Ed itors’ Note
English writer G. K. Chesterton famously warned against pulling down a seemingly useless fence without first understanding its possible purpose. Chesterton’s Fence is a comment on the relative ease of destruction as compared to creation, but also on the inevitability of change whether today or tomorrow, the fence will come down. Change is, in fact, the only universal constant. At all times throughout human history, idealists have sought and seized change, channeling hope for a better world into great social movements that scoured away the pillars of previous societies. By the same token, defenders of the status quo have vainly sought to withstand change’s ever-rising tide and frequently survived only by themselves introducing changes that made room for their ideas. Change is, in short, both the point and the mechanism of politics.
This is not to say that change is linear, or even unidirectional, as Asher Patel shows in “Drifting Away.” After 30 years of fruitful space cooperation between terrestrial great powers, mankind’s future in space appears increasingly split between two hostile blocs those headed by
the United States and by China. For Patel, space is mankind’s final frontier, and substituting competition for cooperation in the celestial domain is as short-sighted as it is dangerous.
Moreover, change’s alleged beneficiaries can often end up its victims. As Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon drag on, the IDF is feeling a manpower pinch. Its proposed solution? Granting citizenship to Eritrean and Sudanese refugees, who have long clamored for a change in status, conditional on their participation in Israel’s campaigns. In “The Cost of Belonging,” Gus LaFave argues that, though the initiative remains in a pilot stage, tying legal residence to military service is unethical.
It should go without saying that change can bring as much good as it does ill, as Dasha Dmitrieva optimistically demonstrates in “Dawn in Dhaka.” Bangladesh’s student movement, which began as an arcane protest over job quotas, erupted into nationwide revolution after senseless police brutality against protestors. Through interviews with five Bangladeshi students, Dmitrieva shines a light on the ways in which the protests have provided a model for other pro-democracy movements worldwide to reject sectarianism and embrace a common, unifying cause.
Sometimes, the change required is simply a return to yesterday’s conventions. “Phoning It In” explores how immigration courts, drowning in a terrifying backlog of removal proceedings, have attempted to speed their processes by replacing in-person interpreters with telephonic ones. The outcome of the policy has been misheard testimony, due process violations, and even more delay. Per Mitsuki Jiang, the easiest solution is turning back the clock and banishing telephonic interpretation into the shadows.
Finally, a change in one direction frequently provokes an equal and opposite response in the other. Daniel Kyte-Zable’s “Pick Your Poison” explores the rise of Glaze and Nightshade, two tools designed to safeguard digital artists from the ever-prying eye of AI companies. Even if, as KyteZable argues, Glaze and Nightshade are destined to lose their technological arms race against their better-funded competition, the lasting impact of both tools will be to mobilize artists to defend their rights as a distinct class.
Though we do not desire our readers to leave this issue with any one impression, we would be lying if we said that we did not wish for it to leave you changed with appreciation for a new argument, contemplating a new perspective, or galvanized to consider an issue differently. In this way, we hope only to perpetuate change by exploring the tiniest fraction of its boundless dimensions.
EXECUTIVE BOARD
EDITORS
CHIEFS
CHIEF
Rohan
MANAGING
Grace Chaikin
Harry Flores
Elliot Smith
CHIEF COPY EDITORS
Grace Leclerc
Miguel Valdovinos
INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS
Ariella Reynolds
Benjamin Stern
DATA DIRECTORS
Ryan Doherty
Amy Qiao
CREATIVE DIRECTORS
Thomas Dimayuga
Haimeng Ge
Grace Liu
MULTIMEDIA DIRECTORS
Matias Gersberg
Mitsuki Jiang
WEB DIRECTOR
Akshay Mehta
DIVERSITY OFFICER
Jordan Lac
BOARD OF ADVISORS
Alexandros Diplas
Allison Meakem
Gabriel Merkel
Hannah Severyns
Mathilda Silbiger
Tiffany Pai
Zander Blitzer
INTERVIEWS BOARD
COPY EDIT BOARD
CHIEF COPY
EDITORS
Grace Leclerc
Miguel Valdovinos
MANAGING COPY
EDITORS
Renee Kuo
Tiffany Eddy
COPY EDITORS
Andrea Li
AnnaLise Sandrich
Ava Rahman
Christina Li
Davis Kelly
Harshil Garg
Jason Hwang
Lilly Roth-Shapiro
Nicholas Clampitt
Rachel Loeb
Sabina Topol
Sara Santacruz
Shiela Phoha
Tanvi Mittal
Vanessa Tao
Vivian Chute
Yael Wellisch
Zoe Kass
DATA BOARD
DATA DIRECTORS
Doherty
Qiao
DATA ASSOCIATES
MULTIMEDIA BOARD
MULTIMEDIA
EDITORIAL BOARD
MANAGING
STAFF WRITERS
Gigi
Ophir
BUSINESS BOARD
BUSINESS DIRECTORS
Rohan Leveille
Caroline Novatney
BUSINESS ASSOCIATES
Aditi Bhattacharjya
Brynn Manke
Jack Plucker
John Lee
Junkai Gong
Manav Musunuru
CREATIVE BOARD
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Thomas Dimayuga
Haimeng Ge
Grace Liu
DESIGN DIRECTORS
Hannah Jeong
Hyunmin Kim
Natalie Ho
GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
Claire Lin
Marie You
Ryan Scott
Thanutchpatch (Punch)
Kulphisanrat
SOCIAL MEDIA DESIGNER Fah Prayottavekit
ART DIRECTORS
Angela Xu
Anna Fischler
Bath Hernández
Margaryta Winkler
Ziwei Chen
DIVERSITY TEAM
Chiupong
COVER ARTIST
Carmina Lopez
ILLUSTRATORS
Haley Maka
Haley Vallarta-Sheridan Kex Huang
Larisa Kachko
Lily Engblom-Stryker
Olivia Bartsch
Paul Li
Qingyang (Tiffany) Zhu
Ruobing Chang
Samantha Takeda
Sarah Mason
Sitong Liu
Sofia Schreiber
Yan (Jessica) Jiang
Yushan Jiang
Zimo Yang
Priceless
Talk is Cheap, Ratings are
Political debates have become less informative over time, but their increasing popularity makes up for their policy shortcomings
by Nicolaas Schmid
’27
, a Political Science concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR
illustration by Oli Bartsch ’26, an Illustration major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
Political debate has stood as a hallmark of American democracy for 250 years. Yet, the progression of debates over that time period has been anything but straightforward evolving as unpredictably as the very institution of American republicanism.
Early American political debate saw a period of change in the late 19th century, with the expansion of technologies like the telegraph and railroad bringing significant increases in the availability of information. The rise of these technologies culminated in widespread fixation on a series of debates between Congressman Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas, both running for an Illinois Senate seat in 1858. The Lincoln-Douglas debates touched on a variety of issues concerning antebellum society, most notably the future of slavery and the idea of popular sovereignty. Despite Lincoln’s outsized public support following the debates, electing senators was a power reserved to the state legislature prior to the 17th Amendment, and in early 1859, Douglas was reappointed to the Senate. While the debate did not sway the predetermined opinions of the political elite, it provided the public with a far more detailed picture
of political discourse than was previously available even if both Lincoln and Douglas were speaking to the Illinois Legislature first and to their fellow citizens second.
The presidential debates of 1960 saw another pivotal turning point in the accessibility of American national elections. On September 26 of that year, debates became available to Americans through a new form of media: live television. Citizens could now see both candidates face off in real time, opening political discourse to new swathes of the population. As with most major technological changes, this new form of debate visibility brought with it unintended consequences. Post-debate analyses showed that the at-home audience was uninterested in the policy positions that both candidates presented. Instead, the public was largely concerned with John F. Kennedy’s attractiveness and Richard Nixon’s sweaty appearance when deciding who won the debate. Ultimately, factors like room temperature, lighting, and the candidates’ suit colors took precedence over the substance of their arguments, playing an all-toopivotal role in whether or not a candidate was considered successful.
“In 1979, at-home viewers faced a difficult choice: watching material about presidential contender ‘Teddy’ Kennedy or a broadcast of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The latter, unsurprisingly, was the overwhelming favorite.”
“Trump continued to use the platform throughout his campaign to attack his political opponents online that is, until his aides took away control of his account.”
The Kennedy-Nixon debates marked the onset of a larger trend that has defined political discourse well into the 21st century. As their accessibility increased, debates became battles for media attention that were less concerned with long-winded policy arguments and more focused on easily digestible audiovisuals. Professors Kathleen Jamieson and David Birdsell best summarized the change: Whereas in the debates of the 19th century, music and “entertainment had lured audiences to speeches,” with the proliferation of digitized debates, the “speech became entertainment.” To get voters to turn out for a debate or political speech is one thing. With the introduction of the television, a different broadcast or video existed just a few buttons away, putting the onus of keeping viewers engaged on the candidates themselves. In 1979, at-home viewers faced a difficult choice: watching material about presidential contender “Teddy” Kennedy or a broadcast of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The latter, unsurprisingly, was the overwhelming favorite. Who would want to watch someone drone on about policy when thrilling cinema is on the next channel?
With the popularization of short-form video content and social media apps over the past decade, emphasis on debates as a form of entertainment has only been exacerbated. On platforms like X and TikTok, viewers at home can immediately post their own takes on debate content as it plays on their screens. Individual posts on social media regarding the debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris garnered thousands, and sometimes millions, of likes in the hours after its conclusion. With voters aged 18 to 29 being the most engaged demographic in debate viewership, the transition from cable to
mobile media is not a surprise. This age group is least likely to consume news through cable TV and most likely to consume it through social media sources.
Debate between presidential candidates has even spilled onto social media platforms itself, namely during the 2016 presidential election. In June of that year, candidates Trump and Hillary Clinton took to X to engage in a very public catfight Clinton told her opponent to get off of the app, and Trump parried with a quip about her email scandal. This exchange garnered hundreds of thousands of retweets and mirrored some of the famous Clinton-Trump exchanges on the debate stage. Trump continued to use the platform throughout his campaign to attack his political opponents online that is, until his aides took away control of his account.
Increasing popular participation in debates has become synonymous with dramatic changes in debate substance. As more people have gained access to debate content and as candidates try to increase their viewership political discourse has shifted from substance to whatever draws in the biggest crowd. The 2016 presidential debate showdowns, for instance, are remembered for their heated personal invective rather than their policy content. Nevertheless, they were among the most viewed debates ever, showcasing just what kind of debate rakes in the best ratings. The number of personal attacks and interruptions by candidates has skyrocketed in general as pundit opinions of debate content have become noticeably negative.
Although some have groaned at the palpable shift in debate content over the past decades, this change mirrors a positive shift in American political participation. Now, more people than ever have access to American elections and
political discourse especially when compared to the eras of Lincoln and Kennedy and it has become apparent that the debates play an important role in expanding that access. New forms of interactive media provide voters with a platform to engage in the political discourse they view on their screens. In 2016, over a billion tweets were authored about the election, as voters, pundits, and political figures alike were able to express their own opinions from home. Engaged political participation has not simply stopped at the screen. Following hours of national media coverage of the September 2024 Trump-Harris debate, hype surrounding the election created sizable surges in voter registration.
The modern debate although tumultuous at times has created tangible success in encouraging Americans to take part in their democracy. Regardless of their depressing effect on policy lovers, it is the heated debate segments of today that encourage millions of Americans to participate in our political system. While some call for a return to the civil, policy-oriented debates of old, the result would likely stifle the expansion of political discourse to include a wider net of citizens. Debates like the Lincoln-Douglas matchups were not inclusive in nature. Their long-winded speeches were aimed at convincing the political elite in Illinois to appoint them to the Senate, not at educating the average citizen of their time. To return to this type of debate would shroud our election system in political ritual and dissuade thousands of voters from participating in public discourse and elections themselves. The debates of today, however chaotic, are increasingly accessible to every American household and, in drawing thousands of voters to take part in election season, truly democratic.
PROTEST, POWER, AND POLICING
An Interview with MIGUEL SANCHEZ
Miguel Sanchez is the Majority Whip of the Providence City Council and an outspoken activist for Palestinian freedoms. In October 2023, Sanchez was fired from his position in Governor Daniel McKee’s office after protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza post October 7. In April 2024, Brown University arrested and subsequently pressed criminal charges against 41 peacefully protesting students. Sanchez, along with two other councilmembers, published a letter to the City Solicitor expressing their “dismay and disapproval” of Brown’s actions and pushing for the City Solicitor’s Office to drop the charges against the protestors.
Benjamin Stern: What was the main catalyst that prompted you to sign onto that letter to the City Solicitor?
Miguel Sanchez: The main motivation behind it was ongoing conversations with folks impacted directly, as well as having conversations with the City Solicitor’s Office to confirm that it was within the office’s legal authority to drop the charges. I would say that even finding out that we were using city resources to prosecute these students in the beginning was really the most disappointing part of it.
BS: Students around the country, whether at Brown or elsewhere, have commonly been met with police force during their protests for Palestine. What are your thoughts?
