Global Governance Where Public and Private Spheres Meet http://www.thecpe.org/ CPE understands peace in all of its senses. The term is active as well as passive.
CPE is a growing community of scholars dedicated to advancing an understanding of peace and ethics, and their application to every aspect of individual and communal human activity. Human collectives—nations, corporations, religions, and other organizations—know peace as freedom from war, conflict, or fundamental disagreement, they know it also as the process through which this freedom from conflic
t is achieved and memorialized. Individuals know peace as a mental state of calm and serenity, but also as an interjection commanding calm or silence or said in greeting or farewell. It is welcoming but can push back. It embraces individuals and communities of people. But in its basic aspect, peace connotes positive connection. That positive connection CPE understands as fundamentally grounded in principles. CPE knows ethics as systems of principles. CPE understands ethics as systems of principles of human conduct, whether as individuals or as groups. CPE understands as a fundamental idea that peace is the goal, the state of being. Ethics is the method, the path to and defense of this state of being. But neither systems nor principles are fungible. CPE understands ethics as that set of principles grounded in human dignity, respect, duty and obligation that are elaborated in the “Statement of CPE Ethical Principles.”
Together peace and ethics suggest a framework for organizing and understanding all human interaction. CPE will dedicate its resources to advance the goals of peace through ethics. COMMITTEE MEMBERS: http://www.thecpe.org/?page_id=105
Larry Catá Backer:
Larry Backer is the Executive Director of the Coalition for Peace & Ethics. He is the W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law & International Affairs at the Pennsylvania State University (B.A. Brandeis University; M.P.P. Harvard University Kennedy School of Government; J.D. Columbia University). He serves as Chair of the Faculty Senate of the Pennsylvania State University (2012-2013). He is the founder and director of the Coalition for Peace & Ethics, and has visited at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (1998) and Tulane Law School (2007-2008). His research focuses on governance related issues of globalization and the constitutional theories of public and private governance, with a focus on institutional frameworks where public and private law systems converge. He is particularly interested in issues of corporate social responsibility, the relationship between state-based regulation and transnational systems of “soft” regulation, state participation in private markets and the emerging problems of polycentricity where multiple systems might be simultaneously applied to a single issue or event. He teaches courses in corporate law, transnational law, and International Organizations. Shorter essays on various aspects of globalization and governance appear on his essay site, “Law at the End of the Day,” http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com. His publications and other work are available on his personal website: http://www.backerinlaw.com/Site/ or through the Social Science Research Network: http://ssrn.com/author=259226. Keren Wang:
Keren is the Assistant Director for The Coalition for Peace & Ethics and an incoming doctoral fellow in Penn State University’s Department of Communication Arts & Sciences. Keren holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from Penn State University, and a B.A. in International Area Studies from Drexel University and Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. As a researcher, Keren’s interdisciplinary background has enabled him to employ pluralistic methods to the study of global problems, where he has engaged in a wide range of research projects involving constitutionalism, transnational governance, socio-economic rights, and social movements. Prior to joining the CPE, Keren worked at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business as the manager of the student support office, and as a research intern at the Global Security Institute, Philadelphia. Tomonori Teraoka:
Tomonori is a researcher and program associate for the project initiative committee at The Coalition for Peace & Ethics. He received Bachelor of Law (L.L.B) in 2010 from Tohoku University, Japan and Master of International Affairs (M.I.A) in 2013 from the Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A. where he focused upon transnational governance and nuclear arms control. Starting this fall, he will enroll in the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies (Culture and Representation Research) at the University of Tokyo and join the Graduate Program on Global Society (GSP). His research focus at the University of Tokyo will be on political, social, and economical cultures and discursive practices in East Asia under globalization. Arianna F. Backer:
Arianna is a researcher and program associate for the project initiative committee at The Coalition for Peace & Ethics. She received a Masters in Public and International Affairs degree from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs’ (GSPIA). With the international political economy major and advanced certificates in International Development & Asian Affairs and Japanese studies, Arianna has focused her secondary educational career on East Asia—and Japan specifically. Her skill and understanding have not only been developed through rigorous academic effort, but also through ample study abroad experience in Japan at Sophia University in Tokyo and the Kobe University Graduate School for International Cooperation Studies in Kobe. Working with the United States Embassy in Tokyo under the United States Department of State and also with the Japan America Society of Pennsylvania have helped develop Arianna’s interests in foreign diplomacy and cooperation. Other research interests include the development of corporate social responsibility in East Asia, the international political economy of Japan in relation to a growing China, and international diplomacy and trade as it relates to the Asia-Pacific. Nabih Haddad:
Nabih is a researcher and program associate for the project initiative committee at the Coalition for Peace & Ethics. Jasmine Siyu Zai:
Jasmine is a post doctor at the Institute of Law of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Her research focuses on civil and commercial law of both China and the US, especially in the circumstances of cross-border transactions. Jasmine received her J.D. from Penn State Law in May 2011, where she was a Dean’s Scholarship recipient, a law review associate editor, a moot court member, and a research assistant to Professor Larry Catá Backer. Before joining CASS, she was working in a New York law firm, practicing law in the areas of corporate law and cross-border business litigation. Nabih Haddad is a researcher and program associate for the project initiative committee at the Coalition for Peace & Ethics.
