If Sadguru could go back into the past, not because of yogic powers, but if there was a time machine, and with foresight, with knowledge about what happened during the World War II, would Sadguru kill baby Hitler? Is the first question that cropped up?  Knowing that six million Jews could be saved from your actions. Say, Adolf Hitler is a consequence, is not the cause of World War II. In the sense, there has been centuries of hatred about the Jewish people. It's not… it did not suddenly crop up because of Adolf Hitler. Well, he used it politically to do all kinds of things, that's a different matter. But this hatred has been endemic in the population. Not for one or two years, for literally eighteen centuries, it's been alive. Now, Adolf Hitler became a representative of that hatred, and he consolidated that hatred, organized it in such a way that it became a mega-disaster. But the disaster has been unfolding for a long time. Forever people have been accusing Jews of being a Jesus killer and wanting to get them in so many ways they've been persecuted, not in one way. Every generation has small-scale persecutions happening in various societies across the… that part of the world at least, not here. So, when Adolf Hitler came, he saw what you're accusing of Adolf Hitler is competence. Everybody had the same hatred. He organized his hatred into a very competent, results-oriented thing. Any number of human beings have come who are as much tyrannical as Adolf Hitler. Fortunately, they were not as competent. I don't know if he studied in IIM because his organizing skills are extraordinary. You have to look at that. If only if he had organized this, not against a particular community, but for the well-being of the world, what a fantastic organizer he is. So, his competence is what we're talking about. Hatred was there in the society. He organized it and made it into an end result of a disastrous kind. See, in every generation there are tyrants. Fortunately, they're important. Fortunately, they're everywhere. Don't think they're not there. Every day I'm meeting thousands of people. You should see what kind of mindsets people have. How much endemic hatred they have for somebody that they do not even know, including me. People who have never met me, people who have not had a word with me, they have so much hatred, say, what's the problem? You've not even seen me yet. But no. So, this endemic hatred is bred in the society in the form of religion, in our society in the form of caste, creed, ideologies. See, everybody is focused on Adolf Hitler. I'm not trying to belittle what he did. He is one man, so many people cause pain to each other, but he is one man who organized human pain like nobody else. He made a machine out of it. In a real organized way, like an industry. He did not do killing, just for killing sake. He made a killing industry, you know, proper industry. Actually, they set up factories of death. So never before nobody organized it, but don't ever think nobody had those intentions. Nobody had those same emotions they had, but this man organized.  No, it wouldn't help because another guy maybe with competence would have come up. You never know. So, what we need to work at is, we need to work at, as I was telling you, a culture of peace. This is important. We never worked at culture of peace. Only when it explodes in our face, we want it solved. Otherwise, we're just going about our business. The way we are driving on the street is violent, all right? It's not fast. It's just violent. I wish they were driving fast. If they were skilled, they would be driving fast. They're unskilled and they're violent drivers.  Hello? Violence need not necessarily mean I'm going to throw a projectile at you. I don't care if you get hurt. This is violence, isn't it? So this is all over the place. We need to see culture is not something that you can build overnight. Slogans you can build overnight. You can do anti-demonstrations overnight. You cannot build a culture overnight. It takes a lifetime of dedication to bring that about. Nobody has shown that dedication. Everybody wants immediate solution. When something explodes, everybody will scream. Once it's over, they go about their business. So it is very important. I want you to understand, adult fitlers can be born just about anywhere, just about anywhere. Because the culture of disliking and hating other people who are not like you is so rooted in the society. It's just a question of, he must do an MBA here. I'm giving compliments to the institution, it's not a... Completely added, but the main issue over here is that you tackle the root causes rather than manifestations of the... Yes. Exactly so. Consequences cannot be dealt with. It is the process we need to address.


KB, sweetie. I've just been dying to know. How was your first day? Let's see. How was my first day? Sorry. What are you apologizing for? Your clumsiness or your sorry outfit? Deseeds here are taken. I call accessorizing. What's going on here? How was my first day? My first day was great. Just great.


Thank you, Andrea. Good afternoon. It's an honor and a privilege to once again serve as a moderator for a panel. I think you'll find this a fascinating discussion. The simple theme that you will see wheezed through these papers is reform. I'm going to shorten the biointroductions in the interest of time, but I commend you to read the entire bios in the handout because these are extraordinary. On my right is Dr. Elizabeth Blake, who is a deputy for individual training and learning at the Joint Staff J7 in Suffolk, Virginia. Next is Patrice Bernay, which I'm a major. Patrice Bernay-Masife, at the Bloody of Seville, who is currently serving in the General Middle Academy of Spain, known as the General. Next is Laura Huber, a Ph.D. student, a local science at Henry University. Her paper, I think, will be very eye-opening as it runs in some ways counter and in some ways compare with some of the things you've heard so far. And then Sarah Schroeder, contractor for the Navy in Washington, D.C., with an extensive background in the private sector of government operations. And she's going to talk about reforms to the U.N., so there's some really interesting detail in her last presentation. I'll take any more time. Dr. Lake, the podium is yours. Good morning. It's great to stand in front of a group of friends and for this great symposium once again. Thank you, Mary, for bringing us all together. I have a lot to talk about today. I only have 15 minutes, as we've already heard. We're on a time crunch. So if there's things that I bring up and only touch upon, please feel free to talk to me during one of the breaks or later on. So through some of the work that I have been working on through PME in the past, professional military education, I had heard about this mandate of women peace and security. And each of those reporting resolutions after that called out training as a requirement within the resolution. The U.N.'s Action Plan developed in 2005 specifically calls out training in several different areas in regards to the topic and say that each of the member states needs to develop a national action plan and that plan must include and require training for their personnel. My current position as an education specialist on the joint staff at the J7 is we deal with policy, but also how to implement that policy. So when it came time for me to do some research for my dissertation, I had a number of different topics I was considering and my dissertation chair actually said, we need to do some work on this women peace and security. Sounds great. Why don't you do a comparative study on how the U.S. is doing in regards to implementing a training program compared to what NATO and Partnership for Peace Countries are doing. And so that's what I'm going to talk to you today about is my research results and what I found which maybe is a little bit of surprise. So I started with a purpose statement and I'll read it right here. It is to provide a means of determining if U.S. military units are behind your head of North Atlantic Tree Organization or NATO and Partnership for Peace Countries in regards to gender awareness training and support of UNSCR Resolution 1325. It will provide a cross-country examination of how militaries in specific countries are institutionalizing gender as a planning factor that will assist in operational effectiveness in any of cultural considerations. The resulting information will assist in determining if there are areas in the U.S. implementation of the national action plan that could be improved upon based upon the work conducted by other countries. So my research questions were rather basic, but it was, are U.S. military units behind your head of the NATO countries? And what are they doing, the U.S. military units are doing in regards to implementation and what are the NATO Partnership for Peace Countries doing? So those are the basic two general ones. And then what are the factors that might have contributed to the outcomes of these questions? Things such as are there cultural barriers or other factors that might affect the support of the training? Have the countries developed a particular position on their staff that is specifically in place to advise on gender? And have professional military education institutions or the respective countries inculcated gender awareness training as a standard in their curriculum? So for my research, my subject matters, my members, consisted of one each from Canada, Norway, France, Germany, Bosnia Herzegovina, the Netherlands, and a partner country of Sweden. There were five members I interviewed that came from the U.S. So total of the 12 members from eight countries included three men and nine women. These people were either ones that I worked with previously in past conferences and sessions and knew about or ones that I heard about that would be a good person to talk to. There are mostly people in their 40s and 50s and these interviews were conducted either in person or on the phone or via Skype. So the research was done through an iterative framework. I reviewed each of the national action plans from those countries that I just mentioned. And I could go into that in great detail that I'm not going to due to time, but I was looking at and comparing all of their different national action plans in the different sections of them. But then also asking them and doing a series of interview questions about 45 minutes with each of them. So through that I looked at the themes that came out of those interviews, bucketed the themes to come up with my findings. So what are the findings? That's the main thing we're trying to find here and talk about today. So are the U.S. military units ahead or behind the other NATO partner countries? Well, yeah. The U.S. does like behind most of the other countries that we interviewed. However, we really are not doing too bad and we're really not alone. There are factors that contributed to how robust the training was in some of the other countries. So it ended up being not such a comparison of the good versus the bad, but kind of almost the bad versus the worse because there's a lot of struggles that everybody is having. And we think we're behind, but there's a lot of other factors that are preventing us from going forward just like there's a lot of other factors out there that the other countries are struggling with also. The U.S. is making inroads in professional military education. Most of the geographic combat commands have at least a little time in the commander's orientation program to explain what WPS is. Training programs within the other countries are more robust. Of course, Sweden, we've already heard about their North Center for Gender Military Operations, but there are other countries such as Australia, Canada, Great Britain, they're starting to think about other programs also. But it all comes down to leadership. The support of leadership really is key.  