Brief Reflections on 习近平以更高标准、更实举措推进全面从严治党 [Xi Jinping, Advance Full and Rigorous Governance over the Party with Higher Standards and More Concrete Measures] Together with the Qiushi Editorial Implement Xi Jinping’s Thinking on Party Building in the Practice of Rigorous Party Governance [把习近平党建思想贯彻到从严管党治党实践中]]

 

A recent issue (2026年第20期《求是》目录) of Qiushi [求是"Seeking Truth"],  the official theoretical journal and news magazine of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), included many interesting articles (table of contents and links below). Two essays were especially interesting to me:

--Xi Jinping, "以更高标准、更实举措推进全面从严治党" ["Advancing Comprehensive and Rigorous Party Self-Governance with Higher Standards and More Substantive Measures"], Qiushi 2026, No. 20 (the principal portion of Xi's January 12, 2026 address to the Fifth Plenary Session of the Twentieth Central Commission for Discipline Inspection).
--Qiushi Magazine Editorial Department, "把习近平党建思想贯彻到从严管党治党实践中" ["Implementing Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building in the Practice of Rigorous Party Management and Governance"], Qiushi 2026, No. 20.

These are important essays, essays produced at a critical moment in the movement through China's New Era, and a foundation for what comes after when it is again time to consider  the next stage of Chinese historical development, and of the general contradiction that must then be confronted, Yo to that the Party and its architecture must be ready. And it is tho that ed that these essays provide some beginnings of guidance, drawn from the lessons of the current era of historical development, and of the way in which the Party's leadership and guidance, provided the structures and impetus for the efforts of the nation to meet them. 

My Reflection is titled Reflections on Two Essays from Qiushi (求是), 2026, No. 20: Translation, Internal Analysis, and a Reading Through Theories of Foundational Principles and Structures of Chinese Marxist-Leninism (25 October 2026). Claude Sonnet 5 was used in the writing and was especially useful in the translation of the Original Chinese text of the essays. The rest, including the ideas and analysis, and its errors are entirely my own. Part 1 of the essay consists of the translations of the original texts (also reproduced below) into English.  Part 2 attempts a semiotic analysis of the texts. It means to read the two texts strictly on their own terms—asking what they are trying to accomplish, what they take for granted, and what interpretive horizon has to already be in place for their sentences to function as they are plainly designed to function. This is not yet an application of any external theoretical apparatus; it is an attempt to describe the cognitive cage from the inside, before asking, in Part Three, what a reader equipped with thoughts I have developed around the notion of governing-loop in and as Chinese Marxist-Leninist constitutionalism (Contradiction, Mass Line, and Democratic Centralism as a Constitutional Governing Loop—and People's Democratic Dictatorship as Its Gatekeeper (Discussion Draft, August 2026)) and other work cited at the end of this essay.

If there is a single thread running from the transliteration choices of Part One through the bracketed internal reading of Part Two to the fully theorized reading of Part Three, it is that these two short, repetitive, almost formulaic texts turn out, on sufficiently patient examination, to be dense with the entire architecture they never once cite by name—contradiction theory, the mass line, democratic centralism, the dual revolutions, people's democratic dictatorship, and the sedimented modernizing horizon that gives all of the foregoing their direction. That density is not an artifact of the reading method imposed upon them; it is, rather, what any text produced from deep within a fully elaborated governing tradition will necessarily exhibit; the alternative, a text that argued its premises from the ground up for a skeptical outside reader, would not be recognizable, within the tradition's own terms, as a Party-building address at all, but as something closer to a philosophical treatise addressed to no one in particular. (Reflections on Two Essays from Qiushi (求是), 2026, No. 20: Translation, Internal Analysis, and a Reading Through Theories of Foundational Principles and Structures of Chinese Marxist-Leninism (25 October 2026))

 Here is a section of Part 3. The full essay follows  below and may be DOWNLOADED HERE.

 

Pix credit here (1984; "energetically complete the task of Party rectification, bring about a basic turn the better in Party spirit) 

PART THREE: A READING THROUGH CHINESE MARXIST-LENINIST THEORY IN ITS NEW ERA

What follows attempts to read the essays through the lens of my recent essays on Chinese Marxist-Leninist constitutionalism—most fully elaborated in an effort at a reconstruction of the governing loop of contradiction theory, the mass line, and democratic centralism under the meta-mechanism of people's democratic dictatorship, and in an account of modernization as the Lebenswelt, the historically sedimented horizon, within which that loop alone becomes intelligible.

It would be a mistake, though a tempting one, to read these two texts from the Fifteenth Plenary Session's discipline-inspection address and its accompanying Qiushi gloss as merely the latest installment in a long-running and somewhat repetitive genre—one more exhortation against the "Four Malfeasances," one more promise that the cage of institutions will finally be woven tightly enough, one more catalogue of two-faced persons whose species, if one has read the genre before, will seem depressingly familiar. That reading is available, and it is not wholly wrong; the texts themselves, after all, concede as much when they describe corruption as "forever on the road," which is a confession, stated without apparent embarrassment, that the object pursued has not yet been caught. But the more interesting question—the one that occupies most of what I have tried to do in reconstructing the governing loop of contradiction theory, the mass line, and democratic centralism as a single recursive system operating within the historically sedimented horizon of modernization—is not whether the campaign has succeeded on its own stated terms, a question the texts themselves seem oddly unanxious about, but what kind of system would produce texts of exactly this shape, texts that are simultaneously diagnostic, confessional, and self-congratulatory, and that treat the coexistence of those three postures as entirely unproblematic.

I. The essays as an instance of contradiction theory's normative strand, read against its own history

Begin with what Essay 1 is doing when it identifies, yet again, non-implementation of central decisions, under-policed institutional loopholes, and recurring corruption as the three matters requiring address. In the four-strand architecture I have elsewhere proposed—normative (N), state-constitutional (S), Party-line (L), and Party-internal-organizational (O)—this address operates almost entirely within the L-strand: it is Xi's own speech, subsequently canonized as "the principal portion" of an address to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, and its natural home, as the second essay makes explicit, is the Selected Works of Xi Jinping on Party Building, item 102 of 102, rather than any amendment to the state constitutional text.

