Blockchain Papers

Dongfa Feng, Yaoming Zhang, Yao Zhang, Si Zhou

No abstract is available for this record.

Sunil Kumar

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) aims to offer transparency, autonomy, and trustless transactions via blockchain technology. However, public perception often diverges from these goals, as media coverage tends to focus on data breaches, fraud, and privacy issues. This paper examines the relationship between DeFi’s technical issues, security vulnerabilities, privacy concerns, and monitoring challenges, and how media portrayals influence societal trust. Through analysis of forensic methods, transaction monitoring, and media narratives, the study reveals the conflict between DeFi’s decentralized principles and the centralized fears constructed through discourse. The results provide insights into how public trust in DeFi is influenced, challenged, and reshaped.

Paweł Krzyworzeka

This research note calls for an alternative approach to understanding ‘innovativeness,’ particularly in arenas like Decentralized Finance (DeFi) where participant perceptions clash with mainstream evaluations, often leading to their dismissal. When conventional metrics fail to capture the perceived value and groundbreaking nature asserted from within these communities, there is a pressing need to explore their distinct ‘cosmologies’ or internal logics. This paper argues for the importance of investigating these alternative meaning systems – how value and innovation are defined and experienced by participants – rather than solely relying on external measures. It posits that a deeper engagement with the ‘native point of view’ in such ‘rejected arenas’ can yield crucial insights, not only for understanding these specific phenomena but also for challenging and enriching our broader conceptions of innovation. This note serves as a call to researchers to undertake such explorations.

Aharon Klieman

In crusading against traditional nineteenth century statecraft, Woodrow Wilson always made a point of condemning in the strongest terms possible the basic immorality of secret diplomacy. Foreign relations have always featured ambiguity and risk, but never to the present extent. Nuclear diplomacy deals with grave uncertainty, where so much depends on a mix of situational and motivational factors. Policymakers, to be sure, insist there are valid reasons for maintaining secrecy. Freedom of action must be preserved where national security is at stake. Military-strategic affairs involve the greatest sensitivity. Governments are charged with having an inordinate passion for secrecy. Diplomatic accords may indeed be made public in the end, but only after secret channels and perhaps unorthodox, devious means were used to achieve them. In the absence of conclusive empirical proof one way or the other, semi-private diplomacy-the combination of secret and public-can be given neither unqualified endorsement nor blanket rejection at present.

David M. Quinn, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, Kathleen Smarick, Victor Asal

International relations scholars have long focused on power relations among nations as an explanatory factor for a wide variety of state behaviors, including alliance formation, strategic interactions, and negotiation strategies. Power transition theorists have argued that war is most likely when power is equally distributed among nations or, more precisely, when the power of the challenger approaches—or begins to exceed—that of its opponent (Organski, 1968 Organski, A. F. K. 1968. World Politics, New York: Knopf. [Google Scholar]; Organski and Kugler, 1980 Organski, A. F. K. and Kugler, Jacek. 1980. The War Ledger, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Kugler and Lemke, 1996 Kugler, Jacek and Lemke, Douglas. 1996. Parity and War: Evaluations and Extensions of The War Ledger, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Balance of power theorists, on the other hand, have argued that equality of power among nations diminishes the chance of war, as uncertainty about outcomes caused by approximate power parity leads actors to be more cautious (Claude, 1962 Claude, Inis. 1962. Power and International Relations, New York: Random House. [Google Scholar]; Wright, 1965 Wright, Quincy. 1965. A Study of War , 2nd, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]). The research presented here considers relative power not as a cause of conflict, as these previous studies have done, but as a factor relevant to conflict resolution efforts. In this study, we focus on crises as a specific instance of conflicts in the international system and on mediation as a specific conflict resolution measure. Building upon previous work (Wilkenfeld et al., 2003 Wilkenfeld, Jonathan, Young, Kathleen, Asal, Victor and Quinn, David. 2003. Mediating International Crises: Cross-national and Experimental Perspectives. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 47: 279–301. [CSA][CROSSREF][Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2005 Wilkenfeld, Jonathan, Young, Kathleen, Quinn, David and Asal, Victor. 2005. Mediating International Crises, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), we examine the way mediation styles and power relations among crisis actors interact and impact on whether the crisis ends in an agreement, and whether the crisis outcome leads to long-term, postcrisis tension reductions. This research is intended to extend understanding of the nature of crisis behavior and to inform efforts to manage crises most effectively.

