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.

Posting Discussion Draft, "God, Golem, Monster, or Instrument: Belief, Cognition, and the Covert Premises of AI Regulation"

 

Pix Credt 100 Greatest Kaiju

 This is the age of the Kaiju (怪獣); the age of strange beasts, of mysterious monsters. They are and have been both distinct from us, autonomous, and yet reflections of us or of its environment, either as manifestation of corrupter or as savior from the corruption that produced it. . . or both. . . simultaneously.  Originally a creature of nature responding to the animating forces of human activity (nuclear weapons, sewage, environmental degradation, and the like), the kaiju embodied a monstrous reflection of humanity as an active, and sometimes disruptive, force. Kaiju represented an advance in the core conceptual problem of the Enlightenment--the centrality of the human in a world that ought to be indifferent to the place of humanity but that appears to respond decisively to human action.  That advance was meant to reorient the problem Mary Shelley posed in Frankenstein--what and where is it that humanity spawns its own demon/divinities. Shelly proposed that humanity seeks to recreate ourselves in our own image using humanity itself as its parts. This, in turn, posed an older problem in more human centric terms; centuries earlier such an act of creation required mimicry of divine creation, using the clay of the earth to create a golem, in humanity's image but neither human nor divine. With the kaiju, the dialectic of divine monstrsity moved from embodiment in the human to embodiment of a mirrored human a¡or human causation in something entirely different, and consequential. It might have originated in, by, or through humanity, but it was autonomous of the human and an outward form of human discipline. 

Kaiju also followed humanity into space and other-earthly encounters. But the dialectical phenomenology remained the same, as did the structures of the semiotics of the kaiju--a creature that was spawned by humanity and perhaps in its own image as an antidote to the spirited rationality that produced it. Kaiju, then in Platonic terms, might be understood as representations of the balancing function of epithumia (ἐπιθυμία; appetite; in tarot the Devil and perhaps the Fool), against an unbalanced logos (λόγος; reason; in tarot the King of Swords) unrestrained by thumos (θυμός; spiritedness, heart will the active phenomenological element; in tarot Strength manifested in the Ace of Wands) to restore balance as this is understood in context (temporal, situational, etc.) that in tarot is represented by the Chariot, with logos driving thumos and epithumia. It is all semiotics, of course. Each of these terms become meaningful only as they incarnate the significs, not that they represent, but with which they are embodied (and thus the kaiju and ensoulment), that then are put in motion in ways that have been scripted by their signification as they act within and against the consequences of their interactions that is the communal interpretive spaces within which interaction is rationalized and judged. 

The ancient Greeks performed this in their tragedies; later societies embedded the systems in their theologies and in their systems of rationality. And now in their dialectical and formative relations with themselves projected out of our (collective) bodies and into virtual representations of ourselves we perform a variation that threatens the older order that, as precarious as it was, was human. The performance of the gods, our kaiju, brings together two forms of divine theater. It might seem, then, that the gods no longer intervene in human affairs by transforming themselves in people; they transform themselves into strange beasts. And in the 21st century those kaiju are encased in non-carbon bodies. But those kaiju can be casing for humans that operate within them (the theological premise of movies like Pacific Rim) fighting the consequences of "naturally" produced kaiju or they can be the aggregated manifestation of the human that exists in the flows and which commemorates with the human through non-carbon based forms (computational hardware) in and through which it might control or operate the instruments humanity has created.  And here the etymology of the term "monster" bears emphasis. It can be traced back directly to the Latin monstrum "divine omen (especially one indicating misfortune), portent, sign; abnormal shape; monster, monstrosity," figuratively "repulsive character, object of dread, awful deed, abomination," a derivative of monere "to remind, bring to (one's) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach."Again, one encounters the interaction of the human and the divine. And one encounters as well its forms, endogenous and projected outward or exogenous and projected into the bodies of created objects. 

Pix credit here

 It is in this current stage of human production of the (our) self in relation to ourselves and our environment, whether projected inward from a superior space or outward from the human into a superior representation of the collective self, that one encounters the kaiju in the computational age, as the embodiment of the fundamental ordering problem of this age.  In this age of the kaiju everything appears ready and able to (re)create God in their own image even as God (re)turns the favor by (re)creating creators in their own image. The age of the computational kaiju, however, represents something special, something that is strangely monstrous is the product of two streams of human creation, and their phenomenological semiotics, that in their union produces what to our prior selves very well appears strangely monstrous. The first involved the projection of the human into its virtual forms, from the self, to the selfie to what Jan Broekman described as the Self-E. The "-E" in Self-E signifies a profound split where the human self is divided between the physical/incarnate and virtual/mirroring images. It is the anchor for human interaction with the broader digital landscape (such as e-commerce, e-mail, and e-conversations) and the hardware encased within e-devices. For instance, in an electronic dialogue, the Self-E creates a complex semiotic dynamic where there are essentially two real human partners and a virtual partner co-existing in the communication. That stream of the disembodying of the human subject produced the second, the need to encase the detached self-E, the collective human subject, into a machine, and then to give that detached collective Self-E a position in an emerging triadic subject that that embeds and determines the self specifically within digital cognitive frameworks. And that produces the monstrous in and as the kaiju of the self in itself, autonomous of itself and in the collective a projection that becomes or replaces traditional notions of the divine, of God, in the inter-subjectivity that is the relationship between humans and God. 

And that image is an embodiment of an appetite to put things right as projected outward from them to us. The dialectic produces resonance which, it appears in this second quarter of the 21st century, appears ready to shatter the fragile glass vessels that are the containers of humanity's precious hold on a rationalized reality in which they are either at the summit or sitting at the right had of the throne. These are our own monsters, our kaiju, though they do not appear monstrous to themselves, indeed, they might consider  humanity as the monstrous ideal against which all else is measured, now freed of confinement on Monster Island. They roam free(r) now; and we, having made and freed them, or they having been made and in the making made us, now seek to manage them to our own ends as they do the same.  