One should resist the temptation to treat this placement as incidental. The CPC Constitution's General Program, as I have argued elsewhere, does real work as the textual site where contradiction-diagnosis becomes programmatic content binding on the Party's own conduct; these two essays are best read as a fresh deposit on that site, a further layer of jidian (积淀, sedimentation) accreting onto the already-thick sediment of fourteen years' worth of "Four Malfeasances" rectification, itself resting on Mao's much older distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradiction. What is being diagnosed here—dilatory implementation, institutional loopholes, recurring graft—is not treated, and could not coherently be treated within the doctrine's own terms, as evidence that the underlying arrangement has reached a limit it cannot absorb. It is instead treated as the ordinary texture of a contradiction "among the people," the very category Mao's 1957 essay supplied for exactly this purpose: internal disagreement, laxity, and even corruption, so long as they are susceptible to criticism and self-criticism rather than treated as evidence of enemy status, register as the normal, recurring material that the loop exists to process rather than as the sign of a crack the loop cannot close.

This matters because it reframes a question an outside reader is tempted to ask—why does the campaign never conclude?—into a question the doctrine itself would regard as malformed. A campaign against non-antagonistic contradiction is not supposed to conclude in the sense of extinguishing its object; contradiction, on Mao's 1937 formulation, is universal and absolute, present in every process at every stage, so that what concludes is not the condition but the particular configuration of the condition characteristic of a given developmental moment. Read this way, the Fifteen-Five period's version of the discipline-inspection address is not evidence of institutional failure so much as evidence that the modernizing horizon has, once again, re-calibrated which fissure—in the vocabulary of the Guiguzi's chapter on exploiting fissures, 抵巇—is currently worth probing. The three numbered sections of Essay 1 are, on this reading, three currently-salient fissures rather than three unsolved problems in the sense a liberal constitutional reader would expect a government white paper to name and then, eventually, to report solved.

II. The mass line's absence, and what that absence discloses about this text's place in the loop

It is worth pausing over what these two texts do not do, because the absence is diagnostically interesting. Neither essay performs, in any explicit or thematized way, the gathering half of the mass line's characteristic movement—"from the masses." There are no petition-office statistics, no field-research findings, no digital consultation-platform results cited as the evidentiary basis for the three diagnoses offered. The texts move directly to concentration and to the return: "to the masses," in the sense of cadres and Party members who are to implement the resulting prescriptions, but without first performing, on the page, the probing gesture (揣, in Guiguzi's vocabulary) by which popular grievance is gathered and converted into diagnosis. This is not evidence that no such gathering occurred—inspection tours, audits, and letters-and-visits channels are referenced as sources of the information underlying the diagnosis—but it is evidence that this particular textual genre, the discipline-inspection address and its canonizing gloss, sits closer to the concentration and return legs of the loop than to its gathering leg. One might say that these texts are democratic centralism's textual residue rather than the mass line's: they are what the loop looks like at the moment concentrated judgment is being handed back down the chain of subordination—individual to organization, lower level to higher level, entire membership to the Central Committee—as binding practice, dressed in the register of exhortation rather than statute.

This placement within the loop has a consequence for how one should read the "two-faced person" taxonomy, which is at once the most vivid and the most theoretically revealing passage in either essay. A taxonomy this elaborate—liberalism, opportunism, factionalism, departmentalism, "good-person-ism"—is doing exactly the sorting work that, in my account of people's democratic dictatorship as a Peircean semiotic thirdness, precedes rather than follows from any individual's observed conduct: it is an act of intelligent naming, in the vocabulary the Guiguzi supplies for the classical rhetoric of 明名, that constitutes the category of internal-enemy-adjacent conduct before any particular cadre's compliance or defiance can be read against it. The "two-faced person" is not discovered through some neutral process of behavioral observation and then classified; the category is elaborated first, with sufficient specificity to leave no plausible dissenting posture uncategorized, and only then does the text instruct its readers—during the "clear-eyed" scrutiny that leadership transitions are said to require—to go looking for instances. This is thirdness doing its gating work one register below where I have located people's democratic dictatorship proper: not sorting the population into "the people" and "the enemy," the dictatorship's classical operation, but sorting Party members themselves into the loyal and the merely performatively loyal, a finer-grained internal analogue to the same semiotic operation, operating entirely within the domain the dictatorship has already constituted as governable through consultation and discipline rather than through coercion.

III. Self-revolution as the dual-revolution doctrine's present test case

The passage in Essay 1 announcing that "our Party has deeply advanced self-revolution" and has thereby "successfully forged a path... that addresses both symptoms and root causes" is not, within the governing loop, a stray rhetorical flourish; it is the point at which the dual-revolution doctrine—self-revolution (自我革命) paired with, and said to lead and safeguard, social revolution (社会革命)—becomes explicitly operative rather than merely implicit. If one accepts, as I have argued, that self-revolution names the mechanism by which the Party keeps its own perceptual apparatus sensitive to the fissures its sedimented categories might otherwise fail to register—inspection tours, democratic life meetings, and criticism and self-criticism functioning as Level 4 feedback at the scale of the Party's own conduct, reopening sedimented dispositions to test whether they still track the field they claim to govern—then these two essays are themselves instances of that feedback loop closing on itself in textual form. The Qiushi editorial essay is not merely reporting on self-revolution; by canonizing Xi's address as item 102 of a 102-item corpus and organizing that corpus around the "Fourteen Upholds," it is performing self-revolution's characteristic operation of testing whether a decade and a half of accumulated practice ("from制定和落实中央八项规定开局破题...到以零容忍态度反腐惩恶") still coheres as a single intelligible line, and finding, unsurprisingly, that it does—a finding the loop is structurally disposed to reach, since the alternative finding (that the line no longer coheres) would itself have to be processed through the very apparatus whose coherence was in question.

The democratic life meeting convened by the Political Bureau on December 25–26, 2025, and depicted in the accompanying photograph, deserves notice on exactly this point. It is tempting for an external observer to read a Political Bureau "democratic life meeting"—a term translated, not without a certain irony that the text itself does not register, into the register of "democracy"—as theater rather than governance. But within the loop as I have reconstructed it, the democratic life meeting is precisely where the O-strand of democratic centralism (the Party-internal-organizational sense in which the chain of subordination governs how disagreement and compliance function inside a branch meeting) is supposed to intersect with the N-strand (the normative diagnosis currently in force): it is the institutional site at which the Politburo subjects itself to the same criticism-and-self-criticism discipline it prescribes, in Essay 1's third section, for discipline-inspection organs generally ("坚持刀刃向内," turning the blade inward). Whether the meeting in fact performed this function with the candor the doctrine requires is a question the texts give an outside reader no evidentiary basis to answer; what the texts do allow one to see is that the doctrine itself treats the meeting's occurrence, reported without further elaboration of its content, as sufficient demonstration that the self-revolutionary mechanism remains active.

