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…