"Learning to think like diplomats": Alberto Terneu gave a class on international conflicts at Liberté

From the Unidad 15 de Batán — a maximum-security penitentiary that is also Liberté territory — and simultaneously by video call, a community sat down on a Friday afternoon to think about the world. It was October 24, 2025. In the Punto de Paz hall, in hybrid format, Hernán Alberto Terneus gave an open lecture: an Ecuadorian based in Argentina, with a degree in Meteorology and a consultant for the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank. The topic: the management of international conflicts — strategies and perspectives for preventing, understanding, and resolving them.

The gathering was an EnClave Libre, the format of Universidad Liberté that, outside of its diploma programs, brings open lectures to the community — including incarcerated people — in hybrid format, with the support of Víctimas por la Paz. The session was opened by Pampa, president of Cooperativa Liberté, who thanked Terneus for making the trip from Buenos Aires «to be with us, to get to know Liberté». He was accompanied by his life partner, Silvana Greco, who did not participate actively that day but joined the diploma program the following morning.

Diana Márquez, secretary of the cooperative's Board of Directors, then took the floor and framed the lecture within the project of Liberté's Free, Popular, and Self-Managed University: «Having Alberto Terneus here today is a privilege», she said, noting she had met him through Silvana Greco. «He has a gift for conveying what he knows… and what he knows is enormous.» What followed was a conversation of more than two hours — with questions from the room and from Zoom — that moved from the seventeenth century to the war in Ukraine without losing the thread.

Watch the full lecture on EduTube.

«The content doesn't matter: what matters is teaching people to think»

Terneus opened by saying that the topic «shows that we are all connected»: the great phenomena that cut across the world — he evoked the tango Cambalache, by Enrique Santos Discépolo — have been occurring throughout history and will keep occurring. He quickly noted that international conflict is «a rather complex subject» and that, to avoid getting lost, one must work carefully and by levels of importance: from the individual to the communal, to the national, and to the international. His aim was pedagogical: for each person to feel, by the end of the talk, «more entitled» to have an opinion about what happens in the world, with their own way of thinking. He put it with an image he repeated throughout the afternoon: learning to think «like foreign ministers». To understand education in Argentina — he said by way of example — you have to think like a minister, not like a student: the student wants to pass and go on vacation; the minister has to think about the medium-term development of the system.

To ground that method, he turned to two «very lucid» thinkers. The first, Baruch de Spinoza, born in Amsterdam in 1632, who said of education: «I am not interested in what content students are given in the classroom. I am interested in teaching them to think», because content changes with the times and what endures is knowing how to think «with order, with logical connection». Spinoza, Terneus recounted, distinguished four ways in which a person perceives that they are learning. The first is being told: a piece of information taken as indisputable without any personal verification — «that is how rumor works». The second, incidental experience: a knock on the knee, a burn from cooking oil; «disordered accumulations of experiences» that do not constitute knowledge. The third, widely used in politics, is attributing to an effect whatever cause suits whoever wants to install a way of thinking: lightning strikes, a tree burns, and someone proclaims the end of the world. «You cannot attribute to an effect a cause», he noted; naturally it works the other way around.

The fourth «is the true one and is the arduous one»: noticing where the lack of understanding lies, recognizing the nature of the phenomenon — whether it is agronomic, veterinary, mechanical, or electrical —, identifying its critical variables, and working in an orderly way. «It is work that must be deepened… returning to one's inner self, reviewing what one thought, finding out more, moving forward.» That, he said, is the knowledge that «will stay with us most» and the one that «consolidates a community that deciphers, thinks, and shares».

The second thinker was Immanuel Kant and his text Toward Perpetual Peace, from the late eighteenth century. His starting point: just as relations between individuals within a country are regulated by law and economics, so are relations between countries. And the central point, Terneus stressed: citizenship «is anchored in the legal and economic relations that shape the State», and the State «notifies» citizens of the level of citizenship they inhabit. If it guarantees education, health, housing, and protection for workers, it signals that any step they take will be supported; if it withdraws from education, from health, from housing, «it is notifying that the condition of citizenship is evaporating — and rapidly».

The anatomy of a conflict: the axes and the capacities

Before the case studies, Terneus set up the board. States, he said, are part of a cosmopolitan space ordered by the United Nations Charter and its agencies — education, agriculture, industrial development, refugees. He recalled that the system brings together nearly two hundred member states, each contributing according to the size of its economy, and asked the community to keep this in mind: «The United Nations system belongs to all of us». It functions, he compared, like the great ministries of the planet: education, health, environment, agriculture, refugees, weapons, organized crime, trade, meteorology.