IV. The Guiguzi vocabulary and the problem of "penning a cat in a cattle shed"

It is difficult to read the institutional-cage section of Essay 1—"把权力关进制度笼子" and its accompanying idioms, the cat penned in the cattle shed, the paper cage that cannot hold a tiger—without hearing an echo, however unintended by the drafters, of the Guiguzi's much older vocabulary of 量权, the measuring of power, and 抵巇, the exploitation of fissures. The passage's complaint is precisely that existing institutions are 过于原则笼统 (excessively general and principled) and lack 针对性操作性 (targeting and operability)—a complaint that, translated into the Guiguzi's idiom, is a complaint that the measuring has not been fine-grained enough, that the cage's dimensions have been estimated rather than calculated against the actual size, strength, and cunning of what it is meant to contain. The solution the text proposes—density without redundancy ("密而不繁"), enforcement calibrated to close the gap between "explicit rules" (明规矩) and "implicit rules" (潜规则)—is an engineering solution to what the Guiguzi's vocabulary would recognize as a problem of insufficiently probing measurement, 量权 performed too coarsely to register the actual contours of the field being governed. One should resist, however, the inference that this makes the problem merely technical in the deflationary sense; within the governing loop, a coarse measurement is not a correctable oversight external to the system but a recurring structural feature of any attempt to translate sedimented diagnosis into the "complete, workable" (完善) institutional form the text demands, which is precisely why the complaint recurs across fourteen years of near-identical formulations rather than being solved once and retired.

V. What the loop cannot see from inside: a reconstructive rather than normative observation

I have argued elsewhere that accurate reconstruction of this governing loop in its own vocabulary must precede any normative judgment about it, and that measuring Chinese constitutional practice against the assumptions of liberal constitutionalism—separation of powers, electoral accountability, judicial review as an external check on power—commits something like a Lebenswelt category error, projecting onto this system the evaluative apparatus of a different one and then mistaking the resulting mismatch for a discovered defect. That caution should be observed here as rigorously as anywhere. And yet reconstruction, properly pursued, is also entitled to notice what a system's own vocabulary makes structurally difficult for that system to register about itself, without thereby smuggling in an external normative standard. What these two texts make visible, read through the governing-loop architecture, is that the loop's own self-revolutionary mechanism—the apparatus by which the Party is meant to test whether its sedimented categories still track the field they claim to govern—is itself staffed, convened, and evaluated entirely by the same hierarchy whose fidelity is in question, such that the only available signal of the mechanism's success or failure is the mechanism's own report of its success, mediated through inspection tours, audits, and democratic life meetings whose findings are, again, reported rather than independently verifiable by this text's reader. This is not a claim that the mechanism is therefore ineffective; effectiveness is an empirical question the theory explicitly declines to adjudicate from within reconstruction alone, since empirical testing can only proceed once the system has been correctly identified in its own vocabulary. It is, rather, an observation about what the loop's architecture makes it structurally difficult for the loop to notice about itself from the inside—namely, whether fourteen years of recurring diagnosis of the identical three problems, each time met with the promise of "higher standards and more substantive measures" rather than a different theory of why the problems recur, represents the loop functioning as designed, or represents sediment hardening into reflex in precisely the way I have elsewhere warned self-revolution exists to prevent. The texts themselves supply no vocabulary for distinguishing these two possibilities, because the doctrine's own grammar treats "永远在路上"—forever on the road—as a confession of permanent vigilance rather than as a question that might, under a different and not necessarily hostile reading, also be asked of a loop whose return signal has stopped changing shape.

VI. Reading the discipline essays against the endogenous architecture of Whole Process People's Democracy

The two Qiushi essays examined above say nothing, on their face, about political parties other than the CPC, about the CPPCC, about the National People's Congress, or about consultation in any of its institutionalized forms; their field of vision is confined to the Party's own internal governance of itself. It would be a mistake, however, to read that silence as evidence that the discipline-inspection address and its canonizing gloss occupy a separate province of doctrine, loosely connected at best to the architecture I have elsewhere reconstructed for Whole Process People's Democracy (全过程人民民主) and the consultative constitutionalism built around it. The silence is better read as a consequence of strand-specificity rather than of doctrinal distance: these two essays are Party-internal-organizational (O-strand) texts almost in their entirety, concerned with how the vanguard disciplines, tests, and purifies itself, and it is a structural feature of the four-strand architecture, not an oversight of these particular texts, that O-strand material of this kind is only loosely constrained by how the corresponding principle is elaborated at the normative (N), state-constitutional (S), or Party-line (L) levels where consultation, representation, and the mass political organizations proper reside. Party building (党建), in other words, is the self-regarding face of a system whose other, outward-facing institutional architecture—the CPPCC, the "new type of political party system," the United Front—belongs to a related but distinguishable undertaking: the construction of a representative apparatus through which the masses, rather than the Party's own membership, are linked to the state. That the two essays never mention this apparatus is not an absence requiring explanation; it is what one would expect to find if the four-strand architecture is correctly specified, since the O-strand's internal discipline and the L/S-strand's external consultative structures are, as I have argued, wired to each other only loosely and are revised on largely independent schedules.

Yet the connection, once one goes looking for it, is closer than the essays' silence first suggests, and it runs through the people's democratic dictatorship itself. The endogenous/exogenous distinction I have elsewhere drawn—liberal democracy as an essentially exogenous practice organized around the insertion of elected representatives into a government apparatus detached from the business of governing, Chinese Whole Process People's Democracy as an essentially endogenous practice organized around structured consultation attached to the business of governing itself—presupposes, as its very first move, that the population over which either form of democracy might operate has already been sorted into "the people," to whom democratic practice of either exogenous or endogenous variety is extended, and everyone else, over whom dictatorship rather than democracy is practiced. The "two-faced person" taxonomy that occupies so much of Essay 1's first section performs a formally identical sorting operation one register further in: not the classical gate-keeping function of people's democratic dictatorship, which decides who counts as "the people" prior to any individual's conduct, but a finer-grained internal analogue that decides, among those already admitted to "the people" by virtue of Party membership, who is sincerely rather than merely performatively loyal to the collective project the dictatorship exists to advance. One might describe this as a second, nested thirdness (collective interpretation as the manifestaiotn and applicaiton of cognitive cages of ideoligical ordering) operating entirely within the domain the first thirdness has already constituted as governable through consultation rather than coercion—the dictatorship's classificatory work is not repeated here so much as recursively applied, at finer resolution, to a population that has already cleared its threshold.