Now at least, the problem becomes clearer. It is this: in a world in which humanity projects itself outward into an autonomous self-subject, the Self-E, and then encases it in hardware that produces an unavoidable object that distinguishes the body of humanity from its virtual collective self, in the face of that act of self-creation and self-projection, what is it that humanity seeks to regulate, and how is that regulation to be crafted. To those ends, what emerges is the problem that must be resolved before an answer to regulatory approaches becomes clear enough to undertake--does humanity understand the object of regulation as God, golem or instrument. To resolve that problem is to produce the inevitable resolution of the question of the form and object of regulation. The difficulty lies in the initial resolution: God, golem or instrument. 

This is the context in which I considered four questions about the relationship of theology, AI, and regulation:   (1) What becomes of politics in an age of apparent subordination of humanity? (2) And what becomes of religion in an age when mankind creates a power that threatens to outstrip our own understanding and become a god? (3) Does this represent a moral crisis, as Pope Leo has suggested in his encyclical Magnifica Humanita? (4) And can anything be done to avert the trajectory we are seemingly on?

This journey produced a discussion draft that I am preparing to present for comments. I would be delighted, should there be interest, in comments, engagements, and discussion off line among those interested. The title of the draft is "God, Golem, Monster, or Instrument: Belief, Cognition, and the Covert Premises of AI Regulation " and it may be accessed HERE and HERE. The object is a preliminary consideration  of artificial or super (see here) intelligence not as a mechanical instrument but as the instrumentalization of the spirit, of the animus of collective humanity the deployment of which then reorders the carefully crafted hierarchies of endogenous and exogenous authority on which humans have crafted their belief systems since they knew enough to sacrifice to the gods. It seeks to begin to engage with the theology of artificial/super intelligence both from the perspective of traditional religion and from a secular orientation.    

The central claim is this: the real contest over AI governance may be less about who controls the technology than about who controls the community’s belief about what the technology is. That belief—whether AI is understood as a tool, a threat, a partner, a mirror, or something else entirely—shapes every regulatory decision that follows. And the paper suggests that this belief-contest may be conducted, mostly invisibly, through the very governance frameworks meant to manage AI. Proposed regulations tend to carry inside them a picture of what AI is; that picture is rarely examined, and it may do much of the work.

The paper is organized around what it calls the “god-question.” Leo XIV, as the paper reads him, holds that God is truly outside the human—the source of grace, dignity, and moral order—and that AI’s deepest danger is that it tempts humanity to replace that outside God with a human-made substitute. The paper’s alternative reading is different but not dismissive. It proposes that what may be happening is that the collective function previously performed by religion—giving the community its orientation, its sense of what is authoritative, its account of what counts as real—is being relocated into AI systems. Not because AI is becoming God, but because communities are investing AI with the kind of trust and authority they once reserved for religious, political, and legal institutions. The question is not whether a new god is being created but whether the god-function—the community’s collective investment in something it treats as authoritative—is being transferred to a new vessel.

Pix credit here (Godzilla)

 

 Here is the abstract:  

This is the age of the kaiju (怪獣): strange beasts at once autonomous of humanity and reflections of it, corrupter and savior from the corruption that produced them, or both. The essay reads generative AI as a kaiju of a particular kind, the product of two streams of human self-production: the projection of the self into its virtual forms, from self to selfie to what Jan Broekman called the Self-E, and the encasing of that detached, aggregated Self-E in non-carbon bodies. The monstrum was first an omen, a warning (monere), and this one poses a question that shapes regulation before any instrument is drafted: does humanity understand the object of regulation as God, golem, or instrument?

The essay reads Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (2026) as one sophisticated answer. It extracts eight premises (P1–P8) and reads them through Peirce’s thirdness, Broekman’s Self-E, the cognitive cage, the ding of Chinese political philosophy, and the Gerasene vessel logic. Its central suggestion is that the encyclical and the projection thesis diverge on the nature of God. For Leo, God is exogenous, the source of address and gift rather than a place outside the world, and the machine must remain an instrument. For the projection thesis, what appears as an exogenous God-relation may be the projection of an endogenous belief in the completeness of the aggregated human, so that what is being relocated into AI systems is the god-function itself: the community’s investment in something it treats as authoritative. Hobbes’s Leviathan, artificial man and mortal god, is an earlier vessel of the same kind. The Gerasene reading suggests that the contest is less over whether there will be vessels than over who is authorized to read them, and a worked example from the EU AI Act shows what picture of AI a regulatory instrument carries. Whether anything stands outside the frame is left open among three candidates: an exogenous God, Peirce’s community of inquiry, or none.

The method is stereoscopic rather than adjudicative. The essay records its exposures: unfalsifiability, the priestly claim dressed as analysis, and the sycophancy of the systems that helped draft it. The Chinese ding held for millennia because belief was shared; the task now is to find out what belief we are sharing, and with whom—or what.

 The Executive Summary and Introduction follows below and the full text may be accessed HERE.

Reflexiones sobre el informe del Grupo de Trabajo sobre la cuestión de los derechos humanos y las empresas transnacionales y otras empresas: Gobierno corporativo, empresas y derechos humanos (A/81/180/UNGA, 14 de julio de 2026)

 ENGLISH LANGUAGE VERSION HERE

El Informe del Grupo de Trabajo sobre la cuestión de los derechos humanos y las empresas transnacionales y otras empresas — Gobernanza corporativa, empresas y derechos humanos, presentado en el 81.° período de sesiones de la Asamblea General — versa sobre los deberes de los directores y las responsabilidades de los altos ejecutivos en las grandes empresas. Su informe refleja un consenso de élites, al menos dentro de la comunidad de empresas y derechos humanos y sus partidarios en el aparato administrativo de los Estados, así como entre académicos y amplios segmentos del sector de la sociedad civil global. Ya solo por esa razón, merece ser tomado en serio, y seriamente examinado en lo que plantea, en lo que vela, y en las consecuencias que pueden derivarse de supuestos que permanecen críticamente sin examinar.