With a chalkboard at hand, he built a diagram. On one axis, the manifest character of conflict — what it is predominantly identified with: environmental, territorial, economic, financial, political (with its two dimensions, the ideological and the potential threat) and, «the most sublime product of human thought», the religious. On the other axis, conflict management, with its levels of intensity: from the exchange of diplomatic notes («We have noted with great displeasure…») to threats and destabilizing maneuvers, armed incursions or cyberattacks on critical systems, all the way to «all-out war».

Schools of diplomacy, he explained, use this to build a prescriptive map: they classify the conflict and prescribe how to manage it according to its type. But «in real life» what is decisive is something else: the capacity of those in charge of deciding the pace. And there he introduced the framework of core capacities, which applies «to any group that wants to do something well»: critical knowledge of the subject matter of the conflict; sound internal democratic functioning — which includes bringing younger members along with the experience of those who came before; and the capacity for connection, for «reading the environment» and seeking help from those who know. He illustrated it with a village pharmacy that cannot manufacture an aspirin and a laboratory that delivers it instantly «because it has people who know, people who find the faster way». «Managing a conflict works the same way.»

When capable diplomatic bodies that truly understand what is happening enter the picture, he added, the model becomes three-dimensional: a «space of conflict complexity» and a space of «managerial complexity» emerge. And one more axis, «coming out of the corner of the room toward the floor»: communication, because governments must account to their populations for what they do.

From the fall of Easter Island to the Mediterranean

With the board set up, the case studies followed. Easter Island between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: each clan carved its totems and moved them on log rollers, until the competition deforested the island, neglected agriculture, and «degenerates into cannibalism, which is the end of society». A conflict that was, at its core, environmental.

The famine in the Sahel in the 1970s, which was presented as a natural catastrophe when it was «a political catastrophe»: food was not getting through because armed factions were blocking it, and the former colonial countries were blaming one another. Its continuation today, he said, takes the form of people displaced by environmental impoverishment and climate change who cross the Mediterranean — many dying in the crossing — and whom destination countries receive as «a political challenge»: «You are sending displaced people to us», «look, they are environmental refugees», «we were your colony».

In economic terms, Terneus read the current situation of the United States — «the most indebted economy in the world» — as a double move: making it harder for products that unbalance it to enter, and «expanding the footprint of our currency», so that each bill is backed by the material resources — land, roads, industries — of other countries. He called it «an expansion of financial possession» and cited Ecuador and Panama, both dollarized, as examples.

To show what happens when someone fails to understand the nature of a conflict, he told an anecdote: an expert in interpersonal conflict who, returning from Salta, explained his plan to «manage climate conflicts» by watching delegates at a summit through a window and switching on a yellow light when the conversation stalled. The problem, he illustrated, was that the expert was missing the essential point: delegates who attend a Conference of the Parties arrive with confidential instructions from their heads of state — «this line is not to be crossed». «It is impossible for someone who does not understand the complexity of an environmental conflict to realize» why a negotiation stalls; that is «a lack of qualification to engage with that conflict».

And then came Ukraine. Terneus narrated it as a movement along the management axis: after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, provinces that had expressed through referenda a wish to join the Russian Federation; NATO moving weapons closer; an escalation he compared to the 1962 missile crisis — when, he recalled, the Bay of Pigs plan was aborted with the help of Rodolfo Walsh, who decoded the CIA's encrypted message in Havana. In his account, the Russian Federation responded with a «special military operation»; NATO proposed a pause for a political resolution; and, two years later, Ukraine had grown stronger. «They lulled us to sleep», summarized Moscow's reading: a ceasefire used to gain advantage «on the management axis». A move, he said, «deceitful, but it happened». On the connection axis he gave another example of lack of qualification: signing a free trade agreement by which foreign high technology — chips — enters duty-free in exchange for exporting chips the country does not produce.

The silenced axis: communication

The communication axis, he warned, can also be a theater of conflict, especially when it is deliberately silenced. He recalled the Gulf War of the early nineties, announced «with great fanfare», and cited it alongside Karl Marx and his The Eighteenth Brumaire: historical episodes, Marx wrote, taking up Hegel, seem to repeat themselves — «the first time as tragedy, the second as farce».