That is something that most everybody is lacking in their training programs, just what that is and how to prevent it. And I'm sure Rachel will agree with me on that one also. The factors that contributed to the non-supportive gender awareness training by any country included cultural aspects that mainly the age of leadership, realizing that this is now part of what the military is doing, fighting in an urban environment, remembering the rear area, not just the steel on target in the front, and basically having an understanding of what it is that's being discussed. Having a gender advisor on a staff certainly helps. It's a good indicator of support if the commander is willing to have that position, because most everybody says, I don't have the resources for this position. Where am I going to take that position out of it? In regards to the inclusion of gender and PME curriculums, the U.S. is actually doing better than all the other countries at this point. Trying to include it as a topic is tough and has had its struggles, but it's at least being talked about. With Mary here at Naval War College, with Nayla at National Defense University, with Lauren at Marine Corps, with Christine at the Army War College, you guys are doing great in trying to clue within the curriculum. I did mention the Air Force, we're still trying to figure that one out, so we're trying to crack that nut. But within the PME institutions, that is something actually the other countries have not had the chance to really kind of talk about as much as they've had in the training programs. So you guys are doing great in that regard. There's still room, though we can move forward. We've already talked about that, but that yesterday will hopefully help with that. So what are the recommendations? Well, key leadership engagement certainly is something, as I mentioned, that is important and critical for this agenda to go forward. And that's not a surprise to anybody here. We've already talked about that. The Nordic Center does do a key leader symposium. We did have one last September over in the United States at the NATO headquarters. There were two people from the United States in attendance. The other 42 military officers, key leaders of the general rank. The other 40 attendees were from NATO countries. So we agree that is something that we want to do more here in the United States. We have great plans to do that. We just need to get some stabilization within some of the positions within DOD before we can go forward and make that happen. Change the professional military education policy. We've tried to include this topic as a special area of emphasis. We were able to do that one year. The next two years it was voted on negatively to not be included. This year we didn't even try. Because I think there's another avenue that we need to try to take that approach. They're going to change the policy on the officer's professional military education policy. There's one sentence in there I'd like to read. Comprehend the roles that factors such as geopolitics, culture, region, and religion play in shaping, planning, and execution of joint force operations. It could be easiest to include more gender in that sentence. There's also other, and you guys have already done a great job under the table making sure this works. But maybe we can bring it forward in other ways. And that's something I think we can look forward to. Support the position of a gender advisor. We've had gender advisors in wartime. The current Resolute Support Gender Advisor is a U.S. Lieutenant Colonel, Air Force. We've had them in the past. But they haven't gone over as trained gender advisors so. So we have that position within our commands such as AFRICOM has one. PACOM has one that's double-headed. And Southcom has a gender advisor. One of the first we heard about Admiral Tidd, he said he wants a gender advisor. He has an E-9 as a gender advisor. And first core is Sergeant Lowry as a gender advisor. We just need to have that awareness of what this position is and how that can help the commander when they are doing the operations. The inclusion of gender in more exercises. I could talk about Talisman Saver for a long time. Just spent three weeks with a couple of people in the audience doing that exercise. That was an objective of the exercise. It had its struggles, but at least it's an objective of the exercise. We need to include it in more of the exercises that the U.S. is doing. Sweden has been doing some of their Viking exercises. They have one coming up at 18. That's already a big part of this Viking 18 exercise. And some other countries have included also. We just need to have the exercise designers and planners understand what this topic is and be able to include it in the exercise. Recruitment of women. The U.S. is doing very well. We're at the top of three countries that have the greatest number of women within the military forces. Now, we've talked about integration of women and how that helps move this agenda forward. Sweden only has 7%. So yeah, they're doing great in the gender mainstream. They just need to get more women into their forces. And they readily admit that. They'll say they're not doing well in that regard.  So there's some work that can be done, but having more women into the field like we're doing will certainly move the agenda along further. And the draft, and this again is what I mentioned from my dissertation defense back in November. Drafted in size and best practices paper, some kind of a guiding document or a handbook that could be in addition to the implementation plan. Now, Christine, in her work at PQSY, is doing great in developing some kind of a handbook that can be a single guide at the desk side reference for those people who don't understand what we're talking about and say, look, here's what it is and here's how we can implement it. Just me and make sure it's on their desk and not on the bookshelf working together dust. So the way ahead. Well, we've all heard about the WPS Act. We all thought it was dead in May. Got a little bit more traction. We'll see if it makes any more traction. But there is one statement in there. Under this bill, DOD would be required to train personnel prior to deploying to certain regions on the importance of involving women in the following areas. Conflict prevention, mitigation and resolution, protecting civilians from violence and combating human trafficking. So if that bill does go farther, we're going to be busy and we're going to make sure this training does happen. We do need included more exercises. Like I mentioned, Talisman Saber did include a little bit of it. I had a promising call by a Marine or Lieutenant Colonel from the Pentagon who said, I just finished a planning conference for an interagency tabletop exercise and I heard that you're doing some work in this area. We need included in the next exercises of work doing up in the Pentagon. Now, they're doing a series of globally integrated exercises between combat commands and also getting the joint staff and DOD to actually play in exercises. And if anybody's been in the exercise world, you normally have role players for those positions. Well, these are going to be people actually doing that job in an exercise. So to have this top being included in a tabletop interagency exercise will be a great, great thing for you to make it happen. Now, we heard about, Amanda Common talked about her work as far as unconscious bias. I had a person approach me two weeks ago. He's a brand new observer trainer where I work. He's a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force, a fighter pilot. And he did his paper, a more winning paper at the Air War College on having a female voice and getting more female radiators into the Air Force and what an importance that is. And he has two young girls and he says, I want to make this world a better place for my girls. And he talked to the CFPA, the Chick Fighter Pilots Association. Chick Fighter Pilots. That's what they call themselves. And he interviewed them for his paper and it was just amazing some of the things that they talked about. And so it's great to have this younger generation, the colonels below, they're finally getting it and finally understanding how having a voice of the other 50% of the population can help move this forward. So I do teach at the Swedish Nordic Center for Gender Military Operations for the Gender Vice Course. Fortunately, they've been, or unfortunately, they've invited me back every time. I helped develop the course and then have been teaching at the sections of the last three. We have another one coming up in October. So Rachel, I'll take on that mantra of getting more UN stuff into the course as we have our instructor prep time in the first part of October. But there is an online courses out there on Gender Awareness Training that we developed four years ago with NATO that was more NATO focused, but we just recently revised it for Talisman Safer and we did include more UN in there. And much of the chagrin of the NATO gender advisor, but we said, look, we've got to include more across the board. And so we did have that in there. And so that is an easy thing that I'm leaving for you all to use within your organizations. As on joint knowledge online, you could easily, anybody can get an account there if you are not associated with the military, whether it's another country or U.S., but you're a civilian, you can use me as a sponsor. I'll be glad to be your sponsor and just sign up and just Google in the search field Gender Awareness, that course will come up. And then that will be a good way to get out to your, the people within your institution. So, I conclude by saying that, yes, we may seem at times we're behind some of the other countries in some areas that we are, but we really are doing some great things. And with this group here that keeps growing every year, I think we have a good momentum to move ahead and move that snowball over the big hill. So, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good morning. I am Mayor Beatriz de la Matipe. First, I want to thank very much Mary for this opportunity of being here with all of us. I belong to a police military corps, which's name is Guadalajara, and I currently assigned to the Humanist Military Department at the General Military Academy from Spain, working as a teacher. Today, I am going to give a lecture entitled Is New Horizon in the Training of Spanish Officers According to Gender Perspective. For beginning, I'd like to begin to show a data chart of December of 2016. We can see that the 8% of women are officers in Spain. The 4.6% of women are not commissioned officers. And the 16.4% of women are intruders and sailors. I am going to divide this talk into five parts. Introduction, Gender Perspective in Spain, the Academy of General Military, historical background and our cadets, Gender Perspective, formation of the Academy of General