El Informe es un documento sofisticado dentro de su propio sistema semiótico — la expresión más avanzada del marco de los Principios Rectores aplicado a la gobernanza corporativa. Pero su sistema operativo interno se encuentra constreñido por su compromiso fundacional con el Estado como primeridad semiótica, la legalidad como segundidad semiótica, y el marco de los Principios Rectores como terceridad semiótica. No puede observar la empresa como un sistema de gobernanza por derecho propio; no puede conceptualizar el cumplimiento como cognición organizacional; no puede procesar la transformación computacional de la gobernanza; y no puede dar cuenta de la desagregación del sujeto portador de derechos dentro de las arquitecturas empresariales que pretende reformar. Lo más crítico es que no declara lo que está haciendo — emplear los derechos humanos como dispositivo oblicuo mediante el cual los principios fundacionales de la gobernanza corporativa — el propósito corporativo, el modelo estándar, la relación entre la corporación y el Estado, y la personalidad jurídica corporativa misma — están siendo transformados sin la confrontación que una declaración abierta provocaría.

crédito aquí

Dicho esto, subrayo que ni "apoyo" ni "cuestiono" ningún tipo de manifestación de variación alguna de lo que los colectivos humanos denominarán "gobernanza corporativa", su sistema operativo fundacional, sus obligaciones, responsabilidades y la jaula cognitiva dentro de la cual todo ello tendrá sentido para sus creadores. Por otra parte, me siento incómodo ante las antiguas tentaciones del velamiento y de dar por sentado lo que pudieran ser cuestiones altamente contenciosas de primeros principios. Esa ha sido una tentación que algunos podrían encontrar irresistible. Es entonces importante exponer lo que la tentación, o más inquietante aún, la creencia en la certeza y la "facticidad", pudiera ocultar detrás de una certidumbre (de la significación e identificación de principios privilegiados a partir de los cuales se construye una realidad totalizante como si fuera ordenada por lo Divino) que produce excelentes documentos políticos y los argumentos que los sostienen, pero poco más — salvo la evangelización de las comunidades de partes interesadas cuya aceptación de una fe en esas construcciones es un elemento necesario para su naturalización dentro de las comunidades humanas. A tales fines he preparado un breve ensayo crítico, "La transformación sub silentio de la gobernanza corporativa: Análisis crítico del Informe del Grupo de Trabajo sobre la cuestión de los derechos humanos y las empresas transnacionales y otras empresas (A/81/180, 14 de julio de 2026)", en el cual aplico mi propia obra previa y marcos analíticos, fundamentados en el análisis del discurso, la semiótica y la fenomenología, al proyecto político-normativo del Grupo de Trabajo de las Naciones Unidas tal como se manifiesta en su Informe de 2026 (A/81/180). He aquí un resumen de lo que intento:

El Grupo de Trabajo de las Naciones Unidas sobre Empresas y Derechos Humanos publicó su Informe sobre Gobernanza Corporativa, Empresas y Derechos Humanos (A/81/180) en julio de 2026. El Informe examina cómo los Principios Rectores de las Naciones Unidas sobre las Empresas y los Derechos Humanos (los Principios Rectores, o PR) deben aplicarse a la gobernanza de las corporaciones — es decir, a los deberes de las juntas directivas y los altos ejecutivos. Se trata, en apariencia, de una empresa directa: cartografía las prácticas de gobernanza corporativa a través de las jurisdicciones, identifica brechas entre la práctica existente y las expectativas de los Principios Rectores, y formula recomendaciones a Estados y empresas. Sus doce recomendaciones a los Estados y trece a las empresas abordan asuntos que van desde la clarificación de los deberes de los directores hasta la integración de los derechos humanos en la remuneración ejecutiva. Es, en estos respectos, una contribución cuidadosa y bien documentada al campo de empresas y derechos humanos. Este ensayo argumenta, sin embargo, que el Informe está emprendiendo algo más ambicioso de lo que su tono mesurado sugiere. Bajo su superficie descriptiva, el Informe se encuentra comprometido en un proyecto de transformación de las categorías fundacionales de la gobernanza corporativa mediante el despliegue de normas de derechos humanos. Esta transformación procede silenciosamente — sub silentio — sin reconocer abiertamente la magnitud de los cambios que contempla. El ensayo no sugiere que esta transformación sea necesariamente errónea, pero sí sugiere que plantea cuestiones importantes sobre transparencia, legitimidad y rendición de cuentas democrática que los formuladores de políticas deberían considerar con detenimiento.

Lo que el Informe propone: El Informe examina los sistemas de gobernanza corporativa a lo largo de múltiples jurisdicciones, desde aquellos organizados en torno a la primacía del accionista (donde los deberes de los directores se deben a los accionistas) pasando por modelos intermedios como el "valor accionarial iluminado" del Reino Unido (donde los directores deben tener en cuenta los intereses de las partes interesadas en el curso de la promoción del beneficio accionarial), hasta modelos híbridos de partes interesadas (India, Brasil, Ghana) donde los directores deben obligaciones a un espectro más amplio de intereses, y finalmente hasta regímenes de debida diligencia obligatoria en materia de derechos humanos (Francia, Alemania, la Unión Europea). El Informe constata que los arreglos de gobernanza existentes son inadecuados: muy pocas empresas tienen políticas significativas de derechos humanos integradas en sus operaciones; la debida diligencia en materia de derechos humanos se encuentra fragmentada entre las funciones corporativas; solo el siete por ciento de las empresas encuestadas proporcionan una cadena clara de responsabilidad en derechos humanos que llegue hasta la junta directiva; y la mayoría de las juntas carecen de experiencia en derechos humanos. Sobre la base de estas constataciones, el Informe recomienda que los Estados clarifiquen que los deberes de los directores incluyen las consideraciones de derechos humanos; promulguen legislación obligatoria de debida diligencia en materia de derechos humanos; introduzcan sanciones personales para los directores que no supervisen el desempeño en derechos humanos; y habiliten a los no accionistas para presentar reclamaciones contra los directores. Recomienda a las empresas que integren los derechos humanos en la supervisión de la junta, establezcan líneas de reporte dedicadas, vinculen la remuneración ejecutiva al desempeño en derechos humanos e incorporen mecanismos de reclamación en todas sus operaciones.

