, also known as the first touchscreen tablet PC (2010). • President Barack Obama begins his second term (2013). • Defense Against Marriage Act is struck down by the Supreme Court (2013). • Black Lives Matter emerges as a political movement (2013). • Michael Brown is fatally shot by a Ferguson police officer (2014). • Nine African Americans churchgoers are killed during a Bible study in Charleston (2015). • Same-sex marriage is legalized in all 50 states (2015). • Pulse Nightclub shooting causes the deaths of 49 LGBTQ+ members (2016). • Unite the Right, a white supremacist rally, leads to three deaths in Charlottesville (2017). • Me Too movement is relaunched following the Harvey Weinstein accusations (2017). • Director Jon M. Chu breaks box office records with his film Crazy Rich Asians (2018). • California Synagogue shooting causes the injuries of three and the death of one (2019). • President Trump's wall receives $2.5 billion in funds under the Supreme Court (2019). • Kobe Bryant, along with his daughter, dies in a helicopter crash (2020). • Geroge Floyd is murdered by a Minneapolis police officer during an arrest (2020). • Kamala Harris becomes the 49th vice president (2021). • Spa shooting in Atlanta leaves eight dead, with six being of Asian descent (2021). Brown 23 Generation Alpha Relevance to The Chameleon "It had only been four days since I was bought from the Greens. The Green House was known for cutting off the body parts of slaves and letting them bleed out slowly or waiting for them to die of infection. They used to take other slaves to the field and pick different parts to cut off. If they cut off too much and you couldn't work anymore, they'd leave the bodies in the field as an example of what happens when you make mistakes. " (2019). —- An excerpt from "Mixed Voices" by Alain Cropper-Makidi The author moves to educate the reader on a particular building utilized during America's slavery period. Also known as the Green House, the building lay separate from the main house and lodged slaves who were being punished for fieldwork mistakes. Whipping, burning, branding, raping, and imprisoning were some of the most common punishments for slaves. However, the Green House resorted to dismembering the slaves' limbs and allowing them to bleed out. This short story, "Mixed Voices," also addresses that some slaves received educational instruction from the main house's mistress. This was most likely executed in secret as slaves were generally prohibited from reading and writing out of fear that they would forge travel passes and escape. 23 23 "Literacy as Freedom - American Experience." SAAM, Smithsonian American Art Museum, https:// americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Literacy-as-Freedom.pdf. Brown 24 "One day You tell me that let's be Together I shake my head Say I'm tired of your lies Rather to get myself alone" (2020). 有⼀天 你对我说我们在⼀起吧 我摇摇头 说我厌倦了你的虚伪 宁愿孤独 —- An excerpt from "Untitled" by Zenghui Zhang Like several others, this poem was both written and translated by a student under Professor Lenny Hu. Since his arrival at Norwich, Professor Hu has assigned his Chinese students the task of writing and translating poetry. This allows them to expand their Chinese literacy and gain a sense of passion for the language itself. As the Norwich language department continues to grow, translations will continue to be included in future Chameleon issues for the benefit of promoting diverse students and staff who already understand or aim to learn beyond that of the English language. Brown 25 Conclusion Sustains & Improves After reviewing all past issues of the Chameleon, it is clear that Norwich's literary journal previously published pieces of writing representing LGBTQ+ members, the BIPOC community, and women in a negative light. This was especially true from 1961 through the late 1990s. Gradually, the Chameleon has begun to positively represent our communities. During our current time period, for example, positive representations have become the primary focus under Professor Sean Prentiss and his team of student editors who have made a conscious effort in improving the Chameleon as a whole. Student writers who distinguish themselves amongst the rest of the student body are oftentimes selected for awards. One of which is the "Be You, Be True Prize" for the best writing by or about the LGBTQ+ community. Additionally, many Norwich University professors currently include culturally sustaining pedagogies within their curricula. Such pedagogies include seeking nontraditional texts, merging language varieties, and encouraging students to explore cultural spaces. To maintain as well as improve such efforts, Norwich University affiliates must remain aware that America's long history of combating minorities often resulted in bloodshed. Although not to the extent of our previous generations, similar events still continue to occur today. Therefore, as one of the most renowned military colleges in the United States, it is our responsibility to protect minority students and ensure that they perceive themselves as valuable members of the community. Without them, the future stands for nothing. Brown 26 References Anderson, Gary C. Ethnic Cleansing & the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America. University Of Oklahoma Press, 2015. "APA Dictionary of Psychology." American Psychological Association, https:// dictionary.apa.org/social-representation. Jha, Amrit Kumar. "Understanding Generation Alpha ." OSF Preprints, 20 June 2020. Johanssen, Warren. "The Etymology of the Word F*****." William Percy, pp. 356–359. Kapadia, Reshma. "The Tulsa Massacre Left a Lasting Impact on Wealth." Trade Journal, vol. 101, no. 22, 31 May 2021. Karras, Ruth Mazo. "The Regulation of 'Sodomy' in the Latin East & West." Speculum, vol. 95, no. 4, 2020, pp. 969–986., https://doi.org/10.1086/710639. Kinser, Amber E. Motherhood & Feminism. Seal Press, 2010. "Literacy as Freedom - American Experience." SAAM, Smithsonian American Art Museum, https://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Literacy-as-Freedom.pdf. Nohria, Nitin, Anthony Mayo, and Mark Benson. "William Levitt, Levittown and the Creation of American Suburbia." Harvard Business School Case 406-062, December 2005. (Revised March 2010.) Oyserman, Daphna, and George Smith. "Self, Self-Concept, and Identity." Handbook of Self and Identity, edited by Kristen Elmore, 2nd ed., The Guilford Press, New York, NY, 2012, pp. 69–104. Brown 27 Pryor, Elizabeth Stordeur. "The Etymology of N*****: Resistance, Politics, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North." Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War, 2016, https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/ 9781469628578.003.0002. Silos, Jill Katherine. "Everybody Get Together: The Sixties Counterculture & Public Space, 1964-1967." University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository, 2003. Snow, Edward. "Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems." Representations, vol. 25, 1989, pp. 30–41., https://doi.org/10.2307/2928465. Tenaglia, Sean. '"Seeing Yourself in the Story:' The Influence of Multicultural Education on Adolescent Identity Formation." The Virginia English Journal, vol. 68, 2018. Woo, Bongki, et al. "The Role of Racial/Ethnic Identity in the Association Between Racial Discrimination & Psychiatric Disorders: A Buffer or Exacerbator?" SSM - Population Health, vol. 7, 7 Apr. 2019, p. 100378., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100378.