This nesting illuminates something the WPPD White Papers state explicitly and the two Party-building essays only presuppose: that the "patriotic" political parties organized under the United Front, no less than the CPC's own membership, are themselves objects of a prior classification before they can participate in consultation at all—they must already be, in the language of the China's New Political Party System White Paper, "socialist participating part[ies] with Chinese characteristics," which is to say, already sorted onto the democratic side of the people's democratic dictatorship's foundational line, before the question of how well or sincerely they discharge their consultative function can even arise. The discipline essays' "two-faced person," read against this architecture, is the O-strand's own version of the same anxiety that animates the S/L-strand concern with ensuring that consultative parties remain "participating" rather than becoming, in the White Paper's own anxious phrase, a center of "opposition." Both discourses are worried about the same structural possibility—formal inclusion within the governable field coexisting with substantive defection from the project that inclusion is supposed to serve—and both resolve that worry the same way: not through an external check capable of adjudicating the question independently, but through continuous internal supervision (督查, 巡视, 民主生活会 on one side; political consultation, democratic oversight, and United Front capacity-building on the other) conducted by the very hierarchy whose fidelity is in question.

The comparative, outward-facing argument that structures the White Paper on The State of Democracy in the United States, and the Summit for Democracy it was drafted to rebut, also sheds a retrospective light on a feature of the two Party-building essays that might otherwise seem like mere rhetorical flourish: Essay 2's observation that "many international observers have commented that Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building... breaks the illusions some hold concerning Western party systems and theory, contributing Chinese wisdom to the progress of world political civilization." This sentence, easy to pass over as boilerplate self-congratulation, in fact performs the same legitimation-through-contrast operation that the WPPD White Papers perform at far greater length and with far more explicit comparative apparatus (the "eight cans," the catalogue of January 6, wealth inequality, and media capture). What differs is genre and audience rather than argumentative structure. The White Papers conduct their comparison in the register of state-to-state and system-to-system apologetics, addressed outward along the spokes of the Belt and Road Initiative and the United Front's internationalized apparatus, as Flora Sapio's account of the United Front's extension into BRI party-to-party exchange makes explicit. The Party-building essays conduct what is structurally the identical comparison in a single compressed sentence, addressed inward to a Party readership being told that its own internal disciplinary project—turning the blade inward, hunting "two-faced persons," weaving the institutional cage more tightly—is not parochial housekeeping but a contribution to "world political civilization" that foreign observers themselves are said to recognize. The rhetorical economy here is worth noticing: self-revolution, which Section III above located as the mechanism testing whether the Party's own sedimented categories still track the field they claim to govern, is here also offered as the mechanism underwriting the external legitimacy of the whole Marxist-Leninist constitutional order vis-à-vis its liberal democratic rival. Internal purification and external legitimation are not two projects running in parallel; within this discourse they are the same project read at two different scales, exactly as I have argued the internal/external distinction generally functions as a change of scale within one semiotic order rather than a boundary between consultation and something else.

This also clarifies why the two discipline essays can afford to say nothing about elections, consultation, or the CPPCC, even though Essay 2 insists that Party building is the chapter of Xi Jinping Thought that must be read alongside every other chapter as part of a single, internally coherent system. The WPPD architecture supplies the missing premise the discipline essays do not need to restate: that democratic centralism's vertical chain of subordination—individual to organization, lower level to higher level, entire membership to the Central Committee, the same chain Article 3 of the 1982 Constitution encodes as a rule binding state institutions and the CPC Constitution encodes independently as a rule binding the Party's own conduct—is what makes it coherent for a Party-internal discipline campaign to be described, as Essay 2 describes it, as using "governance of the Communist Party of China" to "lead and safeguard" "the governance of China" as a whole. The O-strand's purification of the vanguard is not merely analogous to the S/L-strand's construction of consultative democracy for the masses; within democratic centralism's own logic, the former is the precondition of the latter's legitimacy, since a vanguard whose own internal sincerity cannot be verified is a vanguard whose concentration of mass-line input into binding policy carries no guarantee of fidelity to what was gathered. The discipline essays' silence about consultation, representation, and political parties is therefore not an indication that Party building occupies a separate conceptual province; it is an indication that Party building is, within the governing loop's own self-understanding, the maintenance work the loop's other, more visible, and more frequently theorized institutional surfaces (the mass line's gathering, democratic centralism's concentrating, the CPPCC's consulting) all silently depend upon, and whose breakdown neither White Paper nor Party-building address treats as a live possibility requiring a contingency the doctrine has not already supplied.

 

Pix credit here

Borrador de trabajo recién publicado: «La jaula que habla: causalidad personal, libros de contabilidad transaccionales y la semiótica del discurso del presidente Donald Trump sobre Ucrania, 2014-2026. Un estudio en cuatro etapas»

 

