Just before walking into Valletta from the airport, I had done my due diligence and confirmed that that essential chain of providers of sustenance to wary travellers had also made its services available to pilgrims in Malta. But, this being Easter Sunday, all Lidls were closed.
Instead, walking through the center of a small settlement between the airport and Valetta, I came across a bakery selling delicious pastries which seemingly hadn’t made up their mind up as to whether they were Indian, eastern Mediterranean, or their own unique expression of flavour.
I sat down on the steps of the next door house, from where I could watch the drama unfold at the heavily attended religious service across the street, where participants were commemorating the death of their spiritual guide. Then, the bells started to chime, heavy fireworks were ignited, and, eventually, a procession left the house of worship, a number of carriers lifting their born-again god through the entrance of the building, under a subdued applause from the congregated masses.
Malta is small; just over half a million people, four times the size of Manhattan. But, a country with history disproportionally large for its size.
Malta is home to some of the oldest free-standing stone structures in the world, megalithic prehistoric temples that predate the pyramids, as well as grooves that resemble cart ruts, cut in stone, which some associate with a lost highly advanced civilisation. (That said, the temples in Malta are predated by some 6000 years by the ruins in Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.) The island also has, supposedly, a cave in which St. Paul took refuge, and another cave in which Odysseus was imprisoned for 7 years.
But many more made the islands their temporary home.
There’s the long history of the Knights Hospitaller, who settled on the island, preferring the climate of the islands to the colder weather up north. The church, the ‘Rotunda’ in Gozo is the worlds third highest unsupported dome, and is the spiritual seat of the Knights of Malta.
Maltese is a semitic language, originating with Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Turks raided the islands on a number of occasions, and in the mid 16th century enslaved the full population of Gozo, some 5000 people. Who were the forefathers of the current Gozitans? Maltese? Turks? Something else? Eventually, Napoleon captured the islands in 1798, but control was handed to the British in 1814, them adding the country to their string of colonies the world over. Only in 1964 did Malta regain its independence. But, control of the island is still murky; Investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered for her work investigating corruption in the country.
Then there’s the odd ‘Popeye village’, a fake town constructed as the set for the 1980 Popeye movie with Robin Williams.
The island is very cat-friendly. Signs warning drivers of cat-crossings remind you to make sure you drive carefully. Cats hang out around supermarket exists, knowing that shoppers occasionally will buy them cat food.
I am not quite sure how calming it is, knowing that I can die now that I have seen Naples. Surely, it would have been more prudent to hold off on seeing Naples for a while.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe coined the referenced phrase in a letter in 1787, when Naples was the capital of the Kingdom of Naples, when Italy still was a patchwork of nations, where he presumably referenced the city’s wealth, prosperity, and scenery. And, this also roughly coincided with the rediscovery of both Pompeii and Herculaneum, the two cities that were covered in ash after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD.
But, it seems that Goethe, and many years of recurring emphasis, has set my expectations a bit too high. Naples is a bit of a dump, trash everywhere, buildings falling apart, while Pompeii resembles many other Roman ruins.
In fairness, visiting the National Archeological Museum, in Naples, where the most impressive discoveries from Pompeii and Herculaneum were moved, it’s clear how spectacular the rediscovery of these two covered towns, in the 18th century, must have been. The level at which frescoes, paintings, sculptures, people, were preserved is astounding. But, in the formerly covered cities themselves, only some replicas of these finds remain, among, mostly, crumbling walls, making the original sites quite similar to many other Roman ruins around the Mediterranean.
Then, perhaps the one thing I was most looking forward to see, was the Alexander Mosaic. In Pompeii, a copy remains, in the place it was found, the House of the Faun, and experiencing just the copy of the mosaic, in its place, was, for me, grand; the mosaic is believed to be a copy of an early 3rd century BC Greek painting (now lost), which makes this depiction of Alexander the Great one of the few near-contemporary illustrations in existence. The original was moved to the museum, and this was the one object I was most looking forward to see with my own eyes… only to find a canvas of the mosaic, instead of the mosaic itself. Turns out the mosaic is being renovated. It’s ‘hiding’ behind the canvas, but wrapped in paper, so even my lifting the canvas meant I only saw a wrapped package hanging on the wall.
Another sad moment in Naples.
Incidentally, it was the Goethe who popularised the “vedi Napoli e poi muori” after whom the Goethe Institut is named, but it was probably not Goethe who came up with the phrase, borrowing it from the locals upon his visit.