The Argentine example was one that, according to Terneus, «the public still does not know about because the communication axis has been deliberately silenced». He stated that the country's current leader had donated — «not sold, donated» — to a conflict in Eastern Europe military equipment worth, by his estimate, nine hundred million dollars, equivalent, he said, to two and a half years of salaries for seventy thousand public employees: two military helicopters, two dozen F-16 aircraft that were to be purchased from Denmark, and, the previous year, five Super Étendard aircraft, «the ones that fire Exocet missiles». For him, the fact that none of this was communicated «amounts to a failure in the function responsible for overseeing a country».

The abstract and the concrete: hidden agendas

The second, shorter part of the lecture revolved around a distinction. Terneus warned against the uncritical adoption of «recommendations that worked in my country»: an imported manual — his example was «the Japanese method» — is an abstract totality that, transplanted without adaptation to Argentina, does not work. Missing is the step through the country's concrete totality — its scale, its resources, its social aspirations — so that it «arrives properly explained». Without that step, hidden agendas do the rest.

He applied this to what he called the possible «third great European war». If NATO was created to prevent wars against external enemies, he asked, why have the great European wars — from the Thirty Years' War to the two World Wars — always been fought among Europeans? He recalled the sequence of invasions of Russia: Napoleon, who advances and is defeated; Hitler, who in Mein Kampf proclaims German expansion toward the East and also «bounces back». But this time, he said, there is a new actor: the private sector. He spoke of arms supply contracts already signed that condition any negotiation, and cited President Dwight Eisenhower, who in his farewell address warned that the political agenda was being «hijacked» by what he called the military-industrial complex. Today, Terneus stated, senior generals hold shares in arms companies.

«Follow the money»

From there he moved to the figures that, he argued, explain many conflicts beneath their manifest character. He stated that two percent of world gross product is spent on weapons — «in Argentina, neither education nor science nor technology receives two percent of GDP» — and that NATO aims to raise its spending to six percent; adding salaries, vehicles, installations, and contracts, he estimated global spending on security and defense at fourteen percent of world GDP.

On top of that figure he built his central thesis. Citing the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, he enumerated the world's major criminal organizations — the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Neapolitan Camorra, the Chinese triads, among others — and identified the Calabrian as the wealthiest, with an annual turnover he put at six hundred billion dollars. That money, he said, is recycled with the help of investment funds, and he named the largest of all, BlackRock, attributing to it ownership of sixty percent of Ukraine's cultivable land and the role of principal financier of the arms industry — Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus. Of the thirty entities that most finance that sector, he stated, eight are banks and the rest are investment funds.

To organize the idea he turned to an Argentine figure: the triangle of Jorge Sábato, one of the founders of the National Atomic Energy Commission, who envisioned a virtuous interaction among the State, academia, and business. Against it, he proposed a «war triangle» with three vertices — transnational corporations, financial firms, and armies — and a question: «Where is the State? It was co-opted». That is why, he said, citing antimafia judge Giovanni Falcone, in today's conflicts «you have to follow the money». In that light he reread Donald Trump's threats over Greenland, Canada, and the Gulf of Mexico not as «ravings» but as strategic control of routes and missile monitoring; the conflict in Gaza as fuel for the arms industry; and the pressure on Venezuela in relation to its hydrocarbon reserves.

On the connection axis he placed a nearby example: an agreement by which South American countries commit to prohibiting flights to the disputed islands in support of Argentina, and a government that breaks that pact and authorizes flights «for logistical reasons» tied to «private, shadowy» money linked, he argued, to the cocaine hydrochloride route toward Europe. His conclusion ran through the entire lecture: many conflicts «are not ideological», even when they appear to be — that is their manifest character; they are «the movements of capital, which is like the magma» beneath the continents. And he warned about the use of the communication axis «to poison the population», with one example: the campaigns against Pope Francis, which Terneus linked to his dispute with sectors of power within the Church.

National density: what can be done

Terneus returned to Kant's point to close the arc. When a State «notifies» that citizenship is evaporating — because it withdraws from education, from health, from public care — he said, precautions are in order: «The State is ours; it took a long time to build it and to defend it». He recalled that long processes are not reversed in a week — «the solution will take ten years, twenty years» — but must be sustained, and he rejected the idea that there is «only one form of reality, only one reading».

To name what a country needs he used a concept from Aldo Ferrer: national density, sustained on four axes — consolidation of institutions, management with a national imprint, critical thinking, and social cohesion. «People need to know where they are living and why we do something like this.» With that density, he closed by returning to Spinoza, «it does not matter what content is being debated in the world» or in what era: a country preserves its identity. «That is what must be reclaimed.»