La transformación más profunda en juego: El ensayo identifica cuatro respectos en los que las recomendaciones del Informe, tomadas en conjunto, transformarían la arquitectura existente de la gobernanza corporativa en lugar de meramente complementarla. Primero, el propósito corporativo. La recomendación del Informe de que el propósito corporativo "no opere únicamente sobre la primacía del accionista" es, en la práctica, una recomendación de que los Estados legislen contra la comprensión dominante del propósito corporativo en muchas jurisdicciones principales. El Informe trata la primacía del accionista no como un modelo legítimo de gobernanza entre varios, sino como una base deficiente a ser corregida. Esta es una decisión política de considerable magnitud, y los formuladores de políticas deben entenderla como tal. Segundo, la gobernanza de la junta. El Informe prescribe una arquitectura detallada de cómo las juntas deben gobernar los derechos humanos: comités dedicados, líneas de reporte específicas, experiencia requerida y sanciones personales por incumplimiento. La brecha entre la obligación mínima de supervisión reconocida en el derecho existente (ejemplificada por el estándar Caremark en Estados Unidos, que requiere solo que las juntas no omitan por completo la implementación de sistemas de reporte) y la arquitectura comprehensiva que el Informe vislumbra es sustancial. Los formuladores de políticas deben apreciar que esto va más allá de mejorar los estándares de gobernanza existentes hacia la prescripción de un modelo particular de organización de la gobernanza. Tercero, la relación corporación-Estado. Al recomendar que los Estados ordenen la debida diligencia corporativa en materia de derechos humanos y que las corporaciones incorporen normas internacionales de derechos humanos en su gobernanza, el Informe vislumbra el empleo de la corporación como instrumento para dar efecto doméstico a estándares internacionales de derechos humanos — incluso en jurisdicciones cuyos legislativos no han adoptado dichos estándares. La corporación se convierte en conducto mediante el cual las normas internacionales fluyen hacia los ordenamientos jurídicos internos. Este es un desarrollo significativo en la relación entre corporaciones, Estados y derecho internacional que merece deliberación política explícita. Cuarto, la personalidad corporativa. El Informe resuelve implícitamente debates teóricos de larga data sobre la naturaleza de la personalidad jurídica corporativa a favor de lo que podría denominarse una "personalidad de derechos humanos" — una en la cual el propósito, los deberes, los arreglos de gobernanza y la rendición de cuentas de la corporación se definen todos por referencia a obligaciones de derechos humanos. Los formuladores de políticas deben reconocer que esta resolución tiene consecuencias para cómo las corporaciones son entendidas, reguladas y llamadas a rendir cuentas a través de los sistemas jurídicos.

El método del Informe y sus implicaciones: El ensayo también examina el método interpretativo mediante el cual el Informe construye su argumentación. El Informe procede clasificando los arreglos de gobernanza a lo largo de un espectro desde la primacía del accionista hasta los modelos de partes interesadas, identificando la brecha entre cada arreglo y las expectativas de los Principios Rectores, y recomendando que los Estados cierren esa brecha. Este método — clasificar, medir la brecha, recomendar el cierre — es poderoso pero no neutral. Presupone que los Principios Rectores proporcionan la medida correcta de adecuación, y trata las desviaciones de ese estándar como deficiencias a ser corregidas en lugar de como opciones legítimas alternativas de gobernanza. El Informe también traduce las preocupaciones de derechos humanos al lenguaje de la materialidad financiera, lo cual las hace legibles dentro de los marcos de gobernanza existentes pero también las subordina a la lógica financiera — una tensión que el Informe no reconoce plenamente.

Lo que los formuladores de políticas deben considerar: Nada en este análisis implica que los objetivos del Grupo de Trabajo sean erróneos. Existen razones poderosas para creer que las corporaciones deben tener mayor consideración de sus impactos en derechos humanos, que los directores deben ser más atentos a las consecuencias de sus decisiones para los trabajadores y las comunidades, y que los arreglos de gobernanza deben evolucionar para reflejar estas expectativas. La literatura académica apoya ampliamente la proposición de que la arquitectura existente de gobernanza corporativa aborda inadecuadamente las preocupaciones de derechos humanos. Sin embargo, este ensayo sugiere que los formuladores de políticas deben abordar las recomendaciones del Informe con una comprensión clara de lo que implican. El Informe presenta sus recomendaciones como extensiones lógicas de los principios de gobernanza existentes — como la aplicación natural de los Principios Rectores al derecho corporativo. Pero el efecto acumulativo de estas recomendaciones sería transformar, en lugar de extender, las categorías fundacionales de la gobernanza corporativa: el propósito corporativo, la autonomía de la junta, la relación corporación-Estado, y la personalidad corporativa misma. Tal transformación bien pudiera estar justificada, pero debería proceder mediante deliberación transparente en lugar de la extensión incremental de un marco cuyas implicaciones transformativas no se explicitan. Los formuladores de políticas deben considerar también la coherencia de la arquitectura de gobernanza que el Informe vislumbra. Al superponer obligaciones de derechos humanos sobre las estructuras existentes de gobernanza corporativa sin reconstituir dichas estructuras, el Informe corre el riesgo de producir arreglos de gobernanza internamente contradictorios — exigiendo a las juntas que maximicen el valor accionarial mientras simultáneamente priorizan los derechos humanos, sin ofrecer un marco claro para resolver los conflictos entre estos objetivos. Un enfoque más transparente reconocería estas tensiones y propondría un marco coherente para su resolución.