MS: Anytime you bring police enforcement to any situation, it creates tension. Luckily, the situation here in Providence didn’t reach the degree it did at Columbia and in other parts of the country, but calling the police in the first place puts students’ lives and safety at risk. The two series of arrests at Brown were some of the first mass arrests of students protesting genocide across the country. What does that say? Is it kind of opening the door? Creating that possibility is extremely dangerous. These are students using their First Amendment rights to voice their opinions, to discourage their universities from investing their money into manufacturers that are complicit in funding what’s going on in Gaza right now.
BS: Do you see any parallels between modern and historical student activism like the civil rights movement or Vietnam War protests? If so, what do you think those parallels might tell us? And further, what do you think they might reveal about the authorities’ responses?
MS: Just recently was the anniversary of the massacre at Kent State University at the Vietnam War protest in 1970. It’s really sad to see how we are in a very similar position today. And remember, a lot of the arrested students were active during the BLM protests in 2020 as well, so this oppression is something that they’re familiar with. History shows us that governments can never arrest their way out of an issue like this. It’s really just prolonging the problem or spreading the issue of mass incarceration. We need to do a lot better as a society. We need to listen to other people’s opinions and concerns and not immediately start arresting them. I’m also, you know, a pragmatic, responsible,
and reasonable politician. I understand that there are certain policies at the universities that are being broken, so they want to have internal disciplinary actions, and it’s completely within their right to do so. But once you start using city resources and government power to oppress certain populations and voices because you as a university might disagree with them, that’s when I take issue with it; that’s why I signed onto this letter, and that’s why I will keep speaking up against these injustices.
BS: In October, you were fired from your position in Governor McKee’s Office of Constituent Services after participating in protests for Palestinian freedom. Clearly, you haven’t let that stop you from being an outspoken supporter of the cause, but, in your experience, was there any struggle between the risks of potential blows to your career and the importance of the cause you’ve been supporting?
MS: What I tell everyone is that my biggest guiding principle in doing this work is going to sleep at night with a peaceful mind. I’m still able to do that, so I know that I’ve made the right decision. I have absolutely no regrets. Was it tough financially at certain points of being unemployed? Absolutely. But when compared to the struggle that other folks are dealing with, especially the people in Palestine, of course, it’s nothing. That’s something that my mom has always instilled in me: We have a voice, and we need to use it, do good, put good energy out there, and fight for what we believe is right.
Edited for length and clarity.
Interview by Benjamin Stern ’27
Illustration by Sarah Mason ’26
Walters’s Wild West
Ryan Walters’s inflammatory culture war rhetoric has engendered Oklahoma’s teacher exodus
by Wesley Horn ’27, a History concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR
“Walters’s principal method of countering ‘indoctrination’ in Oklahoma schools has been thinly veiled censorship.”
The state of education in Oklahoma is dire. After years of chronic underfunding and declining test scores relative to the nation, Oklahoma’s schools now rank second-worst in the country. Chief among the state’s educational worries is a mass exodus of qualified teachers, creating a recordhigh teacher shortage. During the 2023–2024 school year, the state issued a whopping 5,014 emergency teacher certifications, a more than 15,000 percent increase from the 32 issued from 2011–2012.
For much of the past decade, the teacher shortage in Oklahoma has been explained by unlivable salaries and inadequate classroom funding. In the past few years, however, these explanations have lost the weight they once held. With the help of billions of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funds, Oklahoma schools have filled their coffers and now have access to “unprecedented funding.” The state has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into teacher pay raises and has even begun offering $25,000 signing bonuses for teaching positions in rural areas. Now, teacher pay and total compensation in Oklahoma exceed the regional average. Yet the state still faces a record number of teacher vacancies. Rather than leaving because of financial concerns, teachers have likely fled the state due to harassment and inflammatory rhetoric from Oklahoma’s top education official, Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters.
Before Walters was elected to his current position, Governor Kevin Stitt appointed him as his Secretary of Education. In keeping with other Oklahoma Republicans, austerity measures, charter school endorsements, and support for school vouchers (government funding for students to attend private schools) partly defined Walters’s tenure as Secretary of Education. However, Walters set himself apart by making national culture wars a cornerstone of his platform.
In a State Superintendent debate, Walters said that helping pass House Bill 1775 in 2021 Oklahoma’s so-called critical race theory ban was one of his proudest accomplishments as Secretary of Education, despite no reports of critical race theory being taught in Oklahoma classrooms prior to the bill’s ratification. He attacked teachers and administrators for closing schools due to an influx of Covid-19 cases, saying they were acting out of fear. But when Oklahoma schools were still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, with eighth-grade math proficiency dropping more than in any other state, Walters neglected to respond. He ran his 2022 campaign for State Superintendent on the same anti-trans, “anti-woke” platform that characterized his time as Secretary of Education, and since taking office, he has attempted to put those plans into action.
illustrations by Bath Hernández ’26, an Illustration major at RISD and Art Director for BPR
Walters’s principal method of countering “indoctrination” in Oklahoma schools has been thinly veiled censorship. A key component of Walters’s agenda is banning books with obscene or sexualized content from school libraries; he claims that the ban targets pornographic material, but books investigated by the state for “obscene materials” include Lord of the Flies and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Walters even proposed a plan requiring districts to provide a comprehensive inventory of all books and materials available to students for yearly review by the State Department of Education, a measure the State Attorney General thankfully shut down.
Some districts have fought back against Walters’s book bans. Edmond Public Schools (EPS) sued him and the Oklahoma Board of Education for attempting to remove The Kite Runner and The Glass Castle from its libraries. Oklahoma’s Supreme Court sided with EPS, declaring that the State Board of Education does not have the authority to decide which books districts place on their shelves. Despite legal setbacks like this, Walters has remained steadfast in using his platform to espouse harmful anti-LGBTQ+ positions. He appointed Chaya Raichik, the founder of Libs of TikTok a rightwing account known for instigating online hate campaigns against LGBTQ+ teachers to the state’s Library Media Advisory Committee. Just last year, Raichik, whom Walters has called a powerful ally in fighting against indoctrination, derisively reposted a TikTok made by a librarian at Ellen Ochoa Elementary School in Tulsa. As a result of that post, multiple elementary schools in the district received bomb threats for six consecutive days.
Walters’s inflammatory rhetoric has had tangible and detrimental effects on Oklahoma students. He has targeted transgender and gender-nonconforming Oklahomans, stating
“He has said that those who oppose his book-banning efforts support pedophiles and accused teachers unions of being terrorist organizations that are ‘turning our schools into Epstein Island.’”
that “[r]adical gender ideology has no place in our classrooms.” Amid Walters’s attacks, Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary student, was verbally and physically attacked in a bathroom at Owasso High School and died the next day. In response to the outcry over Benedict’s death, Walters published a Fox News op-ed claiming that the media’s coverage of the story was a liberal smear campaign against him.
Teachers who dare resist Walters’s agenda likewise find themselves targets of his rampant verbal attacks. He has said that those who oppose his book-banning efforts support pedophiles and accused teachers unions of being terrorist organizations that are “turning our schools into Epstein Island.” Walters revoked a teacher’s certification for providing her students with a QR code which led to the Brooklyn Public Library’s banned books list. Oklahoma teachers say they feel “beat down” by an onslaught of intimidation and threats from politicians like Walters. “It literally brought me to tears,” said one Duncan High School teacher of Walters’s attacks on “woke” teachers unions. The havoc Walters has wreaked upon Oklahoma schools has turned teachers our most valuable public servants into political targets.
Educators across Oklahoma say Walters’s culture wars are to blame for high teacher attrition. The state’s teachers have worked through years of underfunded classrooms, but under Walters’s intimidation and attacks, they are finding it increasingly difficult to safely perform the job they have dedicated their lives to. If Oklahoma wants to solve its teacher shortage, it must continue to increase teacher salaries and classroom funding, but that will not be enough. Oklahoma must also reckon with the fact that its top education official has effectively declared war on the state’s teachers for his own political gain.
From JD to EdD
Teachers-turned-politicians offer a promising antidote to lawyerly domination in the Democratic Party
by
Since his name entered contention as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz mania has swept the Democratic Party. One CBS poll found that 60 percent of Democratic voters were enthusiastic about the pick, while another 35 percent were at least satisfied. In their first joint rallies, Harris and Walz turned out crowds in the tens of thousands. Even outside the Democratic Party, Walz sports the highest favorability rating of anyone on either presidential ticket. This enthusiasm and popularity is no surprise. Walz is everything a Democratic Party desperate to reconnect with its working-class roots and regain its populist appeal is looking for in a politician: He’s a veteran, a dad, a former football coach, a Midwesterner from a small town, and perhaps most interestingly, a former public school teacher.
This last quality stands out in a party dominated by lawyers. Every Democratic presidential nominee since former President Jimmy Carter was a lawyer before entering politics, with the exception of former Vice President Al Gore, who attended but never finished law school. Almost half of President Joe Biden’s cabinet has a law degree. However, these party demographics where lawyers are the norm and teachers the exception are the exact opposite of what most voters say they want. A 2023 poll conducted by the Center for Working-Class Politics asked voters which professional background they would most want a hypothetical candidate to have; the most popular response was “Middle-School Teacher,” and the least popular was “Lawyer.” This finding held true for both Democrats and all voters.
There are some obvious explanations for why voters would rate teachers so favorably and lawyers so poorly. Teachers are public servants
devoted to one of the most noble, least objectionable causes: educating children. They are intelligent and highly educated but still perceived as blue-collar. Lawyers, on the other hand, generally exist in the public consciousness as the epitome of sleazebaggery, swindlers who sell themselves to the highest bidder and say fancy words for too much money. These perceptions alone could account for the relative popularity of each kind of candidate, but another plausible explanation is that voters are rejecting the governing philosophy lawyers have represented and are instead embracing the governing philosophy teachers could represent a philosophy Walz has embodied throughout his tenure as Minnesota’s governor.
How social science and history teachers like Walz conceptualize government differs fundamentally from lawyers. The practice of law requires an understanding of government on paper of the statutes and regulations it produces. The practice of teaching government requires breathing life into those often-dull concepts, bridging the divide between the legislator’s pen and the student’s reality. Teachers make laws, regulations, and government tangible and comprehensible for their students, requiring an intimate understanding of how those institutions operate. These characterizations are of course generalized: Teachers have to understand how laws and regulations exist on paper, and lawyers often have to explain the law in layman’s terms. But broadly, these generalizations reflect what is essential to each job and therefore how members of each profession might approach designing policy.
The respective position of each profession within government could also impact the way each views governance. Teachers occupy one
of the few government positions that consistently, directly, and intimately interacts with the American public, and this outlook may make teachers-turned-politicians more inclined and better able to craft robust public programs that straightforwardly benefit their constituents. Many lawyers-turned-politicians, on the other hand, started their careers in prosecutorial or inward-facing government roles as US attorneys or legal counsel to politicians and legislative committees, which could dispose them to policymaking that is aloof and technocratic.
The Democratic policy agenda over the past several years feels distinctly influenced by the legal backgrounds of the people creating it. The Obama administration’s priorities and governance were technocratic and procedural, the effects of the policies it championed hardly noticeable and unremarkable for all but the wonkiest of policy wonks. Its signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was less a comprehensive remake of healthcare policy and more a patchwork of different regulations, subsidies, and mandates whose rollout was marked by incompetence and administrative failure. In other words, the ACA would have made perfect sense to a lawyer well-versed in the American healthcare system and the laws and regulations that govern it but considerably less sense to the people meant to benefit from it.
While Biden’s agenda was a departure from his Democratic predecessor’s, it too often emphasized policies that only obliquely benefited ordinary Americans. Even when the Biden administration did work toward popular, straightforward policies, it made them temporary or couched them deep in elephantine spending plans like the Build Back Better Act (which also contained many not-so-progressive
Steve Robinson ’26, an International and Public Affairs and History concentrator and Senior Editor for BPR
illustration by Sofia Schreiber ’26, an Illustration major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
provisions). In the end, the policies that were actually enacted included allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of specific prescription drugs which will theoretically benefit Americans, but only in the most roundabout way possible (by reducing federal budget deficits). Meanwhile, programs like an expanded, fully refundable child tax credit a policy with a direct and tangible impact on the pocketbooks of American families were temporarily enacted but allowed to expire. Many of these choices could be more broadly attributed to an out-oftouch political class, but the Biden administration’s emphasis on policy projects that are too weedy, too indirect, and too focused on barely-visible procedural reforms smacks of lawyerly influence. It is no wonder that only 17 percent of Americans believe that the Inflation Reduction Act, one of Biden’s signature legislative achievements, will benefit American workers, according to an AP/NORC poll.
Contrast this record with Tim Walz’s. Walz helped steer through legislation that enacted big, bold, and straightforward public programs that directly and noticeably impacted the lives of Minnesotans. Perhaps the highest profile policy that Walz championed was a universal free school breakfast and lunch program that explicitly rejected any of the bureaucratic complexity
that would accompany a means-tested alternative. Walz also created an expanded, fully refundable child tax credit with no expiration date, established paid leave and paid sick days, and passed the largest investment in public education in Minnesota’s history. Minnesotans do not need to be lawyers or policy wonks or even pay attention to the news to understand how Walz’s legislative agenda has benefitted them and see the salutary effects of government programs on their lives.
