Category Archives: Civic Intelligence

Self-Governance plan of Sudan’s resistance committees

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Sudan’s resistance committees are still active – by necessity, because they are the only networks supporting the people of Sudan, taking care of public services while the state has failed nearly completely. We should support these democratic popular forces in whatever way possible.

In January 2022 the resistance committees of Khartoum state (the urban agglomeration of Khartoum, which holds between a third and half of Sudan’s population) published a Charter for the Establishment of People’s Authority. This charter is an open source document, and it leaves most specifics of the transitional governance structures open to be decided in a democratic way. But some of its principles reveal what self-governance coordinated by resistance committees may look like:

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Sudan – The Solution is Real Democracy

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Note: this article has appeared in African Arguments (Sudan: Revolutionary Reflections amid a Raging War) on May 5, 2023. A French version, more didactic and less politically engaged but otherwise substantially the same, appeared in the French edition of The Conversation (Soudan: la Transition Démocratique en Péril) on May 3, 2023.

The current fighting between military factions in Sudan must be seen against the backdrop of the Sudanese revolution that started in December 2018.

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Rêverie Politique

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This was my submission to an ‘Ideas Festival’ organized by the Full Circle in Brussels from 2-4 December 2022

The human species is like an organism in which each individual is a node connected in dynamic ways to other individual nodes. Like the cells in a body, together we form a super-organism: humanity.

We may wonder whether Agent Smith in the Matrix was right when he characterizes humanity as a cancer exhausting and ultimately destroying its natural environment.

Still and text from the Matrix, 1999
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The Sudanese Revolution

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Perspectives from Khartoum, March-April 2022

I have come to Khartoum for a cultural mapping. The European Union has decided to expand its support of the Sudanese cultural sector. The EU, wired to support the state of Sudan, has no partner to work with since the military coup of Oct 25, five months ago: it does not recognize the military government. After several months of efforts to help reconstitute a civilian government, the EU delegation in Sudan has decided to increase its assistance program towards the support of civil society. One of the components of civil society is the cultural sector, supported over the past years through EUNIC. I am glad that sometimes the European Union does use its money wisely. My goal is to help them invest strategically into the cultural sector, in a way that builds it up instead of making it dependent on external funding.

As a result I’m in an intense round of consultations with all kinds of actors in this sector. Artists, directors of private organizations, commercial or non-benefit, institutions, researchers… everybody is speaking about the political and economic crisis, and are thinking about what the cultural sector can do to contribute to an outcome. In the following I will present some of their views on the double failure of the state and the economy, and how they are reacting to this crisis now. But first an explanation about the current situation in Sudan.

El Mek Nimr avenue, Khartoum. Photo by author
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A Plan for the Future of Humanity

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The five posts below are the first of a new series called ‘A Plan for the Future’ which I’m publishing on substack. Please sign up here.

1. Time to replace the state

10 March 2022

The world is going up in flames, but our states are getting ready to fight each other. It is time we humans reorganize to get rid of our states. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change really pulls on the alarm bell, but our governments seem not to be listening. We should be radically cutting our emissions, reorganizing the global economy and preparing for extreme climate events. Instead, Western governments are rearming, getting ready to pump even more greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, reallocating funds to armies and warfare and doing nothing to curb the growing inequalities in the global economy.

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Le Somaliland, la démocratie africaine aux 30 ans d’isolement

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For the full article (in French) see The Conversation here. I also gave a 20-minute interview in French on the Belgian Radio programme ‘Au Bout du Jour’ by Eddy Caekelberghs on 28 Feb 2022 (link here)

Il y a trente ans, tandis que la Somalie sombrait dans la guerre civile, la partie nord-ouest du pays a fait sécession. Elle s’est déclarée indépendante sous le nom de Somaliland. Depuis, ce pays a construit un État, un ordre démocratique, sa propre monnaie et une économie. Il a surtout connu la paix, à la différence de la Somalie voisine.

Le Somaliland, grand comme la moitié de la France, est peuplé de trois à quatre millions de personnes. Il commande une position stratégique sur les rives sud du Golfe d’Aden, une des zones majeures du transit maritime mondial.

Depuis trente ans, ce pays cherche la reconnaissance diplomatique, en tant que bon voisin et en respectant les règles internationales. Pourtant, il n’est pas reconnu. Pourquoi ?

Le marché du bétail à Aynabo. Robert Kluijver, Fourni par l’auteur
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Humanitarian response to Afghanistan: to make us feel good or to support Afghans?