Military, syllabus and additional measures, future vision and conclusions. Let's look now at Gender Perspective in Spain. With respect to military observatory for the equality of women, have several functions among other. It analyses the dates and makes proposals about the impact among men and women in terms of recruitment, military teaching, military career and the conciliation between prevail, family and working life. It follows and studies the suggestion of the Gender Perspective Committee and the action over women is unsecurity, especially in the UN and NATO scope. It ensures the implementation of gender criteria in a statistical sources from the Ministry of Defense in which the data where military personnel are gathered and processes of correcting both genders. Organ law 3, 2007, intends both to fight against all kinds of demonstration which still exists in terms of discrimination, direct or anti-direct on the ground of sex and promote the real equality among men and women getting rid of obstacles and social stereotypes which prevent from getting it. The plan of action of government of Spain for the implementation of 1,325 or solution constitute the decisive political framework to incorporate the gender perspective in deprivation, management and solution of air combats. Finally, the protocol of action against sexual harassment and by reason of sex this protocol tries to keep on promoting the culture of fear tolerance in the air forces by the implementation of preventing measures and evicting protection. The third one, allow through information, formation and amendments to establish a good working atmosphere in the units so as to prevent and avoid a situation of sexual harassment. Whereas the second one, apart from establishing the non-seal mechanism investments, investigation and punishment of sex behaviors and the internal protection of the victim by ensuring the right defense and avoiding, avoiding, sorry, harmful consequences. Now we move on to historical background of the academy. The General Military Academy was created in 1882 located in Eastford, Epoch in the town of Toledo. Since then, the General Military Academy has lead three epochs. First epoch in the town of Toledo from 1992 to 1893, during this period the so-called Spirit of the General was born, which implies the cohesive feeling of currency and unity of origin. Second epoch in the town of Zaragoza from 1927 to 1930, the decalogue set of values of fundamental virtues that cadets have to seek and they are still residing nowadays in different events and paradigms, represent a brilliant example of educative coherence. In this photo, you can read the first article of the decalogue to have great love for the mother country and profess loyalty to the king, openly portrayed in all the events of the life. Third epoch in the town of Zaragoza from 1940 until now, the curricular revolution has adapted scientific and technological studies to the factors that have emerged from the conflicts, completing them with a necessary preparation in humanities and values. In the follow-up on three slides, we are talking about our cadets. Cadets of different corp and branches are trained at the Academy. General corp of the army, they are integrated into different branches in fine tree, cavalry, artillery, engineers and signals. Quartermaster corp and polytechnic engineer corp, dentist common corp, judicial corp, controller, medics at the unit of music and finally, civil guard, police military corp. The officer cadets of the army remain four of the five-year formation at the General Military Academy. The accent mode is with high school grade together with the map got into the university intersection. Moreover, they have to pass a second language test, English test, a physical test and a medical checkup. The percentage of women in 2016 was 10.4%. The presence level set up in 2010 consists of 353 European credits and 52 military training work weeks. Cadets are both commissioned as president and graduated into the university degree of management engineering. Therefore, this is an all-round education, scientific, technological, humanistic, job training and essentially a formation of values. The Defense University Center is an organization under the Ministry of Defense currently attached to the University of Zaragoza and located inside the academy. The next issue I would like to focus on silos in the field gender perspective in the academy. Analysis of the International National aesthetic regulation of the armed forces. Spanish constitution, universal right of equality of all people before the law. Armed forces royal regulations in which commanders are ordered to ensure the implementation of the criteria and regulation related to the effective equality of men and women and the prevention of gender violence. Organic law, 9, 2011 on rights and duties of the Spanish Armed Forces, there is no discrimination on the basis of gender or sex. And finally, Organic law, 8, 2014 of the Spanish Armed Forces disciplinary regime. The expression of content on grounds of gender are sanctions. We have a close curricular way through the study of principle of equality, principle of no discrimination due to sex, treatment of women in air conflicts, practices and activities in relation to gender roles. Now we move on to additional measures about gender perspective. The instructor or professor gave both lectures to the new community students based on gender violence card and talks about information security, 16. All students and teachers attend lectures about the protocol of sexual harassment in the Spain Armed Forces and the prevention of gender violence in which the different ways of behaving are outlined in detail whether victim or witnesses. Commander or insurer of carry out relevant proceeding to serve for sanctioned past events. Fifth year students and teachers attend some talks about gender perspective in order to correctly conclude the process of sterilizing the gender perspective. This is a key aspect to carry out the common action in the present society. Participation and attendance of teachers and students to conference, congresses and seminars. Turning to future vision during this course the academy has created a working group of gender perspective which is analyzing the current situation at the academy and is searching for formative improvements in this area. In the short term some initiatives have already been developed such as the inclusion of a conference related to this topic at Cervantes Chair or the proposal of doing some of the end of degree projects based on the topic of women peace and security in the following academic years. In the medium term to extract the teaching impacted to analyze the presence of women in the front line and theater of operation to train teachers to make an international comparison with other armies and police military corps. And finally in the long term this is essential to lead research projects so as to contribute to make an even better environment. To conclude there is a great concern of the academy and the Spanish Enforces in women peace and security fields. The gender perspective must be present alone must be present alone on the cadets training period. The present syllabus is implemented in a specific and cross curricular way. Talk is related to gender perspective improving such a training with complementary actions. A working group has just been created with the aim of detecting formative deficiencies and needs in this field. And finally the gender perspective must occupy an understanding place in the educational integral system with basic pillar is the format is the formation in values. I would like to mention the teacher Decalogue and his article 5 says teacher will devote all the effort to the integral formation of the cadets conscious that ethical principles such as maturity and professional capacity constitute a role in their development as a person. Finally I have said Prussian philosopher Kan Manuel education is the development of all perfection that the human being nature is capable of. Thank you very much for your attention. We will echo all of the previous presenters Thank you to Mary and to the Naval War College for inviting me to come speak here today as well as boosting all of us in this conference. And so the paper that I'm going to be presenting today asks a question that I think a lot of us have touched upon explicitly or implicitly in our presentations and that's the basic question of why do we see such a large degree of variation among countries in compliance with UNSCR 1325. And I think that as as you mentioned my paper is a little different in the way that I'm going to be approaching that question as well as how I integrate into the theme of our conference today and that's because I actually in order to understand how we can amplify the WPS agenda in the future first take a look back into how we have developed over the past 30 years to look at how various security sectors specifically military and police forces have adopted gender reforms and what has motivated them to adopt these policies. So specifically this paper asks two main questions. First it asks which countries are adopting security sector gender reforms and then the second question is why are they adopting these policies. And as I'll discuss more in a moment this paper argues that while conflict and particularly civil war can be especially damaging to gender equality it can also provide an opportunity for gender reform in the security sector and that this process of conflict does provide an opportunity for gender reform has changed and been amplified after the adoption of 1325. But first I just kind of want to set the stage of it for what I mean when I say variation in the adoption of gender reform within the security sector. As I'm sure many of us know only about 66 sorry 66 states have adopted national action plans for the implementation of 1325 as well as the women's representation within the military's ranges are in military and police forces ranges between 0.5% to 56%. So we see why ranges in women's participation in these forces even though the UN through UNSCR 1325 has specifically called on all countries to increase women's participation within the security sector and yet of 150 countries that I have surveyed only 54 currently had publicly stated gender targets or quotas for increased recruitment of women into their military and police forces. So we see this variation in which on one hand some countries already seem to have implemented gender reform and have higher participation rates of women within their military's whereas other countries are starting to take are taking steps to attempt to improve gender representation within their military's and other countries are doing little to no attempt to reform their security institutions and so this paper is really attempting to understand why we see such variation in these actions of countries. But just to kind of define the terms that I'm using before I go forward and explain my theory when I talk about gender reform in the military sector I'm particularly referring to two types of reforms. The first are female ratio balancing reforms which I'm just going to refer to as gender balancing reforms for the rest of the presentation. And these reforms are those that seek to increase the number of women related to men within a security institution. And so for the purposes of my paper I define this as five different