The devolution of procurement responsibilities to local levels of government is increasingly occurring across South Asia. This trend is significant because increasingly localized decision-making better enables communities to hold government authorities accountable for the effectiveness of public spending, which can lead to various improved development outcomes, such as improvements in quality of service delivery; greater empowerment and understanding by end-users services supplied through public procurement processes; and improved oversight and accountability of service delivery agencies. The objective of this report is to set out an overview of the strategic approach developed by World Bank Institute (WBI) as a component of the Norwegian governance trust fund (NTF) program `procurement and service delivery: establishing effective collaboration between government and beneficiaries on monitoring procurement outcomes`. WBI received funds under the NTF to facilitate the development of context and audience-specific knowledge products by recognized practitioners and civil society organizations in South Asia as part of a broader effort to create a practical curriculum on social accountability in procurement.
The Horn of Africa (HOA) is one of the most underdeveloped regions on earth. It is also one of the most conflict-ridden, insecure regions in the world. While Africa as a whole has enjoyed a trend in recent years toward reduction and termination of many of its civil wars, the HOA is the exception to the rule. Indeed, the region's prolonged armed conflicts have spread, engulfing several neighboring states in warfare and partial state collapse. While aspects of the HOA case are obviously unique, and sensitivity to context and complexity must be privileged in both analysis of and policy toward the Horn, the region's crises are not so distinct that they preclude useful comparative analysis. This paper considers conflict dynamics across the entire Horn of Africa, but devotes special attention to the case of Somalia which, because of the depth, length, and significance of its crisis, is a source of particular international concern. Because Somalia's crisis has been so protracted and has gone through several very distinct phases, it provides an opportunity to compare conflict dynamics in a single country over time.
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The most immediate and visible consequences of Israel's rapidly escalated assault in Lebanon are being felt in Lebanon itself. As with Israel's year-long devastation of the Gaza Strip, Israeli military operations are claiming many civilian lives. According to the Lebanese health ministry, more than 1,000 people, including at least 87 children, have been killed by those operations during the past two weeks. More than 90,000 people have been displaced from their homes. The death toll sharply increased Friday with the Israeli attacks south of Beirut that killed Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Those attacks, on a densely populated neighborhood, flattened several residential buildings. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel's fight is with Hezbollah, not Lebanon, but Lebanon is suffering from the fight. Even before the recent attacks, Lebanon was in a deep economic crisis. Its accompanying political crisis will not be made any better by attempting to disembowel an organization that is one of the Lebanon's major political parties, which has ministers in government and lawmakers in the parliament, and has been a member of coalitions including Christians and others. The Israeli assault, including the killing of Nasrallah, will not eliminate the ability, and certainly not the willingness, of elements within Lebanon to respond forcefully to Israel's actions. Israel's operations — like those against Hamas — are based on the false rationale that threats of violence against Israel originate with the malign nature of certain groups, and that the only appropriate response is thus to kill as many members, and preferably leaders, of those groups as it can.The principal driver of anti-Israeli violence is anger over Israel's own actions. This does not depend on the nature or even the existence of any specific group. As the long history of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians illustrates, if any one resistance group is beaten down or fades into irrelevance, the anger and desire to strike back will find other channels. It should be recalled that Hezbollah's establishment and rapid rise in strength in the early 1980s owed much to widespread anger over an earlier Israeli attack on Lebanon — a full-scale invasion in 1982 that, among other ugliness, featured the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Hezbollah won much popular support by presenting itself as the chief defender of the Lebanese against Israeli depredations. Israel has a history of decapitating Hezbollah, and the approach has not gone well for Israel. In 1992, it used an attack by helicopter gunships to kill the secretary-general of Hezbollah at the time, Abbas al-Musawi. The most significant effect in Lebanon was to open the position for Nasrallah, who proved to be a more effective leader of the group than Musawi was. Additional history relevant to the kind of violence likely to grow out of the current fighting includes two lethal bombings in Buenos Aires, each of which probably was a reprisal for Israeli attacks on Lebanese Shia interests back in the Middle East. In March 1992, a truck bomb with a suicide driver exploded at the front of the Israeli embassy, killing 29 and wounding 242. A claim of responsibility by the Islamic Jihad Organization — widely perceived to be a cover name for Hezbollah — stated that the attack was reprisal for the killing of Musawi the previous month. In May 1994, Israeli commandoes kidnapped Lebanese Shia guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani, while at the same time raiding a Hezbollah camp in southern Lebanon. Two months later, a suicide truck bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires killed 85 and injured over 300. As an official Israel report later acknowledged, the attack may have been payback for the Israeli operations in Lebanon. The recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon — especially the killing of Nasrallah — give Hezbollah at least as much motivation as it had in the 1990s to retaliate. Regardless of how much Israeli strikes may have weakened Hezbollah's ability to fight a conventional war in the Levant, its capacity for irregular operations elsewhere is probably undiminished. The chance of terrorist reprisals against Israeli-related soft targets during the next few months is high. If such an attack occurs, the reaction of outside observers, especially in the United States, probably will include something along the lines of, "Hezbollah is a terrorist group, and that's what terrorist groups do." Such a response will perpetuate the mistake of viewing terrorism as a fixed group of bad guys rather than as a tactic that different groups and nations have used for different purposes. That mistake impedes understanding of the nature of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and its underlying causes. Israel has long used terrorist tactics in this conflict, including car bombings and other clandestine assassinations. It added to that record with its recent use of explosive-rigged pagers. The impossibility of controlling who would become victims when thousands of the devices were detonated remotely, along with the clandestine nature of the operation, fully qualified it as a terrorist attack. That the principal intended targets were members of Hezbollah does not remove that qualification, partly because being a member of Hezbollah—a multifaceted political as well as paramilitary organization—is not the same as being a combatant involved in fighting Israel. Even insofar as true combatants were involved, a useful comparison is with the deadliest attack by Hezbollah against U.S. interests: the suicide truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, in which 241 U.S. military personnel died. The vast majority of Americans would consider that incident to be terrorism, despite the reservations of sticklers who say that because the victims were military personnel on an overseas deployment, the event should instead be considered warfare. If the bombing of the Marine barracks is terrorism, then Israel's pager operation certainly is too, given that the targets were not even on a foreign military mission but were mostly in their own homes, businesses, or neighborhoods when the devices exploded. Even more fundamental than niceties about how to define terrorism is the broader pattern of political violence that causes innocent persons to suffer. Regardless of whether the violence is inflicted by F-16s or by truck bombs, the suffering is just as bad and the relevant moral issues basically the same. If Israel uses one method of inflicting such violence — and it has inflicted far more of it than its adversaries have inflicted on it — while Hezbollah uses a different method, that difference reflects the available capabilities of each side rather than any morally or politically relevant distinction. U.S. policymakers should reflect on all this, especially the prospect of terrorist reprisals, as they shape their responses to the escalated warfare in Lebanon. They also should reflect on the hazards of the United States again becoming a target of terrorism itself. Hezbollah will be seeking to retaliate against Israel, but with the United States already having become more of a potential target because of its association with the Israeli destruction of Gaza, that hazard will increase to the extent it allows itself to become associated as well with the Israeli offensive in Lebanon. The attack that killed Nasrallah was one more in a long series of Israeli actions taken without even informing the United States, let alone taking into account any U.S. views. But the continued unconditional support that the United States nonetheless gives to Israel, especially including munitions that Israel uses in its lethal attacks, makes the United States also responsible, in the eyes of the world, for the resulting casualties and suffering.
