Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Is The Pla Overestimating The Potential Of Artificial Intelligence?, Koichiro Takagi

Joint Force Quarterly

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into its military modernization strategy, or "intelligentization," aiming to develop a world-class military capable of designing future warfare. This article reviews over 370 PLA Daily articles to assess how the PLA envisions AI transforming key areas of warfare, including situational awareness, decisionmaking, unmanned weapons, and cognitive domain operations. While the PLA anticipates significant advantages, it also acknowledges the risks of system malfunctions, biased data, ethical dilemmas, and adversarial manipulation. Despite these limitations, the PLA remains committed to leveraging AI to create new forms of warfare, emphasizing the importance of proactive …

Celtic Security In The Atlantic: How Does Ireland Secure Europe’S Western Flank?, Patrick J. Smith

Joint Force Quarterly

Ireland plays a crucial role in protecting Europe’s western flank, but growing Russian aggression has exposed serious gaps in its security. With a small, outdated naval fleet, limited air capabilities, and inadequate radar systems, Ireland struggles to defend its airspace, waters, and critical undersea cables—vital infrastructure that carries 97% of transatlantic data and underpins global communication and security. These vulnerabilities have made Ireland a target for Russian sabotage and incursions, posing risks to Europe and the transatlantic alliance.

The article explores two paths for Ireland to address these security challenges: joining NATO or seeking Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) status with …

The Urgency Of Warfighting Renewal: Five Principles For Today’S Professional Military Education, Christopher M. Marcell, Gaylon L. Mcalpine, Reagan E. Schaupp, Joseph L. Varuolo

Joint Force Quarterly

This article highlights the urgent need to reform Professional Military Education (PME) to prioritize warfighting skills and strategic thinking, as called for in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Despite recent updates to include China and Russia-focused content, PME programs remain misaligned with their core mission of developing leaders proficient in the art and science of war.

A key challenge is the growing number of external requirements unrelated to warfighting—such as climate security and diversity initiatives—that dilute PME’s focus and weaken instructional quality. The authors recommend establishing a central authority to vet these requirements and ensure they align with warfighting priorities. …

Being Believed: Persuasion And The Narrative In Military Operations, Brent A. Lawniczak

Joint Force Quarterly

This article examines the vital role of persuasive narratives in modern military operations, highlighting their power to shape perceptions, influence behavior, and achieve strategic objectives across the competition continuum. Narratives are described as unifying stories that provide context, coherence, and clarity to military actions, ensuring alignment between words and deeds while promoting credibility and unity of effort.

The article also explores the key elements of effective narratives—setting, characters, plot, and moral—and identifies factors that enhance their persuasiveness. These include emotional appeal, simplicity, consistency with audience values, relatable characters, trust in the narrator, and resonance with cultural and historical contexts.

Military …

The Art Of Campaigning: Joint Planners Working At The Intersections Of Everything, Mary Bell, Edgar M. Hollandsworth, Thomas J. Snukis, Jeffrey Turner, Luke P. Bellocchi, Nicholas Anthony, Steve Tribble, Chris Botterbusch, Justin D. Harper

Joint Force Quarterly

This article examines the evolution of military campaigning from traditional large-scale combat operations to ongoing efforts that shape the global environment and achieve long-term strategic goals. It highlights the role of Combatant Command Campaign Plans (CCPs) in aligning national strategies with operational objectives and addressing modern challenges like cyber, cognitive, and information warfare.

Key topics include the importance of a Combatant Commander’s (CCDR) vision, the integration of global and regional plans, and the use of strategic wargaming to refine approaches. The article also addresses challenges such as delays in guidance, fragmented planning structures, and adapting to dynamic environments.

Finally, it …

Adopting A Data-Centric Mindset For Operational Planning, Jeremiah Hurley, Morgan Greene

Joint Force Quarterly

The Department of Defense (DOD) is investing heavily in advanced technologies, but its true advantage lies in adopting a data-centric mindset that prioritizes the collection, integration, and use of data to drive faster, smarter decision-making. To modernize its outdated operational planning processes, the DOD must replace static tools like PowerPoint and spreadsheets with real-time data visualizations, automated systems, and standardized data collection templates. By formalizing a "data-first" culture, operational planning can identify and address critical information gaps, improve battlefield awareness, and accelerate mission execution. This approach enables commanders to make more informed decisions while unlocking the full potential of artificial …

Preparing For Adversary Employment Of Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons: Tactical Effects, Operational Impacts, Strategic Implications, James H. Gifford