Mainstream liberal thought has become far more friendly to big government in the past several years, as embodied in the shift from the Obama administration’s legislative aims to the Biden administration’s. However, that shift was not fully realized, perhaps in part because of the incongruity between the policy design required to create effective public programs and the lawyerly dispositions of the people designing Democratic policies. Unfortunately, despite Walz’s meteoric rise, the Democratic Party is still a party of lawyers and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future. But Walz’s success signals discontent with that status quo and offers an alternative way forward: a more effective and potentially more electorally successful model of governance that public school teachers are uniquely suited to provide.
“Lawyers, on the other hand, generally exist in the public consciousness as the epitome of sleazebaggery, swindlers who sell themselves to the highest bidder and say fancy words for too much money.”
Holy Shift
The Republican Party has turned to Christian messaging in an attempt to shore up the young male vote but abandoned young women in the process
by Hayden Deffarges ’25, a History and Comparative Literature concentrator and Senior Editor for BPR illustrations by Kex Huang ’27, a Modern Culture and Media and Computer Science concentrator at Brown and Illustrator for BPR
Last month, in the final stretch of the presidential campaign, the New York Times reported landmark findings from a 2023 poll by the American Enterprise Institute. For the first time in modern history, young American men are more likely to identify as religious than women of the same age. Nearly 40 percent of women in Generation Z describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared to 34 percent of Gen Z men. Young American men are increasingly disillusioned about everything from higher education to job prospects to the state of gender relations, a trend reflected in the massive popularity of motivational (and, according to many, misogynistic) social media influencers like Jordan Peterson. In a period marked by social gains for women, the promotion of traditional gender roles in many Christian communities offers purpose to young men confused about their role in society.
Meanwhile, the significant Evangelical Christian presence in the Republican Party and the influence of “post-liberal” Catholic intellectuals embodied by Senator JD Vance’s
ascension to the Republican presidential ticket are having a marked effect on mainstream conservative rhetoric. Republican candidates for office seem to have few qualms calling for an explicitly Christian approach to policymaking, and former President Donald Trump himself recently assured an audience in Florida that Christians would no longer have to vote if he were elected because his presidency will “have it fixed so good [they are not] going to have to.” The campaign has since characterized his remarks as a joke, but Democrats have fixated on the comment as an alarming promise to implement sweeping changes altering the structure of the federal government like those outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025. While Trump and Vance have publicly distanced themselves from the project, mainstream American conservatism has nonetheless effected a rhetorical turn in favor of traditional gender roles with Christian overtones in the hopes of soothing the fears of young men. This effort has widened the gender gap at the expense of the
growing population of young women who are increasingly rejecting the very expectations that attract their male counterparts.
It is important that this generation of young women has come of age in a turbulent moment for American gender relations. The last decade has seen the ascension of Trump over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the presidency amidst a barrage of sexual misconduct allegations, the successful appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the explosion of, and subsequent backlash to, the #MeToo movement, and, perhaps most importantly, the fall of Roe v. Wade. Amidst what many young women perceive as attacks on their autonomy, the Southern Baptist Church one of the denominations attracting a disproportionate number of young men as new congregants recently made headlines for its condemnation of in vitro fertilization. The church’s statement of faith maintains that a woman’s role in marriage is “to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Is it really such a surprise
that a generation of women self-identifying as progressive en masse could drift from this kind of organized religion?
America’s ideological and religious buffer across gender lines may stem in part from the remarkable social and economic progress made by American women in the decades since the heyday of second-wave feminism. In 1970, two years before the passage of Title IX outlawed sex-based discrimination in higher education, only about 40 percent of college students were female. Less than 30 years later, women had not only caught up to their male peers in higher education but also significantly outpaced them: In 2019, about 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees in the United States were earned by women. By 2022, the college-educated labor force was made up of more women than men for the first time.
Increased opportunities have coincided with political transformation for young women. Women ages 18 to 29 are now the most progressive group in modern American history, with over 40 percent self-identifying as liberal. This is more than mere labeling: Young women consistently voice support for progressive stances on specific issues like abortion, gun control, and climate change. Women are also more likely to be politically engaged across the board over seven million more women than men are registered to vote in the United States, and in recent elections, women have displayed notably higher turnout rates among Black, white, and Hispanic voters.
If young women have made great strides, young men are suffering in comparison. Their educational outcomes and measures of social satisfaction have worsened to the point that many journalists and commentators have declared an “epidemic” of male loneliness. A
“That male politicians are the loudest voices touting the decline of the family speaks to the motivating emotion behind their sweeping rhetoric: fear.”
New York Times article focusing on Grace Church in Waco, Texas, a Southern Baptist community that attracted many new, mostly young male congregants in recent years, illustrates some men’s response a return to religion. The appeal of religious community to a group suffering from a lack of social connectivity is intuitive: Churches can offer young men a place to make friends, share in a common cause, and feel that they are improving themselves.
Men ages 18 to 29 are undergoing a political metamorphosis, too: They’re often voting to the right of their grandfathers. Commentators frequently stress that Democrats are losing ground with young male voters, pointing to the presence of popular masculinist social media figures like Adin Ross and Theo Von in the orbit of Trump’s 2024 campaign as evidence that his efforts to cultivate young male voters are succeeding. This explicit cultural appeal to young men comes alongside an unapologetic call by Republicans for the Christianization of government. In July, in a fiery speech at the National Conservatism Conference, rising Republican star Josh Hawley (R-MO) called for Christian principles to be enshrined in law: “Some will say that I am advocating Christian nationalism,” he noted. “And so I do.” This combative rhetoric has been accompanied by fear-mongering about the state of the American family, of which Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comment is only the tip of the iceberg.
That male politicians are the loudest voices touting the decline of the family speaks to the motivating emotion behind their sweeping rhetoric: fear. The freedom of increasingly liberal and secular young women to defer or opt out of traditional family structures, enabled by their socioeconomic mobility, threatens the
“traditional” social order of the male-breadwinner nuclear family. This development could leave men, who typically rely on their partners for social and emotional support, adrift. By directly evoking Christianity, traditional gender roles, and the centrality of the family to American life, the Republican Party is seeking to offer a home to the same kinds of men who are increasingly attracted to organized religion. But the strategy may engender unintended consequences with women voters, who are already distancing themselves from the party. Republicans are attacking advances in reproductive rights that have contributed to women’s socioeconomic freedom in the name of pro-family values while attempting to avoid responsibility for restricting those very freedoms.
Voters are far from stupid, and a recent attempt by Vance to present a less combative face of conservatism during the vice-presidential debate doesn’t seem to have made inroads with women: So far, their overwhelming support for Vice President Kamala Harris has stayed constant. Given that it was Trump’s Supreme Court that overturned Roe, it is difficult to believe him or his vice-presidential candidate when they attempt to embrace a softer line on abortion bans. Republicans’ hostility to the essential components of women’s socioeconomic gains may reassure men seeking solace in the continuity of the traditional family structure, but it risks alienating women who are no longer receptive to these ideas. Though some loud female supporters of traditional gender roles social media “tradwives,” pro-life elected officials are promoting the new conservative strand of Christian nationalism, increasing numbers of women recoil at the notion of wifely submission and are likely to vote accordingly in November.
“Republicans are attacking advances in reproductive rights that have contributed to women’s socioeconomic freedom in the name of pro-family values while attempting to avoid responsibility for restricting those very freedoms.”
Tectonic Tiptoeing
West Coast infrastructure is woefully unprepared for the next big earthquake
“Major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and San Diego could effectively be wiped off the map.”
by Mateo Navarro ’27, a Neuroscience and International and Public Affairs concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR
illustration by Samantha Takeda ’27, a Painting major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
The Pacific Coast is tiptoeing around not one but two of the largest seismic triggers of the region’s modern history. Even with the infrastructure plans championed by policymakers in the West, major coastal cities are woefully unprepared for such an event. Idle politicians are more reactive than proactive when it comes to the looming specter of megathrust earthquakes. In an era of slow-moving environmental policy in the United States, the West Coast is set to become a story of too little, too late.
When discussing major earthquakes, many point to the seismic threat of the San Andreas Fault. Referred to in earnest as the “Big One” on news broadcasts and heroically manhandled by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in a 2015 thriller, this potential earthquake overshadows a much more disastrous tectonic danger: the Cascadia subduction zone, a fault that runs under the Pacific Ocean from Northern California to Vancouver, Canada. An earthquake caused by this fault could be devastating for California and the Pacific Northwest. To put its potential power into perspective, Japan’s 2011 Tohoku earthquake was listed as having a magnitude of 9.0. Waves as tall as 40 meters pummeled the Japanese coastline, and the nation suffered over $220 billion in property damage. Eighteenthousand people died, and several thousand victims were never recovered. San Andreas pales in comparison, holding only 6 percent of the energy of Japan’s 2011 disaster. Yet, in a full-margin rupture of the Cascadia, the region could experience an earthquake reaching magnitudes of 9.2 almost twice as powerful as the Tohoku earthquake on the exponentially increasing
Richter Scale. The quake would flood and upend major sections of a West Coast that is far less earthquake-ready than Japan. Both tsunamis and shock damage would travel far east, all the way to the I-5 freeway. Major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and San Diego could effectively be wiped off the map. With a record 15 seismic earthquake sequences occurring in Southern California just this year (the largest figure in 65 years), an increase in earthquake frequency has prompted fears of major tectonic plate activation. Think of it like this: You crash your Honda Civic onto the side of a steep bluff, teetering like a scale on the edge of a cliff. The large drop beneath you represents the activation of Cascadia and San Andreas. As you clutch the backseat in fear, leaning backward to counter the weight as much as possible, seven soda cans roll toward the front of the car. These cans, much like the smaller seismic quakes in California, are just enough to pull your Civic off the cliffside, dropping you toward the depths of the activated Cascadia below.
As terrifying as the potential for a catastrophic earthquake may seem, little government action to promote earthquake preparedness has been taken in the past 20 years. Recent history shows that political will is reactive, not proactive. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquakes shocked San Francisco, killing 63 people, injuring 3,757, and causing about $6 billion in damage, a number of multi-unit buildings and significant San Francisco structures, including the Bay Bridge and Hetch Hetchy Water System, were retrofitted with supplemental steel frames, thickened walls, and added base isolation. A little ways
down the coast, after two decades of stalled legislative efforts, former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti finally pushed through earthquake safety legislation in the 2010s, leading to over 8,000 of the buildings proven most vulnerable by the 1994 Northridge earthquake being retrofitted as well. Yet, as time has gone by, officials have dropped their interest in environmental hazard safety building more multi-family housing in an ultra-tight California housing market has taken top priority. Nonetheless, even if earthquake preparedness comes with an increase in housing costs, confidence in infrastructure security is crucial in an area so frequently jolted by seismic activity. Loma Prieta has become an event of the distant past, while future tectonic disasters are sorely overlooked.
In truth, the West Coast has no control over or idea of when the true “Big One” may open up. Studies from the state of Oregon show that there is a roughly 37 percent chance of a Cascadia megathrust earthquake occurring in the next 50 years as pressure continues to build under the Juan de Fuca Plate. Yet when the waters start towering along the coastline, the birds scatter from the trees, and dinner plates fall from the top shelf and shatter, both officials and constituents alike will realize the importance of preparing for such an event earlier rather than later. Oh, how the years flew by.
Special Feature:
Mitsuki Jiang by Dasha Dmitrieva
Gus LaFave
P ick You r Poi son
Emerging technologies that protect artists from AI may not be a panacea, but they are awakening artists to their collective power
by Daniel Kyte-Zable ’27, an Applied Math concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustrations by Yan Jiang ’26, an Illustration Major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
The past few decades have seen the invigoration of digital artists whose works have expanded to new frontiers due to grand achievements in information accessibility. Yet the dream of cyberspace for artists is ending or so you might think. Generative AI has disempowered artists by saturating the internet with cheaply produced mimicry that abuses their legal ownership of their own work. The federal government’s lazy pace, coupled with booming public interest in AI, has stacked the odds against an otherwise divided class. May 2023 saw a first glimmer of hope: Glaze, a newly developed technology that prevents image mimicry, was released to the public as open-source software. Its younger sibling, Nightshade, which works to poison an AI model’s ability to classify images, was released this spring. Taken together, these pieces of software seem to level the playing field back toward digital artists.
Glaze and Nightshade both fall under the category of data-poisoning software, which employs adversarial attacks on machine-learning models. Rather than deliberately attacking the architecture of a model with malware or stealing the identifying data of a developer, data-poisoning attacks work by subtly altering training data to cause catastrophic effects on a model’s final output without making the alterations obvious. For instance, if a chatbot is fed data sourced from a social media site populated with fake accounts and rife with politically biased content, then these biases will be apparent in the model’s output frustrating a developer who hoped for a more reasonable interlocutor.
Glaze, the older of the two programs, works to prevent a model from mimicking the contents of a set of images. Given the internal structure of a model effectively, how it analyzes an image to classify it Glaze executes discreet changes to images’ pixels that will cause consistent misclassification of those images. A painting of a dog, when combined with shrewdly chosen pixel noise, is a cat in the eyes of a model. As image-generation models typically rely on underlying classification, this prevents a model from generating new images in a given category. Nightshade uses a similar technique to achieve a different effect. Rather than preventing a model from classifying a specific type of image, it distorts the classification and production of all images. It is a ‘poison pill’ if a sufficient number
“For all the lofty ambitions of their developers, Glaze and Nightshade are not indomitable.”