Shortly before my visiting Naples, the city’s soccer team, once the home of Maradona, had just won some major prize, and they had put lipstick on the pig, with blue and white flags and streamers literally everywhere. But this, in a way, emphasised the somewhat dire state of the city. It’s often said that Maradona is revered like a saint in Naples, but I always figured this was a kind of Italian hyperbole. Except, it isn’t. Maradona is revered like a saint, in Naples.
Besides Maradona, Naples is also home, or the adopted home, to a host of foods recognised the world over, though not for all can the provenance be quite exactly pinned on the city. Yet, these include Neapolitan ice cream, Margarita pizza, limoncello, a bunch of sweet cakes, including the easter special pastiera, spaghetti ala puttanesca, and mozzarella di bufala.
I’ve taken to walking from and to the airports on this journey. This won’t work in every destination, but when it does, like in Naples, it allows me to pass through a number of socioeconomic strata, from the enclave that is the airport, through the crumbling periphery, to the propped-up center. And, in Naples, to the periphery again, as I was staying in a convent, with a crucified Christ above my bed, on the outskirts of town.
I arrived in Nice, close to midnight, only to have to fly out again by 10am.
Not that this was planned, though.
My host in Nice, a lovely lady with a curious old cat that went by Pistache, apologized multiple times for my misfortune in travel. She had prepared a list of things to sea, do, and eat, including the pan bagnat, a kind of salade Nicoise on bread. But with my planned 2-day stay reduced to a night’s sleep, there was little time to try anything.
Leaving her apartment in the morning, still dark, I was surprised the city was already waking up. At a fish market, where surrounding shops, bakers, butchers, were already getting ready for business, I managed to get the sandwich I had gotten my hopes up for, before the sun had even risen. And when the sun did rise, a few minutes later, the square, and the market, was in full swing, and I was digging in to my pan.
Virginia, my host, told me that the temperatures were exceptionally low for the time of year. And it was indeed fresh, at 5 degrees celsius during the night. Yet, at sunrise, a few handful of people were already in the water.
After arriving in Lisbon, leaving Humberto Delgado Airport, perhaps close to 100 Easyjet employees were demonstrating for better treatment by their company. There is not enough worker action in the world, so I warmly supported their efforts. Even when, on the evening on my second day in Lisbon, this meant that I was told that my early morning flight, the next day, was cancelled, due to ‘industrial action’.
More power to the strikers. But, did this put me in a bit of a pickle.
EasyJet pointed me to a webportal (clearly not their first time) for the sole purpose of facilitating cancelled flights. You enter, select the flight that needs attention, and then select either alternative flights, your money back, or a voucher.
I was flying to Nice, and, two days later, onwards to Naples. A voucher or my money back was not an option. Instead, I was given two alternatives for flights, on the same day. Direct flights, though with TAP. But, upon selection, neither flight turned out to be available. Nor was I given the option of picking an indirect flight. And neither were there any flights available the next day.
There was a flight two days later, arriving in Nice after my scheduled departure for Naples.
This was starting to become tricky.
Very sadly, international rail travel in Europe is still not very mature. It’s mostly slow and very expensive (from Lisbon to Nice, 6 trains, or one bus and two trains via Paris). The bus connection is an unpleasant option, at 32 hours in very cramped quarters. But, EasyJet offered, or, probably, is required to offer, flights from any other airport in the same departing country, to any other airport in the destination country.
Porto to Nice was also not available, but Lisbon to Marseille was. But only towards the end of the next day. A train could carry me from the airport in Marseille to Nice, with the expected arrival time in Nice close to midnight.
So then came the next day (I had to switch accommodation), and my flight to Marseille was delayed. Eventually by a good hour. I had put in some slack between the arrival at the airport in Marseille, and the train leaving, but this was going to cut it a bit close.
And then ‘Marseille airport train station’ turned out to be a 36 minute walk away from the airport. As I came out of the airport, my train was scheduled to leave 40 minutes later.
But there was more; At the train station, all trains turned out to be delayed. And I only was going to have a 15 minute gap between arriving in Marseille, and catching the TGV to Nice to begin with.
Still, I managed to get an earlier, delayed, train, which got me to Marseille’s main train station, with only minutes to spare.
So, I got to Nice, was welcomed by Virginia, and Pistache, with an ice tea. Woke up early, got myself a local delicacy, and walked to the airport in Nice.