types of policies it includes the lifting of bans of women from certain types of positions for female combat men as well as things like recruitment campaigns targeted at recruiting women or the creation of an all-female unit or gender specific unit as well as the adoption of a national action plan for the implementation of UNFCR 1325 and how many was that? That was four. The fifth one is escaping me but it is in the paper that you all will receive a copy of later. So that's the first gender balancing and that's what we've been talking about a lot and talk about countries attempting to increase the physical representation of women within their security institution. The second type is a broader category which are gender mainstream reforms. And these I define in my paper very broadly as any type of reform which seeks to change the gender culture of a security institution in order to promote gender equality. So I just mentioned as well as various other types of reforms such as gender training as we have been talking about, the adoption of sexual harassment policies or the creation of specialized equipment or facilities along with various other types of policies. And then secondly for the purposes of this paper my gender reforms that I'm going to talk to you and show you some results for are limited primarily to the police and military forces. So when I look at why certain states are adopting these policies compared to others there are of course a number of different reasons that may motivate a country to adopt gender reform in the security sector. But in this paper I look at how the experience of civil war both while civil war is actively occurring and after civil war had occurred can alter a states level of political will and its ability to adopt gender security sector reform. And particularly there are five different ways which conflicts can help motivate gender security sector reform. The first is perhaps the most pragmatic and that is that during conflict the security sector increases as well as there is a greater need for more mobilization into the security sector. And therefore governments as the demand increases and as it may outstir the supply of available men they may turn to women in order to fill the swelling ranks of the security sector and therefore you are likely to see a greater balance of reforms to occur. Second during and after conflict we often see that traditional gender stereotypes and gender goals may be challenged. This is obviously most explicitly related to the security sector when women participate and a conflict has combatants. As this can demonstrate women's agency as security officers as well as it can help decrease any stereotypes that women are not suitable for the security sector and the ideas that they are weak or nonviolent or innocent. However even short of direct participation in the conflict as combatants women can also find other ways during conflict that may enable them to challenge traditional stereotypes that exclude them from participating within the security sector. For example during conflict women often gain increased roles within the economic sector then they become the breadwinners for their families in the absence and additionally they may gain greater roles within the community such as the leaders of their families they may mobilize peace movements and then they may also become politicians and then they may use kind of the momentum that they gather during the war taking over these roles of perhaps the missing men who are off fighting or have been killed in order to leverage their increased leadership after the war to bring greater access to the security sector. Third kind of in contrast to that past the previous mechanism during conflict women often face great levels of insecurity and they may be greater levels especially to their physical security than they experienced during peacetime and therefore as a result the government may feel responsible and may feel that it can undertake gender reform as an attempt to specifically address women's gender conflict and similarly during conflict the legitimacy of the security sector is often damaged and this is especially true during civil war in which the security sector has potentially participated in violence against its own civilians and therefore the government may hope to leverage stereotypes that women are more peaceful or less corrupt and more trustworthy than men in order to regain some of their legitimacy in the eyes of the public and then finally what international actors often gain unprecedented access to policymaking within the state as we know during conflict policymaking abilities of by the government may falter due to infrastructure destruction or due to political discord and this may make it difficult for the country to pass policies however the international community who then attempts to intervene in the conflict or after the conflict to promote peace then gains an opportunity to influence policymaking within the state and as we know the international community favors the WPS agenda and therefore is likely to promote the adoption of gender reform within the security sector and the post-conflict state therefore in this paper I hypothesize that states are either actively experiencing a civil war or have experienced a civil war within the past 10 years are going to be more likely to adopt both gender balancing and gender mainstream reforms within the security sector than non-conflict states however we might expect that the character of this gender reform within the security sector looks different within these conflict-affected countries and in particular while you will expect that active conflict countries are going to be more concerned with their personnel and therefore they're going to be more concerned with gender balancing reforms in order as I said to follow through in contrast post-conflict states are likely to be more concerned about their ideas of legitimacy and reputation and therefore they're going to be more concerned about gender mainstream reforms so therefore the second set of hypotheses is that while both conflict and post-conflict states are more likely to adopt these policies than non-conflict states active conflict states should be especially more likely to adopt gender balancing reforms whereas post-conflict states and then finally kind of bringing in 1325 if 1325 has been effective in changing the kind of normative structure of how we view the role of women within the security sector we should expect that given its emphasis on conflict that conflict and post-conflict states should be especially more likely to adopt these reforms after the passing of UNSCR 1325 okay so in order to attest these hypotheses I collected data of 150 states between 1988 and 2016 and I recorded their history of gender reform policies during that time and it's important to note that I was only collecting data on the adoption of policies not whether the policies were implemented over time using this data I created two and sorry for any of you who hate statistics but I ran statistical models I'm going to have to talk little statistics quickly I created two main variables these are the outcomes that I'm looking to test the first was whether a gender balancing reform was adopted within the state year and the second was whether a gender mainstream reform was passed or sorry adopted within the state year I then tested whether there was a correlation between a state's conflict status and the adoption of these reforms I had two different kind of indicators of a state's conflict status the first is basically whether the state is either actively experiencing a civil war with 25 battle deaths or more or has experienced a civil war within the past 10 years so I included those within the same category and then the second set of independent variables I used step rated that conflict status out into active conflict and those and for anyone who is interested and I can explain more for the modeling if anybody is interested in a state's progress with state standard errors and a number of controls to help for other things that might be affecting whether or not the state adopts these gender security sector reforms so overall the results do show that conflict status is correlated with the adoption of these gendered security sector reform policies and in particular about 8% more likely to adopt gender both gender balancing and gender mainstream reforms than non-conflict states when we separated out the results are generally consistent however we do see that post-conflict states are not more likely to adopt gender balancing reforms than non-conflict states that is unique to active conflict states which again if we consider that gender balancing may be driven primarily by the swelling of the security sector after conflict we may expect that as the security sector shrinks we will no longer meet that gender balancing reform but we do see that again both post-conflict and active conflict states are more likely to adopt gender mainstream reforms than non-conflict states and then finally how am I doing that okay and then finally I ran a number of models in which I looked at whether this same conflict status and the adoption of these reforms changed when we considered whether or not we were looking at before 1325 was adopted or after 1325 and there are a number of interesting results some of which were not really what I was expecting first we see that non-conflict states were the most receptive to 1325 we saw that it was non-conflict states that changed their behavior most significantly before 1325 to suddenly beginning to adopt both gender balancing and gender mainstream reforms after 1325 so that may imply that 1325 did successfully change the behavior the ideas and the normative values of non-conflict states what kind of the surprising is some of the results of the conflict affected states and once again it's with gender balancing and in it we see that again post-conflict states are not more likely to adopt gender balancing reforms after the adoption of 1325 so it doesn't seem that post-conflict states saw from 1325 that they needed to they needed to take these steps to increase women's representation within the security sector that's something a result that surprised me quite a bit from some of my other work however it may again indicate that gender balancing is mostly affected by this pragmatic need for personnel and not so much by the normative changes of 1325 however we do see that 1325 did change in a statistically significant way the behavior of post-conflict states and that we see that after 1325 post-conflict states are much more likely to adopt gender mainstream reforms than post-conflict states were before 1325 where they were about 33% likely to adopt a gender mainstream reform before 1325 afterwards they're about 50% likely to adopt women's reforms so just to kind of conclude in general these kind of results I think really speak to two things first I think they have a relatively hopeful indication or implication for the effect of 1325 and that they do indicate that 1325 did appear to change the behavior of non-conflict states and post-conflict states however it does appear that the effectiveness perhaps more than normative effectiveness of 1325 is limited when it comes to active conflict states but this is in line with some of the work that we've already referenced in which during conflicts states often become more militarized and