10/27/2024
Text of Kazan Declaration; links to the other documents distributed, and some brief reflections on the proper forms of production of perception narrative as the highest form of new quality production for the development of multilateral collectives.
In the Val-Halle of Perception: BRICs 2024 «Strengthening Multilateralism for Just Global Development and Security» Documents and the Text of the Kazan Declaration
Wang makes three broad points. The first is that GDI envisions of national context focused approach to development and an inter-governmental structure for coordinating these distinctive pathways toward development, united broadly by generalized shared goals. GDI "encourages countries to formulate development plans based on their own national conditions, while strengthening international policy communication, infrastructure connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration and people-to-people exchanges, so as to build a closer and more pragmatic global development partnership."
The second is to align GDI with the emerging structures of socialist modernization as it has been developed within the context of the 3rd Plenum's recent Resolution on Socialist Modernization and New or High Quality Development. That reinforces the alignment between theoretical development within China (especially with respect to internal development) and the projection of that theoretical development outward in ways that can be generalized for the international community.
The Global Development Initiative is a plan of world significance proposed by China in the context of many challenges and changes in economic globalization. It is mainly based on the "six insistences", namely, insisting on giving priority to development, insisting on putting people at the center, insisting on inclusiveness, insisting on innovation-driven, insisting on harmonious coexistence between man and nature, and insisting on action-oriented. It not only reflects China's profound understanding and active response to global development, but also demonstrates the world value of Chinese-style modernization."
Third, Wang notes the efforts to materialize the vision for a Chinese and Socialist Pathway to development through the further development of networks and inter-linkages at the State level. To that end he notes what appears to be the critical pathways toward community. These include the further solidification of the "Friends of GDI" at the UN and likely eventually at other international institutions. Another is the parallel development of linked networks through the China International Development Cooperation Agency. The third is through the Belt & Road Initiative networks. The object is to enhance the centrality of China and the Chinese vision for the re-constitution of the forms and trajectories of the global discourse on development and the embedding of the Chinese development imaginary within the structures and operations of the United Nations systems, and beyond.
Socialist Global Sustainable Development: Wang Manqian, "The Global Development Initiative injects new impetus into global sustainable development" [王曼倩 全球发展倡议为全球可持续发展注入新动力 ]
A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.
10/21/2024
I have been writing about the institutionalization of States of Misery in Cuba. Born of the revolutionary premise that sacrifice is necessary to realize the promise of the revolution, and impervious to deviations from the Cuban Marxist-Leninist ideal in those Socialist states that survived the collapse of European Marxist-Leninism, Cuba has increasingly returned to the fundamental notions of sacrifice to support an order grounded on present misery to preserve the oral economic order represented as the core premise of the revolution and grounded in the antipathy for consumerism, and the signification of consumerism as the avatar for the corrupting influences and exploitative debilitation of the contemporary system of individual and markets driven economic systems.
It is in this context that the recent power disruptions that affected significant portions of Cuba resonate--but perhaps not exactly in the way that the Cuban State apparatus might have preferred.A nd yet the power disruption catastrophe may be different in kind. It is certainly a marker that, from the first months after the success of the 1959 revolution, was seen as a marker inviting revolutionary activity. It is with that in mind, but with no sense of where this may go, that it is worthwhile to reconsider a critical portion of a much longer address delivered by the then young and just emerging leader, Fidel Castro Ruz, at a rally of power plant workers, April 11, 1959.
One reads this today in a very different way than one might have in April, 1959. And yet, even then, the fundamental idea of sacrifice, of popular privation in the service of a greater (and abstracted) thing--the revolution, was already much in evidence. But of course in 1959, flush with the exuberance of a revolution in which, for an instant, almost anything seemed possible, one might never have imagined the power outages of 2024. And yet, perhaps oracularly, Mr. Castro ended his April 1959 remarks to the electrical plant workers with in April 1959, with a vision of the dynamics and realities of the sacrifices to come--for the greater glory of the nation and its revolution. That is how Mr. Castro's remarks end, opening a window, one that no one could have seen through clearly then, of what the future might portend. The text follows
Cuba's State of Misery (Sacrifice) in its More Ironic State: Excerpt from Fidel Castro's Speech at a Rally of Electrical Plant Workers 11 April 1959 [Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz en la concentración de los obreros de plantas eléctricas, el 11 de abril de 1959]
A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.