A significant number of significant events in my life have been the result of chance occurrences. One such occurrence, though the resulting event is still waiting to be significant, is a call for proposals which my WLC colleague Andrew Stuck sent over late last year, for a 1-month residency in northern Sweden.
I responded with the idea of constructing an immersive soundwalk as a murder mystery, where those listening were going to use bone-conducting headphones to navigate through the space in which the piece was set. The requirement for the call was to use AR or VR, so I thought my proposal appropriate.
They liked the idea, but the proposal needed to also be consumable within their gallery, a shipping container that is going to travel the Swedish countryside.
As an alternative, I proposed an experience where the public, sitting in a chair in the gallery, would look through a virtual window, where, in turn, a number of vistas would unfold and where I, for each of these, at some point would briefly walk through the scene. First from right to left, then, halfway through the video, ‘arriving’ at the venue itself, and then walking from left to right, returning home.
They liked that idea too, and so now I’m sitting at the Viracopos Airport, São Paulo’s third international airport, on my way to Europe, where I will do some walking in cities and countries that will take me on a crab walk to northern Sweden, and the town of Moskosel.
At some point, the parameters of the exhibition space changed again somewhat, which will mean that my work is likely to become more immersive, less physical. On the one hand, that is going to be interesting, but perhaps also a bit more of a challenge, and, in a way, also more VR, and less AR. I am not a big believer in VR, but also very strongly feel that (good) AR is going to change the world, perhaps as early as this year, with the expected introduction of Apple Glasses.
My plans go much further than ‘just’ an immersive AR/VR experience in a gallery that will tour the Swedish countryside. And, these plans involve some fairly cutting edge, if already immensely popular, technologies, while using them in a quite conventional, but uncommon, context.
I’m keeping the details a bit close to my chest, for now, and if I manage to pull this off, the result, I intend and hope, will question the meaning of human creativity in this day and age. Indeed, a bit ambitious, and I’m a bit anxious, too.
On a lighter note, I will also upload one photo a day to a Flickr album, In which I Go For a Walk.
My journey will take two full months, 15 flights, and visits to 12 countries, only one of which I have not visited before, even if I nearly was able to touch it, from the other bank of a certain river in Jordan.
One practical challenge I will face is this: Even long-haul flights now no longer appear to include check-in luggage, and Europe’s budget airlines not even include hand luggage. So, I’m traveling with a ‘personal item’ only. It feels appropriate, in an age where extravagance and minimalism live side by side.
So, here I am, at the start of this journey, in which I go for a walk.
We had planned the last stop on our trip to be Santiago, where we were expecting to spend the new year. Instead, an old friend got wind of our visit, and invited us to stay with them. In Santiago, but also in El Quisco, where she was going to spend the new year with her mom. The chance for a wonderful reunion with a beautiful view was impossible to turn down. We were spending the new year on the shores of the Pacific.
It’s typically Valparaiso that is associated with the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, a diplomat and politician, a communist, and winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. He indeed had a house in Valparaiso, but also in Santiago, as well as in the nearby El Quisco, where we were staying, a mere stone’s throw away from Neruda’s house.
Well respected both politically and literarily, more recently, Neruda has become a somewhat more controversial figure. Not unjustified, particularly in the light of a rape he confessed to in posthumously published memoirs. Even if we can’t expect anyone to be flawless, the legacy of any individual is the amalgamation of their life’s work, both good and bad. To me, this should at least mean that the tours you can experience in his three houses, showing perhaps surprising wealt for a communist, which focus more on the man than on his literary work, should also feature his flaws. At the moment, the way in which Neruda is characterised feels a bit too much like the telling of a hagiography, with Neruda being larger than life in every way. This kind of characterisation makes me highly suspicious, at best, and mistrustful, at worst. Recognising the negative sides of Neruda would certainly make Neruda more human, and could result in a deeper understanding of his work.
One of Neruda’s more well known poems is Walking Around a, mostly, narrative poem in which Neruda relates to himself, and his role in society, by reflecting on the world around him.
Neruda was a communist who put his money where his mouth was; In the late 1930s, while a diplomat, he facilitated the immigration, to Chile, of some 2000 refugees from Franco’s Spain. In 1948, the then-president of Chile outlawed communism and issued a warrant for Neruda’s arrest, though Neruda managed to escape to Argentina, returning after three years and, eventually, taking up the role of close advisor to Salvador Allende.