they're more mass humanized which goes against the gender reform kind of values but so that may indicate that as we move forward we should really be focusing on how we can sell the idea of WPS2 states that are actively experiencing conflict and then finally kind of moving forward since the study has shown that country context does play a role in affecting who adopts these reforms I hope to in the future look at how it benefits whether or not the reforms are successfully implemented particularly looking at whether or not I think the reform was adopted due to the internal external pressure how that affects whether or not it is unsuccessfully implemented and that is all for me alright, thank you thank you gravity or ban will be shared, sure that's going to be hard to follow I'd like to echo everyone else and say thank you for the opportunity the Naval War College has allowed me to or afforded me to speak about my thesis Millennium Challenge Corporation, MCC as a model for UN resolution enforcement to promote economic reform of marginalized populations please note that women are a huge subset of the classification marginalized population by MCC I too do not wish to offend anybody mine will be a shock to your system so I apologize in advance I'd like to ask the audience a question please raise your hand if you think the UN resolutions are purposeful resolutions have a duty but they lack enforceability I am going to list some facts to set the tone as stated in the UN General Assembly the effective rate of resolutions for 2017 is only expected to be about 55% for some of the top monetary contributors collectively for peacekeeping operations the UN published that all members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out a security council while other organs of the United Nations make recommendations to member states only the security council has the power to make decisions that member states are then obligated to implement under the charter I am obligated to pay taxes that the government expects in exchange for my right as a US citizen but I can ignore such a demand by not paying taxes until they catch me that's essentially what the member states are doing under into resolutions found by the obligation 25 of the charter but knowingly and willfully ignoring them the UN is recycling and redressing resolutions without actually addressing the problem of enforcement a great example is the UN security council's response to Syrian crisis in total 23 resolutions have been implemented since 2012 if the same resolutions are working why would we need to keep coming up with new ones to address the same issue earlier this week the UN press reports that Carla del Ponte a former war crimes prosecutor who said Sunday she is resigning from the UN's independent commission of inquiry on Syria because of the security council's inaction on holding criminals accountable in the war battered country she told Swiss magazine Blake we have had absolutely no success for five years we've been running up against walls to get a better budget and more than 28 percent of the peacekeeping budget this is $10 billion every year with no return on investment Millennium Challenge Corporation has spent $10 billion overall since it's inception 13 years ago with a return on investment using their model for policy reform building infrastructure preventing the marginalized at this time there is no singular or joint entity, either domestically or foreign, that will pick up the tab if the US pulls out. Of these countries, my thesis looks at Afghanistan, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Syria, and what resolution enforcement would look like. To review the economic landscape of each country, I used reputable tools such as the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom, the World Economic Forum's Global Competitive Index, and the Hofsted model. The fact remains that only three out of five of these countries have a baseline by Hofsted or by left. The country ratings were repressed, mostly on free or not graded. Only one of these has a compact started with MCC, and that's as of December 2016. What's worse is that all five of these countries are members of the UN with resolutions attached to address the current situation. Is it because these countries are not relevant and or too dangerous to compile information on? Think about the countries in Africa. If we were to assist in creating a stable landscape for the marginalized populations, we would not only benefit from the economic standpoint, but from capitalizing on untapped resources like rare earth materials that we require from a national security perspective where China may be the sole provider. No one has offered a solution to the problem, but yet the problem keeps getting discussed over and over. The UN is an outdated system that no longer serves the same purpose it once was established for. We must do something to help the marginalized populations from being tortured, isolated and poverty, held back from financial independence, and free from fear of starvation and death on a regular basis. How do you propose we do this? My thesis proposes that the UN adopt the Millennium Challenge Corporation business model framework and use the UN integrated sustainable development goals, SDGs, to enable a third party UN enforcement arm, aka a corp, that will ensure resolution compliance and promote economic security through infrastructure development and policy reform so the marginalized populations of the world are able to rise simultaneously as the elite. My theory is not an attempt to recreate the wheel, it's taking a fresh approach to generating the synergy among a group of resources not fully aligned before and leveraging the financial punch already thrown by the U.S. but in a different manner. The U.S. needs to paint the picture of what it would look like if they walked away with 22% of the budget. We have already threatened to reduce funding from certain areas, but instead, use the financial cloud to leverage what the catastrophic outlook would be if we pulled out permanently, then perhaps threat to do so and be prepared to walk away as we are dumping $10 billion down the drain every year. This will force other countries to step up to the plate both monetarily as well as adhering to the resolutions. In addition, countries would have no other option than to comply with the new set of rules late before them. If not, they will be ejected from the U.N. arena. Globally, no one has time to deal with defiance in the realm of security for the marginalized populations and stunting global economic growth. The states would be in reaction mode attempting to find out how they will function when 22% of the U.N. budget leaves the table. The answer is it won't. In January, UNGA raised the budget for 2017 to $5.6 billion. The way I see it, the member states have only one choice. This on the assumption the U.S. keeps my advice. The states must comply with resolutions that are monitored and enforced through a third party and increase individual contributions or be forced out of the interpay-to-place circle that has the economic, financial, as well as military cloud to ice-blade a similar country in the non-existence. The U.N. needs to adopt MCC's approach to treating it as a business. Countries go directly to MCC, requesting monetary assistance for infrastructure and security in varying forms with the intent to adhere to the policy reform and MCC mandates as conditions to receive inside assistance. Think of the U.N. as MCC and the countries that are part of the U.N. asking for assistance in the form of resolutions are like the countries coming to MCC for help. The countries in the U.N. must adhere to the resolutions that are adopted or face consequences by the proposed court above, including being expelled from the lead circle of 193 member states. MCC is already entrenched in the U.N. as the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, slated to transform the world by 2030, which were based off of the MCC Millennium Development Goals and DGs. Every member state was tasked with a segment to meet said goals. In turn, the U.N. already sees MCC as a catalyst and policy developer for change through partnership and enforcement. Knowing that the MDGs morphed into the SDGs highlights the underlying synergy between MCC and the U.N. The foundation has already been laid and put in an MCC-style judgeship in charge of ruling, monitoring, as well as affirming a member state's reaction to resolutions is the correct way to proceed forward as the current U.N. SC does not own enforcement due to political entanglements and policy-bound directives. The U.N. is trying to be everything to everybody, which becomes too generalized and results in forwarding power over a single lane of authority to its six different groups slash organs like the U.N. SC. As clearly stated thus far, the bottom line is that the U.N. faces internal issues that cannot be fixed with that independent, non-biased oversight committee that will treat each violation accordingly as directed by a specified set of rulings. It will be absolved and shielded from political rhetoric as the role of each judge would be quite simple. One, the Judiciary Council would be an extension of the already established U.N. International Court of Justice, C.I.J. or I.C.J., which is the principle judicial organ of the U.N. We shall not be the seventh organ and call it the U.N. Resolution Court, U.N. RC. The U.N. C.I.J. would remain an entity, but now roll up to the U.N. RC. The U.N. RC would handle U.N. Resolution Violations with the responsibility of enforcement. This organ will have a larger overreach as the resolutions are voted on by all members and the members are obligated under Article 25 of the Charter to comply. It will no longer be an obligation, but rather complying will be a requirement to maintain the right to be a member state of the U.N. The reason that C.I.J. will not absorb the right and remain separate is that it is the only concern with legal disputes submitted that are between two states as well as giving advice on legal questions when there is still any board and as not all disputes involve ever a member state. Two, the committee would go through nominations and elections for each position of the court and endure a voting by member state peers. It will begin by each nation going through a process to draw up candidates to be the elected judge for the member state. Then the member states would hold primary elections to identify who will be the individual in the general election going against other member state primary election winners. Member states already vote on resolutions as a democracy, so this would not be a new concept to them. We three, we will keep the widely popular number of 15, the U.N.S.C. and U.N. C.I.J. being favorable. However, the 15 judges will be subject to elections and all will be active participants with the 15th judge breaking a tie code on any given judgment regarding a resolution violation. There will no longer be five permanent members with veto power plus 10 non-permanent members representing 193 member states. It will be 15 elected judges with three year terms as enough happens in three years to be seasoned and to react to the violations by member states in a timely manner. In turn, 15 countries will be elected by their peers to maintain citizenship every three years and as in any election, any country who is a primary candidate