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Wed 15 September UPDATED ON 20 SEPTEMBER

Today I tried to send money by Western Union to a friend in Afghanistan. At their office on Louise square, Brussels, I was told that the Afghan government had banned transfers to the country. The director came to confirm that it had been a decision of the Taliban; the employee shook his head sadly in commiseration with the Afghans. Later I managed to transfer the amount on the company’s online platform. It was just not possible in dollars anymore, only in the local currency. That makes sense, because there are not so many dollars left in Afghanistan, and they are needed to buy things from abroad – such as food. Edit 10 November: my donation arrived in the Afghan bank but my friend had to come every day to stand in line, and each time he was told the money was there but they had no cash to pay him out. After three weeks I recalled the money and then sought out an Afghan money trader in Belgium that could send the money to my friend through the hawala system. Transfer costs are a bit lower than with Western Union and my friend could pick up the money from Kabul’s money market the same day.

The EU High Representative, Josep Borrell, said in a press statement this afternoon that a serious lessons learnt exercise was needed within the EU to reflect on the results of twenty years of statebuilding efforts. He also stated the EU should engage the new Taliban government (underlining it is not the same as recognizing them), overriding some member states who rather not even talk to the Taliban. He congratulated Europe on increasing the humanitarian aid available to Afghans to 200 million Euros. The Taliban government, in turn, yesterday thanked the world for the 1.2 billion USD pledged in Geneva to aid Afghanistan. But no European aid will be delivered through the Afghan government. The Ministries of Education, Health, Rural Development and others will have insufficient funds to confront the looming crisis.

A camp in the outskirts of Kabul for people displaced by the fighting in Southwest Afghanistan, visited in 2013. Photo by the author
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Understanding the current Somali political crisis

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Analysis by Robert Kluijver, April 28 2021
The crisis that is rocking Somalia now is caused by the unwillingness of President Farmajo, whose term ended on Feb 8, 2021, to allow a transition of power. If he continues to cling to the presidency, we may witness a disintegration of national security forces into clan-based militias that defend certain areas of Mogadishu, resulting in low to medium levels of armed conflict and permanent instability. The fragile political progress made over the past decade may unravel and the Somali economy may enter a phase of stagnation or decline. Mogadishu residents fleeing their homes to escape the fighting (60,000 to 100,000 on Sunday April 25, according to the UN) and the Al Shabaab attacks in Mogadishu on April 28 are a foreboding of what may come if this crisis is not rapidly resolved.

In the night of Tuesday to Wednesday 28 April, Farmaajo announced he would seek a new mandate from Parliament to solve the current political crisis through elections, overturning his earlier insistence that the extension of his mandate by two years, voted by the Lower House on 14 April, provided sufficient legitimacy for his rule. In the same speech he lashed out at his political opponents, accusing them of engineering the current crisis for their personal benefit. Far from conciliation, he did not suggest he would step down to allow a level playing field during the electoral process, which is a key demand of his opponents.

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The place of the Law in France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

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Today everybody, when speaking of Human Rights, thinks of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, with its 30 articles. But this declaration took its name, the principle of its existence and several of its articles from the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ established by the National Assembly of revolutionary France in August 1789. Prior to that there were other declarations of legal/constitutional nature specifying rights of men, notably the US Declaration of Independence (1776, co-written by Thomas Jefferson who also helped write the French Declaration), the English Bill of Rights (1689),  the 1215 Magna Carta and even King Cyrus’ cylinder (539 BC) which proclaimed the freedom of the Babylonian people. But the French declaration, as the name indicates, was the first to be specifically concerned with the rights of the individual human being and put these at the centre of the political system.

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Transnational Elite Theory: Understanding Hegemony in International Relations

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Abstract

To understand the interplay between international hegemony and the apparent loss of state sovereignty, it is necessary to reintroduce the transnational elite as a global actor. Hegemony, meaning leadership, is based on values. The transnational elite embodies these values and adapts them to the changing global context, integrating counter-hegemonic tendencies and establishing a consensus. That consensus is transmitted through the transnational elite members to domestic societies whose consent – active or passive – is required for socioeconomic reforms which benefit the transnational elite. The role of states as sites for political contestation and debate has decreased, as policy-making, supposedly of a technical/expert nature, is shifted to the inter-state level, leading to an increase in international regulatory regimes which are dominated by the transnational elites. Instead, the state is increasingly becoming an instrument to transmit and enforce the transnational consensus. While transnational values remain largely liberal and elite membership is accessible to anyone sharing them, the manner of establishing consent is increasingly authoritarian. This article retraces the concept of the transnational class in international relations theory and, through a case study of the Trilateral Commission, looks at how the transnational elite has evolved since the 1970s, and how it is integrating counterhegemonic pressures today, becoming increasingly powerful – as the rapidly growing income gap between rich and poor underscores.

Download pdf full text here

Submitted to Millenium Journal of International Studies