Brian Rappert

With the destructiveness of modern conflict, varied national and international calls have been made to constrain the employment of weaponry. Efforts to establish prohibition regimes attempt to cut through disorderly and diverse sociotechnical assemblages to locate the principal source of a problem in order to justify a certain course of action. Science and Technology Studies cautions against separating elements of socio-technical assemblages. Likewise, the fragility and contestability of particular determinations of the acceptability of weaponry are apparent in contemporary prohibition debates. Even while many acknowledge the problems of definitely locating some source of acceptability, many arms-control discussions invariably entail efforts to do just that. This paper considers the dynamics of the claims and counterclaims offered to support contentions about the acceptability of the employment of weaponry and thereby justify certain control regimes. As argued, when faced with fundamental difficulties and dilemmas associated with offering determinations of where unacceptability rests, actors engage in various strategies to deny, defer, deter and deflect having to resolve the complicated issues at stake. Alternative characterizations and definitions involve alternative ways of shifting the burden of proof for resolving intractable problems. The paper proposes the notion of ‘disposal strategies’ as a useful way of characterizing the processes of ordering, whereby actors attempt to manage persistent problems and dilemmas.

Deborah Welch Larson

THE OPEN DOOR FOR REAGAN Deborah W. Larson KJince the end of the Vietnam War economic explanations of American foreign policy have become unfashionable. Instead, political scientists have shaped their analysis to fit a "neorealist" framework, purged of cold war rhetoric. Neorealism views American actions as attempts either to cope with, or redress, the decline of U.S. political and economic hegemony and to define vital strategic interests. In contrast to scholarly thinking, the Reagan administration's foreign policy is responsive to ideology, not interest. American policy toward Central America has once again moved to the forefront of the national consciousness as the Reagan administration has chosen to stake the credibility of the United States' superpower status on achieving an "acceptable" outcome to the civil war in El Salvador and an end to the Marxist regime in Nicaragua. The administration's ideological justification for its initiatives in Central America suggests that the neorealist explanation may no longer be adequate. For example, the Reagan administration hailed the large turnout in the March 25, 1984, elections, despite guerilla violence and sabotage, as proof of Salvadoran support for democracy. Yet voting in El Salvador is compulsory, with fines or worse for noncompliance. The previous El Salvador government was portrayed as both democratic and legitimate. Yet, the United States was not pleased with the outcome of the Constituent Assembly elections in March 1982; to prevent the victorious rightwing parties from electing as interim president Roberto d'Aubuisson, who was implicated in death squad murders, the U.S. government Deborah W. Larson is assistant professor at Columbia University. She has recently completed a book entitled The Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation, to be published by Princeton University Press. 13 14 SAIS REVIEW pressured the military to appoint a moderate, Alvaro Magaña. Accounts of the most recent election highlight an alarming degree of administrative bungling of such severity that at least one Salvadoran death squad has threatened retaliation against the Elections Council. Regardless of who is the victor of this most recent attempt at free elections, Roberto d'Aubuisson or José Napoleón Duarte, effective power will continue to reside with the right-wing military. El Salvador's strategic value is minimal, its principal economic product coffee, and its support within the United States Congress lukewarm at best. Officials of the Reagan administration have reiterated that the United States cannot tolerate either the continued existence of a Marxist regime in Nicaragua or victory for the guerillas in El Salvador. Why do official perceptions diverge from reality? What accounts for the Reagan administration's wholehearted support of a dubious democracy, which is, at best, unimportant to U.S. security? Finally, what alternative policies are suggested by an economic interpretation? In the late 1950s, historian William Appleman Williams stimulated a revisionist strand of research by offering a coherent theoretical interpretation of American foreign policy. Although he preferred democratic socialism, Williams acknowledged that it was incompatible with the American people's longstanding infatuation with private property. Consequently , he looked to the past for an alternative model for a more humane, equitable, and peaceful society. According to Williams, the American Founding Fathers were mercantilists. Enlightened gentry, they used state power to create a territorial and commercial empire not for selfish commercial interests, but for the good of the community as a whole. American mercantilists sought a favorable balance of trade through protectionism and promotion of exports. Their overriding concern was to prevent economic surpluses and unemployment that could endanger domestic stability and democracy. The only flaw in the American mercantilist strategy, as Williams perceived it, was their emphasis on economic expansion as a substitute for social reform. When the frontier appeared to be closed in the 1890s, American leaders redirected their energies from continental expansion to the establishment of a commercial empire based on free trade. The new outlook was reflected in the war against Spain and Hay's "open-door" notes, which called on other nations to respect the principle of equal commercial opportunity in China. The open-door policy was a distillation of a strategy designed to create an "informal empire" based on free trade. Ultimately, the American leaders' drive for access to and control over...