Given Neruda’s convictions as an individual, it’s easy to see Walking Around as an accusation against the commercialisation of society, against materialism, against industrial exploitation, even against the exploitation of capitalism.
But, also, the general feeling which the poem evokes is perhaps one of futility. That is, Neruda doesn’t seem to believe he can meaningfully fight against this pervasiveness of abuse, his individual actions being doomed to succeed on a societal level.
Neruda passed away of cancer shortly after the coup that ousted Allende and which installed Pinochet, heralding the age of neoliberalism and, eventually, the capitalist exploitation of the masses after the end of the Cold War, culminating in the record profits and stagnating salaries we see today.
Perhaps Neruda was right in recognising this futility.
On the other hand, on the first day of the new year, we saw the new president of Brazil be handed the presidential sash by a diverse group of Brazilians, representing the cultural and societal richness of not only this country, but the whole world. The sash went from pair of hands to pair of hands, until the last one in line hung the ribbon around the new president’s neck. Lula’s electoral victory was perhaps uncomfortably narrow, but still meant that millions more voted for him, as opposed to the incumbent, something unprecedented in Brazilian history.
As during his previous two mandates, Lula will pursue a strong pro-poor agenda, and will complement this with policies of emancipation targeting the underrepresented in society, most notably the indigenous population, with one major feature the complete block on cutting down the Amazonian forest. Neruda would have felt strengthened in his convictions.
Our last night was spent in Santiago, of which I have fond memories, after having had to stay there for a while as a consequence of being deported from Brazil a bunch of years ago. We found it still a lovely city, if a bit quiet during the extra long weekend around the new year celebrations. But we also found seemingly much more poverty than the last time we visited.
On the up, walking around town, we stumbled upon a rap battle between rivalling rap gangs, and a very rowdy queer catwalk. And a vegan restaurant selling a meat- and dairy-free version of the seminal Chilean dish, chorrillana.
When we crossed into Chile from Argentina, we were asked for our vaccination cards. The only time on our trip this happened. We didn’t ask what would have occurred if we had had no proof of vaccination on us.
Osorno, the town we were heading to, is not the most interesting architectural gem, even if their central cathedral is impressive. It’s brutalist, and almost has a filigree feel to it.
At the same time, some, at least our host in Santiago, consider Osorno the ugliest town in Chile. Though this felt to me like a bit of a stretch.
What is surprising that, although the city was founded as far back as 1558, there is very little of historical Osorno left. You can visit the tiny remnants of an old fort, in a nearly forgotten corner of the city, but the fort is cut in half, and could easily have been a modern afterthought.
Yet there is some real history in the area. After fighting over control of the land, which included clashes between the Spanish and the Dutch, as well as the Spanish and the indigenous Huilliche, the area became an independent indigenous territory, inaccessible to the Spanish, which lead to speculation that the area contained the mythical ‘city of the caesars, a local Eldorado.
The origin of that myth is likely to have been an amalgamation of a collection of tall tales connected to the colonisation of the area, with one important trigger perhaps being the indigenous telling sailors about the Incan empire to the north.
After the area opened up again in the late 18th century, the Spanish moved in fast, purchasing the land from the indigenous population. An important economic driver, even today, livestock grazing, was founded predominantly by Basque immigrants. Then, in the second half of the 19th century, the government encouraged German immigration, of which the presence is still strong, and which drove the beer industry in Chile’s south.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the city was the large number of birds of prey, hawks perhaps, who were occupying the downtown area, behaving more like pigeons than predators.
We had to rush on; we had wanted to celebrate the new year in Santiago, which was still a night bus away.
Like manufacturing, travel has succumbed to the joys of the just-in-time supply chain. Availability of transport and accommodation is tightly matched to demand. For the same reason that last minute travel has disappeared, as there are now only unexpected surpluses due to unexpected events, like, say, a terrorist attack, waiting with booking anything has become more and more risky.
Our three week journey was going to be on a tight schedule. I had wanted to visit Welsh Argentina, but we forwent that, when we discovered a direct connection between El Calafate and Bariloche, over 1000km apart in a straight line. It meant skipping two, or three, stops, but also changed our schedule from ‘impossible’ to just ‘very tight’.