Foto Crédito aquí

 ENGLISH LANGUAGE ORIGINAL VERSION

中文版本: Backer_Trump_Ukraine_v5_October2026_ZH 

Donald Trump
@realDonaldTrump • Truth Social • 18 de octubre de 2026, 16:36 ET

Mi decisión respecto a Rusia es muy sencilla. Me encuentro en proceso de negociar la paz en la guerra entre Rusia y Ucrania, y no quiero hacer nada que, de manera insensata, aleje a Rusia de la mesa de negociaciones. Se está logrando un gran progreso, y ello incluye las negociaciones actuales sobre rehenes. Firmar ese documento en este momento provocaría precisamente eso, y puedo firmarlo más adelante, o en cualquier momento que desee. Quizá más importante aún: Rusia está haciendo muy poco, si es que hace algo, para ayudar a la República Islámica de Irán, en comparación con lo que podría hacer, y deseo que continúe siendo así, y así será, a menos que personas estúpidas se interpongan. Por último, Zelenski está utilizando las refinerías de diésel en Rusia como objetivo, a sabiendas de que estos ataques están dañando gravemente los mercados mundiales de diésel, incluidos los de Estados Unidos. Los agricultores, ganaderos y empresas de todo tipo están sufriendo enormemente por ello; no obstante, Rusia sigue enviando, a bajo precio, millones de barriles de diésel al mundo. A Zelenski no le importa y, francamente, con todo el dinero que Europa le está dando de manera notoria, y el que el torcido Joe Biden le dio en el pasado, no quiere poner fin a esta guerra, y probablemente nunca lo quiso. Podría haber alcanzado un mejor acuerdo hace dos años del que puede alcanzar ahora. Su país está en ruinas, una gran parte de su territorio se ha perdido, sus océanos y mares han desaparecido, y su población masculina es escasa, herida y/o muerta. ¡QUIERO QUE ESTA GUERRA TERMINE! Gracias por su atención a este asunto.
Presidente DONALD J. TRUMP

En una publicación reciente titulada «Mantened en alto la bandera de la modernización de la IA y el avance por la senda de América Primero. Donald Trump en Truth Social: “Estoy formando la Fuerza de la IA”» ["Hold High the Banner of AI Modernization and Forward Movement Along the America First Path--Donald Trump on Truth Social: "I am Forming the AI Force"], sugerí que, 

en algún momento del futuro, y para disgusto de muchos miembros de la intelligentsia actual, es probable que se ofrezcan cursos sobre la estilística retórica del presidente Trump y su semiótica. No es que el presidente haya sido consciente de forjar una nueva forma discursiva de impacto colectivo humano, pero cabría pensar que, en estas materias, uno o bien hace o bien explica… a posteriori. Los discursos más extensos del presidente podrían proporcionar el tronco principal de tales estudios, pero es en estos breves e intensos estallidos textuales, incluido el citado más arriba, donde el estilo retórico se destila a veces, como aquí, hasta su esencia útil.

He intentado ahora asumir el reto de un estudio más sostenido y a más largo plazo del discurso de las publicaciones en redes sociales del presidente Trump. Con tal fin, he reunido aproximadamente 493 de esos estallidos breves publicados entre 2014 y el 11 de octubre de 2026, todos centrados en la guerra de Ucrania en general y en Ucrania en particular. El resultado es un borrador de trabajo de un examen en cuatro etapas titulado: «La jaula que habla: causalidad personal, libros de contabilidad transaccionales y la semiótica del discurso del presidente Donald Trump sobre Ucrania, 2014-2026. Un estudio en cuatro etapas» [original en inglés aquí].

foto crédito aquí

Este estudio rastrea, a lo largo de cuatro etapas analíticas, cómo Ucrania ha sido construida como objeto discursivo en el registro de redes sociales del presidente Donald J. Trump entre febrero de 2014 y octubre de 2026. La etapa 1 establece una base empírica de 493 publicaciones verificadas y con marca temporal, organizándolas por cronología, tasa de publicación y tema recurrente, y constata que la tasa de referencia sigue de cerca las controversias externas —impeachment, invasión, negociación— mucho más que las circunstancias propias de Ucrania. La etapa 2 sintetiza el registro empírico en una disposición organizada en torno a cuatro premisas: una ontología personalista de la causa de la guerra, una gramática transaccional de la obligación de alianza, una teoría de la resolución como atribución más que como asentamiento, y una práctica epistémica de repetición y denominación que sustituye la demostración por la aserción, junto con una marcada asimetría en la manera en que Zelenski y Putin son construidos respectivamente como objetos de alocución. La etapa 3 pone a prueba esa disposición frente a la arquitectura Mercader/Burócrata desarrollada en trabajos previos del autor sobre América Primero, hallando un ajuste estrecho para el registro transaccional y uno más laxo para el registro personalista y de búsqueda de crédito, que parece exceder lo que una cognición puramente transaccional predeciría; un léxico comparativo de los términos aplicados a Zelenski y a Putin, así como una lectura de cuatro textos ajenos a las propias publicaciones (la entrevista a Rubio de julio de 2025, la conferencia de prensa de Anchorage de agosto de 2025, el borrador del plan de 28 puntos de noviembre de 2025 y los discursos de Davos de enero de 2026), sugieren que la línea entre el uso formal y el vernáculo sigue, con cierta regularidad, la línea entre el cargo que anuncia y la persona que juzga. La etapa 4 emprende una lectura semiótica, modelada sobre el tratamiento previo del autor del discurso de Pnyx del secretario Rubio, trazando el corpus como una cadena recursiva en la que la llamada de 2019 se convierte en engaño, el engaño en vindicación, la vindicación en contrafactual, y el contrafactual genera un libro de contabilidad cuyo eventual asentamiento se ofrece a un reconocimiento —más visiblemente en el material del Premio Nobel— que el propio vocabulario del libro no puede suministrar. Lo hace, sin embargo, desde una premisa subrayada desde el inicio: que el discurso puede tener un único primer semiótico, el presidente-persona, para quien el cargo suministra la significación y la persona el juicio, y cuyos actos iterativos, registrados en algo semejante a una cadena de bloques de publicaciones, sirven a una comunidad como piedra de toque de su interpretación del mundo. El estudio concluye, con las debidas reservas frente a su propio apetito interpretativo, que el discurso exhibe una estructura autogeneradora cuyos momentos posteriores parecen producidos por los anteriores; que esta estructura puede ser menos una jaula que un programa, una fenomenología más cercana a lo computacional, en la que una arquitectura sedimentada se pone en movimiento por el irritante que el día suministre; y que un método semiótico alternativo, construido en torno a la r
elación entre un centro constante y una periferia inestable de objetos descentrados —Ucrania entre ellos—, puede resultar la forma más útil de leerlo. Termina con una aplicación de estas ideas a la publicación del 18 de octubre de 2026, que quizá mejor que la mayoría encapsula el networking neural del presidente dentro de las constricciones y del Lebenswelt de una orientación de tipo mercader y en una concepción de América Primero.