B. Balamurugan, T. Poongodi, M. R. Manu, S. Karthikeyan · 5 authors

The moving image archive of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) includes a copy of the film The Double Day (1975), cataloged in the series Moving Images Relating to International Development Programs and Activities, 1979–1991, a collection of more than eight hundred titles “created to provide information on assistance programs supported by the Agency for International Development (AID).”1 Yet, The Double Day does not, in fact, directly depict or engage with any specific development or aid initiative. Instead, the film—directed by US-based Brazilian filmmaker Helena Solberg as part of the International Women’s Film Project collective and described as “the first Latin American feminist documentary”—examines the gendered dynamics of paid and unpaid labor through the testimonies of women from Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico.2 Its presence in the USAID archive is likely a consequence of its funding history, having received support from the Inter-American Foundation, a USAID-affiliated entity; the development agencies of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; the United Nations Development Program; and US philanthropist Calvin Cafritz.3These transnational funding structures not only enabled the film’s production but also determined its archival destination, which renders legible its place within the history of international development.4 The Double Day’s institutional trajectory reflects the shifting configurations of aid, gender, and media during a historic moment when women were being repositioned at the center of what Arturo Escobar has described as development’s “regimes of visuality.”5 Especially relevant to The Double Day’s production and exhibition was the international institutional framework of Women in Development (WID). Emerging in the early 1970s and culminating in United Nations’ proclamation of 1975 as International Women’s Year, WID emphasized women’s participation in the global economy as both an index and mechanism of development. Indeed, The Double Day premiered at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year, held in Mexico City.6 Within this context, the film forms part of a broader trajectory of media use by international organizations that intensified during the 1970s—as best exemplified by Media Habitat, a collection of 236 documentary films commissioned by the United Nations to represent urban and rural development initiatives for the 1976 Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. As a policy-shaping initiative, Media Habitat primarily featured films from the Global South intended not only to illustrate but also to help codify standardized audiovisual markers of “underdevelopment” that determined access to the emerging global economic order and to international aid.7Framed in relation to these international institutions and their operations, The Double Day could similarly be considered “development media”—exemplifying the type of nonfiction media produced and distributed outside of the commercial film circuits whose aspects and subcategories have been variously described in scholarship as nontheatrical, useful, sponsored, institutional, industrial, educational, or nonprofessional/amateur.8 Scholars working in this area have emphasized the institutional contexts of such media’s production and exhibition infrastructures as shaping its instrumentalized effects. From a feminist perspective, such an approach is crucial to grappling with the broader question of how “gender impacts [these works’] shape, content, and trajectories.”9 Yet we also argue that, taken in isolation, the institutional and infrastructural contexts are insufficient to account for the complex relationship between media and development, potentially not only limiting our understanding of the reach and impact of development but also distorting our interpretive conclusions. For example, to categorize The Double Day as “development media” is to overlook the film’s place within Solberg’s directorial oeuvre, as well as within the histories of both transnational women’s filmmaking and radical Latin American documentary cinema to which it simultaneously belongs. Such exclusive framing is especially limiting given that women globally were disproportionately engaged in nonfiction production throughout the twentieth century—sometimes by political choice but more often due to structural exclusions from fiction filmmaking. Even in nonfiction historiography, however, institutional media has remained particularly marginal, reinforcing hierarchies that separate such works from the aesthetic and authorial frameworks through which film history has been constructed.10 This marginalization not only tends to erase women’s contributions but also presumes a “weak” or derivative authorship, rendering these films unworthy of the interpretive attention needed to apprehend their aesthetic and political complexity.11 The same dynamic is likely to structure assumptions about “development media” as well.Categorizing The Double Day exclusively within this category would further prompt us to assume top-down institutional analyses that have been characteristic of both institutional media methodologies and the scholarship on development at large. This, in turn, would risk obscuring this film’s radical Marxist approach to women’s labor as well as its concrete contribution to activism and its attendant grassroot structures. In Mexico City, The Double Day became a catalyst for feminist solidarity in practice when one of the film’s