Johan Galtung TFF Associate October 2nd, 2022 Originally written in 2003 and expanded upon in 2015 and posted on Transcend Media Service’s, TMS, on September 26, 2022. 1. Definitions and Hypotheses: An Overview Definition: An empire is a transborder Center-Periphery system, in macro-space and in macro-time, with a culture legitimizing a structure of unequal exchange between center and periphery: economically, between exploiters and exploited, as inequity; militarily, between killers and victims, as enforcement; politically, between dominators and dominated, as repression; culturally, between alienators and alienated, as conditioning. Empires have different profiles. The US Empire has a complete configuration, articulated in a statement by a Pentagon planner: “The de facto role of the United States Armed Forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing”.[1] In other words, direct violence to protect...