I was aware of the economic challenges Argentina was, once more, going through, but contrary to the last time, I had not seen any mentioning of a parallel money market. Yet, when I booked the ticket between El Calafate and Bariloche online, the only one on our journey both originating and terminating in Argentina, I balked at the price, while also surprised that no tickets yet had been booked on the bus we were wanting to take.
But, with this connection only running every few days, our options were going to be limited. I bit the bullet and bought the ticket.
On the plus side, we were going to have two seats on the top deck, at the front, and the bus was ‘leito’, meaning the seats are supposed to fold back to a comfortable almost horizontal position.
Then, of course, in passing, in Ushuaia, we learnt that also during this economic downturn, the ‘blue dollar’ existed, that is, the unofficial street rate for foreign currency that’s only just short of being official, but also makes a difference of nearly 100% of the official rate.
So, the price I paid for our ticket, at the official rate, was double the street price.
Then, as we entered the bus, we found that the bus wasn’t actually ‘leito’, with seats only folding partially. And, where I had expected meal service on board, something that was common only 8 years ago, we got a grand total of zero snacks during our 28 hour journey.
Saving grace, hopefully, was going to be the scenery, said to be stunning on route 40, connecting the far north with the Deep South, and coming in at over 5000 kilometres. But, though interesting, the majority of it was pampa, or steppe. A bit… monotonous.
On the bus, two boys in the seats next to us were traveling around the region. Now, they were going fishing together in the Lake District not far from Bariloche. But, over the last months, they had been, on and off, part of a larger loosely connected group, maintaining and building trails in the national parks strewn throughout Argentina. Their chatter disclosed an alternate version of reality, in a way under the surface, disconnected from the regular tourist crowd, more reminiscent of backpacking before being in our now hyperconnected world. It sounded like, in their world, last minute travel might just still exist.
The town of Bariloche was nice enough. With a hammering of chocolate manufacturers and chalets everywhere, it felt like a lower-end version of some Swiss town, on the edge of a pretty Alpine lake.
We rented a bike to tour the shore and visit a few beaches, though the water was very fresh. The bicycle rental had a sign with posted prices for the next few months, heavily inflated for each next month, while previous months had been whited out.
This town’s name, El Calafate, comes from ‘caulk’, the material used to seal joints, but refers to a particular kind of berry that’s very common in the greater region. It’s even used to flavour beer from several breweries, including beer from at least four breweries in town.
The latter is testimony to how popular a tourist destination El Calafate is. Though with a bit of the feel of a border town, the central strip is very much developed, with fancy restaurants and cafes, and quite high prices.
The thing to see is the nearby glacier Perito Moreno. It’s inside a National Park, but you can just take a bus to get there. Getting up early to catch this bus on Christmas Day, we walked to the bus station, and found all bakeries and supermarkets closed, but also plenty of teenagers coming back from their very late-night parties, still consuming their beverages. Argentines party late.
Back in Puerto Natales, Natalia and I had gotten each other presents that we were going to give each other on Christmas Eve. I had gotten her a wooly hat, she had gotten me a homemade pepper. We used the pepper for the food we had on Christmas Eve. When I opened the jar, the pepper released a little cloud of smoke, and it started to rise, until it was overflowing, like a little volcano, unto our table. We ate as much as we could, but couldn’t internalise everything. Analysis made us suspect that an air bubble had been trapped in the jar which, at the higher altitude of El Calafate, had started to expend due to the lower air pressure.
The glacier is stunning, though you’re not allowed to get very close. Obviously immensely tempting, there are warnings against leaving the path everywhere. Apparently, before barriers were put up, dozens of people had died after being hit by pieces of the glacier falling down and then exploding on impact, either with the ground or the water.
The glacier is named after Francisco Pascasio ‘Perito’ Moreno, who was acquainted with Thomas Holdich, who walked the border between Argentina and Chile. The two men are linked via the work they did on the border commission, defining the separation between Argentina and Chile, but also via the rocky outcrop of ‘Piedra Holdich’, in Chubut province, where Moreno had inscribed, on a granite block, that he and Holdich had been there on the 29th April 1902.
As a ‘thank you’ for his part in the work on the border commission, Moreno, was given land in Patagonia and started to become known as ‘perito’ (meaning ‘expert’), for his work. Later, he donated land to his country, what is now the National Park of Nahuel Huapi, an area with a vast lake near Bariloche, where he eventually was buried.
Moreno himself had an English mother, and at some point managed to convince the Welsh community in Argentina to stay with the country, as opposed to allying themselves with Chile. Yes, there’s a Welsh community in Argentina.
