Sharing Power? Prospects for a U.S. Concert-Balance Strategy

View the Executive SummaryThe subject of U.S. grand strategy has been getting increasing attention from the policy and academic communities. However, too often the debate suffers from being too reductionist, limiting America’s choices to worldwide hegemony or narrow isolation. There is a wide spectrum of choices before Washington that lie “somewhere in the middle.” Frequently, not enough thought is given to how such alternative strategies should be designed and implemented. The future cannot be known, and earlier predictions of American decline have proven to be premature. However, there is a shift in wealth and power to the extent that America may not be able to hold on to its position as an unrivalled unipolar superpower. Therefore, it is worth thinking about how the United States could shape and adjust to the changing landscape around it. What is more, there are a number of interlocking factors that mean such a shift would make sense: transnational problems needing collaborative efforts, the military advantages of defenders, the reluctance of states to engage in unbridled competition, and “hegemony fatigue” among the American people. Alternative strategies that are smaller than global hegemony, but bigger than narrow isolationism, would be defined by the logic of “concerts” and “balancing,” in other words, some mixture of collaboration and competition. Can the United States adjust to a Concert-Balance grand strategy that made space for other rising powers without sacrificing too much of its forward military presence, without unleashing too much regional instability, and without losing the domestic political will? It is not certain that a cumulative shift to a new grand strategy would necessarily succeed, since other powers might turn down the chance to cooperate. But with soaring budget deficits and national debt, increasing burdens on social security, and possible agonizing choices in the future between guns and butter, it is surely worth a try.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1530/thumbnail.jp

Power Relationships and Open Source Theatre

This research is based on practice and is the first academic investigation of the methodology of Open Source Theatre (OST). OST is a form of advocacy. It is built on the concerns, experiences and vision of the subject group with the cooperation of representatives from the range of stakeholders. New roles are identified: the Initiator, the Precipitator and in particular the Arbitrator, not dissimilar to the traditional role of Director but stripped of any power over content. Their collaboration, in the Integrated Team, protects the process from insidious dominances. OST increases input from the subject group in the theatre-making process by altering the power balance. It is a response to the constraints and challenges of democracy. I will argue that it combats the habitual silences of apathy and fear and that it counters manipulation from the powerful. The essence is a distillation of fact and fiction in the surfeit of information surrounding us. This encourages the production of information-dense 'snapshots' (or dramatised sound-bites) that concentrate the audience's attention. Definitions of applied theatre sideline OST, in part because the subject group is rarely the target audience. Responding to an often-frustrated desire among the disenfranchised to be given a hearing, OST typically seeks an audience in a wider sphere, albeit sometimes a smaller but more specific and, ideally, more influential one. I will argue that OST processes are complementary to, though distinct from, those used in other forms of theatre for social change. The hypothesis is that impeding the devising team's freedom mobilises the subject group. It is the subject group who set the agenda, approve the critical analysis and validate the drama: they become creative agents rather than donors

Just a Girl in a Man’s World: Factors Affecting Women in Leadership in Law Enforcement

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics from 2013 revealed that of about 477,000 sworn law enforcement officers at the local level in the United States, only 12% are women; and only 6.2% of those who hold intermediate-level rank are women (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Local Police Department, 2013: Personnel, Policies, and Practices, 2015). Although legal mandates have afforded women career opportunities in law enforcement, those mandates have not provided protection within the structures of law enforcement agencies regarding achieving high ranking positions. Women are more likely than men to remain in lower-ranking positions throughout their entire careers because they are less likely to be considered for higher ranking command positions. This research explores promotion rates of women employed by police departments, which are typically headed by appointed heads of agencies, and sheriffs’ offices, which are typically headed by elected heads of agencies, in order to determine the similarities or differences regarding rates of promotion of female law enforcement officers as a function of the agency head (elected or appointed). As expected, I find that sheriffs’ offices are less likely to promote women to executive-level positions than are police departments, but surprisingly, sheriffs’ offices promote slightly more women at lower levels of rank. I also examined other variables that may affect the proportion of ranking officers who are women and the findings show that agencies with education-based incentives, higher population (in the agency’s jurisdiction), and agencies in the South are more likely to promote women at lower levels of rank but less likely to promote women at higher levels of rank

Constitutive exclusion and the work of political unintelligibility

This project, “Constitutive Exclusion and the Work of Political Unintelligibility,” is a study of the ontology and epistemology of post-Hegelian conceptions of difference and their political meanings. It is motivated by the desire to understand what determines how political bodies constitute themselves through defining who is and who is not intelligible as a political agent, and how persons formerly unintelligible as political agents can become intelligible. I emphasize that constitutive exclusion is ambiguously both a structure and a process for operation: it is neither a structure which determines a particular operation, nor is it an operation which founds a certain structure. Constitutive exclusion then is both a structure and an operation by which a system, symbolic, or political body is constituted through the exclusion of some difference which is intolerable to it, or against which it defines itself. This exclusion is, however, never truly “successful,” in that the excluded element necessarily remains within the body that has excluded it, and that element continues to do the work of constituting the body through its internal exclusion. The movement that I describe is therefore twofold: on the one hand, a system, body, or ontology constitutes itself through the production of an excluded element that it nevertheless harbors within itself. On the other hand, this internal harboring of the excluded element is ignored, unrecognized, or disavowed. Constitutive exclusion is productive, therefore, of a remainder, a constitutively excluded figure that occupies what Derrida calls a “quasi-transcendental” position with regard to the delimited space whose boundary it serves to draw. The constitutively excluded figure is both the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of that constituted space. The exclusion of that figure makes the constitution possible, and yet its remaining nevertheless within that constituted space renders it impossible. It is an insurrection from within. The constitutively excluded figure simultaneously grounds and troubles the bodies that rely upon it. At the level of philosophical systems, I argue throughout the dissertation that constitutive exclusion operates on ontological, epistemological, and political levels, and in fact tends to draw the distinctions between these levels. On the level of political systems, I argue as well that political bodies and the terms of political agency are drawn through constitutive exclusion. Such constitution renders constitutively excluded figures politically unintelligible. Though they continue to do the work of drawing and maintaining the boundary of the political body, they remain unintelligible to that body as political agents, and if and when claims are heard from those quarters, they appear to those on the “inside” as wild, strange, threatening, destructive, or mad. Translating the claims of such agents is therefore difficult: rather than simple inclusion on the terms as already established, translation necessitates the reconstitution of the political body itself

LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volum

Vibrancy of Public Spaces: Inclusivity and Participation Amidst the Challenges in Transformative Process in the City of Cagayan de Oro, Philippines

This study examines the dynamics which lead to revitalization of everyday life in the public spaces of Cagayan de Oro, a medium-sized urban center in Northern Mindanao, the Philippines. By employing the oriental philosophies together with western thoughts such as Henri Lefebvre, Alain Touraine and Jürgen Habermas, this study elucidates that the core of perceived, lived and conceived spaces is ‘the Subject.’ Once the Subject utilizes the public sphere to instill social action, social space is ultimately produced. Hawkers, grassroots environmental activists, street readers and artists are the social Subjects who partake in the vibrancy of public spaces. The social Subjects utilize public spaces as venues of social transformation. Thus, this study argues that the social Subjects’ role in democratic process lead to inclusivity of the marginalized sector in the public spaces of the city