Joint Force Quarterly

For over 30 years after the Cold War, the U.S. largely dismissed the threat of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. However, recent nuclear threats from adversaries like Russia have highlighted the need to revisit U.S. strategies. Tactical nuclear weapons differ from strategic ones by their delivery systems, not their destructive power. On the battlefield, they could cause casualties, disrupt missions, and overwhelm medical resources. Operationally, they could create logistical challenges, civilian panic, and delays in military responses. Strategically, even a limited nuclear strike could escalate quickly, requiring leaders to carefully balance deterrence, messaging, and responses to avoid all-out nuclear …

Risk: A Weak Element In U.S. Strategy Formulation, Frank Hoffman

Joint Force Quarterly

This article explores the critical but often overlooked role of risk analysis in U.S. national security decision-making, emphasizing its importance in strategy formulation and execution. Risk, defined as the potential for adverse outcomes tied to uncertainties, is frequently misunderstood or ignored, leading to flawed assumptions, bias-driven decisions, and costly strategic failures. Using examples from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the operation to capture Osama bin Laden, the article illustrates how inadequate risk management has hampered strategic outcomes. It highlights the need for a consistent framework for assessing risk, broader than current military doctrine, to address political, economic, and diplomatic risks. Recommendations include …

Executive Summary, William T. Eliason

Joint Force Quarterly

This issue of Joint Force Quarterly explores the fall of Bashar al-Asad’s regime in Syria, marking a major geopolitical shift with significant implications for the Middle East and beyond. It examines the role of U.S. and NATO strategies in this outcome and raises critical questions about post-conflict support and the future military posture in the region.

Key topics include managing risk in U.S. national security decisions, the strategic implications of Russia’s vast nonstrategic nuclear arsenal, and the rising role of artificial intelligence in military planning. Insights are provided on enhancing joint warfighting capabilities, improving military education, and modernizing command systems …

Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 116, 1st Quarter 2025, National Defense University Press

Joint Force Quarterly

Joint Force Quarterly 116 explores key challenges and innovations in military strategy, operations, and global security. The Forum section examines how the U.S. approaches risk in its strategy, the impact of nonstrategic nuclear weapons, and the importance of using data-driven methods in planning military operations.

In JPME Today, articles focus on how joint military campaigns succeed, the role of storytelling and persuasion in operations, and the urgent need to modernize professional military education.

The Commentary section highlights Ireland's strategic role in securing Europe’s western flank and evaluates whether China’s military overestimates the potential of artificial intelligence.

The Features section dives …

Holy Day Surveys And Political Attitudes In Israel, Hannah M. Ridge

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

Researchers regularly use large survey studies to examine public political opinion. Surveys running over days and months will necessarily incorporate religious occasions that can introduce variation in public opinion. Using recent survey data from Israel, this study demonstrates that giving surveys on religious occasions (e.g., the Sabbath, Hannukah, Sukkot) can elicit different opinion responses. These effects are found among both religious and non-religious respondents. While incorporating these fluctuations is realistic in longer-term surveys, surveys fielded in a short window inadvertently drawing heavily on a holiday or holy day sample may bias their findings. This study thus urges researchers to be …

Native Organizations Fill Gaps In Federal Support For Tribal Renewable Energy, Healing Native Communities, Corrie Grosse, Dawn D. Davis, Robert Blake, Chéri Smith

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Seeing Through Solid Words: Using Gebser’S Concept Of Transparency To Understand A Gnostic Poem Expressing Integral Consciousness, Lisa Maroski

Journal of Conscious Evolution

It is difficult to express integral consciousness using ordinary language because of the inherent tendency of language to separate and distinguish. Jean Gebser, in The Ever-Present Origin, suggested concepts such as transparency and diaphaneity as ways to access integral consciousness, and the Gnostic text The Thunder, Perfect Mind (TPM) is written from the perspective of a being with integral consciousness. I use Jean Gebser’s concepts of transparency and diaphaneity to explicate TPM, an enigmatic, paradoxical poem in the Nag Hammadi Library. Because TPM is written from the perspective of an integral being, one who is All-of-It (i.e., paradoxical completeness rather …