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China and the United States, like sports captains picking sides, have been engaged in a considered effort to enlist partners. In the recruitment rush, the Biden administration has given short shrift to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its much vaunted balancing, or "centrality" in the Asia Pacific. Washington, like Beijing, has favored certain ASEAN members over others, frustrated no doubt by the group's lack of cohesion and effectiveness. But in the new multipolar world, these hinge countries and their groupings can be as important as power poles. There has been a lot of coalition building lately. In August, the BRICS bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — invited six new members to join at the start of 2024. In March, Iran and Saudi Arabia reestablished ties after years of antagonism in a deal brokered by Beijing. In July, China signed an accord on law enforcement and security with the Solomon Islands and announced a strategic partnership with Georgia. This month, China upgraded its relationship with American bugaboo Venezuela to an "all-weather" partnership.The U.S. has been similarly busy — perhaps more so to make up for Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) bridge-building over the past decade. In August, President Joe Biden and his Japanese and South Korean counterparts launched a trilateral grouping at Camp David. The U.S. and the Philippines in February revived an agreement giving increased American access to Filipino military facilities. In May, the U.S. and Papua New Guinea concluded a defense pact. At the G20 summit in New Delhi this month, the leaders of the U.S., the European Union, India, Saudi Arabia and other countries committed to developing an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor for cooperation on clean energy, power grids and telecommunications. After the G20, Biden traveled to Hanoi where the U.S. and Vietnam announced that they were elevating relations to a "comprehensive strategic partnership," deepening cooperation in cloud computing, semiconductors and artificial intelligence — all areas of contention between Washington and Beijing. In a 2021 lecture, Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan described how the administration was assembling a "latticework of alliances and partnerships globally." This was "not just about refurbishing the old bilateral alliances," he explained, "but modernizing those elements of the latticework and adding new components." Sullivan cited as examples the upgrading of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.), to leader level and the creation of AUKUS, the partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Canberra and collaborate on advanced technologies.Both Washington and Beijing say they are not forcing countries to pick sides, though the impression that they do just that is unavoidable. Beijing has applied economic pressure on states for actions that it perceives to hew too closely to American positions — Canada, Australia, South Korea and Japan have had to deal with such coercion. In network building, the U.S. has offered more carrots than sticks, particularly when it comes to courting pivotal states that Washington deems to have distinct geostrategic importance and — more to the point — the capacity to contribute to countering or containing China. In the Indo-Pacific, India, the Philippines and Vietnam have been the chief recipients of American courtship. But what about ASEAN? Washington insists that it values ASEAN centrality, but the proof of its perspective is in its actions. Biden skipped ASEAN's annual leaders' jamboree with dialogue partners, leaving it to his vice president to go to Jakarta, but squeezed in a visit to Hanoi just days later. The president's participation in the G20 was a not-to-be-missed opportunity to butter up Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who only in June had been feted at the White House. India is the most-prized pivot country in the Indo-Pacific (that status so obvious in the term). Under Modi, it sees itself as a power pole in its own right. New Delhi has proven its multi-alignment credentials, with its participation in the Quad, the BRICS and the China/Russia-conceived Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and its refusal to turn against traditional ally Moscow since the Ukraine war broke out. Biden is oiling the Indian hinge so it swings more Washington's way — and may be succeeding, given India's border clashes with China and its participation in joint military activities in the Pacific, Quad initiatives and Biden's Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF).ASEAN should be as critical a hinge player if not to win over, at least to keep "central" as the region's balancer — a crucial section of the lattice that would act as a security blanket for peace and stability. Some member states, worried that the China-U.S. rivalry undermines their agency, have warned the two great powers against forcing them to choose sides. ASEAN has not bought into the American Indo-Pacific construct, merely articulating an "outlook" on the concept. Southeast Asian nations will profit more not by putting on any one team's jersey, but instead playing the field as something of a referee or honest broker in good stead with both sides, however heated the competition.U.S. administrations have never taken the centrality of ASEAN seriously, largely because member states themselves have failed to show what it means to be the region's ballast. It is a systemic problem — ASEAN is no EU in either form or practice. Even though it has launched an "economic community" and has sought to address thorny problems, such as Myanmar and the South China Sea, as a group, it remains a politically divided, economically diverse collection of states, with a reputation for glacial progress and ineffectiveness. It was born this way, though it was successful in its founding mission to be a bulwark against communism's spread.But ASEAN has strengths beyond being the world's fifth largest economy. Its convening power is unmatched, reaching across economic and strategic spheres. Its ASEAN Regional Forum and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus are as evolved and inclusive a strategic framework for the region as is possible. ASEAN-led platforms offer a neutral space for the great powers to interact on a wide range of issues. By lavishing attention on certain ASEAN members — the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore (host of a U.S. military facility) — Washington is mimicking the Chinese divide-and-conquer approach (Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are reckoned to be on Team Beijing). But even small gaps weaken a lattice. The ASEAN way may be slow and plodding — negotiations with Beijing on a code of conduct in the South China Sea have dragged on for years — but this tortoise cannot be written off.In a speech on September 13 outlining "the power and purpose of American diplomacy," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tellingly never mentioned ASEAN. Yet, the Biden administration may be smartening up. Seven of the ASEAN 10 are part of the IPEF, the American answer to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), from which the U.S. withdrew, and the ASEAN-China concocted Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade accord. And guess who's coming to the White House for a bilateral with Biden in November? Indonesian President Joko Widodo, the very leader whom Biden "snubbed" in favor of one night in Vietnam. With its sizable population, strategic geographical position, participation in China's BRI, a maritime dispute of its own with Beijing, a growing strategic relationship with Washington, and a critical presidential election next year, Indonesia is the key hinge power in Southeast Asia. Like India, it has proven its agency and pragmatism, particularly in vital areas such as data security standards and infrastructure development. Giving Jakarta more attention would bolster ASEAN's position in the American Indo-Pacific latticework, especially with Laos, a country that tilts towards Beijing and is taking over from Indonesia as ASEAN chair next year.