Moreno traveled a lot within the region, and is by some considered the last witness to the Indian world before it was decimated. In his writings, he combined travel writing with his scientific exploration, perhaps being a kind of Gonzo scientist.
At some point, Moreno was captured during a conflict between Indians and the Argentine state. Sayhueque was the leader of all the Indian tribes in Patagonia, and he wanted to exchange Moreno for indigenous compatriots who had been captured. But many caciques, minor leaders, wanted Moreno dead. Sayhueque waited until after a particular feast would be over before making a decision, and Moreno knew that the whole tribe would get drunk on the apple-based alcohol which they brewed, a kind of chicha we later had in Osorno, in Chile. Moreno planned to escape by a raft built from willow tree trunks, down the nearby river.
Moreno got his guards to drink a mixture of some herbs and seeds he had been carrying with him, which he knew would send them to sleep. Moreno and his two Indian partners escaped by horse the next night in the dark, leaving his theodolite under a blanket as if it was his body asleep, and pulling branches behind him to rub out the horses hoof marks. After a week, running out of food, they saw camp smoke, fired the pistol he was still carrying, and unfurled an Argentinian flag he had kept under his military jacket. They were picked up by a patrol shortly after.
Our journey was not as adventurous. After El Calafate, we took a bus to Bariloche, much further north, which took over 28 hours.
Puerto Natales serves as the base for visiting the Torres del Paine National Park. The park’s iconic features are the three ‘blue towers’, ‘paine’ meaning ‘blue’ in an indigenous language.
Typical for the region, the weather can shift quickly. Though we were expecting high temperatures and a clear sky on the day of our trek, we started off with clouds and rain, with the towers not visible due to either fog or precipitation. This, while the night before, the day of our arrival, the weather was so gorgeous that locals were wearing flip flops, shorts, and shirts, while parading back and forth on the town’s promenade.
Puerto Natales is one of those towns which has internalised that global unified standard of what it means to be a hip tourist destination for the young, affluent, western backpacker; craft beer, good coffee, boutique restaurants, all in a kind of aspiration to serve the digital nomad. Yet, though we struggled to find eateries catering to locals, we did not fail.
The journey in to the park, with all the required expenses, small and large, becomes a wealth transfer from the global north to the global south, if we can take the liberty to include Chile in the global south, similar to how visiting Machu Picchu is also an assault on your wallet. But then, considering how curated the experience is, visiting the park does end up feeling a bit like it’s a Disneyland for hikers.
Technically, the mountains in Torres del Paine National Park are not part of the Andes, which is part of the reason why the greater region was part of a border dispute between Argentina and Chile, in the late 19th century.
By visiting the region, in a way, we were walking in the footsteps of Thomas Holdich, geographer and president of the Royal Geographic Society, who walked the border between the two countries a good 100 years ago.
The border between Chile and Argentina, in principle, was decided as being the watershed between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Rain falling on land draining into the Pacific meant the land was Chilean, land draining into the Atlantic belonged to Argentina. Except, by the end of the 19th century, it became clear that the natural border between the two countries, the Andes, not quite divided the countries in exactly this way as the mountain range approaches the far side of the continent. So, as a consequence, Chile, at the end of the 19th century, staked a claim to the Straight of Magellan, and, with a slow buildup in the following years, there was a real risk of the two countries going to war over this territorial dispute in the far south.
But, public opinion rose against this conflict, incidentally mostly led by women and women’s organisations, and a considered neutral third party was called in to decide. First, the British embassy, then King Edward VII, and, finally, Thomas Holdich, by then known for having settled somewhat comparable border disputes in Asia.
Holdich walked the entire length of the border between the two countries, passing through many places where no man, it was thought, had gone before; an expedition of exploration. As he traveled, Holdich studied the cultures of the two countries, and concluded that “Love of nature’s beauty seems to be inherent in the Chilean. Trees and flowers, clouds and sunsets, these things appeal to him just as imposing buildings, magnificent streets, miles of wharfage, and acres of whool-sheds appeal to the Argentine imagination.” At the time, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, with, at some point, perhaps even the highest GDP per capita. So, Holdich adopted this as his criteria. When there was a choice, scenic landscapes went to the Chileans, more fertile land went to the Argentines.
Edward VII announced the results, the countries accepted the decision, both stated they had been fairly treated, and reason had triumphed. War was averted, peace had prevailed.