El objeto es comprender estos textos como discurso, y considerar su alineación con lo que eventualmente emerge como un enfoque más maduro de las estructuras ideológicas de América Primero. Quienes se interesen por la crítica política o de políticas públicas deben buscar en otra parte; aquí podrían hallarse los fundamentos de cualquier crítica (o elogio) de ese tipo, si es que merecen ser leídos. El Resumen, la Introducción y una parte de la Sección 1 se reproducen a continuación. El borrador completo puede consultarse AQUÍ. Se agradece el compromiso fuera de línea. Se trata de un borrador de trabajo; lo republicaré una vez refinado el documento.

Now Available: Telos 216 (Fall 2026): Dangers to Democracy

 

I am delighted to pass along the announcement of the publication of Telos 216 (Fall 2026), the theme of which is Dangers to Democracy. As David Pan describes it:

As we watch riots and burning buildings in Europe, we might wonder where our democracies are heading. The breakdown of civil debate and social norms certainly poses serious dangers to liberal democracy. Many of the issues are continuations of the same problems that have plagued democracies since the original storming of the Bastille and the disastrous Athenian invasion of Sicily. Telos 216 delves into the dangers that our democracies are facing today: the decline of evidence-based reasoning, populist political polarization on the Left and the Right, rhetorical excesses, identity politics, rising antisemitism, AI, and terrorist enemies. There is a lot to worry about, and our issue attempts to take on each of these problems in turn. I hope it provides you with some valuable insights.

The list of contributions with links follows below. The issue may be accessed HERE. Also included is David Pan's Introduction in which the contributions are discussed.

 

Now Available Vol 39(7) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law/ Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique (IJSL)--"Special Issue: Legal Semiotics & the Marginalized Body"

 

New Special Issue Published | International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (IJSL). We are delighted to announce the publication of Volume 39, Number 7 (October 2026) of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique, published by Springer.

📚 Special Issue: “Legal Semiotics & the Marginalized Body” Guest Editors: Aleksandra Matulewska and Anne Wagner

This special issue brings together interdisciplinary perspectives exploring how law, language, discourse, and representation shape experiences of marginalization, exclusion, identity, and human rights.

The contributions address a wide range of critical themes, including constitutional law and marginalization, disability and bodily difference, prostitution and legal discourse, gender and reproductive rights, and representations of marginalized bodies in digital, literary, and audiovisual environments. Through the lens of legal semiotics, this collection invites us to reconsider the relationships between law, power, visibility, dignity, and social justice.

🔗 Explore the Special Issue and its contributions below:

 

Working Draft Just Posted: "The Cage That Speaks: Personal Causality, Transactional Ledgers, and the Semiotics of President Donald Trump's Ukraine Discourse, 2014–2026" (17 October 2026)" [《会说话的牢笼：个人因果、交易账本与特朗普乌克兰话语的符号学（2014—2026）》]

 

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VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL

中文版本: Backer_Trump_Ukraine_v5_October2026_ZH 

Donald Trump
@realDonaldTrump • Truth Social • October 18, 2026 @ 4:36 PM ET
View on Truth Social

My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table. Great progress is being made, and that includes current hostage negotiations! Signing that document at this time will do that, and I can sign it later, or any time that I want! Perhaps more importantly, Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way. Lastly, Zelenskyy is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target, knowing that these attacks are seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States. Farmers, ranchers, and businesses of all kinds are suffering greatly from this, but Russia is, nevertheless, sending, at a low price, millions of barrels of diesel to the World. Zelenskyy doesn’t care, and frankly, with all of the money that Europe is famously giving him, and that Crooked Joe Biden gave him in the past, he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did. He could have made a better deal two years ago than he can now. His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost, his oceans and seas are gone, and his male population is low, wounded, and/or dead. I WANT THIS WAR END! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

 In a recent post, "Hold High the Banner of AI Modernization and Forward Movement Along the America First Path--Donald Trump on Truth Social: "I am Forming the AI Force", I suggested 

At some point in the future, and to the chagrin of many in the intelligentsia today, there will likely be courses offered on President Trump's rhetorical stylistics, and its semiotics. Not that the President might have been conscious of crafting a new discursive form that had collective human impact, but then it might be thought that in these matters one either does or one explains . . . after the fact. The President's longer speeches may provide the Yule Log of such study, but it is in these short and intense textual bursts, including this one quoted above, that the rhetorical style is sometimes, as here, distilled to its useful essence.

I have now tried to take up the challenge of a more sustained and longer term study of President Trump's social media post discourse. To that end I have gathered together about 493 such short burst posted between 2014 and 11 October 2026, all focused on the Ukraine War in general, and Ukraine in particular. The result is a working draft of a 4 stage examination entitled, "The Cage That Speaks: Personal Causality, Transactional Ledgers, and the Semiotics of President Donald Trump's Ukraine Discourse, 2014–2026 A four-stage study."

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This study traces, across four analytical stages, how Ukraine has been constructed as a discursive object in the social media record of President Donald J. Trump between February 2014 and October 2026. Stage 1 establishes an empirical base of 493 verified, timestamped posts, organizing them by chronology, posting rate, and recurring theme, and finds that the rate of reference tracks external controversy—impeachment, invasion, negotiation—far more closely than it tracks Ukraine's own circumstances. Stage 2 synthesizes the empirical record into a disposition organized around four premises: a personalist ontology of the war's cause, a transactional grammar of alliance obligation, a theory of resolution as attribution rather than settlement, and an epistemic practice of repetition and naming that substitutes assertion for demonstration—together with a marked asymmetry in how Zelensky and Putin are each constructed as objects of address. Stage 3 tests that disposition against the Merchant/Bureaucrat architecture developed in the author's prior work on America First, finding a close fit for the transactional register and a looser one for the personalist and credit-seeking register, which appears to exceed what a purely transactional cognition would predict; a comparative lexicon of the terms applied to Zelensky and to Putin, and a reading of four texts beyond the posts themselves (the Rubio interview of July 2025, the Anchorage news conference of August 2025, the draft 28-point plan of November 2025, and the Davos addresses of January 2026), suggest that the line between formal and vernacular usage tracks, with some regularity, the line between the office that announces and the person who judges. Stage 4 undertakes a semiotic reading, modeled on the author's prior treatment of Secretary Rubio's Pnyx address, tracing the corpus as a recursive chain in which the 2019 call becomes hoax, hoax becomes vindication, vindication becomes counterfactual, and counterfactual generates a ledger whose eventual settlement is offered up for a recognition—most visibly in the Nobel Prize material—that the ledger's own vocabulary cannot supply. It does so, however, from a premise foregrounded at its outset: that the discourse may have a single semiotic first, the person-president, for whom the office supplies the signification and the person the judgment, and whose iterative acts, recorded in something like a block chain of posting, serve a community as the touchstone of its interpretation of the world. The study concludes, hedged throughout against its own interpretive appetite, that the discourse displays a self-generating structure whose later moments appear produced by its earlier ones; that this structure may be less a cage than a program, a phenomenology closer to the computational, in which a sedimented architecture is set in motion by whatever irritant the day supplies; and that an alternative semiotic method, built around the relation between a constant center and an unstable periphery of de-centered objects, Ukraine among them, may prove the more useful way of reading it. It ends with an application of the insights to the posting of 18 October 2026 that perhaps better than most encapsulates the President's neural networking within the constraints and lebenswelt of a merchant type orientation and in one conception of America First.