01.21.2025 Ored Connect, Liz Williamson

ORED Newsletter

SmartTech MS Advanced Manufacturing Prize

Mileage Rate Increases

Meth Mortality Rate Increases

Revealing Students’ And Teachers’ Perceptions Of Challenges And Strategies In Arabic Reading Comprehension, Osama Othman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the perceptions of Arabic as a Foreign Language (AFL) students and teachers regarding the influence of eight textual features on reading comprehension. These features are: vowelization, word patterns, roots, vocabulary, case endings, word order, punctuation marks, and text organization. It also investigates reading comprehension strategies employed by both groups to overcome comprehension challenges associated with these features. Data were collected from 102 AFL students and 26 AFL teachers through questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 6 students and 11 teachers. Results revealed that students generally rated the influence of these features more highly than teachers. The …

Prison Sentences: Spaces Of Liberation In Arab Prison Writing, Joseph Farag

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Spatial and temporal motifs predominate throughout the extensive corpus of Arabic prison writing. However, far from establishing the prison as an exceptional space, and periods of imprisonment as “time outside time,” this paper argues that modern Arabic prison literature tends instead to blur the distinction between “inside” and “outside” prison space and time. In place of a rigid spatial demarcation, dramatically exemplified by images of towering, razor wire-tipped walls, Arabic prison writing consistently seeks to create continuity between the punishment meted out to those within the prison’s walls and the repression endured by those beyond it. Consequently, these texts figuratively …

Punish Yet Cannot Discipline: Two Iraqi Prison Novels, Hanan Jasim Khammas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Al-Munāḍil (The Militant) (1972) by ʿAzīz al-Sayyid Jāsim, and Iʿjām (Iʿjaam) (2004) by Sinan Antoon are two prison novels about the historical turning points which mark the rise and fall of the Baʿth regime in Iraq. While the first employs imprisonment as a lens through to expose the corruption and injustice exercised by the monarchy against the emergent revolutionary power, the second shows the Baʿthist government applying similar methods of surveillance, and of physical and psychological torture. Reading these texts by al-Sayyid Jāsim, who died in the Baʿth prisons, and by Antoon who wrote Iʿjaam …

Hold Fast The Rope Of God: Space, Authority, And Speech In Muslim Prison Narratives, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Walaa Quisay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our textual and ethnographic engagements, we read for varied permutations of carceral space, formations of religious authority, and an intimate (witnessing) relation between speech and violence. Muslim prison narratives see a broad emphasis on the …

The Networks Of Prison Narrative: Imagining Sociality And Making Narrative In Assad’S Syria, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article argues for a new reading of collectivity – in both narrative voice and scenes of shared experience – in works of Syrian prison literature. Although these texts were published and are interpreted as the products of single author figures, the wider narrative field from which they emerge is shaped by numerous collective practices, from the oral and written to the digital. Breaking disciplinary boundaries around prison literature, this article introduces the term “prison narrative” and foregrounds diverse efforts by Syrian writers and former prisoners to imagine alternative formations of national experience and community under the Assad regime (1970-2024). …

Prison As A Living Being: ‘Assad’S Syria’ As A Model For The Imprisonment State, Jaber Baker

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Syrian Assad regime used prisons as tools of domination. As such, prisons had the power not only of active repression but also as places of detention and disappearance for Syrians. The expansion of political detention in Syria over fifty years transformed prison into a living being in the sense that prison became a part not just of Syrians' political life, but also of their social identity. One can recognize it in voices, attitudes, lifestyles, and even written and oral culture. Syrian cities are full of weapons since a large area of the urban space is inhabited by the buildings …

From Prison To The World: A Comparative Reading Of Naji’S Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence, 2020) And Abd El-Fattah’S You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), Teresa Pepe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyses Ahmed Naji’s Hirz Mikamkim (Rotten Evidence) and Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated through the lens of ‘prison literature’, that is “literary works produced in, about, or through the experience of political detention” (Taleghani 13). Comparing them to previous forms of prison literature from Egypt, it shows that both books depart from the social-realistic mode that has prevailed throughout the 20^th century. Rather they renovate the genre with aesthetic traits drawn from postmodern and digital literature, exemplified by autofictional or anonymous modes of authorship and co-authorship, narrative fragmentation, and bodily exposures. These aesthetic …

Khairy Shalaby’S Novel The City Of The Enslaved: Egyptian Prison Literature With A Russian Twist, Sarali Gintsburg

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Although the interconnectedness of Russian and Arabic literatures has been demonstrated by Soviet/Russian and, to a limited extent, Western Arabists, this research remains limited to a few names. However, the role that the Russian/Soviet literary tradition had in shaping contemporary genres of Arabic literature is complex and diverse. This is, for instance, the case with prison literature—Russian/Soviet literature has a long tradition of turning to the topic of imprisonment. It was Dostoyevsky, who turned to the genre of katorzhnaya proza (prison literature) and popularized it. Later, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky dedicated a number of their influential literary works to further …