Problem statement: general view and its connection with important scientific or practical tasks. Achieving the goals and realizing the interests of states and transnational corporations and even some specific actors on the world stage is gaining new opportunities through the intensive development of high technology, innovation, information and global cyberspace. Open military confrontation and other types of conflicts in these conditions are transformed into hybrid forms of destructive actions, in which the component of cognitive influences aimed at the human mind, worldview, mentality, which are an integral part of the cognitive sphere of society, grows. Such influences, at the present stage of development of society, are often aimed at forming distrust, changing views and value systems, weakening social cohesion and distorted perception of national interests and values, etc., so their study and counteraction is extremely relevant. Analysis of recent publications in sphere of research and identification of previously unresolved parts of the general problem. Issues related to the study of the cognitive sphere and its components, various cognitive influences on the audience in the process of communication, cognitive manipulation, especially in the field of discourses, and their consequences, were considered in the works of many domestic and foreign researchers, namely: M. Eisenko, L. Apostel, M. Bakhtin, D. Bolinger, P. Brown, E. Bienvenu, R. Blakar, X. Weinrich, A. Vezhbytska, V. Vinokur, Y. Habermas, J. Gintikki, G. Grice, S. Green, T. van Dyck, V. Demyankov, V. Zabotkin, A. Zvirintsev, S. Kara-Murza, E. Koit, O. Kubryakova, R. Lakoff, J. Lakoff, J. Lich, Y. Lotman , S. Levinson, D. Marr, J. Allwood, J. Austin, M. Popper, G. Pocheptsov, O. Rosenstock-Hussey, J. Searle, W. Stewart, S. Tulmin, L. Yakubinsky. At the same time, the study of multilevel, interconnected destructive cognitive effects in cyberspace and through cyberspace in hybrid conflicts and the analysis of practical experience of their coping and consequences, especially with regard to deep systemic aspects and synergies in modern publications are insufficiently addressed. The aim of the article is to study the threats and features of cognitive influences on society in cyberspace and respond to them to reduce the risks of their consequences. Main results. Modern hybrid warfare is a war with a combination of fundamentally different types and methods of its conduct, which are used in a coordinated manner to achieve its goals. It is a high-tech conflict, a continuation of the policy of states (coalitions, political groups, transnational corporations, etc.) in order to impose their will on opponents through complex, adaptive, asymmetric and synchronized influences on them in multidimensional space and various spheres with a combination of conventional and unconventional components, ensuring multiplicity and synergy of results and a high level of uncertainty for opponents regarding the ultimate goals and ways to achieve them. Its features are permanent, variable, in wide ranges, intensity, focus on systemic destabilization and changes that are useful to achieve the interests of the beneficiary, in all spheres of life and activity of the state that is the object of aggression. Hybrid actions, in addition to the purely force component, include complex destructive cognitive, informational, informational-psychological, propaganda and disinformation influences on certain target groups and society as a whole, with cyberattacks on information resources, infrastructure, economic processes and democratic institutions. At the same time, cognitive influences play a significant role in trying to manage communication, transform the beliefs of target audiences to the right (desired) and control their behavior. Issues of destructive cognitive actions are directly related to the processes of emission, processing, interpretation, transformation and internalization of knowledge in managed communication from strategic to tactical levels, from general to targeted impacts on society as a whole and its individual components and specific targets. audiences with integrated use of linguistic, figurative, hidden media effects, mental and other influences at different levels of cybersocial interaction, which, in modern conditions, is increasingly carried out in cyberspace and / or through cyberspace. The theoretical and applied results presented in the article can be used to ensure timely detection of dangers and threats of destructive cognitive influences on society in cyberspace and through cyberspace, risk assessment of their implementation and taking measures to counter and neutralize them. Conclusions. Cognitive influences have become an integral part of hybrid conflicts, both interstate and domestic, and between any geopolitical and regional actors, corporations, and organizations. The cognitive component has an exceptional role in the set of factors that form and cause conflict, affect its course and results, intensity and consequences. Therefore, modern, and especially conflicts of the future, are and will be conducted for the cognitive sphere of society (society, social groups, individuals), taking control and management of cognitive space, which includes perception, awareness, beliefs, understanding and values, intellectual environment of both individuals and social groups and society as a whole, in which, in fact, is their decision-making. Therefore, the main result of successful destructive cognitive influences is a change in the model of the world and its perception in man, social groups and society as a whole, which provides the opportunity to take control and external management on emotional, moral, cultural, ideological and mental levels with the formation stereotypes for the perception of reality through their prism. Of particular importance are the imposition and promotion of erroneous scientific, social, economic, state, military theories, paradigms, concepts, strategies, narratives, which are most effectively promoted and implemented through educational and scientific institutions, NGOs, electronic, social networks and the blogosphere. To this end, all opportunities for strategic communication are used, informational, psychological, cyber and other measures (actions, operations, etc.) are taken, which are aimed at both the direct participants in the conflict and the population of the participating countries, the international community. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a thorough analysis of the threats of such influences, their timely detection and deploy an effective system to counter them and neutralize them, because it becomes one of the key components of national security for today and in the future. Key words: cognitive influences; cyberspace; cybersecurity; destructive cyber influences; information security. ; У статті розглядаються теоретико-прикладні аспекти, особливості, небезпеки, загрози і ризики когнітивних впливів на соціум у кіберпросторі і через кіберпростір та реагування на них. Доведено, що боротьба за отримання контролю над певними цільовими групами в сучасних умовах передбачає насамперед можливість управління їхньою когнітивною сферою з використанням методів ментального, образного, мовного тощо впливів на неї. Це здійснюється в різноманітних інфокомунікаційних системах відповідно до ситуацій, переважно через соціальні мережі, блогосферу, художню, науково-популярну і наукову літературу та відповідні ресурси в інтернеті, розважальну і професійно-орієнтовану аудіо- і відеопродукцію, рекламу, ЗМІ, а також шляхом уведення змін, які сприяють цьому, в наукові теорії, навчальні програми тощо. Основна мета – навмисний вплив на відповідні цільові аудиторії для трансформації їх поглядів, переконань, світогляду, і самого сприйняття дійсності відповідно до інтересів і потреб сторони, яка справляє вплив. Це завжди багатоплановий, багатовекторний, комплексний, системний та керований процес загальної спрямованості або цільові, спрямовані на суспільство в цілому або на цільові групи, конкретних індивідів (ключових акторів), який передбачає справляння за єдиним замислом, планом, місцем і часом когнітивних, інформаційних, інформаційно-психологічних, кібер-впливів тощо. У сучасних умовах значна кількість сфер людської життєдіяльності перенеслася до кіберпростору та здійснюється через кіберпростір. При цьому майже єдиним джерелом знань та інформації для більшості людей поступово стають різноманітні інформаційні та освітні портали й електронні ресурси, які формуються в кіберпросторі. Це значно впливає на формування та зміну світогляду і ментальності соціуму. Саме через глобальну мережу «Інтернет» молодь сприймає найбільше неперевіреної, часто негативної, небажаної і навіть небезпечної інформації. Відсутність захисту соціуму від когнітивних загроз, які реалізуються в кіберпросторі і через кіберпростір, стає серйозним фактором ризику, деякі аспекти зменшення якого розглядаються в цій роботі. Ключові слова: когнітивні впливи; кіберпростір; кібербезпека; деструктивні кібервпливи; інформаційна безпека.