Questions from the floor

Diana Márquez served as the link between the lecture and the discussion. She highlighted Terneus's movement «from the macro to the micro» and brought it home: one cannot understand «the very conflicts that arise in the community, in our Liberté territory», without these theoretical frameworks «that help us think, opening our minds», without getting stuck «in our own small square meter».

From the room, Daniel Q. raised his hand — he introduced himself as sixty years old and with the sense of having seen «this country and the world in many different situations». His question was that of a citizen who watches the great movements of power «on television», with anxiety, feeling that «we can't do anything but watch it go by»: «What can we, ordinary citizens, do to at least feel that we can form an alternative?»

From Puerto Madryn, in Chubut, Susana Elba López offered a reflection: she asked that we remember all the people fleeing war zones — from Ukraine, from the Gaza Strip, the Europeans who emigrated to the Americas in another era — and argued that the intelligence of countless people «means that those wars remain» confined to those who want to fight them. Diana Márquez added her own: what place does democracy «as government of the people» have in all of this, and why, even amid the diversity of opinions that enriches it, does «this winning or losing» end up weighing so heavily, with the sense that «we are almost always on the side of the losers». «Perhaps», she answered herself, «it is because we are looking at it from below».

«We are a minority — but not just any minority»

«Those are three very good questions; all three converge», Terneus replied. The first thing, he said, is «to legitimate oneself to think critically». He invoked Mark Fisher and his Capitalist Realism — the «there is no alternative» that Margaret Thatcher proclaimed while dismantling the British productive system — to ask whether that realism is truly «without alternative». With some humor, he distinguished the real (what is seen), reality (its interpretation), the realist (one who takes a position from the real), and realism (one who believes «nothing else matters but this»).

To show that there has always been another way of reading, he turned to Antonio Gramsci, who wrote his Prison Notebooks over more than a decade of confinement under fascism, and to his concept of hegemony: the worldview that the powerful impose as the only one — «don't think about it, I'll do the thinking for you» — which, he warned, is the first error Spinoza identified and the antechamber of fascism. He then moved through political economy: Thomas Malthus and the idea that «social justice is an aberration»; the dispute between Martin Luther — for whom man carries evil within — and Thomas Müntzer, «the first socialist theologian of Europe», who said that «nothing is more sacred to a human being than another human being» and who was crushed in the sixteenth century; the arrival of those ideas in the British Isles with Thomas Hobbes's «man is a wolf to man» in his Leviathan; and the «invisible hand» of Adam Smith, who imagined society as a machine lubricated by self-interest.

Against that current he placed another. In Judaism, he said, the first precept is not «love your neighbor as yourself» but «love the other as yourself»: «the other comes first; it is through the other that we exist». He recounted — following Hermann Cohen — how the Hebrew word for «other» was translated in the Septuagint as «neighbor» and then, in the Vulgate, as «proximate», and how that shift «disfigured» a central precept. He showed its extreme reverse in the language of Nazism, which went so far as to classify human beings until it denied them their humanity altogether. And he closed that passage with Martin Buber: doing evil «is very easy» — through violence, through impulse, through inaction; doing good «is laborious; it requires understanding, renunciation, dedication».

The closing was a legend. That of the thirty-six righteous: in the world there are thirty-six just people who do not know they are just, and who hold the social fabric together so that it does not tear. Its moral, for Terneus, is to act virtuously not for reward or out of fear of punishment, but out of conviction. Hence his message to the community: «We are a minority — but not just any minority». A minority that «holds aloft the banner of justice, participation, inclusion, love for the other, solidarity» — «in Hebrew, justice means solidarity». He called for a participatory democracy that does not exhaust itself in the vote, for «forming at least communes» and beginning to work, with the certainty that what today seems lost «we will reverse in a decade». He cited Walter Benjamin and his automaton that played chess, moved by a hidden dwarf inside, to say that «the sensitive ones» stop losing when they stop accepting the theology that others impose on them. And he recalled that no species thrives «without bonds of association»: «We must hold on to the conviction that we are right, we have solidarity, we have vocation. We associate».

Time — and the satellite connection — worked against them throughout the afternoon. «The satellite drops in a minute», Pampa warned more than once, and Terneus wrapped up to applause. Miguel Ángel M., who had opened the gathering, bid him farewell on behalf of Universidad Liberté and Víctimas por la Paz, from «the maximum-security penitentiary in Batán and Cooperativa Liberté», and promised a next gathering «en clave libre».