To commemorate the process, a statue was commissioned and erected in 1904, on the border between the two countries, on the road between Mendoza and Santiago, Christ the Redeemer of the Andes. Except, the workers had, by accident, turned the orientation of the statue by 90 degrees and, instead of pointing south, Christ was pointing to Argentina, with his back to Chile.
Passions briefly flared, but a Chilean newspaperman calmed passions when writing that “The statue is placed as it should be. The people of Argentina need more watching over than the Chileans.” Amazingly, placated, both countries buried their arms, reduced the size of their armies, turned barracks into schools, and converted battleships for commercial purposes, signing an agreement that a permanent arbitrator, the British government, would settle all disputes between the two countries in the future.
Praised as a victory for peace, Peru and Bolivia, a few years later, settled a similar border dispute by also bringing in the Royal Geographic Society, and also settled their conflict amicably.
The long walk of Holdich had made a real, tangible, and meaningful difference in the world. And then, World War I.
Now, the continental deep south sees no conflict. Though talk of some kind of reparations for the small indigenous community that once lived here would not be out of order. Back in Ushuaia, in 2007, literally only 1 individual was still alive who descended from the indigenous population in the area, both countries having had a past of being quite careless with the original population of the continent.
For us, after a stunning hike up to the towers, and a perhaps even more stunning tour through the park, we settled down at the last Hope distillery, where, besides gin, they’re now waiting for their first whiskey to mature. I had a cocktail that tasted a bit like the spiced juice that pickles come in. It was great.
The distance from Ushuaia to Punta Arenas is a mere 250km, in a straight line. But, the two are separated by the Strait of Magellan, and to get from one to the other, by road, takes about 11 hours, including a surprisingly short ferry ride across the Strait.
Magellan, of course, was the first European to discover the strait and round the Americas, back in 1519. Magellan was killed, in 1521, on the same trip, in an anti-colonial conflict in The Philippines, but his expedition became the first known circumnavigation of the world. On an earlier trip, Magellan had visited present-day Malaysia, meaning he eventually just fell short of being the first known person to fully circumnavigate the globe. But, it’s likely to have been Magellan’s personal slave, Enrique, who hailed from Malaysia, and was with him on his expedition westward, who was the actual first known person to have circumnavigated the globe, in a way coming home shortly after Magellan’s death. (Though this is speculation, as there is no record of Enrique’s journey after being released from his service.)
After Magellan, Juan Sebastian Elcano captained the expedition, and eventually returned to Spain with one ship and a mere 18 men, out of the original 5 ships and 270 sailors. It then took an impressive 58 years for the next successful single circumnavigation to round the globe, this one led by Sir Francis Drake.
But Drake’s party was not the second to try. The Spanish mounted a second expedition, with the aim of circumnavigation, in 1525. Here, none of the seven ships completed the voyage. Successive chiefs of the expedition died, and some men eventually reached the Malaysian islands in 1526, only to be taken prisoner by the Portuguese. A few of the men eventually returned to Spain in 1536, via India, the Cape of Good Hope, and Portugal, completing the second (known) world circumnavigation in history. One of the only four survivors was Hans von Aachen, who was also one of the 18 survivors of Magellan’s expedition. Unstoppable, Maestre Anes, Master Hans, then joined a third exhibition to round the globe, in 1541, which also ended in failure, even though some of the sailors also eventually came back to Spain. Though not, it appears, Master Hans.
Where we found the area around Ushuaia surprisingly green and quite lush, particularly considering the land is covered in snow for many months of the year, as we left the southernmost city in the world, entered Chile and made our way to Punta Arenas, the land became flatter, browner, and more arid.
Punta arenas is the home of Gabriel Boric, the current president of Chile. He cut his political teeth as a student leader in Santiago, but served in the Chilean lower house as a representative of the Magallanes and Antarctic district, of which Punta Arenas is the capital.
On his father’s side, his family left the Austro-Hungarian empire just before the end of the 19th century, with his great grandfather said to have been one of the first 10 Croats to arrive in the region, him and his brother joining the gold rush to the south of the Beagle channel, across the water from Ushuaia. Exemplifying the ethnic diversity of the region, Boric’ mom is of Catalan descent.
As an aside, Boric is also the first Latin American head of state to have visible tattoos, including a map of the Magallanes Region.