entered into the general election. We will be applicable as they say or maybe it's just me, permanent positions with veto power or so last year. This has been a long time coming due to the political entrenchment that the U.N. has allowed to happen. If the U.N. wants to talk in circles due to more emphasis on political figures than this by their high life, the elephant in the room or forced countries to get the right individuals into the right positions by forcing diplomatic and transparent communications between states. Seeing as how we need change yesterday, my suggestion would be to implement the new structure of my thesis proposals beginning in 2018 and line it up with the next adjustments to its scale of assessments by the UNGA. This means start now, line up the project milestones for reform, place them into an agenda for completion and pass out rules to monitor progress and ensure completion. I would venture to say that the lack of true enforcement in the UN resolution process is the definition of insanity. We're doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Resolutions seem to come back to a need for politics and a want of establishing democracy. If resolutions are enforced, then democracy can be built and if democracy can be built then policy reform can occur. Policy reform will give and enforce rights of the country's citizens and stimulate the economy by reducing the number of people fleeing their country. Plain by NCC's rules will result in infrastructure development for the hard to reach areas if the country complies with policy reform regulations. Rookie Jews will return to their country if hope is given for a better life with the right to own property not be the property of another individuals be an entrepreneur and free from torture. There are three core principles to the NCC model. First, since they believe policy matters NCC funding is performance based. Second, they believe that foreign aid should be predicated on partnership and not paternalism. NCC funding requires country ownership. Third, since they are interested in outcomes NCC insists upon tangible, meaningful and sustainable results. I think this approach will work the same for resolutions and that the US is investing in the UN and each resolution should be traded like a compact or threshold project. The countries need to take ownership of implementation and put a larger portion of the budget. The UN would fall apart without US investment. To me, this means enforcement would foster empowerment for development and create opportunities for the US, its businesses as well as other countries to open up trade discussions with other countries who are relatively inaccessible or secure. NCC forms partnerships with some of the world's poorest countries but only those committed to good governance, economic freedom and investments in their citizens. I think this falls right in line with the UN resolutions as they are commitments by the member states of the UN as a group to implement the same traits in a country that NCC forms partnerships with countries for. The UN enforcement would force countries to meet conditions for investments. NCC uses an economic rate of return, ERR, to identify which projects and countries to choose for contacts and threshold programs. NCC states at its core, ERR is a comparison of the cost and benefits of a public investment. I think the US should look through the business lens and view the UN as a public investment that should have an estimated and expected return on investment. NCC is extremely transparent in how it issues foreign assistance to promote good governance practices and government decision-making. NCC's methodology for ERR analysis is thus described as micro-economic growth analysis which matters the expected increases in household incomes or the value added of individual firms. I have stated that I think the US needs to view the UN like NCC would add a country for investment. If the UN member states are not upholding the implementation of resolutions in their countries, then the UN would use the new judgeship that I suggested and as a means of action would kick out the countries that are not complying with the rules. It's that simple. No one wants to leave the UN as it doesn't provide a conduit for trade, development, and alliance building. In turn, I think countries would heed the US's warning if they threaten to pull funding unless this new structure is implemented. NCC speaks to the fact that work in one country has a likeness to spread to other countries which would imply economic stimulus is contagious and will build regional cooperation. As discussed earlier, the NCC values are already ingrained in the UN as the UN's sustainable development goals slated to transform the world by 2030 or based off of NCC's MDGs. NCC, by contract, works to eliminate obstacles and reduce risks in our partner countries to encourage business investment and accelerate economic growth and alleviate poverty. In conclusion, I'm not saying that my way is the right way, but I'm not saying that the current system is not working. We need to do more and buck status quo. It'll be a time for a fourth question. I know it's a challenge given the wide variety of the interest in the presentations, but let's start. Thank you so much. So for Laura Hover, I'm curious to know if the research went into the balance of those countries that have conscriptive service, those that have a voluntary service. At the moment, it hasn't. As I move forward with the project, I do plan that I'm going to do a closer look at how the militaries are constructed and particularly how they recruit their officers as well as their previous or, for lack of a better word, their current gender standing. So theoretically security sectors that are already relatively gender equitable don't need to adopt gender reforms, although from looking at the data, that's not what I'm seeing. I'm seeing that countries are adopting these gender reforms that are relatively equal rate across relatively more equitable countries and less equitable countries, but I have not yet looked at how the country, the military itself does their recruitment, so that is a good idea. That's something to report to the major. I'm back. My questions for Dr. Layton. So one of your recommendations was inclusion of gender and more exercises. So then you talked about the need for exercise of designers and planners to understand gender. Do you have any recommendations on how to go about getting the planners and the exercise designers more involved in this area? So I went to our observer trainers and said, okay, this is what we need to do. You need to look for these in the exercises. And they said, okay, great, I understand. Good concept. But we don't plan the exercises. So I went to the exercise planners and said, this is what you need to do to plan the exercises. I said, okay, great, but I understand it. Good thing, but we don't request it. We need to go on what the combat commander, whoever's requesting the exercise and then we'll design it included in there. So every month we have a monthly BTC that Suzanne does coordinate and we go out to the people and often I'll tell them, hey, if you want this included in your exercises, you have to go to your exercise planners and make sure this included it within the exercises. Recently one of our other exercise planners came to me and said, hey, well, the exercise designers who are our contract force need to understand what this concept is also. So they may be able to, without any overall knowledge, be able to include it just kind of surreptitiously. And so it's there without really being requested because we're having that struggle. And so we need to do a top-down and a bottom-up approach. And so that's just getting the word out for it. Thank you. Thank you, I'm Rachel. It's not really a question to Sarah, but to thank you for your very explosive, very fun take and it was a pretty accurate take over the year unfortunately. And to give you some more ammunition, I think that something that your organisation or your theory could also say is that when you're looking at each country if they meet their UN mandates on the resolutions. You could also get this court to look and hold to account for soldiers who are committing sexual exploitation and abuse because at the moment it's done internally by each nation and for me it seems to be a bit of an error because unfortunately things have been pushed under carpet. So that's just some strength and that's a segue to a question to Laura. Have you considered that countries which have a good architecture in women peace and security might have had an internal sexual exploitation and abuse problem? And I say that on thin ice, but I can see that some countries which are really good at this, that they've got their gender advisors are in some way recoiling from an internal scandal. Are you interested in any other countries doing that? I have definitely found evidence that some countries there will be some kind of scandal and then as a result they do suddenly adopt the sexual harassment policy, sexual exploitation policy to try to recruit more women and they have this reactionary push to adopt all these gender reforms. I have not yet tested, tried to find as actual statistical correlation partially because I can't find accurate data of those kinds of scandals happening within the military. I have, I am attempting to record when I find evidence sometimes you know when it makes it to the media I can find evidence of those things happening and so I have some kind of total evidence. I don't have any hard statistical evidence at the moment but I definitely do think in some countries that is the case. Good time for one more question. I have one, I thought we had one. Just one, go ahead. I have a question for Laura. Looking forward into the implementation piece you said you were going to be tracking how those gender balancing or gender mainstream reforms are implemented. Are you going to be dating into account, you talked about how the post-conflict states there are a lot of international players that can have a role and then introducing those gender reforms did any of your research track how those forms were adopted based on the role of an international player or are you going to look at that in your implementation piece as well? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So when I was collecting the data on the adoption of the reforms I had to see evidence that it was a government driven reform so if the reform appeared to be driven almost entirely by the UN or by civil society or NGO that was not included with my data set. It gets marquee especially in post-conflict states because sometimes the UN has such a strong role or these civil society actors have such a strong role within the security center reform that they overlapped and who is actually adopting the policy but I had to see evidence that it was the government actually participating in the adoption of the reform. That being said I do think that these international actors play a big role in the implementation and moving forward I do plan to track for example what the level of the UN presence or civil society presence was within the country to see how that then affects whether it's implemented in the long term. I haven't been able to do that as yet but that is something I'm planning to do moving forward. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Thank you.