 

El ensayo completo puede consultarse AQUÍ.  

 

crédito aquí

 

 

Reflections on Report of the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises Corporate governance, business and human rights (A/81/180/UNGA, 14 July 2026)

 

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VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ

  The report of the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises Corporate governance, business and human rights at the 81st session of the General Assembly, writes about directors’ duties and the responsibilities of senior executives in large companies. Its  report reflects an elite consensus, at least within the business and human rights community and their supporters in the administrative apparatus of states, and among academics and large segments of the global civil society sector. For that reason alone, it is worthy of being taken seriously, and seriously examined for for it puts forward, what it veils, and what the consequences drawn from assumptions that remain critically unexamined, may produce. 

The Report is a sophisticated document within its own semiotic system — the most advanced expression of the GP framework as applied to corporate governance. But its internal operating system is constrained by its foundational commitment to the state as semiotic first, legality as semiotic second, and the GP framework as semiotic third. It cannot observe the enterprise as a governance system in its own right; it cannot conceptualize compliance as organizational cognition; it cannot process the computational transformation of governance; and it cannot account for the disaggregation of the rights-bearing subject within the enterprise architectures it seeks to reform. Most critically, it does not declare what it is doing — using human rights as the sideways device through which the foundational principles of corporate governance — corporate purpose, the standard model, the corporation-state relationship, and corporate personality itself — are being transformed without the confrontation that an open declaration would provoke.

That said, I underscore that I neither "support" nor "challenge" any sort of manifestation of any variation of what human collectives will name "corporate governance", its foundational operating system, its obligations, responsibilities and the cognitive caged within which all of this will make sense to its makers. On the other hand I am uncomfortable with ancient temptations of veiling and of assuming away what may be highly contentious issue of first principles. That has been a temptation that some might find irresistible. It is then important to expose what temptation, or more troubling the belief in the certainty and "facticity", might hide behind a certainty (of the signification and identification of foregrounded principles from which a totalizing reality is constructed as if ordered by the Divine) that produces excellent political documents and the arguments supporting them, but little else--other than the evangelization of the communities of stakeholders whose acceptance of a faith in those constructions is a necessary element in its naturalization within human communities.

To those ends I have prepared a short critical essay, "The Sub Silentio Transformation of Corporate Governance: A Critical Analysis of the Report of the Working Group on the Issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises (A/81/180, 14 July 2026) in which I appy my own prior work and analytical frameworks, grounded in discourse analysis, semiotics and phenomenology, to the political-normative project of the UN Working Group as manifested in its 2026 Report (A/81/180). Here is a summary of what I am attemptingç

 

The United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights released its Report on Corporate Governance, Business and Human Rights (A/81/180) in July 2026. The Report examines how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (the Guiding Principles, or GPs) should be applied to the governance of corporations—that is, to the duties of boards of directors and senior executives. This is, on its face, a straightforward undertaking: it maps corporate governance practices across jurisdictions, identifies gaps between existing practice and the expectations of the Guiding Principles, and offers recommendations to states and companies. Its twelve recommendations to states and thirteen to companies address matters ranging from the clarification of directors' duties to the integration of human rights into executive remuneration. It is, in these respects, a careful and well-documented contribution to the business and human rights field.

This essay argues, however, that the Report is doing something more ambitious than its measured tone suggests. Beneath its descriptive surface, the Report is engaged in a project of transforming the foundational categories of corporate governance through the deployment of human rights norms. This transformation proceeds quietly—sub silentio—without openly acknowledging the magnitude of the changes it contemplates. The essay does not suggest that this transformation is necessarily wrong, but it does suggest that it raises important questions about transparency, legitimacy, and democratic accountability that policymakers should consider carefully.

What the Report Proposes: The Report surveys corporate governance systems across many jurisdictions, from those organized around shareholder primacy (where directors' duties run to shareholders) through intermediate models such as the United Kingdom's "enlightened shareholder value" (where directors must have regard to stakeholder interests in the course of promoting shareholder benefit), to hybrid stakeholder models (India, Brazil, Ghana) where directors owe obligations to a broader range of interests, and finally to mandatory human rights due diligence regimes (France, Germany, the European Union). The Report finds that existing governance arrangements are inadequate: too few companies have meaningful human rights policies embedded across their operations; human rights due diligence is fragmented across corporate functions; only seven percent of companies surveyed provide a clear chain of responsibility for human rights reaching the board; and most boards lack human rights expertise.

On the basis of these findings, the Report recommends that states clarify that directors' duties include human rights considerations; enact mandatory human rights due diligence legislation; introduce personal sanctions for directors who fail to oversee human rights performance; and enable non-shareholders to bring claims against directors. It recommends that companies integrate human rights into board oversight, establish dedicated reporting lines, link executive remuneration to human rights performance, and embed grievance mechanisms throughout their operations.

The Deeper Transformation at Stake: The essay identifies four respects in which the Report's recommendations, taken together, would transform the existing architecture of corporate governance rather than merely supplement it.

First, corporate purpose. The Report's recommendation that corporate purpose 'not operate solely on shareholder primacy' is, in practice, a recommendation that states legislate away the dominant understanding of corporate purpose in many major jurisdictions. The Report treats shareholder primacy not as one legitimate governance model among several but as a deficient baseline to be corrected. This is a policy choice of considerable magnitude, and policymakers should understand it as such.