“But online artists, few of whom are likely to be following novel machine learning research on ArXiv, are treating Glaze and Nightshade as permanent extra-legal protections rather than recent iterations of a cat-and-mouse game between opposing computer scientists. ”
of Nightshade-poisoned images accumulates in a model’s training set, all outputs will be distorted and unrecognizable.
Both Glaze and Nightshade are the brainchildren of the University of Chicago’s Security, Algorithms, Networks and Data Lab, headed by computer science professor Benjamin Zhao. Zhao styles himself as the art world’s foremost free-wheeling vigilante. Nightshade is not just some generic piece of cybersecurity software; according to Zhao, it is a way to “tip the balance” of the uneven “playing field” between companies and freelance artists. In releasing it as open-source software, he seeks to stop the “destruction that’s facing the art community” rather than to turn a quick profit. Given this aim, Zhao validates the existence of both Glaze and Nightshade as heuristic solutions, critical to providing artists with some sense of security while Congress and state legislatures fail to enact meaningful protections.
Zhao is justified in his concerns about the speed and efficacy of legal decisions concerning the fair use of artwork published online. AI companies have scored an early victory in Authors Guild v. Google, which found that Google’s copying of books into an online database fell under fair use. OpenAI has used the ruling to contend that model training on copyrighted text and images is justified, provided that training materials are not released to the public. Although illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz won in Andersen v. Stability AI, in which a district judge held that Stability AI and Midjourney’s storage of their copyrighted materials is illegal, the ruling failed to conclude whether or not model training on the materials is itself illegal. Even if protections for copyrighted material are sufficiently instituted in the future, they may only be enforced against larger AI companies little is stopping individuals from scouring the internet and outfitting their own homebrew model.
Amid these grim legal outcomes, Zhao and his colleagues have achieved celebrity status among some artists a week after its release, Glaze was downloaded 250,000 times. Zhao estimates that between May 2023 and May 2024, the software was downloaded 2.3 million times. Coverage by
major outlets has been positive, highlighting the responses of artists like McKernan, who views Glaze as her “mace and… ax” against companies like Stability AI.
For all the lofty ambitions of their developers, Glaze and Nightshade are not indomitable. Image-cleansing techniques have proven to be effective tools to negate both softwares’ effects. For instance, AdverseCleaner, a program that consists of ten lines of code, almost completely neutralizes Glaze. Meanwhile, researchers at Google DeepMind showed that Gaussian blur, a common technique that changes the content of a pixel based on neighboring pixels, is effective against both Glaze and Nightshade. For Glaze and Nightshade to remain viable in the face of these countermeasures, they must add much more pixel noise to images but this renders a poisoned image recognizably distorted to the human eye and thus more obvious to curators of training datasets. Nor are the images employed by StableDiffusion and OpenAI scraped directly from the internet typically, they come from established, commonly used datasets free of poisoning. Finally, should a sufficient quantity of poisoned images saturate the internet, dataset curators can simply turn to a different source of training material: frames taken from video works or videos of artwork, which cannot be protected by either Glaze or Nightshade.
Because of their uncertain future utility, the long-term impact of Glaze, Nightshade, and similar programs is unclear. But online artists, few of whom are likely to be following novel machine learning research on ArXiv, are treating Glaze and Nightshade as permanent extra-legal protections rather than recent iterations of a cat-and-mouse game between opposing computer scientists. Glaze has even been directly incorporated into the framework of Cara, a widely used community art platform. Artists like Autumn Beverly and McKernan have cited both softwares as motivation for reuploading their work after discovering earlier instances of scraping by AI companies. Glaze and Nightshade arguably offer a false sense of security. Online artists who would not otherwise publish their works online out of fear of misuse by AI companies may naively begin to do so.
Yet the symbolic purpose of Glaze and Nightshade as a means of unit ing artists against a common foe endures beyond its technical failures. In order to disrupt a large model, millions of images must be poisoned with Nightshade; should an online artist act alone in using the software, they will fail to meaningfully damage a model trained on their data and thus see no benefit. The efficacy of Nightshade therefore rests wholly on the collective action of many artists. Jingna Zhang, the founder of Cara, sees Glaze as the “very first step in people coming together to build tools to help artists” rather than just a means of self-protection.
Nightshade represents another step in a broader turn toward solidarity among artists a group that has historically failed to produce the powerful unions typical of blue-collar labor. It follows the unionization of the museum workers of the Guggenheim, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and their incorporation into groups like the United Auto Workers, along with last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike one of the longest entertainment strikes in history which saw actors militate against the use of their likenesses for training AI models. Though mass use of Nightshade does not replicate the hierarchical, centralized structure of a union, it does represent artistic self-defense: Its express purpose is to draw AI companies into explicit negotiations with artists and re-empower an otherwise unprivileged class. For creators like Beverly, Nightshade is a means of returning “power back to the artists.”
P ho ning It In
Telephonic interpretation in US Immigration Courts undermines immigrants’ rights to a fair and just hearing
Picture this: After years of waiting for your immigration hearing, you finally step into the courtroom. You take your seat, ready to share your story and then realize you cannot understand anything that is happening. The interpreter’s voice is muffled, and the words sound foreign. You ask for help, but the interpreter does not catch what you are saying. You are powerless to communicate your own story.
This is becoming the reality for many in the US immigration system. The 1978 Federal Court Interpreters Act, which guarantees access to interpreters for migrants with limited English proficiency, has been increasingly compromised. In 2018, approximately 89 percent of immigration court hearings fell under the act. Given how expensive and difficult finding live interpreters has become, the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) is now favoring third-party telephonic interpretation services. But to ensure a baseline of justice that protects immigrants’ fundamental right to participate fully in their judicial proceedings, government agencies must reverse course and limit their growing reliance on telephonic interpreters, which not only compromises the quality of communication but also reduces efficiency in the immigration system.
In 2019, the Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered immigration judges to use more translators who work over the phone for languages other than Spanish. Unfortunately, telephonic interpretation is often of significantly lower quality than in-person interpretation. Telephonic interpretation slows down proceedings due to lags in communication and an inability to convey facial expressions and body language critical elements when immigrants are sharing traumatic stories. When combined with poor call quality or frequent technical difficulties, phrases become lost in translation. Because court transcribers only write down what the interpreter translates, erroneous statements frequently enter the legal record. A mistranslation or a drop in the call could misconstrue an entire passage of testimony in a proceeding in which credibility is critical.
The DOJ justified its shift toward telephonic interpretation by citing budgetary constraints, but a fairer accounting of the facts reveals budgetary mismanagement. In 2015, for instance, a corporation named SOS International (SOSi) won the bidding for EOIR interpretation services, replacing Lionbridge Global Solutions. Since then, EOIR has signed multiple contracts with SOSi totaling up to $400 million. SOSi slashed pay rates nearly in half, forced interpreters to travel nationwide with little notice, assigned erratic hours, and often required interpreters to work without breaks a significant problem, considering that interpreters are known to perform badly without sufficient rest. A court even found that SOSi illegally retaliated against worker organizations that protested the changes.
“SOSi slashed pay rates nearly in half, forced interpreters to travel nationwide with little notice, assigned erratic hours, and often required interpreters to work without breaks — a significant problem, considering that interpreters are known to perform badly without sufficient rest.”
by Mitsuki Jiang ’27, an Applied Math-Economics concentrator, Multimedia Director, and Editor for BPR illustration by Ruobing Chang ’26, an Illustration major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
These poor labor practices caused many interpreters to refuse to work in immigration courts after the 2015 contract, leading to today’s critical shortage. Coupled with immigration courts’ low certification standards for interpreters compared to other federal courts, SOSi’s contract has led to a marked decline in interpretation quality.
It seems logical to argue that already overwhelmed immigration courts, burdened by millions of cases, would fare even worse if the EOIR moved away from regular use of telephonic interpretation. However, cutting corners on interpretation not only corrupts justice and impartiality but actually contributes to delays. Miscommunications, poor interpretations, and difficulties securing telephonic interpreters only add to the backlog. A rushed hearing with inadequate interpretation can backfire, resulting in appeals, remands, and the need for additional hearings, dragging cases out for years. Improving interpretation is not an obstacle to efficiency but rather a vital reform to ensure fair and timely adjudication.
Potential reforms range from simple logistical improvements to systemic changes that lighten the load on interpreters. Telephonic interpretation should be reserved for situations where no alternative exists, such as cases involving rare indigenous languages. In these instances, audio and visual quality must be drastically improved with more modern systems that include multiple cameras and microphones, ensuring that the interpreter can see and hear proceedings clearly.
The EOIR should also reduce its dependence on contract interpreters and instead hire full-time staff interpreters to maintain higher standards and improve working conditions. Alongside staffing changes, the EOIR should implement a strategy of team interpreting, whereby two or more interpreters work together. This system is recommended by organizations like the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators to prevent fatigue and improve interpretation accuracy.
The consequences of a systemic reliance on telephonic interpretation are not merely technical they are fundamentally unjust and deeply felt by immigrants. Poor interpretation can leave an individual unable to effectively present their case. In a system in which your story is your lifeline, migrants find their futures hanging in the balance because of a simple communication error and may never know what went wrong. However, the problems inherent in telephonic interpretation extend beyond the tendency to diminish an individual immigrant’s right to a fair trial. These egregious miscarriages of justice threaten the integrity of immigration court as an institution.
Daw n i n Dhaka
Five Bangladeshi students show how their nation’s freedom protests provide a model for pro-democracy activists worldwide
by Dasha Dmitrieva ’27, a Political Science and Psychology concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR
The myth of David and Goliath tells of a warrior of immense height and strength, slain by the hand of a shepherd. Surrounded by a crowd of exhausted soldiers, silent and dumbfounded, David must have heard his own heart pumping louder than ever as the giant’s body hit the ground with a deafening thud.
Bangladeshi youth have recently slayed a Goliath of their own. In July, protests began on college campuses in response to the reinstatement of legislation that reserved 30 percent of civil service jobs for descendants of those who fought in the Liberation War against Pakistan, a move that many criticized as granting preference to the children of regime cadres. The protesters immediately faced harsh political persecution, including violence and murder, at the hands of police. What started as local student protests escalated into a nationwide movement and eventually culminated in a revolution, forcing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign and flee to India on August 5. After 15 years of censorship and corruption under Asia’s very own Iron Lady, a new Bangladesh appears ready to emerge from the rubble.
Based on five interviews with international students from Bangladesh, this article examines the protest’s origins, success, and replicability. Ultimately, Bangladesh’s freedom protest can serve as a blueprint for a new age of revolutions that oppose democratic backsliding and empower the youth of authoritarian states.
For those whom I spoke with, the protest’s momentum was spurred by an unprecedented level of police brutality. While it is not immediately clear why the government chose to suppress what was initially a minor threat to the status quo, Mashrafi Monon, a senior at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, gave a possible explanation: “One of the reasons why the government used too much force was the fact that this job quota gave them a legal loophole to recruit pro-government people in the executive judiciary, public services, and all the top positions.”
Students were humiliated, arrested, and shot in broad daylight. Sheikh Hasina went as far as to call the protesters razakars a deeply offensive term coined during the Liberation War to denote traitors to Bangladesh. The students, in turn, simply adopted the word for their own ends, chanting the slogan: “We are razakars!”
Hasina’s regime sealed its fate the moment live ammunition was fired. When the public witnessed the murder of Abu Sayed an unarmed victim of police brutality and other innocent students, its frustration with the viciousness of the government crescendoed. Even after the government caved and tried to negotiate with students, it was too late the momentum
illustrations by Haley Sheridan ’25, an Illustration major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
“An idea that was going around is that fear is contagious, but so is bravery. When you are cornered to that extent by the violence of the state, people don’t really care if they live or die. ”
of the protest had transformed it into a nationwide movement. “At that point, we wanted accountability for the lives lost, the missing people, and the media outage,” Areea Fairuz, a junior at Brown University and the President of Brown’s Bengali Students’ Association, explained. “When you start killing your citizens, you have to take accountability for that. And I think that’s what the protests became about.” Atquizzaman Bhuiyan, a junior at NYU Abu Dhabi, echoed this sentiment: “We tingled with the fury of being betrayed, of the damage they have done through corruption and massacre. It started with the quota system, but at a certain point, they started killing our brothers and our sisters there… When my peers, my brothers are dying, I can’t sit at home. I can’t just keep silent.”
The death of innocents like Abu Sayed did more than just rouse immense nationwide dissatisfaction that had been suppressed for the last 15 years it also united the people of Bangladesh across sectarian lines. Rupkatha Rahman, a junior at NYU Abu Dhabi, noted, “We saw most of the general uprisings caught in between cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identity. These differences were not prominent in the protest. People just wanted equality for students and the demise of the government. I think this just shows how this new generation has so much power.”