When will foreign leaders start asking to speak to America's real government? During the furor over Nancy Pelosi's incendiary Taiwan visit last week I was watching an appearance by anti-war as Dave DeKamp on the show Rising Which brought up the under discussed point that US officials going to Taipei is actually a continuation of a trend that had already begun happening under the Trump administration DeKamp pointed out that China began regularly flying planes into Taiwan's air defense identification zone after Trump administration officials made similar visits to Pelosi's That started happening regularly after August 2020 when President Trump sent Alex Azar to Taiwan DeKamp said He was his health secretary. He was the highest level cabinet official to visit Taiwan since 1979 The following month in September 2020. They sent Keith crack He was the undersecretary for economics in the State Department, and he was the highest level State Department official to visit Taiwan since 1979 So these are unprecedented steps and since then we've seen more Chinese military activity in the region Later in the interview rising's Breonna Joy Gray asked DeKamp if these escalations against China from the Trump administration into the Biden administration were a quote kind of blob foreign policy decision that is not partisan DeKamp explained how in 2018 the US military began officially transitioning from emphasis on counterterrorism in the Middle East Toward great power competition with China and Russia with the ultimate target being China If you look at all the really hawkish think tanks in Washington that are funded by the arms industry It's all about this so-called great power competition DeKamp said Russia right now seems to be the more imminent issue, I guess but China seems to be in the long run and we've seen this from just about every government agency the Pentagon the FBI the State Department the CIA say that China is the long-term so-called threat and We've seen Biden say this and this is kind of the name of the game in Washington right now in the lead up to Pelosi's visit moon of Alabama spotlighted this strange phenomenon Where US foreign policy moves along the same trajectory regardless of political party or election results with a collection of recent articles That have all raised this subject independently This one from naked capitalism stands out the most right now quote National leaders never have complete freedom to act even autocrats have constituencies or power blocks they have to appease In the US it has become clear that the president has limited degrees of freedom on foreign policy matters The military intelligence interests call the shots mind you There are factions so a president can push the needle to a degree That's why for instance Obama was able to check Clinton's plans to escalate in Syria But the flip side is that presidents who want to improve relations with pet enemies get nowhere in In the Oliver Stone interviews Putin recounts how he had productive discussions with Bush and they agreed on concrete de-escalation measures Follow-ups were unanswered Eventually Putin got a written baffle speak climbed down That and other examples led to Putin concluding that US presidents are hostage to bureaucratic and commercial interests Biden is a very weak president and it appears that that has enabled the neocons to have an even bigger say over foreign policy than usual One assumes Xi has to understand that Yet the Chinese readout has Xi starting from lofty first principles to contend that the US and China as leading world powers have a duty to promote peace global development and prosperity From that Xi reasons that seeing China as a strategic rival is misperceiving US-China relations and misleading the world community Who is Xi talking to when he goes on like that? It certainly isn't Biden and quote an example of the aforementioned comments by Putin was when Oliver Stone asked him You've gone through four US presidents Clinton Bush Obama and now Trump. What changes? Almost nothing your bureaucracy is very strong and it is that bureaucracy that rules the world Putin replied It's that bureaucracy that is responsible for the fact that the US centralized empire continues to move in the same way Along the same trajectory regardless of political parties and election results Nobody elects that bureaucracy You can't even see most of it behind the veils of government and corporate secrecy You can study at your whole life and at best you'll come away with a list of opaque government agencies long-time military and intelligence operatives plutocrats corporations banks war profiteers think tanks lobbying firms and NGOs With ties to different nations and governments around the world But exactly who is responsible for what specific decisions behind each specific move of the empire will remain shrouded in mystery to you It's just a jumble of names and words with no useful application Westerners are fond of crowing about the freedom they have to criticize their president or prime minister in whatever way they want Saying that if you tried to criticize the leadership of one of the foreign regimes We are all trained to hate you would be thrown in jail for it Depending on the nation that may be true But is it really freedom to be able to criticize an elected official who is nothing more than a figurehead? Sure, you can criticize the president all you want You can stick googly eyes on a sock and criticize that all you want to it'll make the same amount of difference At least people who live under more overtly authoritarian governments know who rules over them and who's calling the shots in That sense they have more freedom than us As an Australian I know I live in a member state of the US centralized Empire, which is functionally just a US military base with kangaroos But I can't see who's making the actual decisions about how the Empire will act how capitalism will move and Whether my children will be conscripted into the military to fight some idiotic war with China provoked over Taiwan or the Solomon Islands If I were Chinese I would know exactly who is ultimately responsible for making the important decisions about economics and foreign policy in my country But as an Australian I don't get to know those things The truth is Westerners live in a giant Empire loosely centralized around the United States whose operations they have literally no influence over Whose operators they don't even get to know and whose mechanisms are entirely hidden If you call that freedom I call you a fool We can see that the Empire moves the same way on important matters regardless of who we elect by simple naked eye Observation of the Empire's behaviors from year to year We can also see it in the fact that the official leader of the most powerful government on earth is obviously suffering from some kind of Dementia and is clearly not the one calling the shots All this makes me wonder At what point will foreign leaders begin demanding to speak with those who are calling the shots? At what point do Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping begin saying no, we're not doing another fake phone call with America's fake government Put me in touch with the actual people who are responsible for the issues. I am concerned about Who is making the actual decisions on these specific matters? Let me talk to them I demand to speak to your real government


I think that's the state of the museum. I'm not going to write it down. That's not a good thing. Is it? No. Anyway, when he built a... Just 10 points away from the museum.  Okay, it's too close. It's close, right? So he built a really big house outside the museum. Do you know what it is? Yes. He would call you, but before you are here. But you will be here, or you will be... The sound will go out from the speaker to me, I mean. The sound will go out from the speaker? No. No? Ladies. No, gentlemen. Especially those that want to be there.


Okay, first of all, Ricky, thank you very much for your unwavering belief in architecture, which has been proved over several sessions of the Urban Age conference. I am not sure whether we deserve such a trust, architects, but anyway, I'm gonna, when Ricky told me quite a few months ago, he called me and said, well, do you know anything about Electric City? I'm doing a conference on Electric City. I thought that I could only say that I have been part of an experiment that I did a couple of years ago in Princeton as a commission from the former dean who asked me to get engaged in a program that was done through different schools in the US called Culture Now, which was aimed to see what was the, how do I move the slides forward? Okay, so I was a part of this Culture Now experiment, which was aimed to assess what, in what way architecture can contribute to American culture. And thinking about that, I thought that probably the most important phenomenon that happened in American culture in the last decades is the emergence of the Web 2.0, which is a space that changes. It was a very challenging question because I think it's a space that now everybody uses, not only in America but also elsewhere. It's a space that has pervaded political engagement, has now embodied a very important part of political forces. It's a space that is fundamentally challenging the very principles of architecture. So if architecture, and I have to say that for me, the interesting question about being engaged in this experiment was almost to see what could be the future, if you want style, what would be the traits of an architecture that is made within this realm. So this is the previous paradigm, which you all know is based on large buildings, pliant forms, custom made elements, etc. So what happens with architecture when, if architecture is the vehicle that tries to communicate, to represent things in physical forms, what happens when things now have an IP address and communicate with each other, what has been called the internet of things. When sensors, I mean we've seen already several examples of this world in the conference, sensors are communicating with actuators and controlling the environment. What happens when urban space, which was one of the primary means for a collective to come together, to share space, is now replaced by other vehicles that also help us to share content, to share intelligence. I mean it's, and how do these things merge? What happens when knowledge is crowdsourced, when editors are no longer there and we are basically driven by this media. I mean this is a media that has produced also very interesting examples of sharing, which was one of the, I think one of the main purposes of urbanism or architecture, sharing cars, sharing apartments or rooms, sharing intelligence, even sharing a financial endeavor through micro financing or this kind of crowdsourced finance. It was also, it is also I think a milieu that is starting to challenge the previous processes of authorship and patronage, which are now being replaced again by crowdsourced intelligence. So it was actually a very interesting question, how do we turn this world into something that has a physical effect. And my intuition two years ago was the time when there were a number of programs or engines appearing on the Web 2.0 like Foursquare or Google Latitude, which after having globalized content were starting to focus on location and were starting to provide, and cities would be now designed for people carrying one of these devices that give you a different impression of the city. So the hypothesis here was that this sudden turn from a worldwide Web to a localized interface between information and physical objects was maybe an opportunity to explore, that basically drove the experiment. It was an experiment that I did with students. We applied a number of theories of network diagrams trying to understand who are the agents that are engaged in each one of these engines. And we did quite a few interesting proposals that for example had to do with identifying and resolving food deserts in America and proposing vehicles whereby Web 2.0 devices could pair up with physical infrastructures that would, for example, optimize food wastage. We collaborated with different companies, literally. We were talking to Walmart and we were talking to a number of engines like Vimeo and Indaba. So we literally were working with some of these Web 2.0 engines in making, this was another project which was about regenerating Detroit using some website which is Indaba, which is a music shared website and using the kind of musical tradition of Detroit in order to produce certain elements to be distributed in the urban fabric to regenerate certain areas of Detroit. So in terms of creating new urban institutions, the experiment was very