protagonists, Bolivian activist and trade unionist Domitila Barrios de Chungara, was invited to participate in the Tribune of Non-Governmental Organizations held alongside the official UN conference.12 There, Barrios de Chungara challenged Western feminist priorities by reframing the debate around labor, class, and imperialism, helping to articulate a shared Third World feminist agenda that significantly departed from the developmentalist vision of the United Nations and USAID.13 Seen through the lens of activist media, The Double Day helped forge transnational solidarity networks by enabling information exchange across the diverse voices that shaped its making—from the women featured in the film to the activists who circulated it—revealing a considerably more dynamic interplay between institutional and grassroots or contingent media practices.Moreover, the film’s Latin American context—reflected in Solberg’s formation in Brazil as the only woman in Cinema Novo, its focus on women from across the region, and its premiere and key reception in Mexico City—requires grappling with the regional specificities of the very notion of development in its multiple iterations.14 Far from being an epistemological and political framework imposed solely by the Global North, both the practices of development and the theoretical foundations of developmentalism (understood as a broad and polysemic set of discourses) were shaped through the active participation of Latin American economists.15 Within this iteration, underdevelopment, as a constitutive notion of developmentalism, became central to a distinctly critical strand, which by the late 1960s became known as the dependency theory.16 This same approach is reflected in some of the best-known Latin American radical film manifestos of the time, arising precisely from the same milieus to which Solberg belonged.17These various considerations of the film’s history illustrate the methodological challenges confronting feminist scholars seeking to assess the impact of development on media projects, theories, and practices. To disregard the developmentalist context of such works by emphasizing their political aesthetics and affects risks reproducing a romanticized narrative of heroic resistance (albeit from a feminist perspective). Yet to engage exclusively with their institutional and material infrastructures risks naturalizing developmentalism’s political and epistemological foundations at the expense of the goals and beliefs of the many women who participated in these projects. The contradictions and ambivalences that animate such histories call for feminist frameworks capable of holding both institutional complicity and radical possibility in view.This challenge resonates with ongoing debates about the politics of the archive and what Allyson Field has termed “the practice of informed speculation.”18 As she reminds us, feminist, queer, and decolonial methodologies have long taught us to “press at the limits” of the archive to “inoculate our scholarship against our evidence’s afflictions.”19 The concern that the evidence we draw on in our analysis reproduces the very structures and blind spots of the dominant ideology and therefore shapes and delimits our interpretation becomes particularly urgent when engaging the developmentalist media corpus. Informed speculation offers an alternative by inviting the experimental, creative, and speculative rewriting of history, mobilizing the archive “in a project that runs counter to the original purpose, or the imperative to preserve, or the conditions that led to erasure.”20 Yet, as Field cautions, such speculative gestures must remain grounded in a deep and “intimate familiarity with the archive” that we are working with and against. Building on this imperative, we suggest that the developmentalist archive, in particular, demands expansion and critical reconsideration in ways that unsettle the very disciplinary frameworks through which it has been studied as well as the larger institutional contexts for such knowledge production.Our focus on The Double Day in the opening of this introduction thus foregrounds the entanglements of institutional and grassroots forces, local and international contexts, structural and interpersonal relations, and creative and economic factors that have shaped not only this film but the broader ecosystem of development media projects—and their preservation—over time. Addressing such a constellation involves transgressing methodologically entrenched divisions between political economy and aesthetics, between material infrastructures and affective regimes; reckoning with divergent periodizations across film history and world economics; and situating these within the local specificities of women’s movements and international institutional programs. It also demands attentiveness to the coexistence of multiple, and sometimes competing, understandings of development—each historically, geographically, and ideologically situated.We imagine this special issue as an opening toward a critical dialogue, not only about how such an approach might be enacted in practice but also about the far-reaching ways development paradigms have shaped both our objects of study and the contours of the field itself. The decision to center institutionally sponsored films across all the essays in this issue is deliberate and enables us to highlight institutional critique as a vital methodological imperative within our analytical framework. Created within the frameworks of international organizations, state agencies, or NGOs, these films’ histories make legible the institutional