For many, participation in the protest movement provided a glimpse of true national unity, as well as the chance to realize their right to voice political opinions. Through struggle and solidarity, the will to defend basic rights, and an overwhelming sense of national pride, the protest movement achieved an immense victory that ended more than a decade of oppression. “When I came to know that she [Sheikh Hasina] resigned, it was one of the happiest moments in my life. It was the biggest victory for the Bangladeshi people, second only to the Independence War in 1971,” Bhuiyan shared. Shakawat Hossain, a student at University Canada West, provided his reflections: “What I have learned is that anything is possible. Any government can be removed at any time. If we find that we are not happy with something, we should be protesting it, doing the right thing, and speaking up about this topic.”
A majority of the interviewees agreed that the Bangladesh protests can serve as a model for student-led uprisings against authoritarianism worldwide. Bangladesh has become a beacon, demonstrating that change is possible and inspiring those oppressed. Monon observed: “An idea that was going around is that fear is contagious, but so is bravery. When you are cornered to that extent by the violence of the state, people don’t really care if they live or die. What others could learn is seeing the vulnerability of dictatorial regimes. Through fear, they portray themselves as strong, but it’s really just a sandcastle.”
The abrupt end of Hasina’s rule opened up a political vacuum and has left Bangladesh in a state of uncertainty under an interim government led by Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus. Some hold concerns about the future: “People might not be able to maintain this unity that we have right now. Now everyone has their own diverging opinions on how we can better shape the country,” Fairuz said. Still, the people of Bangladesh await the upcoming elections with a gleam of celebration in their eyes. “If things go well in the elections, I would love to see my country in a much better state. People within my country have struggled for a long time,” Hossain shared. “I hope to see people live a life where they’re actually happy.”
Despite political uncertainty, it seems that the student uprising has led Bangladesh to a new era of striving toward democracy and transparency for the first time in many years, the people can envision a country where their needs will be met and their voices heard. “I think whatever the future holds is going to be better than the past that we have been through,” Rahman shared. “Just seeing that people come together and the solidarity that we have shown has improved the trust within the people themselves.” Most of the students I interviewed shared her optimism.
Goliath’s corpse rots in the rising sun, unable to hurt anyone there is no trace of the fear he once inflicted. David wipes the sweat off his forehead. There is much work to be done, but for now, the future is bright. The giant has been slain, and a new dawn of hope rises in Bangladesh.
T he C os t
of Belon
gi ng
Israel’s new approach to asylum-seeking East Africans is a morally reprehensible attempt to import military manpower
In the fall of 2023, clashes erupted on the streets of Tel Aviv, Israel, between factions of Eritrean migrants some celebrating the 30th anniversary of Isaias Afwerki’s authoritarian rule and others protesting it. Police forces reacted to suppress the conflict, with officers firing live ammunition upon rally-goers and counter-demonstrators alike. In the aftermath of the violence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that all non-Israelis involved in the incident would be placed in administrative detention pending deportation, a charge that easily slipped into a rhetorical campaign calling for the systematic expulsion of all “illegal infiltrators.” In the weeks following, the Israeli government announced a $7.8 million offensive earmarked in part to deport Eritrean asylum seekers, some of whom had lived in Israel for decades. The move brazenly defied international law and echoed across the Sinai Peninsula.
For years, Israel’s hostile posture toward East African migrants has been grounded in nativism and emboldened by the global rise of populism. One of Israel’s two Chief Rabbis was caught slinging racial slurs, two teenagers lynched a Black African after he spoke to them for less than 10 seconds, and members of Netanyahu’s hardline right-wing coalition have given voice to a frightening surge in anti-Black sentiment in Israel. Israel has also struck backdoor deals siphoning off asylum seekers to already inundated Rwanda and Uganda, despite boasting a significantly higher GDP per capita than either nation. Between 2013 and 2018, nearly 4,000 asylum seekers were transferred to the two nations in bold defiance of UNHCR guidelines. Although the program ended in 2018, Amnesty International reported that only 0.5 percent of 15,200 Eritrean and Sudanese asylumseeker claims were accepted by the Israeli government, with a mere 12 fully legitimized as refugees.
However, dynamics in the Middle East have dramatically shifted Israel’s calculus. Since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them children, and wounded many more. Despite the Israeli government’s predilection for airstrikes, deployment of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) active duty and reserve contingents has stretched through the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Soldiers facing PTSD, reservists refusing to return to Gaza, and the public backlash to a proposed draft of ultra-Orthodox Jews have all contributed to the government’s push to increase the IDF’s manpower. As conflict intensifies with the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, IDF leaders are diverting resources and deploying troops in greater numbers to Israel’s northern border, further contributing to a perceived lack of troops.
On September 15, Israeli media reported the rollout of new recruitment tactics. IDF representatives have approached Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Eritrean asylum seekers, promising permanent legal status in exchange
by Gus LaFave ’26, an Urban Studies and Economics concentrator and Chief of Staff for BPR
“Full citizenship would offer hope where it has been scarce — hope for residential and economic stability, hope to finally put to rest the fear of a forced return to war-torn nations of origin. All one must do is participate in the ongoing campaign in Gaza.”
illustration by Haimeng Ge ’25, an Illustration major at RISD and Creative Director of BPR
for enlistment in the IDF. Although official reports on how these asylum seekers are deployed by the Israeli military are barred from public view by state censorship, it is estimated that the program seeks to fill a gap of nearly 10,000 soldiers. Most asylum seekers have been stuck in a limbo of conditional release permits for years, which offer nominal protection from deportation but withhold access to state medical coverage, welfare programs, and political representation. Full citizenship would offer hope where it has been scarce hope for residential and economic stability, hope to finally put to rest the fear of a forced return to war-torn nations of origin. All one must do is participate in the ongoing campaign in Gaza.
Although Israel claims that the program is entirely legal, the move entails myriad ethical and moral questions. For years, the Israeli government has held an estimated 30,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers in a never-ending battle of red tape, opting to deport some and leaving others with few pathways to social integration. Of these 30,000, around 8,700 are children and teenagers, an estimated 57 percent of whom were born in Israel. Asylum seekers are not allowed to hold driver’s licenses or professional licenses and are often barred from participating in vocational training. This traps them in low-wage jobs where workplace exploitation is common. They are often concentrated in impoverished areas of urban Israel, accepting inflated rents for subpar apartments because many landlords are simply unwilling to rent to Africans.
The opportunity to escape these conditions through a pathway to citizenship is a golden one that many young Eritreans and Sudanese may be willing to embrace to finally be accepted by the country in which they were raised. Military service is required for citizens of Israel, which helps ingrain nationalism in the fiber of Israeli youth. Studies have found a connection between enlistment in the IDF and the degradation of social barriers for second-generation immigrants. Those enlisted were afforded greater formal
and informal inclusion in Israeli society than their peers. It is no surprise, then, that many asylum-seeking youth want to join the military.
The conditions that asylum seekers find themselves in should be understood as an extension of the larger nationalist movement that has swept through Israel’s electorate in recent years. Netanyahu’s previous stints as prime minister had been marked by moments of Zionist zeal, but none so much as his current administration. The hardline coalition formed between Netanyahu and politicians like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich has tapped into feelings of nativism, positioning asylum seekers as a threat to the country “be[ing] Jewish and democratic.” The African asylum-seeking population in Israel has been battered by populist rhetoric, physical and social walls, and labeling as “infiltrators.” Exploiting the individuals who are caught in an environment of the Israeli government’s own making reflects an intense and explicit moral failure of the state.
The whispered offerings of pathways to citizenship should be understood as a direct consequence of war. There are no confirmed reports of any African asylum seeker receiving citizenship, inviting speculation that this move remains an illusory, desperate ploy by Netanyahu’s regime to recruit manpower to aid Israeli forces in the conflict. While Israel withholds full citizenship from many Arab Palestinians, it dangles it in front of its African residents a cruel civil tactic to bolster its defenses.
Israel stands on the brink of a precipice. At the time of writing, tensions have escalated in Lebanon, with serious indications of an armed ground conflict on the horizon. Although the loss of any life is an abhorrent tragedy, the recruitment of African migrants by the IDF represents cold-hearted manipulation of a vulnerable population. The international community must be precisely attuned to the Israeli government’s changing attitudes toward its asylum-seeking population and condemn any practice of pawn-making in the ongoing war.
Dr if ti ng Aw a y
Space cooperation beyond the International Space Station
Since its 1998 creation, the International Space Station (ISS) has been a beacon of science, exploration, and space diplomacy. Research conducted both for and on the ISS has led to numerous scientific advancements, from new approaches in cancer treatment and ultrasound procedures to the development of robot manufacturing arms and the enhancement of food preservation. Even in the face of diplomatic trials, like Russia’s threats to pull out of the project in 2022, this joint operation of five foreign agencies has stood the test of time, allowing more than 23 nations to reach space peacefully. However, technological limits are bringing the ISS to an end. In 2031, the 400-ton, football field-sized station will be safely deorbited and decommissioned, leaving a vacuum in space operations. While the path charted by the ISS was one of multilateralism and cooperation, what comes next for space exploration is less clear.
The current future of space exploration reflects the modern terrestrial geopolitical climate, with the emergence of two key blocs. China, historically separated from the ISS and banned from partnership with NASA, launched its own low Earth orbit space station, Tiangong, in 2021. With an expected lifespan of over 15 years, this independently constructed, expandable, three-module station is a sign of Chinese strength and interest in space exploration. The autonomous nature of the station grants China significant diplomatic power. Soon, the country will be well-positioned to host the many nations it claims are privately vying to send their astronauts to space, as Beijing dictates Tiangong’s operations without needing any form of multilateral consensus.
In 2022, the European Space Agency (ESA) pulled out of Tiangong partnership discussions due to budgetary and political misalignment, a significant blow to China’s aspirations of becoming a leader in space diplomacy. At the same time, the ESA has been actively collaborating with the Artemis Accords, a US-led initiative founded in 2020 on principles of rules-based behavior, including transparency, peaceful exploration, and compliance with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the Registration Convention. The 43-state bloc has been considering plans for a new lunar-orbiting station called Gateway, designed to continue research and increase access to moon exploration, Mars, and deep space.
While Artemis’s Gateway project points toward the bloc’s aspirations of a multilateral space presence, Russia and China’s absence from the group undermines the integrity of these ambitions. Russia chose not to sign the Artemis Accords because of their position outside the UN and their perceived pro-American nature. China, on the other hand, has been congressionally prohibited from working with the United States in space matters since 2011 thanks to the Wolf Amendment, which sought to pressure Beijing to ameliorate human rights grievances but only “pushed [the state] to develop parallel capabilities on its own.” With such significant actors missing, Gateway cannot be categorized as effectively multilateral. In a world of alarming great power tensions, the United States must again treat space exploration as a domain of cooperation rather than an extension of competition with actors like China.
by Asher Patel ’28, an Economics and International and Public Affairs concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR illustration
by Zimo Yang ’26, an Illustration major at RISD and Illustrator for
BPR
“Such a noble step could be the accelerant that ensures humanity’s multiplanetary existence and this generation’s Mars landing.”
History can serve as a guide for both parties. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States and Russia signed an agreement “in which they pledged to collaborate and have their crew members fly on each other’s vehicles.” Despite domestic tensions, this partnership paved the way for the joint ISS project and brought the two superpowers closer together. Additionally, by using space and science areas that inspire citizens and leaders alike to meet Russia in partnership, the United States netted “collateral foreign policy benefits” such as multilateral inter-continental missile arms control. Today, such alignment between great powers can overflow into other foreign policy matters, facilitating collaboration across the board.
Moreover, while diplomacy was a major objective of bringing Russia into the ISS mission, space multilateralism brought about substantial cost and efficiency benefits as well. For example, NASA relied entirely on Russian Soyuz rockets to get American astronauts to the ISS from 2011 to 2020. Without this cooperation, the United States would have been forced to develop its own capabilities, costing precious time and money. Even now, as the United States increasingly becomes self-sufficient due to advancements from companies like SpaceX, its exclusionary stance limits its capabilities. China is spending massive amounts on space development and is projected to become a major space power by 2030. Further, the low Earth orbit of China’s Tiangong could be useful for the United States and its Artemis allies, which are planning to create a base in lunar orbit. It is wasteful and technologically inefficient for both the United States and China to spend money on research and development that could be shared to expedite space exploration. Terrestrial disagreements must not bleed into space policy when considering the transformative possibilities of greater space cooperation.
More severe issues than wastefulness arise from disjointed space-tech diplomacy. Space is an unforgiving climate in which operations can go wrong for many reasons. More than 3,000 satellites orbit Earth today, meaning accidental collisions are possible. Beyond technological and monetary losses, these collisions create space debris that can disrupt other space activities. Because one collision can cause thousands of pieces of debris, even slight misalignments or delayed communications between satellite-operating states could be costly. For example, an accidental collision between American and Russian satellites in 2009 created more than “2300 trackable fragments.” At the extreme, collisions can cascade and create a domino effect called the Kessler Syndrome, which can cause entire orbital regions to reach a “critical mass” and become unusable making future launches difficult or impossible.