Problem statement: general view and its connection with important scientific or practical tasks. Achieving the goals and realizing the interests of states and transnational corporations and even some specific actors on the world stage is gaining new opportunities through the intensive development of high technology, innovation, information and global cyberspace. Open military confrontation and other types of conflicts in these conditions are transformed into hybrid forms of destructive actions, in which the component of cognitive influences aimed at the human mind, worldview, mentality, which are an integral part of the cognitive sphere of society, grows. Such influences, at the present stage of development of society, are often aimed at forming distrust, changing views and value systems, weakening social cohesion and distorted perception of national interests and values, etc., so their study and counteraction is extremely relevant. Analysis of recent publications in sphere of research and identification of previously unresolved parts of the general problem. Issues related to the study of the cognitive sphere and its components, various cognitive influences on the audience in the process of communication, cognitive manipulation, especially in the field of discourses, and their consequences, were considered in the works of many domestic and foreign researchers, namely: M. Eisenko, L. Apostel, M. Bakhtin, D. Bolinger, P. Brown, E. Bienvenu, R. Blakar, X. Weinrich, A. Vezhbytska, V. Vinokur, Y. Habermas, J. Gintikki, G. Grice, S. Green, T. van Dyck, V. Demyankov, V. Zabotkin, A. Zvirintsev, S. Kara-Murza, E. Koit, O. Kubryakova, R. Lakoff, J. Lakoff, J. Lich, Y. Lotman , S. Levinson, D. Marr, J. Allwood, J. Austin, M. Popper, G. Pocheptsov, O. Rosenstock-Hussey, J. Searle, W. Stewart, S. Tulmin, L. Yakubinsky. At the same time, the study of multilevel, interconnected destructive cognitive effects in cyberspace and through cyberspace in hybrid conflicts and the analysis of practical experience of their coping and consequences, especially with regard to deep systemic aspects and synergies in modern publications are insufficiently addressed. The aim of the article is to study the threats and features of cognitive influences on society in cyberspace and respond to them to reduce the risks of their consequences. Main results. Modern hybrid warfare is a war with a combination of fundamentally different types and methods of its conduct, which are used in a coordinated manner to achieve its goals. It is a high-tech conflict, a continuation of the policy of states (coalitions, political groups, transnational corporations, etc.) in order to impose their will on opponents through complex, adaptive, asymmetric and synchronized influences on them in multidimensional space and various spheres with a combination of conventional and unconventional components, ensuring multiplicity and synergy of results and a high level of uncertainty for opponents regarding the ultimate goals and ways to achieve them. Its features are permanent, variable, in wide ranges, intensity, focus on systemic destabilization and changes that are useful to achieve the interests of the beneficiary, in all spheres of life and activity of the state that is the object of aggression. Hybrid actions, in addition to the purely force component, include complex destructive cognitive, informational, informational-psychological, propaganda and disinformation influences on certain target groups and society as a whole, with cyberattacks on information resources, infrastructure, economic processes and democratic institutions. At the same time, cognitive influences play a significant role in trying to manage communication, transform the beliefs of target audiences to the right (desired) and control their behavior. Issues of destructive cognitive actions are directly related to the processes of emission, processing, interpretation, transformation and internalization of knowledge in managed communication from strategic to tactical levels, from general to targeted impacts on society as a whole and its individual components and specific targets. audiences with integrated use of linguistic, figurative, hidden media effects, mental and other influences at different levels of cybersocial interaction, which, in modern conditions, is increasingly carried out in cyberspace and / or through cyberspace. The theoretical and applied results presented in the article can be used to ensure timely detection of dangers and threats of destructive cognitive influences on society in cyberspace and through cyberspace, risk assessment of their implementation and taking measures to counter and neutralize them. Conclusions. Cognitive influences have become an integral part of hybrid conflicts, both interstate and domestic, and between any geopolitical and regional actors, corporations, and organizations. The cognitive component has an exceptional role in the set of factors that form and cause conflict, affect its course and results, intensity and consequences. Therefore, modern, and especially conflicts of the future, are and will be conducted for the cognitive sphere of society (society, social groups, individuals), taking control and management of cognitive space, which includes perception, awareness, beliefs, understanding and values, intellectual environment of both individuals and social groups and society as a whole, in which, in fact, is their decision-making. Therefore, the main result of successful destructive cognitive influences is a change in the model of the world and its perception in man, social groups and society as a whole, which provides the opportunity to take control and external management on emotional, moral, cultural, ideological and mental levels with the formation stereotypes for the perception of reality through their prism. Of particular importance are the imposition and promotion of erroneous scientific, social, economic, state, military theories, paradigms, concepts, strategies, narratives, which are most effectively promoted and implemented through educational and scientific institutions, NGOs, electronic, social networks and the blogosphere. To this end, all opportunities for strategic communication are used, informational, psychological, cyber and other measures (actions, operations, etc.) are taken, which are aimed at both the direct participants in the conflict and the population of the participating countries, the international community. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a thorough analysis of the threats of such influences, their timely detection and deploy an effective system to counter them and neutralize them, because it becomes one of the key components of national security for today and in the future. Key words: cognitive influences; cyberspace; cybersecurity; destructive cyber influences; information security. ; У статті розглядаються теоретико-прикладні аспекти, особливості, небезпеки, загрози і ризики когнітивних впливів на соціум у кіберпросторі і через кіберпростір та реагування на них. Доведено, що боротьба за отримання контролю над певними цільовими групами в сучасних умовах передбачає насамперед можливість управління їхньою когнітивною сферою з використанням методів ментального, образного, мовного тощо впливів на неї. Це здійснюється в різноманітних інфокомунікаційних системах відповідно до ситуацій, переважно через соціальні мережі, блогосферу, художню, науково-популярну і наукову літературу та відповідні ресурси в інтернеті, розважальну і професійно-орієнтовану аудіо- і відеопродукцію, рекламу, ЗМІ, а також шляхом уведення змін, які сприяють цьому, в наукові теорії, навчальні програми тощо. Основна мета – навмисний вплив на відповідні цільові аудиторії для трансформації їх поглядів, переконань, світогляду, і самого сприйняття дійсності відповідно до інтересів і потреб сторони, яка справляє вплив. Це завжди багатоплановий, багатовекторний, комплексний, системний та керований процес загальної спрямованості або цільові, спрямовані на суспільство в цілому або на цільові групи, конкретних індивідів (ключових акторів), який передбачає справляння за єдиним замислом, планом, місцем і часом когнітивних, інформаційних, інформаційно-психологічних, кібер-впливів тощо. У сучасних умовах значна кількість сфер людської життєдіяльності перенеслася до кіберпростору та здійснюється через кіберпростір. При цьому майже єдиним джерелом знань та інформації для більшості людей поступово стають різноманітні інформаційні та освітні портали й електронні ресурси, які формуються в кіберпросторі. Це значно впливає на формування та зміну світогляду і ментальності соціуму. Саме через глобальну мережу «Інтернет» молодь сприймає найбільше неперевіреної, часто негативної, небажаної і навіть небезпечної інформації. Відсутність захисту соціуму від когнітивних загроз, які реалізуються в кіберпросторі і через кіберпростір, стає серйозним фактором ризику, деякі аспекти зменшення якого розглядаються в цій роботі. Ключові слова: когнітивні впливи; кіберпростір; кібербезпека; деструктивні кібервпливи; інформаційна безпека.