10/18/2024
PowerPoint for Presentation of "Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline" Prepared for 2024 Annual ASCE Conference
A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.
10/18/2024
I am delighted to share the discussion draft of the paper I am presenting at the 2024 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy taking place 18-20 Oct.
My object was to consider ways of approaching the following questions:
Might it be possible to describe the current state of Cuba as an effort to perfect a stable state of misery? Can one better understand the core premises of its political-economic model as pointing to the perfection of administrative apparatus that oversees this state of misery? Can what to outsiders appears to be a state of wretchedness be instead understood from the inside as the fulfillment of a vision of social relations that relies for its ordering on maintaining just enough wretchedness to divert popular attention from the political (and its ruling apparatus) to the business of surviving; a set of social relations en el que lo principal es resolver (in which the principal objective is to solve, to fix, or to overcome the immediate challenges of finding enough to eat and to live well enough)? And might that stability of misery be a condition that suits the rest of the world, which contributes to the maintenance of this implementation of the moral judgments embedded in the Cuban political-economic model?
These elements are woven together through twelve vignettes-- vignettes that are both in search of a theoretical framework and that also suggest its form. The first three weave together the moral order foundations supporting the construction of a robust and stable state of misery, and its transposition to political ideology and its response to and identification of its inverse (and enemy). The second set of five vignettes spotlight key aspects of the way that theory finds its way into the constitution of the policy frameworks through which the state fulfills what it has determined is the best form of application of the principles that make Cuban Marxist Leninism itself and in the actions of foreign states that collude in the enterprise. The last four vignettes add the dialectical element to the system.The contemporary forms of that engagement manifested after COVID with the 11 July 2021 protests. But more than that, the dialectic merges protests as a form of dialectic conversation with the (and perhaps measured by) the willingness of the state apparatus to widen or narrow the aperture of toleration of the non-state sector.
Links to the discussion draft are included as well as the Abstract, table of contents and the essay introduction.
Discussion Draft Posted: "Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline"
A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.
10/11/2024
"The object is to apply a semiotic lens to constitutional projects (generally): what happens if the constitutional object, its text, is approached as both a memory of the threat-fear-crisis-response-resolution trajectories that produced it, and as the stage and stage directions for mimetic performances of this initial dialectic in ways protective of the fundamental ideological principles that signifies the constitutional object. Interpretation then signifies (in its own right) both an affirmation of the generative act and an affirmation of the solidarity enhancing repeat performances relevant to current actors in time, place and space. Constitutions, in this sense are mimetic dialectical spaces defined by the ideological principles that give them form, and built to anticipate and channel the inevitable repetition of the threat-response the initial resolution of which was the constitution itself. In that context it is worth considering the clues that might be extracted from key extraconstitutional and preambular text. The focus is on the constitutional projects in the UNited States, China, Cuba, and Kosovo."
Contents: (1) Introduction; (2) American Constitutional Convulsions in the Search for the Structures of a More Perfect Union; (3) The Marxist-Leninist Variations: A Glimpse at China and Cuba and Foreign Corruption; (4) From the State to the Techno-Bureaucratization of Dialectics of Fear and Crisis: A Glimpse at Kosovo; (5) From Template to the Mimetic Constitutionalization of Fear/Crisis; (6) Conclusion.
Discussion Draft Posted: "The Constitution of Fear and the Performance of Crisis: The Dialectical Mimetic Semiotics of the Constitutional State and the Signification of Preambular and Extraconstitutional Texts"
For those with an interest in original source material relating to the development of Chinese Marxist-Leninism during the early years of the PRC.
From 高大伟 David Cowhig's Translation Blog: " 1958: Party’s “Rightist” Speech Collection After Hundred Flowers Campaign" 【高等学校右派言論选編 中共中国人民大学委員会社会主义思想敎育办公室】
A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.
10/03/2024
A short set of thoughts on the semiotics of purpose and its phenomenology in conflicts. From the reflections:
"Less abstractly, perhaps, the human proclivity for vesting objects around them with function, purpose or a specific relationship to the human—and then to develop baroque and complex regulatory systems around that set of ordering diktats (in law, morals, science, and the like)—misperceives the relationship between the human and their objects. The relationship between the human and their objects is dialectical and inter-subjective rather than hierarchical. Each shapes the other through repeated and mimetic interactions that are affected both by the “meaning” assigned to objects and the use to which they put or which resists containment within the name given. The regulatory structures which are then used to manage their dialectics might be understood as ideologically political—as a dialectics of meaning making through lived experience in relation to and against the idea of that object."
