Dunia draws lessons from ten years of action-observation in contact with different socio-political and geo-cultural environments. The harsh and multipolar world calls for a new frame of reference for thought and action. Conceiving such a frame of reference implies an arduous and demanding effort of adaptation, in order to keep up with the shifting balance of power. Our agenda, modest though it may be, is being repositioned on the terrain of geopolitical conflict, strategic intelligence and information warfare. IT engineering, one of our core businesses, now fits into all three. A spirit of commitment and adventure is just one of the ingredients that our Franco-Argentine team is mobilizing as we move towards this new horizon.
“You have to choose: rest or be free”. Thucydides
Review
Launched around the Rio+20 Earth Summit during 2012, the Dunia communication platform set out first and foremost to equip civil society organizations, confronted with the challenges of sustainability and the geopolitical and geoeconomic power relations inherent to it, with the tools to exchange information and mobilize.
The projects of this first decade have confirmed (or invalidated) a number of initial premises, which we summarize here, leaving deliberately aside several secondary aspects.
- The IT platform and methodological tools, with a dual focus on efficiency and sovereignty, have fulfilled their operational goals satisfactorily, but remain sterile if there are no links with the strategic field. For civil or economic entities whose existence depends directly on these tools, awareness of the stakes is generally more immediate. But the effort remains anecdotal when organizations use it in a technical manner, with no desire to appropriate it, and no strategic ambition. Without overlooking the fact that the primary purpose of tools is to automate mental and communication tasks, information’s scope takes us far beyond this functional perimeter, and experimentation is all the more transformative when it connects with the strategic field, i.e. the creative link between objectives and the means deployed to take action.
- Information is indeed a new strategic asset, at the heart of collective action and the physiology of the 21st century. It underpins human activity and has changed the nature of power relations. Computing power, ubiquitous networks and software have all provided levers for equalizing power, offering the civilian world maneuvering capabilities that were previously difficult to imagine. This expansion, however, tends to mask another equally decisive use of information: that of gathering and developing the knowledge needed to compete in a national economies chessboard.
- The discovery of the power and resources of information has brought about a profound transformation of the economy and a movement of predation comparable to previous eras (maritime exploration, electricity, steam, fossil fuels). This movement outdoes the climate of economic warfare that prevailed until then, and extends its scope. Informational and cognitive dependence is emerging as one of the new faces of domination between players or between powers.
- The characterization of stakes and power relations is biased and misleading. As a result of ideological inertia and information battles, the way in which local and global issues are interpreted by many circles is often out of sync with reality. Such is the case with the commitment to climate protection, which masks a geo-economic war waged by the barons of feudal capitalism to control energy and development. This is true of a significant part of the European and UN agendas, and those of other international institutions, which cloak in a double language a move to weaken target societies. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, is less a defensive war provoked by NATO expansion than an offensive move to destabilize European security, part of a new kind of Cold War between Atlanticism and the Sino-Russian duo. Examples of this kind are legion, and are no exception to the rule.
This state of affairs is now sufficiently critical for Dunia to adopt a new roadmap. The recent breakdown of some of our partnerships has prompted us to make this commitment.
A 2.0 compass
The first area of evolution concerns our overall vision.
Over the past three decades, the world has been sliding towards a new state of conflict and instability, the description of which still eludes the vocabulary of history and strategy textbooks. The most striking feature is the systemic rivalry between the United States and China, with the planet’s center of gravity shifting towards Asia, against a backdrop of multipolar reconfiguration. Around this line of force, the Russian-Chinese couple is striving to fracture Western hegemony and split its monopoly into two sub-systems, by means of a protean war, at once geo-economic, geopolitical, technological and military.
Apart from multilateral comity, competition prevails between allied or rival states, which wage a systemic battle on all existing fronts. Totalitarianism has not let go of autocratic or democratic regimes, where mass persuasion techniques have pushed back the frontiers of social engineering. More and more evidence suggests that COVID-19 has been built up worldwide as a health psychosis, with the aim of extending the mechanisms of social control. The Western sphere is bending under the combined effect of these internal feudalisms, the action of protesting powers and a loss of faith in itself. The business world and civil society are both affected by this hardening, while at the same time playing an active part in its theater of operation. In France, these multiple variables, combined with successive renunciations to reform and budgetary mismanagement, inevitably herald a downgrading, just as Germany is experiencing the break-up of its energy model.