Second, board governance. The Report prescribes a detailed architecture for how boards should govern human rights: dedicated committees, specific reporting lines, required expertise, and personal sanctions for failure. The gap between the minimal oversight obligation recognized in existing law (exemplified by the Caremark standard in the United States, which requires only that boards not entirely fail to establish reporting systems) and the comprehensive architecture the Report envisions is substantial. Policymakers should appreciate that this moves beyond enhancing existing governance standards toward prescribing a particular model of governance organization.

Third, the corporation-state relationship. By recommending that states mandate corporate human rights due diligence and that corporations embed international human rights norms in their governance, the Report envisions using the corporation as an instrument for giving domestic effect to international human rights standards—including in jurisdictions whose legislatures have not adopted those standards. The corporation becomes a conduit through which international norms flow into domestic legal orders. This is a significant development in the relationship between corporations, states, and international law that deserves explicit policy deliberation.

Fourth, corporate personality. The Report implicitly resolves longstanding theoretical debates about the nature of corporate legal personality in favor of what might be called a 'human rights personality'—one in which the corporation's purpose, duties, governance arrangements, and accountability are all defined by reference to human rights obligations. Policymakers should recognize that this resolution has consequences for how corporations are understood, regulated, and held accountable across legal systems.
The Report's Method and Its Implications

The essay also examines the interpretive method through which the Report builds its case. The Report proceeds by classifying governance arrangements along a spectrum from shareholder primacy to stakeholder models, identifying the gap between each arrangement and the expectations of the Guiding Principles, and recommending that states close the gap. This method—classify, measure the gap, recommend closure—is powerful but not neutral. It presupposes that the Guiding Principles provide the correct measure of adequacy, and it treats departures from that standard as deficiencies to be corrected rather than as legitimate alternative governance choices. The Report also translates human rights concerns into the language of financial materiality, which makes them legible within existing governance frameworks but also subordinates them to financial logic—a tension the Report does not fully acknowledge.

What Policymakers Should Consider: None of this analysis implies that the Working Group's objectives are wrong. There are powerful reasons to believe that corporations should take greater account of their human rights impacts, that directors should be more attentive to the consequences of their decisions for workers and communities, and that governance arrangements should evolve to reflect these expectations. The scholarly literature broadly supports the proposition that the existing corporate governance architecture inadequately addresses human rights concerns.

However, this essay suggests that policymakers should approach the Report's recommendations with a clear understanding of what they entail. The Report presents its recommendations as logical extensions of existing governance principles—as the natural application of the Guiding Principles to corporate law. But the cumulative effect of these recommendations would be to transform, rather than extend, the foundational categories of corporate governance: corporate purpose, board autonomy, the corporation-state relationship, and corporate personality itself. Such a transformation may well be warranted, but it should proceed through transparent deliberation rather than through the incremental extension of a framework whose transformative implications are not made explicit.

Policymakers should also consider the coherence of the governance architecture the Report envisions. By layering human rights obligations onto existing corporate governance structures without reconstituting those structures, the Report risks producing governance arrangements that are internally contradictory—requiring boards to maximize shareholder value while simultaneously prioritizing human rights, without providing a clear framework for resolving conflicts between these objectives. A more transparent approach would acknowledge these tensions and propose a coherent framework for their resolution.

The essay follows and may be accessed HERE.

 

"Voices From the Structuring Silence The Netanyahu and Abbas Addresses at the 81st UN General Assembly Read Against the Semiotic Architecture of 'Reading in Three Dimensions'"

 

 

This is the second part of a two part analysis of the constitution of the way that certain speeches delivered at that great performative theater that is the United Nations also usefully help unmask the underlying cognitive verities within which each is buried and also surfaces even as their discourse suggests something else entirely. 

The first part undertook a close, multi-layered reading of four addresses delivered before the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly: those of the United States (Trump), the Islamic Republic of Iran (Pezeshkian), Turkey (Erdoğan), and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Abdullah II). The analysis proceeds through seven interpretive registers—surface diplomatic grammar, underlying legal-structural claims, theological Lebenswelt, civilizational self-positioning, the construction of absence and silence, instrumental invocations of international law, and the embedding of eschatological temporality within ostensibly secular rhetoric. Its principal contribution was meant to be encased in and as a demonstration that the shared vocabulary of multilateral diplomacy—sovereignty, human rights, rules-based order, peace—conceals radically incompatible meaning-structures, such that speakers who appear to be engaged in common discourse may in fact be operating within incommensurable semiotic universes.

The present essay brings into the analytical field the two voices that occupied, or might be said to have occupied, the very position of that structuring absence itself. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, spoke as the voice of Jewish sovereignty — the claim to statehood grounded, at least in part, in theological narrative and historical suffering. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, spoke as the voice of Palestinian statehood — the counter-claim grounded in international law, territorial integrity, and the lived experience of dispossession. One might suggest that these two addresses, read against the seven-layer semiotic architecture developed in the original essay, illuminate dimensions of the structuring silence that the original analysis could only gesture toward.

The performative conditions under which each address was delivered are themselves of considerable analytical significance. Netanyahu spoke in person to a General Assembly hall from which approximately seventy-seven delegations had already walked out in coordinated protest — addressing, therefore, a hall defined as much by its absences as by its presences. Abbas, for the second consecutive year, was denied a United States visa and was compelled to address the Assembly via pre-recorded video — a mediated presence that enacts, at the level of the body itself, the very exclusion that the substance of his address decries. These conditions of delivery are not incidental to the analysis but constitute its outermost frame: physical presence amid orchestrated absence, and enforced absence within the institution of universal presence.