* * *
"Recently, though, these fundamental rules of the operating systems of human relations around objects have appeared more urgently in the context of common household products—even the description of the objects around which the problematique is to be discussed suggests the power of naming in cabining fundamental premises about the “thing”, its “legitimate” or “expected” use and as well the consequences for “mis” use.
Indeed, the condition or meaning of ordinary household products has exploded in recent weeks.
Literally". * * *
On the Semiotics of Small Consumer Goods in Conflict: Coding Purpose and Purposing Codes in Legal or Other Regulatory Systems
A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.
09/26/2024
Brief reflections on the recent reforms of the regulatory architecture for small and micro enterprises in Cuba and what it may suggest but in the context of the Cuban State and some broader theoretical implications.
On the Management of Necessary States of Misery in Economic Policy: Cuba Reforms its Private Sector Rules (again)
A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.
09/22/2024
Some very brief thoughts on this excellent essay touching on the dialectics of the mass line.
The Mass Line from a Liberal Democratic Point of View: Clyde Yicheng Wang, "The Self-Image of Propaganda: Biopolitics of Yuqing Governance"
My contribution focused on the development of Whole Process People's Democracy. It considers the development of dual track structures of endogenous (voting for representatives) and exogenous (collectivized popular consultations) democratic practices within and through the leadership and guidance of a vanguard party. These structures, long in the making had been effectively parallel structures of socialist democratic engagement. The exogenous element of democratic structuring is embedded in the People's Congress system; the mandatory structures of democratic consultation has emerged through the system of the CPPC and collective mass organizations, including the old United Front parties. The Decision/Resolution of the 3rd Plenum of the 20th CPC Congress, concluded in July 2024 formally embedded a principle of coordination among these two institutional elements. Together these elements constitute the whole of whole process peoples democracy. Whole process people's democracy and its processes (especially) are then embedded in the evolving construct of socialist modernization and its high quality productive forces modalities. These then further integrate the political and consultative structures of democratic operation within the broader ideologies of the comprehensive development of all of the society's productive forces, now through focused innovation. The essay first situates the "issue" of democratic expression its its core framework--the spectrum of possibilities within which it is possible to express premise of rule or governance by the people. It then contrasts the baseline approaches of liberal democracy's centering of exogenous democratic practices (through the election fo representatives) with the expression of Chinese Marxist-Leninist democratic practices through endogenous (institutionalized consultation) approach.
Workshop Presentation--"Whole Process People's Democracy"-- Public Law and Human Rights Forum, School of Law of City University of Hong Kong; "Exploring Cutting Edge Constitutional Issues in the "New Era" of China"
A blog about globalization, governance, law, corporations, religion and culture in changing times.
09/14/2024
I was delighted to have been able to "sit" for a short interview with Payman Yazdani for the Mehr News Agency. The topic was BRICS and the potential for its emerging role in whatever emerges as the contemporary world order.
The discussion was framed around three key questions, each of which served as a doorway to a perhaps more profound
Pix credit hereNATO member, Turkey has recently applied for BRICS membership. Earlier some other big economies like Saudi Arabia and UAE had joined the BRICS. Why is the desire to join the bloc increasing among world countries, especially among Asian and African countries?
How did the US and its European allies' policy in using the dollar and global banking system as a political weapon against their rivals motivate the world countries to look for alternatives like BRICS?
How do you see the future of BRICS in the long term? Can we expect a new order?
The text of the interview, with links to the original may be accessed in the post.
"BRICS can discipline strategic interventions in intl. organs": Text of my Interview with Payman Yazdani for Mehr News Agency
Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Coalition for Peace & Ethics posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
CPE serves as an institutional environment for an ideology free, non-partisan and independent investigation, analysis, scrutiny, research, inquiry, examination, and practice of peace and ethics. To that end, CPE will encourage and support boundary-pushing, multi- and interdisciplinary research that advances an understanding of issues relating to peace and ethics studies, including issues of constitutional governance, globalization, public and private economic activities and their social, cultural, economic, religious and political impacts.
CPE serves as a forum for the discussion of issues of peace and ethics as they affect individuals, governments, religion, business, and other organizations. It will also serve as a clearinghouse for the advancement and dissemination of information relating to peace and ethics study.
It will promote activities that seek to further the peace and ethics principles that serve as the foundation of the organization. CPE will engage in three categories of activities:
(1) producing knowledge through peace & ethics research projects;
(2) communicating knowledge through peace & ethics education projects;
(3) implementing knowledge through the council for peace & ethics groups.