interesting, very successful. We identified a number of interesting new potentials where I think the experiment was less effective in actually bringing this to a close in terms of physical output. It was, there were projects that where you could identify already a number of, if you call, traits and I would like to go back to this first intention of the project which was to identify let's say the new style that will emerge out of the interface between physical objects in the city and these new technologies and that new style was not very promising in what we got out of our engagement with these Web 2.0 engines. Many of the projects were temporary, were scaffolding based, so it was maybe interesting as a project, but maybe not forthcoming in terms of producing a new architectural paradigm like the Guggenheim perhaps did at some point. And so what I would like to, but out of the experiment I managed to get a few ideas which I would like to share and to put on the table almost as a kind of polemical statement of what could be the architecture that may emerge from the engagement with these processes and these technologies. And I would like to say that a number of these processes have to do with, I bring this image because the first phone is a phone that is made out of the assemblage of devices to listen, to speak to, every one of the elements is visible in the object, is a discrete object, is very different for example from the Guggenheim and the kind of parametric continuous, pliant form that we have seen emerging in the last few decades. And so that type of phone is now this. We've gone through a phase in which technology has become virtually totally integrated in certain forms, in certain geometries. But the proposal that I would like to make is that perhaps that continuity, that style of continuous variation may actually be changing. That the new paradigm of, or the new canon of architecture probably will be discretized, will be again an assemblage rather than than this kind of seamless continuity of the previous models. And there are a number of reasons for that. This milieu, this web 2.0 now enables us more than ever to customize products, to crowdsource intelligence that enables people literally to become makers, to become producers. It's another very important lineage that is emerging where people are actually able to acquire intelligence and apply it in producing objects that look like this. This is a self-made track that one guy called Andy in the States put together out of crowdsourcing intelligence and pieces from different places. Customization of products, Ikea disobedience, recent show at MoMA from Andres Hake was exploring this type of almost the evolution of the design agents to a wider base of actually to the users, the evolution of the design agency to the user. So these processes of crowdsourcing and customization I think are crucial in terms of perhaps producing a new architectural paradigm, a new architectural canon and I believe, and this is where in a way the manifesto or the statement comes forward, is a canon that rather than being highly technological is going to be more driven by low technologies and the skilled production. You may know that this is what this is a lock-com bolt, something that Ikea uses in order to enable everybody to assemble furniture. This is another example of the architecture that is emerging from these processes, the wiki house where you see also a system of elements that can be assembled in order to produce a variety of objects that are part of a series and yet not designed by, affected by the system itself, but not designed by a single mind and have this kind of combinatorial nature. This is another example of things that are happening and I believe that some of these processes have to do with the formation of a new paradigm HHF art farm project that actually uses industrial off-the-shelf products in order to assemble architecture. The container, the unit of contained space is suddenly a very widespread paradigm that all kinds of architects are using in order to produce physical objects in the city. These are some of the examples that I found this one around the corner from here in which suddenly this container of the shelf container is suddenly assembled and is used to produce the new urban facilities that have to do with that are accessed through the web etc. Discretization I think is one of the or discrete variation versus the smooth continuity of the parametric. I think that one could perhaps identify as a current tendency that is enabled and supported by some of these engagements with web 2.0 is experiments that have to do with units, containers in the case before in this case bricks, but units that are not customized, that are all the same, but in whose, where the project is in the assemblage between of these units, some examples from Gramatio and Coller and also some other examples of established architects who are actually learning from these processes and trying to capture the images that emerge out of this this new brave world of the web 2.0 and the customized production. The idea of the unfinished is something that is also present in this devolution of the design agency to the user Alejandro Aravena is one example that you all probably know Giancarlo Massanti, another architect that is exploring this idea of some sort of combinatorial assemblage of open systems that are finally decided in time by the user obviously the Torre de la Concordia. It's very interesting how many of these experiments are done by architects in Latin America. I mean thinking about what Enrique was saying before about non-planning or almost how the political and economical infrastructure in those countries is in some ways producing a certain capacity to engage with this type of of systems. I think that if there is one model that everybody is talking about now probably is the SLAM, a very ad hoc and also talking about some of the things that Richard was mentioning and writing recently had to do with perhaps this emerging as some sort of latent paradigm that everybody is suddenly becoming interested in. Other paradigms that have to do with this world is the pop-up show where actually containers in the city like the one that we are inhabiting now are suddenly activated. This idea of urban recycling is another I think strand in the developments that emerge out of this world of the pop-up shop of the city that is made for a certain moment in a certain space of the city trying to recycle some of the existing infrastructures and I mean of course I think Tate Modern is perhaps one of the local examples of this and maybe a very advanced one because it was done a long time ago and it obviously has had enormous impact in how the city can be reused, can be transformed. The city is almost like a carcass that is inhabited that is used by these other processes that are pervading. I remember always Jack had talking about this city as dealing with a mountain and I think that perhaps some of these processes are operating with existing urban topographies almost as if they were mountains and the architecture is some sort of inhabitation of them. So this is basically some of the trends that I identify as perhaps the emergence of a new paradigm enabled by these new technologies that I would like to propose today for the discussion. Thank you very much. Maybe before we move on I'll just ask you a question or two. I think it was interesting that you began by looking for a style as if architecture was sort of existing in some abstract world in which it moves from style to style. Implicit in that is of course some question of capital that is to say that architecture needs like any product to repackage itself and it seems to me that part of what you've discovered with which I'm in complete agreement is that you have as essentially as the economy has come apart you also have it's not just technologically driven right it's about who's going to pay for these things. So you have now a lot of these much smaller projects cheaper and they are participatory. I was thinking of one in San Francisco called proxy community along a redeveloped area. I won't take too much time but where a highway came down wanted to have something in an empty space because the economy could not support the buildings that were supposed to go there. Went to the city. The city put out a RPF and said you know come up with something and an architectural firm there came up with the idea of essentially containers for a series of shops and other things so it was a kind of pop-up urbanism. Handsome, capitalized, very successful. Not terribly architectural so my question to you is I mean so what is the role actually of the architect then if it's not if you're not going to design a Guggenheim what how does this mean the architects what is the architect supposed to be doing now? Well I think that the architect is probably supposed to be doing more or less the same that it was doing before which is to formalize these processes into structures physical structures but I and I don't know I mean I don't have the perfect answer to simply the probably the relationship with the user the relationship with the client is going to be different there is not going to be the big patron and the big architect but a multitude of of patrons that perhaps I mean when you look at Kickstarter and all these devices of crowdsourcing finances you don't you're not talking to a to a client you almost have to invent the project and put it out there to see whether it takes whether whether people engage with the project so I think that perhaps one of the one of the possibilities is that architects need to become more entrepreneurial and more capable of identifying opportunities and putting there in the public realm to see whether people are prepared to finance them. I always when I was doing this experiment I always remember a famous sentence from back minister Fuller who once said there will be a time where when people will vote with their wallets and I think that we are through this media we are starting to reach a situation where actually people put their money where where their beliefs are and those beliefs are are are gonna have to be maybe the architect is more that kind of person who generates a belief that then attracts capital. Yeah I mean do you find this an issue or a problem with the the incompleteness the temporiness the the idea that this is I mean in the sense it embraces the notion of architecture is in fact generally not permanent I mean do you do you think that's an opportunity for architects or a particular challenge? No I think I think it is an it is an opportunity and and you know these things are also going to be permanent some of these buildings that I was showing from Herzog de Maron who are in some ways capturing this idea of a sort of discreteness of the new canon of architecture of what I would say is a new canon and the fact that the figure of the building is not is not a pristine complete figure but something that is almost made by an accretion of cells by an accretion of parts you know there may be one way to put it is that if it answers a need then people will value it I was thinking of the paper museum church that Shigeroban did that was part of the relief effort and actually that's lasted for well over 10 years now partly because people like it so they take care of it we build all sorts of permanent buildings made out of concrete and steel and people don't like them they come down after a few years the Eiffel tower had planning permission for five years there you go so it's you just mentioned accretion I just want to one thing which came out of your presentation very clearly to me which is first of all a sort of modesty about what the profession is about which is very welcome I don't think you even showed one of your buildings which quite something but the notion of the notion of accretion brings something else not just the assemblage the system and the combination but also a sense of time that actually begins to say that the incompleteness that we've talked about means that one has to have attention to what happens in five ten twenty thirty years which on the whole has not been the case is that something you've been yes I mean I mean the impossibility to or the unfinished the the the paradigm of the of the the element that grows that is unfinished that incorporates a number of I could have perhaps shown a few projects but I thought it was more interesting to simply leave the ideas on the table that architects can or have to learn to produce or the new architectural paradigm is is perhaps about incompleteness and and and that incompleteness needs to be physically and visually manifested right that's what thank you for that we need to move on