Oggetto della tesi è un ventennio cruciale della storia contemporanea turca, compreso tra il colpo di Stato militare realizzato dalla giunta del generale Kenan Evren il 12 settembre 1980 e la prima vittoria del Partito della Giustizia e dello Sviluppo (AKP) di Recep Tayyip Erdoğan alle elezioni generali del 3 novembre 2002. L'obiettivo è spiegare le premesse, le motivazioni e le dinamiche storico-politiche sia domestiche sia internazionali che, nel corso di tale ventennio, hanno condotto al progressivo declino dell'establishment kemalista e all'affermazione di uno specifico ramo del movimento islamico sulla scena politica, economica e culturale turca. Una simile analisi consentirà di formulare anche delle linee di interpretazione per le vicende attuali, che appaiono strettamente legate a quanto accaduto tra il 1980 e il 2002. La ricostruzione storica dei principali avvenimenti verificatisi nel ventennio si basa sullo studio di fonti primarie e secondarie in massima parte in lingua turca. Tra le prime, è prevalente la documentazione ufficiale (dibattiti parlamentari, programmi di governo, rapporti di commissioni d'inchiesta, documenti di partito, atti processuali, discorsi di personalità politiche, etc.) disponibile negli archivi digitali delle istituzioni turche. Per quanto riguarda le fonti secondarie, si privilegia la storiografia turca più recente e non ancora tradotta in altre lingue. Allo scopo di favorire una comprensione più completa delle dinamiche in esame, accanto alla contestualizzazione storica si offre una riflessione critica su alcuni aspetti significativi di natura maggiormente teorica, riguardanti in particolare l'ideologia kemalista, lo sviluppo dell'islam politico, il rapporto tra religione e secolarismo nel Paese. L'Introduzione chiarisce gli interrogativi e le ipotesi della ricerca, argomentandone tra l'altro la rilevanza rispetto ai recenti fatti di cronaca e alla situazione politica corrente; vengono inoltre presentati lo stato dell'arte, le fonti di riferimento e l'approccio teorico. Nel Capitolo I viene ricostruito il clima antecedente al 1980, discutendo innanzitutto alcune contraddizioni intrinseche dei principi kemalisti e il ruolo dell'Esercito nella vita politica. Successivamente ci si sofferma sul colpo di Stato del 1960, sul memorandum militare del 1971 e sulla crisi economico-politica che ha interessato il Paese negli anni Settanta. Il Capitolo II è dedicato alla trattazione del colpo di Stato del 1980, delle sue cause, delle sue conseguenze e dei provvedimenti imposti dalla giunta militare al potere fino al 1983. In seguito, vengono descritte la trasformazione neoliberale e la graduale liberalizzazione promosse durante il governo decennale di Turgut Özal, leader della Nuova destra turca. Nel Capitolo III viene affrontata l'ascesa dell'islam politico e della borghesia conservatrice in Turchia, riservando un approfondimento al movimento della Visione Nazionale e alla comunità religiosa di Fethullah Gülen. Si ripercorre quindi l'affermazione del Partito islamico del Benessere, fino alla formazione del governo di coalizione affidato a Necmettin Erbakan. Il Capitolo IV si apre con il golpe post-moderno che ha abbattuto il governo di Erbakan e represso il movimento islamico; questo ha quindi intrapreso una fase di rinnovamento, culminata nella fondazione dell'AKP sotto la leadership di Erdoğan (del quale viene fornita una sintetica biografia). La tesi si conclude con la descrizione dello scenario politico risultato dalle elezioni del 2002. In conclusione, verranno offerte delle risposte agli interrogativi di ricerca alla luce di alcune ricorrenze storiche e dei paradigmi politici fondamentali emersi dallo studio del ventennio. In particolare, si propone una lettura non dicotomica del rapporto tra kemalismo e islam politico, che risulta caratterizzato da interazione ed influenza reciproca piuttosto che da conflitto e opposizione. Tale rapporto può essere meglio compreso nella cornice della sostanziale continuità dell'autoritarismo nei regimi politici turchi post-1980. Come prospettiva di ricerca futura, verrà suggerito uno studio dell'era dell'AKP in un'ottica di comparazione e di continuità storica con il ventennio cruciale. ; THE DECLINE OF KEMALISM AND A NEW FACE OF POLITICAL ISLAM. TWENTY CRUCIAL YEARS IN TURKEY'S HISTORY: 1980-2002. The present dissertation focuses on twenty crucial years of contemporary Turkey's history, between the 12th September 1980 military coup d'état staged by General Kenan Evren's junta and the first victory of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the 3rd November 2002 general elections. It aims to explain the background, motivations, historical and political dynamics (both domestic and international) underlying the gradual decline of the Kemalist establishment and the rise of a specific branch of the Islamic movement on the political, economic and cultural stage of Turkey during those twenty years. Such an analysis makes it also possible to draw some guidelines to understand the current circumstances, being these closely linked to what happened between 1980 and 2002. The historical reconstruction of the main events occurred during the crucial twenty years relies on primary and secondary sources that are mostly in Turkish language. Among the first, official documentation prevails (parliamentary debates, governments programs, reports by parliamentary committees of enquiry, party manifestos, procedural documents, statements made by Turkish authorities, etc.); such documentation is largely available in the digital archives of Turkish institutions. As regards the secondary sources, more recent and still untranslated Turkish historiography is preferred. Along with the historical context, a critical comment is given on some significant aspects, which are more theoretical and mainly concern the Kemalist ideology, the development of political Islam, the relationship between religion and secularism in Turkey. This should provide a deeper understanding of the research objects. The Introduction explains the research questions and hypotheses, arguing their relevance with reference to the recent events and ongoing political issues of the country. The literature review, sources and theoretical approach are presented too. The Chapter I describes the situation before 1980. First, it discusses some contradictions inherent in the Kemalist principles and the role of the Army in Turkish politics. Then, it looks in more detail at the 1960 coup, the 1971 military memorandum, the economic and political crisis afflicting the country throughout the 1970s. The Chapter II analyses the 1980 coup, its roots, its consequences, and the measures implemented by the military junta in power until 1983. Subsequently, it traces the history of the neoliberal transformation and the gradual liberalization promoted by Turgut Özal, the leader of Turkish New Right who ruled for ten years. The Chapter III deals with the upsurge of political Islam and conservative bourgeoisie in Turkey, with a focus on the National Outlook movement and the religious community of Fethullah Gülen. It also illustrates the rise of the Islamic Welfare Party, until the creation of a coalition government led by Necmettin Erbakan. The Chapter IV begins with the post-modern coup that overthrew Erbakan's government and repressed the Islamic movement; consequently, the latter entered a phase of regeneration culminating in the establishment of AKP under the leadership of Erdoğan (whose short biography is also included). The dissertation ends with a description of the political landscape resulting from the 2002 elections. In conclusion, answers to the research questions are provided under the light of some recurring historical patterns and fundamental political paradigms, which emerged from the crucial twenty years. In particular, it is argued that the relationship between Kemalism and political Islam is characterized by interaction and reciprocal influence, rather than conflict and dichotomous opposition. Such a relationship can be better understood in the framework of the substantial continuity of authoritarianism in the post-1980 political regimes in Turkey. As a perspective for future research, it is suggested to study the AKP era in terms of comparison and historical continuity with the crucial twenty years.