Additionally, if states continue to view space exploration as a venue for competition, they may be incentivized to intentionally claim or dominate key space territories like Lagrange points space “parking spots” where capabilities can stay “in a fixed position with minimal fuel consumption” or the south side of the Moon. Because modern international law does not sufficiently regulate space conduct, such disagreements could escalate and cause a weaponization of space. We could see existing states attack orbiting bases, disrupt satellites that are crucial to daily life, or, in the most extreme case, weaponize future bases. Fostering an international community of space collaboration is essential to protecting global security and creating international mechanisms for space-conflict resolution.
No matter how contentious global politics may seem today, the history of the ISS demonstrates that space can be the great unifier, forging competing nations into a coalition of efficient scientific and technological partnerships. With debris agglomeration and space militarization posing significant threats to all space ventures, the costs are too high for competing space blocs to go down exclusive paths. The first step toward tangible change in space cooperation would be for the United States to lift the Wolf Amendment ban on Chinese space cooperation. This bold move is necessary to incite further conversation over the future of space collaboration. With Chinese President Xi Jinping showing a personal desire for space exploration, a clear opportunity exists. Further, as the state with more advanced space technology, the United States should bear the security risk of scientific collaboration with its adversary and lead the international community by taking a leap of faith that paves the way for meaningful great power space cooperation. Such a noble step could be the accelerant that ensures humanity’s multiplanetary existence and this generation’s Mars landing.
Echoes of the Past
by Adora Limani ’28, a Political Science and International and Public Affairs concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR
illustrations by Lily Engblom-Stryker ’26, an Illustration major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
A bullet hole decorates the roof of my grandma’s patio in North Macedonia the neighbors had thrown a wedding the night before I first saw the gaping hole. “The last time someone shot a gun at a wedding here, an old woman suffered a head injury,” my uncle explained. “At least all of our heads are intact!” In the Balkans, celebratory gunfire is a common and normalized practice. In 2021, there were 125 reported celebratory shootings in the region, 84 of which took place during family gatherings. According to a survey, 80 percent of Serbian youth have seen celebratory shootings at weddings. It may be difficult for those who have never witnessed this phenomenon to imagine a context in which guns are instruments for
“It may be difficult for those who have never witnessed this phenomenon to imagine a context in which guns are instruments for expressing joy, but during many Balkan celebrations, the sound of laughter reverberates alongside the sound of bullets.”
Celebratory gunfire signals the systemic legitimization of violence in the Balkans
expressing joy, but during many Balkan celebrations, the sound of laughter reverberates alongside the sound of bullets.
Celebratory gunfire is more than just a lighthearted tradition; it is a marker of the systemic legitimization of violence that permeates societies still healing from conflict. A report by South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SEESAC) found that celebratory gunfire is significantly more prevalent in Albania and the post-conflict ex-Yugoslav republics than in countries like Bulgaria, whose most recent conflict dates all the way back to World War II. Celebratory gunfire was banned during the communist era, but the practice became more prevalent as a result of growing political unrest and ethnic tension in the Balkans after the fall of communism. In Albania, celebratory gunfire became frequent after 1997 civil unrest and economic breakdown, while in North Macedonia, it proliferated in response to 2001 ethnic conflict. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, SEESAC notes that celebratory shootings tend to be more common in multi-ethnic communities, where decades-long tensions continue to fester.
The chaos that seized post-communist societies also led to sharp increases in rates of gun ownership. According to research by Small Arms Survey, there are currently 1,532,914 unregistered civilian firearms in Serbia, which equates to 39 per 100 people. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, there are 832,000 unregistered civilian firearms, or 31 firearms per 100 people. Celebratory shootings serve as an alarming reminder of how deeply entrenched violence is in the fabric of ex-communist societies. A citizen of Tetovo, North Macedonia, told local news that many people believe “a celebration doesn’t feel complete without using a firearm.”
The link between celebratory gunfire and post-conflict ideas of masculinity makes the practice especially difficult to curtail. Celebratory
shootings are not only intended to express happiness and mark important events; they are often about asserting dominance, masculinity, and power. A SEESAC report reveals that 97.2 percent of firearm owners and 98.4 percent of firearm-related criminal offenders in Southeastern Europe are men. Moreover, most young people in Belgrade, Serbia, have witnessed celebratory gunfire at weddings and the births of children, but the practice is especially common during the birth of a male child or the marriage of a son. In Roma communities in Northern Croatia, the “head” of the household the oldest man fires two gunshots to announce that a bride has escaped her family and will become his daughter-in-law. In other regions of Croatia, groups of men shoot their pistols to celebrate the resurrection of Christ on Easter. The practice of celebratory gunfire persists because these displays of violence are not only normalized but also actively encouraged by norms of masculinity in post-conflict societies.
Governments and international organizations have attempted to alleviate the impact of celebratory gunfire by implementing strategies that prevent casualties from stray bullets. However, because campaigns like this fail to address the actual systemic problem with celebratory gunfire, they have been largely unsuccessful in mitigating the issue. For instance, a United Nations Development Programme campaign was launched in collaboration with Balkan governments in 2021 with the tagline “Every bullet has a target! Celebrate with your heart, not your gun!” In an interview about the campaign, North Macedonia’s Minister of Internal Affairs, Oliver Spasovski, cited the case of a 19-year-old girl who lost her life to a stray bullet after a New Year’s celebration in Skopje, North Macedonia. Addressing how the Ministry would prevent tragedies like this from occurring in the future, Spasovski emphasized that “the police act on every complaint filed, without exception” and that he was taking steps to reduce the proliferation of illegal weapons. While he acknowledged that the issue has “multifaceted causes,” Spasovski made only vague references to the “preventive and educational action” the Ministry would take to address the deep roots of celebratory gunfire.
The post-conflict reconstruction process has been a rocky road for Balkan societies. Studies show that those who suffered most from war in Bosnia and Herzegovina were less likely to obtain a secondary education. To this day, educational quality has failed to improve in North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania. Additionally, Balkan countries face gender disparities in work participation, political representation, and health. In Serbia, Albania, and Montenegro, 139 femicides were recorded from 2020 to 2023. Moreover, corruption continues to undermine democratic processes and hinder efforts for equality. This
destabilized environment has allowed systemic violence to take root and poison societies from within, leaving communities without any tools for restoration and healing.
The normalization of celebratory shootings is the product of a social system that places value on domination, hierarchy, and force and consequently normalizes all other forms of violence. Thus, ending the practice of celebratory shootings is not a question of stronger laws or their stricter implementation, as many laws that already exist theoretically protect civilians from stray bullets. Rather, it is a question of reversing social norms and rebuilding institutions that give rise to systemic violence in post-conflict societies. This will require mending the spheres that were most impacted by conflict, such as education, gender equality, and political stability. Above all, it will require a collective effort of holistic reconstruction rather than punitive government responses.
Celebratory gunfire is a remnant of the Balkans’ unstable past and serves as a reminder that conflict still shapes the reality of the region. For many people, a large-scale and longstanding legitimization of violence has detrimental impacts on everyday life. A man from Skopje
shared the implications of celebratory shootings for his family: “There are instances where celebrations happen far away from you, on a totally different street… whereas I find bullet shells in front of my doorstep. I have young kids who want to swim in the pool all day during the summer… I’ve told them to stay inside.” Violence has become a legitimate means of human interaction and community-building, distorting the meanings of joy and love. A crucial question arises: How can we celebrate with our hearts if we cannot discern between our hearts and our guns?
Green Dreams, Red Nightmares
by Chiupong Huang ’27, an English concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR
illustration by Paul Li ’28, a Prospective Architecture major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
On July 7, 2021, 40 environmental and progressive advocacy groups released an open letter that “[called] on the Biden administration and all members of Congress to eschew the dominant antagonistic approach to US-China relations” in favor of “multilateralism, diplomacy, and cooperation with China to address the existential threat that is the climate crisis.” While superficially a benign call for urgency on global climate change policy, the letter was a thinly veiled admission of environmentalists’ willingness to ignore and abet Chinese Communist Party (CCP) human rights abuses to advance their climate initiatives.
Western climate activists hurt their own cause by failing to recognize China’s human rights violations
The choice by some Western progressive activist groups to prioritize climate policy collaboration over confronting the CCP’s human rights violations empowers such violations while failing to recognize the interdependency of the two issues. Their refusal to acknowledge China’s abuses not only further victimizes those persecuted by the CCP but also proves counterproductive toward climate and conservation policy goals.
While the letter sidesteps naming issues like the Uyghur genocide or the wrongful detention of journalists and political dissidents, what it decries as America’s “antagonistic approach” to
relations with China in large part refers to US efforts to stem the CCP’s human rights abuses. The same year the open letter was released, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that CCP policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region constituted genocide and crimes against humanity. Congress took action in 2020, passing the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. Months later, the United States levied sanctions against the former Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, and other Hong Kong officials following their punitive response to protests against a policy to cede further autonomy to China.
“Bans, factory shutdowns, fines, land reclamations, and intense surveillance imposed on China’s marginalized have become pillars of Beijing’s sustainable initiatives.”
Some American advocacy groups and environmental leaders have directly expressed their desire to avoid US-China friction on human rights violations. The anti-war group CODEPINK, a signatory of the letter, defended China’s Uyghur policy on its website in a section titled, “China is not our enemy.” It provided links to Uyghur genocide denial content and implied that China’s policies in Xinjiang are a response to terrorism, in line with CCP rhetoric justifying genocide as a defense against extremism. Omer Kanat, Executive Director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, said of the letter’s dire implications, “We felt they were sacrificing Uyghurs to convince China to come to the table for climate change.”
Embedded within advocacy for eschewing human rights concerns in favor of climate policy collaboration is the near-sighted assumption that environmental policy is extricable from humanitarian and social justice issues. In reality, any effective approach to climate policy in China simply cannot avoid addressing the international reach of the CCP’s state control. Any number of policies designed to promote Chinese sustainability demonstrate the interconnectedness of environmental and social justice. For example, if environmental groups were to advocate for sustainability in the manufacturing of rayon, a semi-synthetic fabric made from eucalyptus pulp, policy efforts would have to tackle reliance on forced Uyghur labor for processing the pulp
and the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and land for eucalyptus farming. In Indonesia, eucalyptus farming by pulp corporation PT Toba Pulp Lestari Tbk has led to mass deforestation and appropriation of 62,000 acres of land that local Indigenous peoples rely on for their livelihoods. Much of that eucalyptus is subsequently sent to Xinjiang for further processing largely because of China’s more lax policies around sustainable sourcing where there is ample evidence of coercive and abusive labor practices being levied against Uyghurs. Clearly, then, American success at improving climate practices in China depends on a parallel effort to mitigate its multinational human rights violations.
Domestically, the two policy areas are no less interconnected: The CCP’s environmental initiatives are based on the very authoritarian ideologies that lead to its human rights violations. Beijing’s green policies often rely on draconian, poorly implemented measures that devastate the most disenfranchised rural and industrial manufacturing communities. Shutdowns of high-polluting factories have single-handedly crippled the livelihoods of low-income laborers in Hebei, while coal bans in Linfen have left households with either inadequate heating or exorbitant fines. Bans, factory shutdowns, fines, land reclamations, and intense surveillance imposed on China’s marginalized have become pillars of Beijing’s sustainable initiatives. Meanwhile, China’s top-down implementation of green policies cuts out local democratic input, leading to pushback and a lack of compliance. Protests against the policies have erupted, disrupting factories working toward goals like carbon capture and solar panel manufacturing. Provincial officials regularly underreport emissions. Many environmental advocacy groups, especially those with offices in China, often praise the climate
policy progress made by the CCP, ignoring its eco-authoritarian approach.
Moreover, Chinese climate activists who speak out against the CCP in their advocacy face harsh retribution from the state. In 2020, Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong democracy activist who is now imprisoned, shed light on the CCP’s political persecution of teen activist and climate organizer Howey Ou. The censorship and harassment of Ou exemplify China’s broader pattern of silencing independent environmental activism, an issue that Western climate advocacy groups have largely ignored.
Given that the CCP has gone so far as to oppress climate activism within its borders, US environmental activists ought to align themselves with the policies of human rights groups. In turning a blind eye to China’s rampant human rights violations, environmental groups have failed to stay true to their mission. They have let the perceived need to court and cooperate with China obscure their stated commitment to working toward a more socially just and environmentally sustainable world. Signatories of the 2021 letter vigorously and rightfully advocate on behalf of an array of human rights issues when it is politically favorable to do so: condemning Israel’s crimes in Gaza, supporting American racial justice initiatives, and speaking out against US police brutality. Despite targeting similar structures of oppression, whether it be the mass detention of Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang or the religious persecution of Buddhists in Tibet, Chinese dissidents have been consistently left out of activist discourse in the West.
Tragically, two movements with the shared goal of fighting institutional injustice find themselves alienated from and even in opposition to one another when it comes to the CCP. This is not just a moral issue but also a practical one: Western environmental groups hurt their own cause when they prop up Beijing’s repressive and ineffective climate policy by staying complicit in China’s human rights abuses. If these climate advocacy groups wish to work toward a more just and sustainable world, they must stop tolerating authoritarian CCP rule.