In this picture, the dominant dynamic is that of the omnipresence of power relations and predation, even if there are of course other explanatory factors. The inertia of reading grids and the obsolescence of analyses, the first obstacles to understanding reality, thus appear as two central problems. The spread of conflict has changed the nature of politics in democratic regimes. Altermondialism is torn between a conception of emancipation rooted in the false problem of the ecological crisis of civilization and the overcoming of relations of domination according to a dogmatic, post-national vision. Ironically, many civil networks and social movements have internalized the double language of feudal capitalism and its influence factories. On the other side of the spectrum, the fabric of production is held in the stranglehold of power confrontation and an irenic conception of liberalism, while many are in the throes of economic warfare and geo-economics offers a preferential route to power-building. These rapid changes have turned many earlier approaches into residual thinking.
One of Dunia‘s priorities is therefore to take part in this effort to renew these reading grids, on the basis of a non-ideological and realistic viewpoint.
Our work themes are as follows:
- The renewal of geostrategic and polemological frameworks for understanding the world.
- Systemic warfare in the age of integrated military, economic and information conflict.
- Cognitive warfare, influence and the strategic use of information.
- The art of combat for societies and their players in the face of multiple forms of violence, biopolitics and predation.
- The renewal of economic approaches in the age of the information society and competition.
The second axis of evolution is that of work sites and alliances.
The “unconventional” vision just outlined has already had a strong influence on the alliances sought by Dunia, as well as its working methods. Previous bonds of trust have been diluted or broken. Far beyond our particular case, it is clear to observe that the zeitgeist is busy ostracizing those who question the dominant thinking or embrace such a frame of reference on the periphery of a system that prefers to repress the disturbing reality of power relations or confine this approach to ultra-specialized circles (military, strategic community, university).
And yet, in theory, these themes concern a very large number of players. The underlying aim is to bring conflict back into the political arena, in the hope of regulating it and reducing its destructive potential. In practice, however, many actors operate in a fragmented way, due to the existence of cultural, identity and conceptual barriers, or even ideological barriers built on an offensive mode. And yet, it is at the very point of these boundaries that ideas and modes of action are often born that are in phase with the issues outlined above.
This last point should be seen in the context of Dunia‘s main collaborations to date. The results have been highly variable, due in part to ideological biases and the cohesion of upstream visions. When an action to be implemented is rooted more in ideology than in proven reality, it is all too predictable that it will achieve only limited results. Moreover, ideological conservatism is reinforced by the conforming effect of the collective or vested interests. The most virtuous partnerships, qualitatively speaking, and even on a small scale, were often those in which a real intellectual and conceptual investment was made on both sides, whether organizations or individuals, coupled with a criterion of being anchored in real needs.
Since the beginning of 2024, Dunia has been independent of any funding from philanthropic organizations. While this may have temporarily created a financial imbalance, it now gives to the project a greater freedom of manoeuvre, making it easier to commit to a new agenda. The Dunia micro-company was legally created in France in October 2023, with an expanded status.
These multiple steps led to a reorganization of Dunia‘s modus operandi.
- Maintain a professional activity based on IT engineering (infomanagement, design of information and communication systems), oriented towards SMEs, civil networks or institutions, always from the angle of technological sovereignty, a strategic approach and collective intelligence.
- Expand into training and consulting in the fields of strategic intelligence, information warfare and geopolitics.
- Nurture research and conceptual production (books, articles, translations) focused on the above-mentioned themes.
- Promote initiatives aimed at disseminating ideas and building networks (through meetings, webinars, training courses, etc.).
- Promote an ethic of action based on conceptual relevance, integrity, a spirit of adventure and intercultural dialogue.
Work in progress
- Publication and distribution of the book Una nueva era de confrontación informacional en América Latina (Ciccus, Argentina).
- Translation of the book La guerre économique au XXIe siècle (VA éditions).
- Writing in progress of Combattre en Amérique latine (present and historical look at combat cultures) with VA éditions.
- Writing in progress: Reconquérir le cybermonde and Contre-mémoires de l’usage du monde.
- Drafting of Itinéraires with Arnaud Blin and Gérard Chaliand.
- Production and networking: Communication et Influence, revue d’Intelligence économique (interview), revue Conflits (articles on Argentina), revue Sécurité globale (interview), revue Perspectives d’Amérique Latine (article on politico-informational wars in Latin America).
- Set up an information system to manage relations and communications for the Global Social Economy Forum.
- Preparation of symposium on “Distorting mirrors of violence in Latin America”.
- Thematic workshop on information warfare with the Institut de l’iconomie.