logics that underwrite their production. Yet our critique does not stop at these specific entities. Rather, we argue for a broader interrogation of the political conditions and institutional infrastructures that shape media and knowledge production more generally. This includes contemporary corporations embedded in the digital platform economy, from streaming services to the rapid expansion of AI. Equally critical is a reflexive examination of academia itself, where departments of economics, political science, and centers for development have played a formative role in producing and legitimizing developmentalist theories and policy frameworks. While the humanities and arts have at times offered critical alternatives, they have also frequently mirrored and reinforced many of the same developmentalist assumptions. A feminist analysis of the nexus between development and media must therefore unsettle not only dominant archives but also the institutional and disciplinary foundations of our own scholarly practices.As scholars, we share the complex position of navigating the same tensions between institutional complicity and emancipatory aspiration as many of the media-makers whose work we study. Mirroring our subjects is also the transnational, collective mode of this special issue’s own production as it emerges from an ongoing informal working group we have sustained over several years. While relying on institutional and disciplinary affordances—such as university funding for conferences or access to academic publishing platforms—we have been working toward creating a community that exceeds, and often resists, the prevailing logics of our academic institutions. Our aim has been to create a space for shared inquiry and mutual support that pushes back against disciplinary siloing and technocratic neoliberal assessment modes of both labor and knowledge production—and this certainly extends to our experience collaborating with the journal editors throughout the publication process. Our goal has been to examine both the persistence and variability of developmentalism, understood as what Gustavo Esteva calls a “powerful but fragile semantic constellation,” as a conceptual formation that has historically inspired, legitimized, and mobilized media projects across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.21 And gendered biopolitics, from population control to gender mainstreaming, have remained integral to development policies and media practices, recurring across formats from institutional newsreels to film festivals.We share the conviction that, far beyond the history of nonfiction institutional media, development (as both a broad ideological project and a network of material and institutional practices) and developmentalism (as a set of discourses and theoretical models associated with development) have exerted a far-reaching influence on film and media cultures at large. As such, they must be treated as a major force in shaping global film and media systems and also the many ongoing assumptions behind their critical discourses. The discipline of communication studies was founded on modernization theory governed by Cold War goals of dissemination of Western liberal democracy around the world, while “an area studies framework allowed compartmentalizing Western and non-Western outcomes of technologies that were always claimed to be universal.”22 Despite critique from postcolonial and critical race studies, many of these frameworks have remained foundational for media theory.23 In historical scholarship, as we increasingly move beyond “modernity” as a dominant conceptual anchor, engaging with practices and discourses of development opens more precise analytical pathways. These film and media’s entanglements with the logics of and economic and the associated with as well as their conceptual underdevelopment, and impact in as diverse as and of media aesthetic and paradigms in film and film and funding are developmentalist assumptions to the they to underwrite the narrative and logics of and global media from the structure of the film to the cultures of argue that a examination of the historical entanglements between film and developmentalist aesthetics, modes of as well as infrastructures and critical the and that our contemporary media is a of the historical contours of development as a field of inquiry embedded within a of some of the methodologies by the featured in this special a of this complex history, to the larger at in media, development, and gender all its development a it as an of be with practices as divergent as and in In as we work on this the of the of the USAID the ideological that have the history of international the and of this on the global its a from development as a global practice and as an institutional and which over the has as a with its own media Yet or does not erase the historical impact of these the contradictions they have reflected and over the as the of development several crucial to the economic theories of development initiatives to and through the of the development an international policy framework at from the Global to the of the Global the by the political role of and the of the International the on was challenged by dependency theory and at development as global structural the neoliberal of the the Programs by the and World imposed and as conditions for and forms of assistance became known as the major markers for international development development has moving beyond economic to such as the Human Development and the Development and from international organizations such as the United Nations to a