The analytical method remains, as in the original essay, phenomenological and semiotic rather than evaluative. The concern is not with the truth or falsity of the claims advanced by either speaker but rather with the positioning of those claims within layered systems of signification, the use of language simultaneously to disclose and to conceal, and the structures through which meaning is produced, contested, and rendered incommensurable. Everything, as the original essay insisted, must be read against the language and semiotics of "Reading in Three Dimensions."

 And it starts, not as the operatic conflict between Gaza and the clan tribes of Israel, the children of Jacob  in the land of Canaan in ther form of Samson and Delilah, though there is a bit of that going on here as well, but in the more broadly contemporary stage settiong of Verdi's opera Nabucco. 

  

Va’, pensiero, sull’ali dorate;
Va’, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli,
Ove olezzano tepide e molli
L’aure dolci del suolo natal!
Del Giordano le rive saluta,
Di Sionne le torri atterrate.
O mia Patria, sì bella e perduta!
O membranza, sì cara e fatal!
Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati,
Perché muta dal salice pendi?
Le memorie nel petto raccendi,
Ci favella del tempo che fu!
O simile di Solima ai fati,
Traggi un suono di crudo lamento,
O t’ispiri il Signore un concento
Che ne infonda al patire virtù!

 

Fly, thought, on golden wings;
Go, settle upon the slopes and the hills,
Where the warm and soft breezes
Of our native soil smell sweet!
Greet the banks of the Jordan
And the toppled towers of Zion.
O my country, so lovely and so lost!
O memory, so dear and so fatal!
Golden harp of the prophetic seers,
Why do you hang mute upon the willow?
Rekindle the memories in our breast,
And speak to us of the time gone by!
Mindful of the fate of Jerusalem,
Give forth a sound of raw lamentation,
Or may the Lord inspire you with a harmony
That infuses us with virtue to bear our suffering!

(Verdi, Nabucco (1842), libretto by Temistocle Solera, chorus, Va’ Pensiero)

Va’, pensiero begins not with an unmarked future but with the recollection of a damaged place, with the banks of the Jordan and the toppled towers of Zion, so that longing appears neither as a private emotion nor as an aesthetic response to loss but as a way in which a people inhabits history, and memory, lamentation, sacred geography, and the demand that suffering be made bearable become joined in a single movement of thought. The chorus is therefore not merely an evocative literary allusion but a phenomenological entry point: it discloses the Lebenswelt — the living world of longing, sacred geography, and fatal memory — from which the political and theological languages of the speeches draw their force. Read in this way, the chorus does not offer a proposition about the truth of a people or the justice of a claim; it opens the living world in which an absent homeland is made present through language, a ruined sanctuary becomes a sign of continuity, and endurance depends upon the return of a past that remains intimate, fatal, and unfinished.

 

The speeches cannot be understood apart from this Lebenswelt, and the Lebenswelt cannot be discerned except through the speeches. It is not a background against which political language happens to appear, but the living world of religious competition, longing, loss, and fatal othering that gives the language its objects and its urgency, even as the language discloses that world in partial and contested form. What the discourse reveals is therefore also what makes the discourse intelligible: the addresses are evidence of the Lebenswelt, while the Lebenswelt is the condition under which their invocations of land, sovereignty, return, sacrifice, and justice can be heard as more than public formulas.

 

Within this living world, religious competition is not a contest among discrete propositions but a struggle among comprehensive accounts of origin, inheritance, loss, and return, each organizing persons, places, histories, and institutions according to an account of where the world came from and what its restoration would require. When such accounts harden into reductionist essentialism, persons become bearers of categories, communities become remnants of an earlier dispensation, and political conflict is cast within a providential drama in which some are made to carry the future while others are treated as obstacles to its arrival. The secular vocabulary of sovereignty, occupation, security, recognition, and humanitarian obligation can then carry an older religious contest without naming it, and the speeches become the place where that contest is both concealed and made legible.

 

The essay follows below and may be accessed here.

 

 

Reading in Three Dimensions: The 81st UN General Assembly Addresses of the United States, Türkiye, Iran, and Jordan as Sites of Layered Meaning, Concealed Theology, and Competing Legalities

 

The United Nations is many things, some of them more interesting than others. It is certainly useful; a tool that can be wielded in the service of any one or any collective willing to take that up and infinitely malleable  in its form and utility. But that is politics and ought not to offend; though it does serve as a caution.  Perhaps less well understood is the utility of the United Nation as an instrument, as a tool, for evangelization. It is that place--like Jerusalem in the years before the Emperor Titus obliterated the city and set the stage for the theater that one encounters today--where all sorts of zealots, separated by their commonality and the intensity of their reactions to each other, each wrapped in the belief (itself an object, a signific, and the basis for creating cognitive universes or ordered meaning) in the righteousness of however it is that they constitute themselves and reconstitute their targets, where these zealots run around as the modern day fishers of humans and their communities (Matthew 4:19; "And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."). 

Belief, passion, conflict--discourse in the service of evangelization--that provides, at least for me, almost the only interesting element of the messy business of the global Sultanate of Women that the empire of the United Nations has become. 

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 It is with this in mind that I approached the question of what might be extracted from four  related and interesting speeches made by a quartet of actors  connected to each other by interest, hatred, love, need, and ambition, each dancing around a singularly absent center. The four speeches of four humans who identify as male:

1. United States of America; His Excellency, Donald Trump, President (22 September 2026); 

2. Türkiye; His Excellency; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; President (22 September 2026);

3. Jordan; His Majesty; Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein; King (22 September 2026);

4.  Iran (Islamic Republic of); His Excellency; Masoud Pezeshkian; President (23 September 2026)

That resulted in a fairly deep dive into the semiotics and discourse of  the four speeches that while singularly unremarkable become much more interesting, and valuable, when read against each other. The essay, entitled  Reading in Three Dimensions: The 81st UN General Assembly Addresses of the United States, Türkiye, Iran, and Jordan, as Sites of Layered Meaning, Concealed Theology, and Competing Legalities . Here is the abstract to give you a sense of the project. 