Bishkek Out, Libreville In
Russia is expanding its sanctionsbusting capabilities to new frontiers
by Julianna Muzyczynyn ’27, an International and Public Affairs and English concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR
illustration by Grace Liu ’26, a Graphic Design major at RISD and Creative Director of
BPR
In September 2023, photos of a military parade celebrating the success of the Gabonese coup d’état briefly circulated across global media. Amongst the scenes of tanks in the streets and celebrations outside government buildings, two flags flew in the background: the Gabonese and the Russian. While increasingly close-knit relations between China and a number of African nations have alarmed Western media and leaders, similar diplomatic advances by Russia have flown under the radar. Through deepening economic, diplomatic, and security relationships with a number of African states, the Kremlin has not only secured political support on the international stage but also maneuvered around the extensive Western sanctions that struck a major blow to the Russian economy following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It appears Gabon could be Russia’s newest partner in crime.
Russia is no stranger to sanctions: The most recent tranche, announced by the European Union in June 2024, was the 14th since 2014. However, the packages introduced by the European Union and the United States following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine are unprecedentedly broad in scope. Largely expanding on the sanctions imposed in response to the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the 2022 vintage effectively severed ties between Russian banks and the rest of the financial world, froze assets, restricted exports of technology, and suspended
(or, indeed, ended) energy dependence on Russia. The Russian economy has nevertheless grown steadily since the invasion, and sanctions on aircraft parts and other technology do not appear to be hindering the country’s military capacity. Predictably, the Kremlin and its business associates have an extensive record of sidestepping sanctions, predominantly through third-party trade partners who legally acquire prohibited goods and sell them to Russian companies. The War and Sanctions database, an online platform run by Ukrainian civil servants, lists nearly 4,000 Western-manufactured components discovered in confiscated Russian arms.
The majority came from the West indirectly, via Türkiye, Armenia, the UAE, and other proxy countries. These proxy states have maintained relative neutrality in the power struggle between Russia and NATO even Türkiye, an uneasy US ally, has faced criticism for its entanglement and dialogue with Russia.
The United States has made somewhat successful efforts to combat evasive practices. In
October 2024, for instance, Kyrgyzstan presumably under pressure from the US government following a visit from US Treasury officials enacted a ban on foreign companies paying for prohibited goods through Kyrgyz banks unless those firms could prove that the goods would ultimately remain in Kyrgyzstan. Due to the Kyrgyzstan crackdown and similar suppression against established Russian allies, Russia has increasingly relied on a new partner in West Africa. Gabon, a small coastal nation 10,000 kilometers from Russia, supplied a staggering $1.5 billion in aircraft parts to Russia in 2023 alone. This is more than 7 percent of the country’s total GDP and more than 75 percent of all aircraft parts exported to Russia that year. These included 15 US-made aircraft engines acquired and resold to Russia by Ter Assala Parts, a mysterious company whose sole beneficiary is an unnamed Kyrgyz citizen. Notably, these exports only began this past August, after a military coup established a new, autocratic junta government and Gabonese relations with the West deteriorated. Economist Igor Lipsitz, asked for comment by the Moscow Times, called the operation a “complicated criminal scheme.” Gabon’s entanglement with sanctioned Russian goods goes beyond aircraft parts. The
“Gabon, a small coastal nation 10,000 kilometers from Russia, supplied a staggering $1.5 billion in aircraft parts to Russia in 2023 alone.”
nation, home to only 2.3 million people, saw its ship registry rapidly expand sixfold to more than 100 ships after the intensification of Western sanctions on Russia. About 70 of these ships have “obscure ownership” and are almost certainly being utilized by Russia and Iran to move oil under sanction. This is not a new practice: Gabon is merely the newest member of Russia’s “shadow fleet” of ships sailing under the flags of other countries. Since 2022, more than 1,400 ships are thought to have ceased legal shipping operations to illegally transport Russian oil instead. To avoid enforcement of US sanctions, Russia’s oil tankers periodically rotate which “flag of convenience” they fly that is, which country they claim to originate from. Since the beginning of the war, around 50 ships belonging to the Russian shipping titan Sovcomflot switched from using Liberia’s flag to Gabon’s. As demand for Russian oil has grown in China, India, and other non-Western nations, Russia’s dark fleet has expanded to meet the market: The fleet now transports 10 percent of all the oil shipped by sea.
The European Union and the United States appear to have a blind spot when it comes to the covert trade of sanctioned goods. Russia’s economic and security efforts in Africa may pale in comparison to China’s gargantuan Belt and Road Initiative, but the Kremlin is undoubtedly expanding its economic network to work against Western sanction efforts. In order to effectively put pressure on the Kremlin and sever the supply of sanctioned goods, the West should pay closer attention to the sinister nature of Russian economic efforts in Africa.
BEYOND THE GREEN AND BLUE
An Interview with GLORIA GILBERT STOGA
Interview by Eiffel Sunga ’27
Illustration by Sarah Mason ’26
In 1997, Gloria Gilbert Stoga founded Puppies Behind Bars (PBB), an organization that partners puppies with incarcerated individuals who train them to serve as bomb sniffers, veteran servicers, and police dogs. They have provided dogs to four Public Service Departments at Ivy League universities, including Brown’s former service dog, Elvy. For over 25 years, Stoga has championed PBB to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the nation, all while breaking down barriers between police officers and incarcerated individuals. PBB gets people to see “beyond the green and beyond the blue.”
Eiffel Sunga: Why exactly did you establish Puppies Behind Bars?
Gloria Gilbert Stoga: A veterinarian in Florida, Dr. Thomas Lane, came up with the idea. I read about it in People magazine and thought it was brilliant. It made sense to give people who are incarcerated a second chance, and given how much I love animals, it was a no-brainer that dogs could be the conduit.
ES: And when did you really start to see the impact of your organization?
GGS: Immediately. I put four puppies into a women’s prison the night before Thanksgiving 1997. At 10 o’clock two days later, the phone rang. This deep booming voice said he was a lieutenant from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. He said, “I’m calling because I went to the housing unit where the puppies are. I got down on my knees and felt one of the puppies’ noses I think it’s warm.” At that point, my husband and I looked at each other and said, “That’s it! Success!” Here’s this huge guy in a maximum security prison getting down on his knees, being worried, and calling me at home. That kind of concern really said it all.
ES: PBB went through an evolution after 9/11. Could you explain the work you did there and the impact 9/11 had?
GGS: I live in New York, and we are a Manhattanbased organization. I wanted to say thank you to all of the law enforcement agencies that descended on the city. It took me until May 2002 to get the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to agree to get our dogs. In those months between September and May, I was making relationships. I was trying to get law enforcement to realize dogs raised in prison were going to be okay.
ES: You mention how it was difficult for police officers to trust dogs that were raised in prison. How have you tried to change people’s minds on that?
GGS: When ATF accepted our dogs, that was the watershed. The ATF agents would test the dogs in a two-week training where police officers come into prison and train with the incarcerated individuals. Officers walk through prison, go through the medical detectors, take off their belts, and lock up their guns. They’re vulnerable. They’re scared out of their minds. The incarcerated individuals are nervous wrecks.
“Your dog will curl up into your lap, and you can tell your dog anything. You can tell her some of the worst cases you ever had to respond to. You can tell her that you’re having problems at home. You can tell your dog anything.”
They’re gonna be working with people who’ve spent their careers arresting and locking people up. And now they’re meeting inside a prison over a love of dogs. There’s a common bond that forms.
Every day we end class doing a command called “tell me a story.” You get on the floor and say to your doggy, “Tell me a story.” Your dog will curl up into your lap, and you can tell your dog anything. You can tell her some of the worst cases you ever had to respond to. You can tell her that you’re having problems at home. You can tell your dog anything.
You’ve got physically vulnerable people on the floor cops sitting next to incarcerated individuals and vice versa. That vulnerability is how you break down barriers. You bring people of very disparate views together over one common factor, and there’s a common bond that forms. I like to say that Puppies Behind Bars gets people to see beyond the green and beyond the blue because in New York State, incarcerated individuals wear green uniforms and police officers wear blue.
ES: I know that PBB has been involved in many events. You guys were there after 9/11, after Afghanistan, then Sandy Hook as well, and even Covid-19. How did you manage to adapt your services to help different people through all these periods of time?
GGS: How do we adapt? Where there’s a will, there’s a way. When we wanted to do something to help Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans, we made up 12 or 14 of our own commands specifically for veterans.
In Covid-19, we worked with doctors, nurses, and the National Guard when New York City was the hotspot. FEMA was bringing in nurses and doctors from literally all over the country, and they were put up in huge empty hotels in New York City. They didn’t want the dogs in a hospital setting, but we figured out a way dogs could service the doctors and the nurses.
There were buses that came to the hotels and took doctors and nurses to hospitals at 6:30 in the morning. They’d get off 14 to 15 hours later, and at first, the doctors and nurses would get off the bus, see the dogs, pet the doggies, maybe throw a ball down a long empty hallway, then disappear into their rooms. A head nurse came to me and said, “This isn’t healthy. They can’t just have been in a hospital for hours, come home, and lock themselves in their rooms.”
So, we used the dogs as ploys. We said, “You can’t pet a doggy after you get off the bus. You have to go to your room, disinfect, then come down to the lobby. The dogs will be waiting.” That was a way we got the doctors and nurses not to self-isolate. Not only did they play with dogs, but they’d sit there and eat a crappy muffin and have somebody else to talk to. That’s part of how Puppies Behind Bars has evolved. Here’s a problem, we know dogs can solve it, but what do we humans have to put in place to solve it?
ES: So, what else do you see in the future for Puppies Behind Bars? Any goals?
GGS: I don’t know. We respond to the world at large. We’re talking about putting dogs into schools because there’s a mental health crisis with kids post-Covid. If we can figure out how our dogs can help that community, that could be the next thing. Or, America could be at war again before we know it then we’re back to working with active-duty veterans coming home. I have absolutely no idea, but we are nimble enough that we can pivot. That’s one thing I’m proud of. We’re not a bureaucracy. When there’s a need, we can say, “Okay, we can figure this out. Let’s go in and fill that void.”
ES: That being said, how can our readers get involved with Puppies Behind Bars?
GGS: If your readers know police departments they could be university, college, community, city or fire departments that might need or want a facility dog, they should apply to Puppies Behind Bars. If they know somebody who might have post-traumatic stress because they’re a veteran or they’re a first responder, tell them to come to Puppies Behind Bars. We provide the dog completely free of charge, all the training free of charge. Your readers could do us a great benefit by spreading the word.
Edited for length and clarity.
Mr. Security’s Gambit
Netanyahu exploits sectarian tensions to prolong his grip on power
by Yael Ranel Filus ’28, a Chemical Engineering and Philosophy concentrator and Staff Writer for BPR
illustration by Margaryta Winkler ’25, an Illustration master’s student at RISD and Art Director for BPR
While global attention is fixated on the wars Israel is fighting on multiple fronts, another conflict an internal civil struggle between religious and secular Jewish communities has received far less attention internationally. The egotism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hardline coalition has only fueled these tensions, allowing Netanyahu to act with impunity, enable corruption in the upper echelons of the Israeli government, and unnecessarily prolong the war against Hamas threatening to prompt the eruption of a wider conflict across the Middle East.
Israel has a long history of political division. Two major socio-cultural groups of Israeli Jews haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, and hilonim, or secular Jews find themselves fundamentally at odds on the degree to which religion should be intertwined with politics. The two factions advocate starkly different policy agendas on issues like marriage, divorce, military conscription, and gender segregation. Moreover, while the haredi faction has constructed multiple parties in the Knesset acting on behalf of its interests, the hiloni sector has underestimated the importance of political representation.
During his 20 years as prime minister, Netanyahu has successfully widened the chasm between the haredi and hiloni factions. His coalition is composed of religious parties but remains unstable, holding a majority by only three seats. The Knesset has dissolved five times in the span of four years, overturned whenever a disgruntled party head finds a policy proposition unfavorable. Recently, threats to torpedo the current government have been levied over daycare budgets, despite the far more pressing issues at hand: 101 Israeli hostages are still in captivity,
“It is no coincidence that the
Netanyahu government has sought to dismantle the justice system at a time when his political future is on the line.”
their names chanted outside of the Knesset walls but unspoken inside.
The instability of the Israeli parliament is exacerbated by policies that clearly prioritize the wants of the ultra-Orthodox faction. In 2022, Netanyahu supported the reallocation of $28 million in funding away from girls’ and secular schools to ultra-Orthodox schools aimed at making traditional Jews more religious. These schools do not teach standard core curriculum subjects, giving way to a future in which the proportion of the Israeli population that is uneducated, unemployed, and financially dependent on the remaining citizens will increase. No economy can sustain these conditions, and yet Netanyahu’s government seems to keep rewarding this downward trend.
Netanyahu’s collaboration with Yariv Levin, the Minister of Justice, has further intensified the domestic divisions between haredim and hilonim. Levin and the Netanyahu government spearheaded a judicial reform in 2022, which they presented as a quick fix to the justice system’s faults. But in reality, the proposal would erode the Israeli Supreme Court’s ability to block laws, euthanizing the court system and subordinating it to the Knesset effectively removing the checks and balances of Israeli democracy. The introduction of the judicial reform was an inflection point for hilonim, who recognized that religion was beginning to govern politics in Israel. Secular Israelis directed their rage not just at the Netanyahu government but also toward haredi communities. On a Saturday night, marching on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street to protest the reform, I read these words:
“The haredim are sucking our blood”; “Haredi parasite, not at my expense.”