broader network of These frameworks increasingly of and liberal of and with what in many ways to various while the of the to development’s epistemological more scholarship has toward a of its and material the field has to a of and critical by and scholars, which development as a dynamic of conceptual and political to these the studies in this special issue call for sustained analysis in place of In we draw from a of and that in of of gender and to this special issue engage that and from Mexico to contemporary specific local historical of global distinctly feminist methodologies as well as attention to studies that this issue a in the global history of development on and documentary work in Mexico how early women infrastructures as of while US films an early of state and transnational on a outside the Global as the of developmentalist both the and markers of development media, its to the and Latin central grounded in archival also women’s in transnational and the methodological of archives on study of the series to a a digital media not by but by women not as but as subjects and within circuits of neoliberal and the aesthetics and of how development’s has models of to contemporary neoliberal paradigms of and analysis how digital and gender and practices, discourses on and their of these essays the of some of the historical of developmentalist as the question of the role of the state within such on a notion of economic as a and the dominant of development that the state as the for and through infrastructural projects. This understanding of development was shared across both of the as well as in the Third The United and the increasingly mobilized international in the of the modes of international at the postcolonial of policy and ideological These programs were at the expansion of their and of while with the and decolonial of The conceptual between modernization and development that the Cold in of and hierarchies of that long and As an of postcolonial their role as of international aid concern about the of Western development projects. In alternative across the Global South that to structural between and through policies of and In many they were further the global structures. In Latin for example, this approach was through organizations such as the United Nations for Latin and the both developmentalist projects and their have taken many forms historically, and they have and they have been to a of projects, and postcolonial and development has been and in ways and with frequently political While many of these alternative frameworks the embedded in dominant Western they often technocratic and assumptions. gender and gender as for the of to be shaped by This becomes particularly in the media that of development where women frequently a crucial associated with and women were as both the subjects and of their participation in the and labor often as the index of In this study of from the 1970s how women were as of this as these about women’s urban and recurring and of a within the own of and critique that official examination of archives and enables a feminist interrogation of their mobilizing a of the in the of contribution to this issue similarly the of a dynamic within as well as across ideological the of women’s and the media of the and as active in labor and as integral to the technocratic women became of as their labor remained a of and analysis and archival with attention to the specific of and It also transnational that as a and affective a nexus of and practices through which gender, media, and developmentalism one film not as a but as part of the of alongside and work a broader concern of this special media as a of developmentalist projects. The debates the World and which international such as the United Nations and a critical historical for such primarily by postcolonial and of the for the of media and communication infrastructures in as to counter Western The a between and economic how systems of media and reinforced global hierarchies of and in an agenda that supported and alternative media infrastructures across postcolonial contexts, the framework gender as an analytical This “gender in the 1970s by of the Women in Development in relation to The Double its political critique of with its broader to center women in development policy through and This was also in of media, which was shaped by its international reach and audiovisual production and and and Yet, as WID institutional it also to the and of the women’s development programs often by in These were by a of studies, and on and the to of women’s presence and through the of their economic and In this on the filmmaker this history directly by the and of for women by the WID framework during the with and agencies the of and against Women in at the of the neoliberal turn, when institutional media often the only to access and support to projects. The an by this dynamic as of the from the Global South are to engage with the developmentalist assumptions funding models that their similarly the as a in developmentalist media history by the of and centers on the Film a between of and the attention toward the and labor by and work was foundational the of and the of audiovisual aid, as both a of development projects and a critical for their the in this issue argue for a with media, gender, and developmentalism as an field of that is and shaped by feminist and methodologies and that challenge the entanglements between academic knowledge production and and technocratic development And while methodological these dynamics at the structural the of feminist in media and cinema by this the very a