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This essay undertakes a close, multi-layered reading of four addresses delivered before the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly: those of the United States (Trump), the Islamic Republic of Iran (Pezeshkian), Turkey (Erdoğan), and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Abdullah II). The analysis proceeds through seven interpretive registers—surface diplomatic grammar, underlying legal-structural claims, theological Lebenswelt, civilizational self-positioning, the construction of absence and silence, instrumental invocations of international law, and the embedding of eschatological temporality within ostensibly secular rhetoric. One might suggest that a principal contribution of the present work lies in its demonstration that the shared vocabulary of multilateral diplomacy—sovereignty, human rights, rules-based order, peace—conceals radically incompatible meaning-structures, such that speakers who appear to be engaged in common discourse may in fact be operating within incommensurable semiotic universes.

It is perhaps possible to read the persistence of the so-called Jewish question—understood here not as an empirical matter but as a structuring absence around which the theological commitments of each address are organized—as one possible interpretive contribution of the essay. The empirical finding developed below is more specific: Islam and Christianity are named, invoked, defended, and prayed through across the corpus, while “Jew” and “Jewish” do not appear in any of the four speeches, and “Judaism” appears exactly once — in King Abdullah’s address, and there only in the mode of negation: “It is also tried to cast this conflict as a war of religions — Islam on one side, Judaism and Christianity on the other. It is not.” The single mention names the religious dimension precisely in order to foreclose it, a discursive operation whose analytical significance is developed below. The silence is therefore not general; its selective and targeted character warrants examination, even though the essay does not purport to settle the speakers’ motives. Drawing on my framework for analyzing theocratic constitutionalism (Backer 2009) and his methodological insistence on reading for plausibility rather than authorial intention, the analysis suggests that each speaker’s treatment of Israel-Palestine functions less as a policy position than as a site at which incommensurable theological, legal, and civilizational premises become momentarily visible. The essay employs my methodological approach (Backer 2024) to treat these addresses not as transparent policy statements but as layered texts requiring sustained hermeneutic excavation. The implications for international legal scholarship, diplomatic practice, and the coherence of multilateral governance are, one might cautiously submit, considerable.

The essay was created with the help of Harvey AI, which proved to be a more interesting experience than I had imagined--Harvey AI responded more like a student research assistant in need of constant correction and guidance than what is emerging as the discourse of AI computational systems "taking over." Still, the computational system was in the end useful in creating efficiencies in drafting (and in my case certainly in avoiding typos). Remaining errors including but not limited to conceptual decisions and the like remain entirely mine. The full  text of the essay follows below and may be accessed HERE. 

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The Implementation Opinions on Intelligent Agents in Comparative Perspective Situating China’s Approach Within Global Regulatory Trends on Agentic AI

 

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This working paper undertakes a structured comparative reading of thirteen instruments addressing the governance of agentic artificial intelligence — systems capable of sustained, multi-step, tool-using autonomous action — issued between late 2024 and mid-2026 by jurisdictions with markedly different political-economic systems and governance traditions. The instruments span binding legislation (the EU AI Act; Japan’s Act on Promotion of AI-Related Technologies), executive orders and presidential memoranda (the Trump Executive Order of June 2026, Trump NSPM-11, Biden Executive Order 14110, Biden NSM-25), intergovernmental recommendations (the OECD Recommendation on Artificial Intelligence), regional development strategies (the African Union Continental AI Strategy), voluntary governance frameworks (Singapore’s Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI v1.5, the Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime framework), cybersecurity guidance (the Five Eyes/Australia advisory on careful adoption of agentic AI services), government employee guidance (Canada’s Treasury Board Secretariat Guide), analytical frameworks (the Gradient Institute’s risks-and-controls framework for multi-agent systems), and aspirational international instruments (UN General Assembly Resolution 79/325, the UN High-Level Advisory Body report). The primary object of inquiry is China’s Implementation Opinions on the Standardized Application and Innovative Development of Intelligent Agents (2026).

Drawing on my earlier work  — which conceptualizes AI governance through the lenses of AI as strategic infrastructure, the development-security dialectic, platforms as governance intermediaries, the instrumentalisation question (the risk that the relationship between autonomous technology and its wielders may be reversed), and the ‘cognitive cage’ metaphor for the political-economic structures that constrain regulatory imagination — the analysis suggests that the near-simultaneity of these instruments may reflect a shared recognition that agentic AI poses governance challenges existing frameworks do not adequately address. Yet the convergence on vocabulary — autonomy, oversight, accountability, transparency — appears to mask sharp operative divergences that become visible only when these terms are traced to their institutional and normative contexts. The instruments may be read as revealing competing conceptions of what governance is for: fundamental rights protection (EU), market integrity (Singapore), cybersecurity (Five Eyes), bureaucratic accountability (Canada), development and the bridging of capability gaps (AU), socialist modernization under party-state coordination (China), and market sovereignty fused with national security (US). The instrumentalisation question — what happens when agents do not merely assist governance but perform it — remains, the analysis suggests, inadequately addressed by all instruments examined.

 The paper concludes by considering path dependence and what might be characterized as techno-bureaucratic mimicry — Nietzsche’s herd instinct refracted through the practices of benchmarking and landscape analysis — while observing the paradox that the very conformity these practices produce also generates variation, and that the gap between rhetoric (which foregrounds difference) and operative text (which may reveal a narrower bandwidth of actual divergence) poses questions about the depth of the disagreements the instruments appear to embody.

Executive Summary follows below. The full paper may be accessed at SSRN HERE.