At the end of 2024, the new president of the United States once again put Panama in the eye of the storm. The metaphor is not exaggerated. As a crossroad of major transnational flows and an unprecedented gateway between two oceans, Panama is today one of the points of contact between the two major…
A year is drawing to a close at the edge of the sixty centuries that separate us from the dawn of human history. A blink of an eye, if ever there was one, on which a retrospective view remains essential in order to discern the overall trends and look ahead. The last four years…
Initiated in 1999, the free trade agreement between Europe and Latin America now seems obsolete. Yet there is a need to unite the two sides of the Atlantic in the face of China’s power. But the war of standards and the intrusive power of NGOs are blocking the growth of power. The December…
It is an almost taken-for-granted idea that what we call the West is in relative decline. From an invincible West and a Europe controlling most of Asia or Africa in 1914, what remains today is a “de-Europeanized” configuration on a profoundly changed global chessboard. China and other powers have contributed to the design of…
Is ecology the world’s new totem? Eco-citizen responsibility and the ecological preaching broadcasted daily by the media seem to be melting into the great project of the Green New Deal, or even “green civilization”, displayed by the two great geopolitical powers of the moment. Virtually everyone is now turning their attention to this polysemous…
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…
Pluto and his cornucopia had dreamed of it. Information spread across the world like a prodigal and unlimited stream of immaterial resources accessible to everyone. Combined with the human hand and mind, the network and the microprocessor opened wide the door to the third industrial age and the information age. It was the inevitable…
Dunia’s contribution to a transversal reading of systematized contents of the Forum. 1. Methodology The present analysis is based on scientific methods of qualitative investigation. Stage 1: the reports of each session generated a primary verbatim (2,300 statements for the whole forum), structured according to four analysis categories, namely 1. main points raised;…
A crucible of ideological aspirations, internationalism is above all part of the relations of power on the international scene, in other words, in the confrontation between States, the main strategic entities on the world chessboard, but also of the relations between the peoples whose influence has increased tenfold over the last three decades thanks…
François Soulard – Dunia Platform Michel Volle – economist, Iconomy Institute Introduction For thirty years, the digital revolution has been breaking down the walls that have somehow kept contemporary economy in balance with rights and social justice. From inequalities, predation and new forms of dependency on network intelligence to the contradictions between automation, employment and…
Two years have passed since the 2019 electoral crisis in Bolivia. On October 20, 2019, the Andean country plunged into a chaotic situation that brought Evo Morales’s presidency to an end, which had begun in 2005. Contrary to many opinions consolidated throughout the continent and abroad, that crisis did not originate in a coup…
“Rather than being a cause of the late twentieth-century crisis, the Internet appears to have been a consequence of the breakdown of hierarchical power.” – Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, 2019. “There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances…
Social forums were born in 2001 as a dissenting aspiration against a globalizing wind that had been unleashed in the early 1990s. Wrapped in State-building and the model of liberal democracy, neoliberalism and its renewed forms of domination appeared without rivals at world level to mold a particularly homogenizing liberal order. The “end of…
The Internet and the digital space have driven a fantastic leap into a new era of communicational confrontation. Apart from certain libertarian ideological bases associated with the initial shaping of the Internet, it is a fact that the freedom that governs this space for exchange has also enabled the rise of a new architecture…
There is nothing new in saying that the region has a particularly intense level of communicational and media confrontation, to a certain extent comparable to levels seen in war contexts. The slogan “territory at peace” proclaimed in 2011 by the representatives of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union…
Brice Lalonde was the guest of GéoPragma on Tuesday, June 15, 2021. On the agenda: present a geopolitical inventory of the climate issue, at a time when a new IPCC alert highlights the negative acceleration of climate disturbances. Environmental activist and former French Minister for the Environment (1988-1992), Brice Lalonde was also executive coordinator…
This draft was written using the conceptual mapping of the Digital New Deal essays. The maps are generated by the tool Desmodo/Scrutari and available at desmographies2.desmodo.net/digital (thanks to Vincent Calame from Exemole for the technical support). By François Soulard, coordinator of the Dunia communication platform dunia.earth, member of the Forum for a New World Governance…
(Essay published in Digital New Deal of IT for Change, illustration by Kevin Ilango) The shockwaves of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought to the forefront the physiognomy of digitization. In the backdrop of a fragmented multilateral stage, the intensified use of digital technologies to support the post-pandemic recovery has come without sufficient awareness…
After forty years of computerization against a background of reconfiguration of the geopolitical spectrum, the broader question of developing a new interpretation grid for the current socio-technical system is now more urgent. Our economies are not only transformed by “digital” flows and networks. They are more widely affected by the combined effect of ubiquitous…
Five months since the onset of the pandemic, the concert of Nations displays a sharper image on the world stage. Driver of economic and social recession, the pandemic is phenomenally accelerating the political times and appears to be covering up the past with the future. Previous trends were in full view. In October 2019,…
The SARS-CoV-2 virus has put the weak global architecture in check and points to the importance of the social. Human mobility, viral spread and vulnerabilities are three key forces, acting faster than the political and the cultural. The information and electronic communication ecosystems are closely intertwined with this commotion. What role do these play?…
The expansion of the Internet and electronic communications, as new global interdependence and infrastructure of industrial economies, is well established. Networks of information exchange, the Internet has also set up a global commons which, like other commons, is involved in a fierce strategic dispute. Russia plans to start its own network in 2021 and…
Notwithstanding the “happy” globalization that appears to be called into question, information flows are nevertheless on the rise. Unopposed, they have laid and continue to lay a web of interdependence as tenuous as irreversible within societies. Both captives and cardinal points of this web, the media and more generally the producers of information have risen…