Obama's governing style puzzles many people inside and outside the Beltway.In order to understand the 44th President's distinct, indeed, at times puzzling behavior, it is useful to go back to his biography. A Constitutional lawyer and professor who spend only one term in the Senate, and whose political experience came mainly from community organizing. The son of a white globe-trotting sociologist and a Kenyan professor, who spent his early years in Indonesia, and was later raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii. An introspective young man trying to find his way in the turbulent 1960s and ending up in Harvard law school, where he became president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. This minimalist biographical sketch contains many hints to help us analyze the way he governs. First and foremost, the president is an intellectual, a Constitutional scholar and a student of US history. He is also an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, arguably the most important yet problematic of US presidents. The first Black president in a country where racism has left an eternal imprint, he is deeply and constantly aware of his own historic role in American politics. Second, because of his particular heritage, he learned to move easily in different social settings but never quite felt he belonged in any of them. Paradoxically, even now, after five years in the highest office, he still seems uncomfortable with the daily give and take of inside-the-Beltway politics and avoids direct talks with the Republican leaders in House and Senate.This has played out for better or worse in his relations with Congress, his own staff and the public at large. Obama was elected by a broad coalition of white intellectuals, college students, women and ethnic minorities. He mesmerized them with his epic speeches and soaring rhetoric. He promised to undo much of the damage inherited from the Bush administration and was relatively successful, as proved by the fact of his re-election. However, his approach to policy making constantly raises eyebrows in the public as well as in Congress.The Left wonders why he hasn't closed the Guantanamo prison, why he allows the seemingly unlimited use of drones in war scenarios, and why he gives a free hand to the National Security Agency's spying on Americans. The Right accuses him of sins of commission and omission, from abuse of executive power (example: alleged cover-ups in Benghazi and AP scandals, or over-use of prosecutorial discretion and executive orders) to leading from behind in Libya and doing nothing in Syria. And Congress is surprised at his indifference and detachment: he introduces big ideas but does not get involved in the details; he lets legislators fight his battles and find their own way. He is not interested in developing personal ties or working relationships with them (something he also failed to do while he was a Senator).In his relation with the legislative branch, Obama is neither a salesman like Harry Truman nor an arm twister, like Lyndon B. Johnson. In sum, he does not play the Washington game. His two main venues for policy discussions are with his own expert staff and with large public audiences. The former he uses for in-depth study of the issue and lengthy debate on options; the latter, to get grassroots support for major policies (immigration, health care) and also to rail against Congress, to publicly blame it for its dysfunction and inaction. A case in point is the fundamental issue of gun-control. Obama, together with 90% of the public supported background checks after the Sandyhook and Aurora massacres, but the NRA stronghold on Congress killed the bill, with the President not being able to persuade even some Democrats to vote for it. Frustrated with what he sees as a dysfunctional Congress, his call for bipartisanship is enunciated as a royal wish, not something he is ready to roll up his sleeves and work for.His use of executive power is hard to predict and is often criticized for its incoherence, but a closer look reveals an inner logic. Always the Constitutional law professor, he abides by checks and balances, which explains his cool distance from legislators once a bill is being deliberated. However, he is ready to use executive orders to bypass Congress on core priorities which he has long decided will be part of his legacy, for example, on his decision this week to reduce greenhouse gases by 37% in a period of 7 years. He thinks strategically and on a case by case basis: in this case, the carbon reduction rules were announced together with a conditional approval to the building of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, a project strongly supported by Republicans and the public. But, he added, "only subject to review of its effects on carbon pollution". The announcement raised protests from both Right and Left, but seems measured to satisfy the center.On foreign and security policy, however, he defers to the establishment. One interpretation of this detachment is that once he became aware by secret daily briefings, of the intricacies of National Security and the immense power of the military-intelligence complex that naturally accompanies it, he decided leave it to the experts, his main focus being on "keeping the country safe" as he articulates it daily to his audiences. This is true on all defense issues except those that are personal to him, part of his envisioned legacy, such as disarmament. But his approach is clearly perceived as weakness by foreign leaders, as demonstrated by the reaction to self-admitted leaker Edward Snowden: the US indicted him for espionage, revoked his passport and asked for his extradition but both Hong Kong (pressed by Beijing) and Russia ignored the request.Obama's domestic policy legacy is quite in line with what he was elected to do both in his first and second term. Through his early action of getting Congress to pass a stimulus package, he saved the banking system and the automobile industry. Health reform was his next success. Today Immigration Reform has passed the Senate and is bound for the House. Failing to get Congress to pass his plan for environmental regulation, he has now done it through the EPA using a broad interpretation of the old Clean Air Act. At every step his actions were challenged and sent to the highest court which has for the most part ruled in his direction. Last week the Defense of Marriage Act was deemed unconstitutional, another triumph for the President and his base. Right now it is mainly his actions or inactions in foreign and defense policy that are being challenged by parts of the electorate, including a sizable part of his base.If Obama believes, as many devotees of Executive Power do, that presidents possess a vast reservoir of power that can be invoked at their discretion, then he preserves it carefully and uses it strategically, in pursuit of the "safety and well-being of the American people". His personal interpretation of American constitutional democracy seems to be: never forget the three first words of the Preamble, We the People, but use executive power to the full in order to save the Republic, even in contradiction to the written law, under the authority of what Thomas Jefferson called, the "laws of necessity, of self-preservation." These have to be redefined by every generation. For Lincoln, it was the inevitable suspension of certain rights during the civil war. History will judge whether Obama is governing according to the spirit of his time. Sobre el autorMaria Fornella-Oehninger - Old Dominion University
