Colombia en la era de las transiciones: lineamientos geoestratégicos para el siglo XXI desde un neorrealismo ecológico

El término era de las transiciones, acuñado por Newt Gingrich en 2000, denota en su sentido original la revolución tecnológica que conduce a la fusión y convergencia de los mundos biofísico, humano y tecnológico. Este artículo retoma y amplía el concepto a fin de proponer que la actual era, la cual se manifiesta como una transición geopolítica, un cambio sistémico y una crisis civilizacional, va acercándose gradualmente a una real y efectiva confrontación hegemónica. Sus actores geoestratégicos principales son Estados Unidos y China por gozar de mayores capacidades, voluntad política y dinamismo. Al analizar la interacción entre ambos, guiados por sus respectivos imperativos geopolíticos en términos de competencia geoestratégica —en especial, por la inteligencia artificial y los recursos naturales estratégicos—, este artículo expone cómo dicha competencia ha ido dando forma a una nueva estructura internacional enmarcada en las dos megatendencias globales de nuestro tiempo: la cuarta revolución industrial y la crisis ecológica. Aunque el concepto de Gingrich no incluye este último factor, este texto considera que la crisis ecológica es el signo definitorio de nuestra era que revela las vulnerabilidades de ambas potencias en cuanto a sus biocapacidades. Partiendo del entorno geoestratégico que se describe y desde la perspectiva de un neorrealismo ecológico, este artículo busca responder la pregunta ¿qué debe hacer Colombia para lograr un mejor posicionamiento en el sistema internacional en el transcurso de la próxima década? Finalmente, desde la perspectiva anunciada y en torno a las biocapacidades de Colombia, se proponen tres geoestrategias para ser implementadas en la presente transición. Esta es la contribución del presente artículo.

BAD ATTACHMENTS: EMAIL AND QUEER ANTI-CENSORSHIP PROTESTS

This paper examines a 1996 U.S. internet censorship protest that encouraged users to email a series of technically “indecent” files as attachments to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich using an online email generator. These attachments were: a list of abortion clinics, a graphic illustration of condom-use instructions, and excerpted sexually explicit scenes from Gingrich’s own novel, 1945. Selecting from a drop-down menu, senders chose their attachments, completed a personalized message, and clicked send, all within a web-based form. By using the platform to inundate the Speaker’s email with attachments, senders cleverly broke the censorship provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), putting themselves at risk to the criminalization of sexual expression online. The “bad attachments” protest grew out of the fact that online information about sexuality was vital to marginalized communities with limited access to other kinds of information channels—including queer and rural youth, and people living with HIV. This paper argues that the protest attachments constitute a queer, material digital practice, attuned to the political demand for ready information access as a means of survival.

Pursuing Medicaid Block Grants with the Healthy Adult Opportunity Initiative: Dressing Up Old Ideas in New Clothes

The Trump administration’s “Healthy Adult Opportunity” waiver follows a long history of Republican attempts to retrench the Medicaid program through block grants and to markedly reduce federal spending while providing states with substantially greater flexibility over program structure. Previous block grant proposals were promulgated under the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and congressional majorities in Congress, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the House Budget Committee and then Speaker Paul Ryan. Most recently, Medicaid block grants featured prominently in Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. This essay traces the history of Republican Medicaid block grant proposals, culminating in the Trump Administration’s Healthy Adult Opportunity initiative. It concludes that the Trump administration’s attempt to convert Medicaid into a block grant program through the waiver process is illegal and, if implemented, would leave thousands of people without necessary medical care. This fact, combined with failed legislative efforts to block grant Medicaid over the last forty years, highlights the substantial roadblocks to radically restructuring a popular program that helps millions of Americans.

Nation

Chapter 4 shows how American sex scandals have a specifically national element inspired by evangelical thinking. How a politician is accountable for illicit sex depends on whether he typifies white masculine norms, and whether he symbolizes a protector who will keep white Americans safe from their enemies, both foreign (e.g., Muslim terrorists) and domestic (e.g., poor blacks). Politicians thus function like national fathers whose indecencies Americans tolerate so long as they can assure the white public of the nation’s strength. To chart this idea, the author explores the proliferation of family rhetoric in political speech across the 1970s and1980s (including that of Ronald Reagan), discusses the racialized gender norms that politicians follow to increase their public appeal, and shows how Americans see themselves as childlike citizens who need a father’s protection. These ideals are borne out in a comparison of the sex scandals of Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards.

Community Partnership Through Transformative Justice

In the Foreword to Gerard Robinson and Elizabeth English Smith's Education for Liberation volume on educational initiatives in prison, Newt Gingrich and Van Jones note that educational programs “do something powerful: they give hope and dignity to the incarcerated.” The authors wholeheartedly agree and while they recognize the importance of higher education programs that confer degrees and therefore credentials out in the free world, they find that education can be broadly understood in prison in ways that greatly enhance the hope and dignity of the incarcerated. In this chapter, they explore the creation of a Japanese-style healing garden at the Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP), a maximum security, 2,000-person male prison in Salem, Oregon. This prisoner-led initiative was a resounding success, despite all the odds against it, because it was animated by a philosophy of transformative justice that both prison administration and prisoners could believe in, and it embraced the need for meaningful and inclusive community partnerships.

Open Competition Races II: House Republicans

This chapter continues the discussion on the open competition race, the most common type of leadership race in the House of Representatives, focusing on the GOP. It begins with a detailed discussion of perhaps the most consequential GOP leadership election in the past three decades: the 1989 race for whip, in which Newt Gingrich (R-GA) narrowly bested Ed Madigan (R-IL) and positioned himself to become the first Republican Speaker of the House in forty years. It then considers three additional cases of open competition for GOP posts: the minority leader and whip races in 1980 and the majority whip contest in 1994. As in the previous chapter, the findings are consistent with the mixed-motive model of vote choice.