A new division of the world is under way. Whether it takes place on the surface with resounding clashes or in less comprehensible subterranean slides, many power relations and inter-dependencies are affected by this undercurrent on whose meaning and manifestations we must shed light. But this transition does not fail to put back the…
Cross-sectoral reflection on the knowledge gained in several meetings/processes held by the Department of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, National University of La Plata (Argentina) Three meetings supported by the Department of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (UNLP, Argentina) since 2015 have provided fruitful conceptual outcomes that could serve to nurture the actions of agricultural actors. These…
The fledgling global common of internet connectivity is increasingly embracing other human activities and penetrating strategic cultures. This is how digital resources are conceived and mobilized in any given society project. This strategic perspective, or more simply, the perception that every geocultural or sectoral sphere is formed from the internet, is no small thing.…
Buenos Aires. 1 March 2019. Space is the field of man’s strength, time is that of his weakness. -Spinoza. These are times of retreat and confusion in South America. A new geopolitical cycle can be seen in the domino effect that now has Venezuela in the eye of the emotional storm, after Brazil, Argentina,…
This question may seem overly broad or ambitious to be addressed in this short essay. But however briefly or incompletely, in a time of hyper-connectivity it is important to explore into this burning question. In a period of mass information, public opinions and social imaginaries have an impact on global feeling and governance, as a…
“The struggle against out own weaknesses (…) whatever difficulties the enemy may put in our way, this struggle against ourselves is the most difficult of all, both in the present and the future of our peoples.” – Amilcar Cabral (1966). “Our problem is not the problem of governance in cyberspace. Our problem is a problem…
The trajectory of a workers’ struggle that began in the trade union movement and worker-recovered factories in Argentina has led to a new debate about the global economy. Author: François Soulard, November 2016 The threat of climate change, the turbulence of global politics and the dénouement of forty years of expansion of neoliberal socioproductive…
Introduction The struggle against our own weaknesses (…) whatever the difficulties created by the enemy may be, this struggle against ourselves is the hardest, both in the present and in the future of our peoples. — Amilcar Cabral, Havana, 1966. From this moment on, each man must stand guard over his own life –…
Text of Laura Flanders originally published in The Next System. A personal introduction In the interest of full transparency, this essay is personal. When it comes to journalism, I’ve been on a career-long search for an effective, sustainable alternative to corporate mono-speak. In all that time, regular people have never had more communications capacity…
“The struggle against our own weaknesses (…) regardless of any difficulties created by our enemy, the struggle against ourselves is the hardest, both now and in the future of our people” – Amilcar Cabral, La Habana, 1966. The Internet and cyberspace have, in just 25 years, become a new strategic frontier for competition among powers…
“What times are these in which it is necessary to defend the obvious.” Bertolt Brecht Human migration, a vector of transformation and a symbolic manifestation of the globalized world, has gradually taken on a more compulsive and tragic aspect in recent years. We are seeing growth in national state police and security apparatus on a…
On the shock of the present, the narrowness of interpretative frameworks, and the communicational rape of the masses In the first half of the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World of his fear that the truth would be drowned in a sea of insignificant news and the desire for knowledge repressed.…
Let us summarize the red thread connecting various recent occurrences in Argentina and Brazil, occurrences that are only disconnected on the media surface. We are immersed in a significant process of change in the correlation of political forces pushing to reform the architecture of the State and the accumulation of wealth, a State that has…
Beyond its umbilical association with the vast global electronic territory, free software has established a solid home base, even an “adopted” homeland, in Latin America. Far from being a chauvinist derivation, this metaphor nevertheless proves to be realistic enough to illustrate the singular fertility that has developed over the last twenty years between the free…
The persistence of the global crisis and the risks of reconstitution of an even more virulent globalised capitalism in the coming decades require a faster understanding of the new geopolitical landscape and building critical thinking on the basis of emerging experiences. Latin America, a stakeholder of a true “change of era”, has actively embraced these…
As a result of the Anti-CFA Front’s initiative in Africa, on 11 February this year a series of actions will be undertaken in twenty-five countries and three continents to protest at financial colonialism and to debate new proposals. Could these be the seeds of an intercontinental front for a new financial and monetary system? Authors:…
We, communicators and activists committed to multiple emancipatory communication practices across different regions of the world, freely assembled in March 2015 in Tunis, on the occasion of the 4th World Forum on Free Media, organized as part of the World Social Forum 2015, Adopt this World Charter of Free Media, as the result of our…
Authors: François Soulard, Germà Pelayo “The river that carries everything away is called violent, but no one calls violent the bed that oppresses it” – Berthold Brecht “It is not the earth that moves this time, it is we, migrants. The migrants, all those people going through the many forms of human mobility, we are…
By Arnaud Blin (Center for Global Policy and Governance Studies (New York), author of The History of Terrorism with Gérard Chaliand.) François Soulard (Forum for a New World Governance (Buenos Aires), contributor to the Dictionary of World Governance) After several weeks of uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump’s foreign policy, in the space of a few days…
A contribution to the Social Internet Forum debates In the space of twenty-five years, cyberspace has raised the upper echelons of global power to become a geostrategic asset like other traditional spaces such as international waters, the atmosphere, and space. The speed with which it has ascended is unprecedented in history. Never before in times…
Globalization, a central phenomenon of our time, has made a surprising and tumultuous return to the agenda, judging by upheavals in various political arenas. There are those who herald a turn towards a post-liberal cycle, while others sound the death knell of economic globalization. Without losing sight of the gravity of the situation, we should…
“We must either invent or err” combatively claimed Venezuelan thinker Simón Rodríguez to inspire the liberators of the Latin American continent at the dawn of its first independence. This phrase gives a very clear idea of what awaits the hundreds of communicators, media, networks and activists meeting at the next World Forum of Free…