My dissertation, titled "Rearticulating the Social: Spatial Practices, Collective Subjects, and Oaxaca's Art of Protest," explores how the popular uprising begun in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006 is reconfiguring conceptions of public space and rights to the city, redefining political participation through novel practices of self-formation, and questioning the role of democratic government in Mexico's future. As both an architect and an anthropologist, my central research objective was to analyze how shifts in Oaxacan's habitual practices enabled and engendered socio-political and subjective transformations. In eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2007-2008), I thus worked closely with and became a member of a group of political street artists from marginalized communities who were part of the coalition of individuals, collectives, and social organizations that became the Popular Assembly of the People's of Oaxaca, or APPO. Focusing on practices of struggle such as the making and maintaining of barricades, protest marches, sit-in strikes, and making the art of protest, the dissertation argues that APPO's practices of struggle in Oaxaca have been both highly mobile and mobilizing. As the dissertation argues, greater attention to both senses of movement as moving bodies and the capacity of spatial practices to mobilize people affectively allows us greater understanding of the materiality and imagined political geographies of social movements. The dissertation focuses on the role of practices of struggle and the competing aesthetics of political street artists, protest groups, elite cultural and governmental institutions, and ordinary Oaxacans to emphasize the importance of everyday spatial practices and a recognition that, as Michel de Certeau writes, "history begins at ground level, with footsteps" (1984:129). Whether manifested as literal occupations and appropriations of city spaces or as different modalities for inhabiting and making place, Oaxacans' spatial practices disrupted dominant understandings and uses of the open and democratic nature of public space. In stenciling their graphic messages on city walls, street artists gave visual form to a long history of the systemic marginalization of the Oaxacan people and, more importantly, to the Oaxacan people's courage in mobilizing to find a solution. Speaking from the perspective of shared experiences and struggles, images on city walls revealed common points of identification that interpellated the collective subject of el pueblo (the people). Focusing on the transformative potential of artists' spatial practices through their investment in the material spaces of the city, my dissertation contends that political subjectivities are formed in and through an encounter with the city's material environment. Consequently, I argue that urban space is not a passive landscape but is an actant--to use Bruno Latour's terminology--that interpellates individuals as members of particular political publics. This is rendered visible, for example, in how an anti-government stencil hailing el pueblo on the façade of a municipal building invites a different mode for inhabiting social and physical space from a billboard promoting tourism for foreigners framing the city as the heritage and patrimony of all Oaxacans. An empirical and theoretical focus on these practices of struggle is central to work that I conceive of as an anthropology of urban space and provides a critical perspective on spatial practices that are changing definitions of political agency and public responsibility in an increasingly polarized urban world.Though artistic expression has been central to contemporary and past social movements such as those of the Black Panthers, the Chicano movement and the United Farm Workers, and more recent struggles against the World Trade Organization, the artistic and social relevance of this cultural production has not received much scholarly attention in anthropology. For the economically impoverished and socially marginalized youths that made up the street art collective I worked with, artistic expression and collective organization became a means not just to make their voices heard, however, but fostered communal practices that gave rise to alternative models of human flourishing or of "the good life." Organized through participatory assembly, creating and collaborating on art projects as a group, and holding art workshops to teach artistic skills to members and others, members of the art collective were able to transform their isolation and create a space of dialogue and debate that produced a powerful sociality that went beyond aesthetic expression or the imagined political and social horizon of the social movement engendered by APPO. Assessing the social and political dynamics produced by the art of protest, the dissertation addresses how Oaxaca's terrain of political positioning was constantly shifting, putting into doubt the notion of a possible scripted strategy pre-existing the mobile dynamics of contestation and struggle. The practices of struggle that APPO engendered were an invitation to insurgency, yet lacked any roadmap. As situated spatial practices with multiple mobile manifestations, the practices exceed the possibility to pin down APPO as a political formation, model, or organization. This raises challenges for mapping Left and populist politics in Latin America and the Global South, yet offers new opportunities for considering the power and possibilities of social movements from Caracas to Cairo to change and challenge not just governing regimes, but dominant social norms and forms. Attentive to the spatial practices through which collective political subjectivities were formed in Oaxaca's social movement, my dissertation also brings a critical perspective to how social movements in the Global South are commonly assessed in political imaginaries in the West. Filtered through discourses of democratic representation or human rights, social movements are generally appraised in relation to the possibilities that these afford for subaltern groups to subvert the dominant structures that marginalize them by giving voice to the injurious workings of power. I argue that an important effect of the political imaginaries of resistance that emerge from this perspective is to conceive of political traction through the lens of what Michael Warner refers to as "state-based thinking." Under the framework of state-based political imaginaries, agency is acquired in relation to the state and the state remains the means of political self-realization. However, by looking at the internal processes that social movements enable, I consider how social movements produce possibilities for social transformation that go beyond the external goals that they set forth. The mobilizing practices of struggle in Oaxaca demanded and gained recognition and rights to the city at a multiplicity of social and geographic scales. While marches, local media takeovers, and stencils on city walls were localized political practices, their political traction and demand for recognition addressed multiple audiences that included, but were not limited to, regional or federal government bodies. The dissertation argues that, when the state is imagined as the ground by which to secure social justice and political change, this marginalizes the productive power of practices of struggle in social movements as transformative of spaces and social relations in their own right. In a contemporary moment where democracy is both seen as the global future and yet is also in need of being defended and implemented militarily, the dissertation contends that practices of social protest in urban settings produce forms of organizing collective life that call into question prevalent conceptions of representative democracy and the state as the pinnacle of political organization. What emerges from an ethnographic analysis of the practices of struggle of the public assemblies, neighborhood barricades, political art on city walls, and the megamarches of millions are the ways in which these transcended the purely confrontational aspect of a repudiation of the governor to become their own point of reference; Oaxacans' embodied practices are forming alternative conceptions of ethical communities and a collective subject that bypasses state-based frameworks as the necessary horizon of Oaxaca's future. I thus argue that making the populist collective subject of "the people" is just as important as challenging the state in pursuing social justice and making a space for politics. Delimiting the political and social effect of APPO in relation to the authoritarian politics of Oaxaca's governor means neglecting how its mobilizing practices of struggle changed forms of political subjectivity and social community, with effects that continue to reverberate to this day.