The object is to understand these as discourse, and to consider its alignment with what eventually emerges as a more mature approach to the ideological structures of America First. Those interested in political or policy critique must look elsewhere; here the foundations of any such critique (or praise), if it is worth reading, might be found. The Abstract, Introduction and a part of Section 1 follow below. The entire draft may be accessed HERE . Offline engagement welcomed. This is a working draft; I will repost after the document is refined.

 

Fall 2026 (Vol 112(4)) of Academe (Magazine of the American Association of University Professors) Now Available: Theme--The Brave New World of Higher Ed; with Reflections on "The Reconstruction of US Research Infrastructure"

 

Delighted to pass along the announcement of the availability of Vol 112(4) of Academe.

The fall issue of Academe considers the “brave new world” of higher education and the collective courage required in a time of rising authoritarianism. Contributors discuss topics such as the defense of noncitizens, organizing for the future reconstruction of US research infrastructure, strategies for countering attacks on academic freedom, and the history and continuing importance of the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. 

Contributions with links follow below. 

Among the more interesting articles was the quite thoughtful article, Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, Vani Pariyadath, Natalie Aviles, and Ian Mullins, Toward the Reconstruction of US Research Infrastructure: How to ensure that funding decisions are expert-led and democratic. It is reproduced below.

The essay opens with a diagnosis. The authors contend that, since the start of the second Trump administration, the US research funding infrastructure has been subjected to a political assault, including censorship of researchers, what they describe as an ideological takeover of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal funders, and a proposed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rule tightening political control over federal grants and contracts (Chou et al. 2026, 1). They frame this through historical parallels with the brain drain from 1930s Germany and from Hungary under Viktor Orbán (Chou et al. 2026, 1–2). In their view the structure for evaluating merit is “thoroughly broken,” and their constructive proposal is to reimagine university-style shared governance at the federal level, formally establishing the academic community’s central role in ensuring that public investment in research serves the public good (Chou et al. 2026, 2).

I also include my own reflections on the Chou et al essay, which I have included below as well and titled  Expertise, Democracy, and the Public Purse.

One might entertain a premise the essay does not address, though it is not necessarily hostile to it: that the state, when it expends public money on research, acts first as a principal pursuing public objectives, and only secondarily, if at all, as a patron obliged to follow the internal trajectories of the disciplines. Provided the state does not block research it declines to fund, and provided that philanthropic, corporate, institutional, and individual channels of support remain undisturbed, it seems at least arguable that the principal function of state research funding is to meet state needs as the state articulates them, and that the articulation of such needs is not a corruption of research governance but perhaps one of the clearer expressions of the democratic republican mechanism, in which officials elected by and answerable to the people are charged in good faith with fidelity to the Republic and its aggregate welfare as they understand it. * * * 

Once that possibility is entertained, some of what the essay calls politicization, including a system in which “political appointees prioritize the presidential agenda” and a rule allowing presidential priorities to override peer review judgments (Chou et al. 2026, 4–5), might instead be understood as the ordinary operation of democratic principalship over public funds. The reframing would not necessarily excuse every action the essay describes. Practices amounting to censorship of research content, or the conditioning of institutional funding on limits to academic freedom and speech, as the essay describes the Compact (Chou et al. 2026, 6), may well fall outside the premise, because they reach beyond the choice of what the state will fund into what others may say, study, or teach, and so disturb the alternative channels whose openness makes the premise defensible. The premise therefore seems to call for a more careful distinction between the state declining to fund, which may be a legitimate exercise of republican choice, and the state penalizing, which raises different and perhaps graver concerns. * * * 

Perhaps the most that can be offered is an invitation rather than a conclusion: the suggestion that public research funding is, at its foundation, a political act, not in any pejorative or partisan sense, but in the older republican sense of collective judgment by accountable officials about what the commonwealth needs to know, and that the expert’s distinctive contribution may lie less in deciding which questions the public should pay to answer than in ensuring that whatever questions are chosen are pursued with rigor, honesty, and methodological integrity. If so, the contest the essay describes might be less a struggle between democracy and its adversaries than a disagreement between two conceptions of democratic legitimacy, one grounded in expertise and organized professional voice and the other in electoral accountability and republican office, each of which may hold part of the truth and each of which may become more persuasive once it has tried to understand the other on the other’s own terms.

ICoCA Newsletter July-September 2026: A Reflection on its theme "Securing Communities for a Just Transition"

 

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Accountability, transparency, and engagement are critical elements of any principles based system.  Just transition principles move from effectively and normatively positive system design and operation to the objectives toward which that system is to be directed--that s , it represents a cluster of objectives, premises, and principles that shape the way in which the system weighs, values, processes, aligns, orders,  and identifies information and then  applies that as a function of its objectives parameters. In that sense, just transition, like any 0ther foundational set of ordering premises not merely shapes the cognitive cages within which the machine/system operates, but also serve as a justification space within which its ordered biases can be realized. This is not a bad thing; but it is a "thing" that ought to be recognized as one puts forward a normative cage  within which the operation and accountability, transparency, and engagement of systems are undertaken. 