Terrorists, Spies, And Diplomatic Crises: The Birth Of Morocco’S Multimedia Prison Literature, Brahim El Guabli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article captures the literary shift that accompanied the transformation of the nature of political imprisonment in Morocco in the last twenty years. Focusing on the new victims of state violence, who fall within two categories: prisoners accused of terrorism and those accused of heinous sexual crimes, this article argues that the emergence of these new criminal profiles has led to the establishment of a transnational “Multimedia Prison Literature” (MPL). Drawing on the cases of Ali Arras, a Belgian-Moroccan whom Spain delivered to Morocco for terrorist charges, and Mohamed Hajib, a German-Moroccan citizen whom Germany extradited to his country of …

The Absurdity Of Liberation In Moroccan Prison Narratives, Hakima Choukri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Moroccan prison narratives have been credited with major political and social changes, yet their existential value is equally worth acknowledging. The prison narratives of Aziz Binebine, Mohamed Raiss, Malika Oufkir, and Fatna El Bouih, to mention but a few, are fraught with existentialist patterns that are uncovered upon reading them comparatively. One pattern that persists through these narratives is the absurdity of liberation. Borrowing Camus’ concept of the absurd, this article highlights the absurdity of the post-prison chapter for being nothing more than an extension of the prison episode that makes the impossibility of freedom acutely felt. The absurdity of …

Captivity, Resistance And Political Consciousness In Walid Daqqa’S Prison Literature, Ashjan Ajour

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines the prison literature of the Palestinian intellectual Walid Daqqa who has been serving a life sentence for resistance since 1986 in Israeli prisons. From the depth of his experience he writes about his conceptualization of captivity, colonial violence, the resistance of the Palestinian political prisoners in the Israeli prison system and the construction of Palestinian national imagination in his book Consciousness Molded: or The Re-Identification of Palestinian Torture (2010) Published in Arabic and his first young adults novel The Story of the Oil’s Secret (Ḥikayat Sir al-Zeit) published in 2018 in Arabic. Daqqa has become …

Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing From Captivity, Basil Farraj

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article discusses writings by Palestinian political prisoners and the broader body of prison literature situating them as practices of ‘smuggling freedom’ from Israel’s carceral regime, shedding light onto their political and social meaning. Through discussing writings by prisoners, the article points to a long history through which Palestinian prisoners confronted the Israeli regime’s torture and violent practices, and its broader project of eliminating the political nature of captivity. The article argues that prisoners’ writings reveal much about the dynamics of carceral power and violence, and the logic behind the confrontation practices used by prisoners in Palestine and beyond. These …

New Approaches To Mena Prison Literatures After 2011, Anne-Marie Mcmanus

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Lanthorn, Vol. 59, No. 10, January 20, 2025, Grand Valley State University

Volume 59, August 5, 2024 – April 14, 2025

Lanthorn is Grand Valley State's student newspaper, published from 1968 to the present.

The Role Of Film And Media In Cultivating Hope: A Conflict Resolution Platform, Lizyvette Ramos, Alexia Georgakopoulos

Peace and Conflict Studies Journal Conference

The Role of Film and Media in Cultivating Hope: A Conflict Resolution Platform: The role of film is that it not only provides humans with a visceral experience when we watch atrocities of war and injustices to innocent humans, but films also provide humans with a pause to consider alternatives as we reimagine conflict from a different trajectory with a future that includes peace and conflict transformation. This session will allow participants to gain insight into how to approach films and media from the positive side in that they offer people an opportunity to learn and that people themselves have …

“K-Pop In Public”: Vietnamese Youth Using Dance To Queer The Public Space, Ha Bich Dong, Thuy Bich Dong

Peace and Conflict Studies Journal Conference

In Vietnam, where public protests are criminalized (Kerkvliet, 2022), young people continue finding creative ways to advocate for their rights through different venues, particularly the arts. This research combines digital ethnography and duoethnography to examine K-pop dance covers in Vietnamese public spaces as a platform for youth to explore their gender identities, connect, and visibilize queerness.

K-pop is a music genre, pop culture, and cultural phenomenon that emerged in South Korea and has gained significant popularity and influence around the world (Aini, 2020). We, two researchers (one is a K-pop dancer), began the research by using digital ethnography (Zorn, & …