The fracturing of Israeli society across religious and party lines goes unacknowledged by many anti-Israel protestors in the United States. Rather than recognizing the complexities and variations in the experiences of pro-Israeli Jews, protestors frequently find themselves toeing the line between legitimate criticism and labeling all supporters of the Israeli state “colonizers,” “imperialists,” or promoters of genocide. Simultaneously, Jews are asked to give the benefit of the doubt that certain chants like “from the river to the sea” do not promote violent attacks on Israeli citizens but are instead a simple slogan of justice without a hint of antisemitism. While Jews are asked to be acutely aware of the fact that being pro-Palestinian does not imply an endorsement of Hamas, the anti-Israel critique can easily devolve into antisemitism by suggesting that all Jews who support the existence of an Israeli state must also support Netanyahu and the war with Hamas.
In truth, many Israelis are acutely aware of the fact that Netanyahu’s political career has been devoted more to preserving his public image than to serving his citizenry. Netanyahu’s criminal trials in front of the Supreme Court, where he has pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, perhaps explain his desire to substantially overhaul Israel’s highest judicial body. Given that the proposed reform drastically alters the process of judicial appointments ensuring that Netanyahu’s government retains the power to make these appointments its benefits for the prime minister are starkly apparent: protecting his freedom. It is no coincidence that the Netanyahu government has sought to dismantle the justice system at a time when his political future is on the line.
Keeping the threat of an attack on Israel alive has likewise become key to Netanyahu’s political calculus. He allowed Hamas to grow and gain power, resulting in a war that has taken the lives of thousands of innocent civilians across Gaza and Israel. For years, Netanyahu delayed confronting Hamas because it served him politically
and sustained the adoration of his supporters across multiple election seasons. Dubbing himself “Mr. Security,” he recognized that his political career would be terminated when the security threat subsided. On October 7, his decades-long overconfidence, arrogance, and dismissal of the threat Hamas posed came at the cost of the lives of 1,200 Israeli citizens. This is not to say that Netanyahu is more responsible for the attacks on October 7 than Hamas, but rather that the prime minister has more responsibility to the Israeli people than a terrorist organization does.
Yet even following October 7, Netanyahu has refused to reach a hostage deal with Hamas; the ongoing war has continuously shifted the spotlight from Netanyahu’s wrongdoings, cementing his power as an invaluable figure for the longterm security of Israel. The end of the war and the return of the hostages now seem farther than ever. Israeli journalist Yaron Avraham presented a report detailing all of the hostage negotiations proposed since last November, revealing that three hostages who were recently murdered in the tunnels under Gaza had been part of a deal rejected by Netanyahu. Following these events, in early September, Israelis flooded the streets in some of the largest protests the country has ever seen, consumed by grief and shattered hopes.
Late September also brought reports of the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general one of the most profound steps Israel has taken against the militant group in the past 20 years. While Nasrallah’s assassination was certainly not purely motivated by Netanyahu’s political interests, as the operation most likely required months, if not years, of planning, it is nonetheless convenient that, time and time again, Netanyahu makes drastic gains when public support for his leadership is declining. Now, as the Israeli media celebrates the death of Nasrallah, Netanyahu might just be dragging Israel to a disastrous regional war, leaving the country in total ruin and despair.
At least he won’t go to jail.
“This is not to say that Netanyahu is more responsible for the attacks on October 7 than Hamas, but rather that the prime minister has more responsibility to the Israeli people than a terrorist organization does.”
REMEDYING REGULATION FOR A BETTER ENERGY FUTURE
An Interview with BRUCE BIEWALD
Bruce Biewald is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Synapse Energy Economics, Inc. For more than 30 years, Biewald has worked at the intersection of energy economics, climate policy, and electric industry regulation. His analyses have been presented before state and federal courts, Congress, and key regulatory agencies such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Charlie Adams: Most conversations on energy policy are grounded in the urgency for action now. Is time on our side?
Bruce Biewald: The clean energy revolution has to move faster. A lot of the issues have to do with inertia and bottlenecks to the rate of transformation. Utilities are at the center of this, but they’ve got to become central to the solution, and organizations need to promote that change.
CA: How have people reacted to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)?
BB: People are interested in taking advantage of the IRA’s money, but it can be complicated: Can local groups efficiently absorb these quantities of money and run effective programs quickly? A lot of action is around addressing that question.
CA: The need to build infrastructure to support the coming surge in electricity demand has been met with skepticism. How should different groups responsibly navigate this dynamic?
BB: I think there will be new electric load and declining gas load. So, even though there might not be a massive growth in total energy, customers will have to transition. Ultimately, we’ve got to build a lot of new renewable capacity now.
CA: In your paper “Investing in Failure,” you argued that major utilities are not taking action to decarbonize despite their ambitious public-facing plans. How do these companies expect to get away with those promises, and have any of them responded to your research?
BB: It’s actually worse than lack of action: Their investments are making decarbonization harder. There’s this contradiction between what utilities are saying and doing.
In terms of the paper itself, there’s a deafening silence. Utilities don’t really want to engage in that conversation, but those same conversations are going on in the planning dockets. There’s a fair amount of arguing, denial, and protest. And there’s pretending that these resources are less expensive than they are.
CA: What is the power dynamic between regulators and regulatees when it comes to decarbonization?
BB: Utilities in the United States are mostly regulated monopolies, but there are challenges with regulation. Regulators don’t have the time to develop the expertise
needed to regulate the companies effectively, so they have to rely on utilities. In principle, utilities should only make prudent decisions; they should be looking out for their customers and for the environment. In practice, if there are things that the utilities don’t want to do, it can be very difficult to change their minds.
CA: What opportunities are there for regulators at the Public Utilities Commission or state level to incentivize slow-moving utilities to innovate?
BB: Sometimes the solution is to get utilities out of the way. Regulators can give more agile competitors automation, metering, and grid technologies the opportunity to work in that space, and there’s a lot of interest from the private sector in innovating there. The utility in that role would build open platforms.
Regulators can and should always think about incentives and performance as they regulate. There’s a lot of room for innovative rate designs and for having extra compensation or penalties associated with particular activities. Financial rate-making incentives of this type can be an effective tool for regulators to motivate utilities appropriately.
CA: Many Brown students are interested in careers in clean energy policy, but they’re easily lured in by the consulting industry. What advice do you have for undergrads in that position?
BB: Make sure you’re always learning and figuring out where you fit. Also, look at where the money’s coming from. Who are the investors, and who are the customers? That tends to reveal the organization’s constraints and priorities. Finally, pay attention to where you can learn a useful skill that you enjoy refining. Over the years, that skill will probably serve you and others.
CA: Could you describe the pervasiveness of the “revolving door” and how it’s relevant in regulatory conversations?
BB: The big energy companies have a lot of money, and some people make decisions based on the prospects of being employable at these companies. There are also consultants who think one thing and say another because of their clients and funders. If you’re the kind of person who’s going to be uncomfortable with that, you should be very careful in your choice of employer.
Interview by Charlie Adams ’25
Illustration by Sarah Mason ’26
A Literal Minefield
A durable peace in Ukraine requires both belligerents to recognize that the land they are contesting is a liability, not an asset
by Bryce Vist ’25, an Economics and International and Public Affairs concentrator and Editor in Chief for BPR
As the Russo-Ukrainian war’s third year drags on, peace seems to be the furthest thing from the minds of both belligerents. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made clear that he will not countenance any peace talks until all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized sovereign territory is back in Ukrainian hands in other words, that victory is a prerequisite for peace. Russia, in the meantime, has stated that its preconditions for negotiations include a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, as well as total control over the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, including the parts that Russia does not currently hold. These are, of course, the original goals of the “special military operation” announced in 2022, indicating that Russia also makes no distinction between victory and peace.
Typically, warring parties seek peace when they are losing and reject it when they are winning. The Russo-Ukrainian war, therefore, presents a true anomaly both parties are rejecting peace as they are losing. Ukraine is hemorrhaging people, both on the battlefield and through emigration. Meanwhile, Russia’s economy is finally cracking under a stringent Western sanctions regime despite a remarkably spirited effort from the Russian Central Bank (RCB). Moreover, the spoils of victory are, for both sides, more abstract than tangible. The territory being contested the Donbas region and parts of Kherson Oblast is economically unproductive and will remain that way for decades. While Ukrainian national pride and the Russian desire to remake Ukraine in its own image are certainly powerful motivators, they are simply not worth the mounting costs of war. A treaty that codifies today’s battle lines can spare Russia’s nationalistic blushes while protecting Ukraine’s long-term security.
For Ukraine, the war has exacerbated the two core problems that threaten the state’s long-term prosperity: corruption and demographic collapse. Hopes that the war would bring Ukrainians together and drive a largescale social realignment against corruption have failed to manifest. The Ukrainian war effort has been dogged by continuous scandals regarding draft dodging and the procurement of weapons and equipment. On the civilian side, some of Zelensky’s top aides have been ensnared in anti-corruption probes including Andriy Yermak, his chief of staff, and Oleh Tatarov, the man tapped to lead a major anticorruption reform in law enforcement. Since most countries would be credibly unable to wage an all-out war and conduct anticorruption purges at the top of the state at the same time, the war has provided political elites with a convenient shield against Western demands for greater anticorruption action. The war’s end would therefore remove Ukraine’s excuses for tolerating corruption and likely improve the health of a postwar government. With respect to demographics, Ukraine’s prewar total fertility rate was already an anemic 1.2; since then, 6.5 million refugees have fled the country while 80,000 troops have died at the front and 400,000 more have been injured. Ukraine will not survive as a state if it retains its land but not the people required to populate or work it productively. Each day that the war drags on, more Ukrainian refugees acclimate to life in their host countries perhaps well enough to remain even after the war ends. Thus, even a triumphant conclusion in the fight for territory may ultimately prove to be a pyrrhic victory in the larger war for state survival.
In Russia, the costs of war are less existential, but three years of punishing sanctions are
“The RussoUkrainian war therefore presents a truly special case both parties are rejecting peace as they are losing.”
illustration by Larisa Kachko ’26, a Painting major at RISD and Illustrator for BPR
beginning to bite. Russia’s central bank has flagged persistent inflation, slowing economic growth, and labor shortages as critical issues all of which have been brought on by the war. The exodus of highly skilled workers, coupled with a partial military draft, has forced Russian businesses to raise wages to attract labor. The result has been an inflationary surge that will only worsen over time. Foreign currency reserves have begun dwindling, prompting private banks to beg the RCB to prop up foreign trade by selling them increasingly scarce Chinese yuan. As citizens begin to feel the pinch, Russia’s domestic front will destabilize, prompting yet another population outflow and a perpetuation of the vicious cycle.
A realistic pathway to peace requires only that leaders in both nations consider their situation soberly rather than chasing unattainable maximalist ambitions. Russia should be satisfied when Western sanctions are removed and
“Ukraine will not survive as a state if it retains its land but not the people required to populate or work it productively.”
its claim over the warm-water port of Sevastopol affirmed by the international community, while Ukraine can find solace in permanently exiting the Russian security orbit by joining NATO and the European Union. These goals are fundamentally compatible Ukraine stands little chance of regaining the Crimean Peninsula, and Putin’s grandstanding regarding NATO is belied by the fact that he took little issue with the accession of the Baltic states to the alliance in the 2000s. What remains to be disputed is the status of the portion of Eastern Ukraine occupied by Russia. The best solution from Ukraine’s vantage point is to treat the land as what it is a poison pill, not a concession. Traditionally, more land is seen as an obvious asset for any state, providing expanded room for settlement, industry, and commerce. But this assumes that the land is functional, safe for human habitation and artifice. In Ukraine’s east, the opposite is true: Land mining operations conducted by both sides have left huge swathes of territory unusable for any purpose. Thirty percent of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory has been mined, implying that almost the entirety of the east is unsafe. More than 1,000 Ukrainian civilians have already lost limbs due to land mines, and if historical precedent is any guide, demining operations will take decades and carry astronomical costs.
Earlier this year, the World Bank estimated that demining might cost as much as $37 billion an impossibly large figure for a country recovering from war. Moreover, the heavy industry that has long been Donetsk’s calling card has either been bombed or transported to Russia. The country that ultimately wins control of the minefields that once represented Ukraine’s industrial heartland may well be able to put on a proud display of nationalistic chest-thumping, but the costs of revitalization will dwarf the benefits to national pride. Saddling Russia with the responsibility of demining an area the size of Florida will stunt another Russian military buildup more completely than any combination of Western sanctions ever could.
Ukraine will no doubt feel the loss of its sovereign territory keenly in a spiritual sense, and President Zelensky, who has staked his reputation on total victory, is unlikely to survive the political fallout. But, in the long term, Ukraine is threatened far more by continued population shrinkage and corruption than by the loss of unusable land that will not become viable for at least several decades. Less can be more. If Ukraine saddles its adversary with a costly land reclamation project while stopping its own bleeding, it will have struck an advantageous peace for its future prosperity.
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