That is certainly the case with "just transition"--a term, an idea, a set of significs, the premises around which a community of believers organizes its rationalization, and judgment of the world around them. Yet like other foundational terms, objectives, premises and the like, the signification of just transition represents a spectrum of orthodoxy some of which may not be entirely aligned with others.  “Just transition” is not a term with one settled definition, a universally accepted set of criteria, or a single institutional owner. It is better understood as a contested concept whose meaning changes with the institution, political constituency, economic problem, and conception of justice through which it is articulated. The term originated in labor and environmental disputes over the consequences of environmental regulation for workers and communities, but it has since acquired a broader field of application encompassing climate policy, energy systems, regional development, human rights, ecological restoration, democratic participation, and, in some settings, transitions beyond decarbonization (see, e.g.,  UN DESA Policy Brief No. 141: A just green transition: concepts and practice so far (2022); pdf here).

The analytical problem is therefore not simply to collect definitions and compare their wording. It is to determine what each definition makes the object of justice, whose interests it recognizes, which institutions it authorizes to act, what kind of change it regards as necessary, and what obligations follow from describing that change as just. A definition that treats justice as compensation for displaced workers does something different from one that treats it as the redistribution of economic power, the protection of internationally recognized rights, or the transformation of an extractive economic order.

Three distinctions might usefully guide any inquiry: 

(1) Transition versus transformation. A transition may change the means of production while retaining the underlying economic and political order; a transformative conception may instead make that order, including its distribution of power and resources, an object of change.

(2) Justice as outcome versus justice as process. One approach asks whether the benefits and burdens of change are distributed fairly; another asks whether those affected have meaningful authority over the decisions that produce those outcomes.

(3) Justice within a system versus justice of the system. Some definitions seek to make a specified transition fairer without questioning its governing objectives. Others ask whether the existing system's ownership arrangements, development priorities, or historical relationships of exploitation are themselves unjust.

The distinctions, of course, are not meant to suggest analytical categories, nor do they purpose to suggest mutually exclusive schools or official classifications. A single policy may incorporate elements of all three, although their coexistence does not establish that the tensions among them have been resolved. And yet, precision, at least with respect to analytical streams may prove useful when one moves from "high concepts" to operational realities in sector and territorially specific context. 

It might follow, then that the term "just transition" as object, as a vessel of signified principles; and as the platform for the orthodox organizaiton of a view of the world  through its conceptual lens, invites further consideration which might be divided along four analytical streams: considerations of Several conclusions follow from the comparison.

First, there may be a meaningful difference between making a transition just and using transition as an occasion to pursue justice. The former can be satisfied, at least in principle, through measures that reduce the harms associated with a specified policy. The latter may make the existing economic order itself an object of criticism and change. It is worth noting the difference--the former is passive and reactive, the latter is active and anticipatory. One responds to changes in the world, the other seeks to cause and direct them. The differences in these approaches reflect the foundational principles of political/normative ideology since the start of modernity in the Enlightenment--are humans to be led toward "the good" by a vanguard of social forces (the current position within elements of liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninist ordering) that proceeds from principal applied to individual through collective leadership and guidance; or are humans to respond to the stimulus/irritation of change through the iterative mimetic interactions of individuals which when aggregated serve as the change around which one might be able to discern the emergence of principle. he former embraces deductive processes; the latter inductive processes. Usually human systems deploy both, but virtually all lead with one or the other. 

Second, the relationship between justice and efficiency is unlikely to be settled by the terminology. A transition may be economically efficient in aggregate while imposing concentrated costs on particular workers or communities. Conversely, policies intended to protect affected populations may impose fiscal or adjustment costs of their own. The question is how those competing considerations are ordered and justified, rather than whether one can simply be substituted for the other. And that is a question of politics, and the control of the collective meaning of the terms imposed either as internalized "truth" or as truth imposed through the usual mechanisms of disciplining orthodoxy. 

Third, participation, compensation, and transformation might be better treated as separate dimensions. They may reinforce one another, but none is a reliable proxy for the others. Indeed, the issue of proxies in just transition suggests the tension between idealization and its insertion into terms or actions that are deemed to signify their value or occurrence, and the actual occurrence itself that evidences values. Each is itself a term with its own spectrum of idealization, usually a s a function of other, though sometimes related, sets of ordering norms and premises. Each can be understood itsef as a vessel through which the operationalization  of connections and reinforcement among norms necessary for the articulation and then realization of objectives may be comprehensively approached.  Indeed, at its core, each of the terms also requires a "just transition" if the meta-concept of societal just transition, even within distinct sectors of human organizational life is to be realized. And yet all of these then test the weight and importance of those objectives against the fundamental goals of political systems within which it is to be undertaken.

Fourth, the concept's breadth, then,may be understood, even in sector specific application, as both useful and problematic. It allows institutions with different mandates to address related consequences of economic change. At the same time, it permits a relatively narrow policy of employment adjustment and a more fundamental project of economic transformation to share the same designation without necessarily sharing the same substantive commitments. The conceptual review by Wang and Lo identifies precisely this difficulty: the variety of definitions and perspectives can make communication and debate more difficult in the absence of clearer distinctions. 

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All of this enriches the engagement with the concerns and approaches elaborated in the  July-September 2026 Newsletter of The International Code of Conduct Association – ICoCA--"Accountable Security in Transition." The theme is framed in this way for the Newsletter:

As demand for critical minerals grows, responsible private security has an important role to play in protecting human rights, strengthening community trust and supporting a just transition. In this edition, we explore how security practices affect communities, highlight initiatives to strengthen accountability and prevent human rights risks, and showcase responsible security in action. We also look ahead to ICoCA’s 13th Annual General Assembly.

ICoCA "is a multi-stakeholder initiative formed in 2013 to ensure that providers of private security services respect human rights and humanitarian law. It serves as the governance and oversight mechanism of the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers." (ICoCA--About). The ICoCa summarizes its mission this way: "Our mission is to raise private security industry standards and practices that respect human rights and international humanitarian law and to engage with key stakeholders to achieve widespread adherence to the International Code of Conduct globally. Discover the benefits for each stakeholder group below."

Featured interventions include: (1) From mine to market: the security blind spot in critical minerals supply chains; (2) Private security: the critical minerals game-changer policymakers and investors can't afford to ignore; (3) From accountability to prevention: securing Mozambique's critical minerals; (4) When mineral demand meets community realities in Peru; and (5) two case studies on transition in South Sudan and Kenya.

A French version of this newsletter is available here.