There’s a substantial Croatian community in the south of both Chile and Argentina. One large driver was the early Croatian immigrant to Argentina, Nikola Mihanović, who by 1909 employed 5000 mostly Croatians from his native Dalmatia. However, he was based in Buenos Aires, far from the shores of Patagonia.
It was a second wave of Croatian immigrants to Argentina, an additional 15000 by 1939, who focused more on the south of the continent.
Then, after the Second World War, some 20000 political, instead of economical, migrants arrived in Argentina, coming from what was now Yugoslavia, initially predominantly working on Perron’s public works projects.
Now, Chile has the largest community of ethnic Croatians outside Europe and the US, coming in at some 400000 Chileans, or about 2% of the population. Compared, the much larger Brazil is estimated to only have some 40000 Croats.
Interestingly, as they first started migrating during the time when Austria-Hungary still existed, these immigrants were first registered as ‘Austrian’, then ‘Yugoslavian’, and now Croatian.
In Chile, they eventually settled at the two geographical extremes of the country, Patagonia and the Atacama in the far north, and were joined by a trickle of Croatians who first had gone to Argentina. It’s said that the geological features of southern Chile, with its many islands, resembles Dalmatia in Croatia.
Punta Arenas perhaps doesn’t carry the mystique of Ushuaia. And, spending a few days there, we could relate to this sentiment. Though it’s a ‘real’ city, with some pleasant late 19th century architecture, and has a population of over 100000 inhabitants, it’s also quite sleepy, and without geographical landmarks of note, even if it has a few impressive shipwrecks. Like Ushuaia, it’s a jump off point for the Antarctic, and for too much money you can visit one of the ‘nearby’ Penguin colonies, but that’s mostly it.
On his journey, when passing through the south of the continent, Magellan reported seeing and interacting with ‘giants’, describing them as 8-foot tall. Consensus, now, is that they met a relatively tall indigenous tribe, and that Magellan and his crew were embellishing their accounts. What is still ubiquitous, more so here, but in lesser extent also in Ushuaia and Puerto Natales, is depictions of striking body paintings of indigenous tribes as part of particular celebrations, participants decked out in minimal, but otherworldly dress.
Our last day in town was lovely; blue skies, warm, the sun shining brightly. Everyone had come out to play on the long corniche facing the strait, with many lounging in the public spaces littered around the town. I went for a bike ride to visit an open air museum which houses replicas of some famous ships, including Darwin’s Beagle. On the way back, I cycled though the Croatian suburb and the Croatian park, which has a statue of the Croatian cost of arms. Intriguing, as Croatia only became a country in 1991, long after the vast majority of those identifying as Croatian emigrated to Chile.
The deepest south, save for Antarctica itself, is on many bucket lists. It’s a kind of legendary, with the names Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego having almost mythical qualities.
Ushuaia is the self-styled southernmost city in the world. Even though it’s not even that far south, its distance from the equator being about the same as that for Belfast. There is still a long way to go south. There’s just not much more land between the fairly popular tourist town of Ushuaia, and Antarctica.
And there are even more settlements south of Ushuaia, though not in Argentina. They’re in Chile, with one, nearby, having some 1000 inhabitants, and another one, further afield, having a mere 100 or so. Arguably, Ushuaia is perhaps the southernmost city, but there are villages further south.
Somewhat similarly, a spot inside the Tierra del Fuego National Park low-key markets itself as the southernmost point you can drive to in the Americas. Except, you have to cross the Strait of Magellan to do so.
We had been looking at what to do for Christmas and new year. Flights everywhere have skyrocketed in price since the pandemic, meaning we were considering opting for an internal Brazilian flight, perhaps to the geographical center of the country, or the continent, and then to slowly head back home, by a series of bus connections.
But then I stumbled on a cheap flight all the way to the southern tip of the continent. However, this was paired with an eye wateringly expensive return trip. And without the inclusion of checked-in luggage.
Some digging resulted in finding more affordable flights, for a return trip, from Santiago, the capital of Chile, though those with even worse conditions, not allowing even hand luggage.
Still, a plan was hatched, and we were going to head south for Christmas and the new year.
In São Paulo, we just finished a week at 30 degrees, and on our stop over in Buenos Aires, it was going to be even warmer. Our destination, though at the height of summer, was going to be slightly fresher; taking into account the wind chill factor, it was going to feel like around 5 degrees upon arrival. Natalia was taking her mountain of a coat, nicknamed Michael (hee hee), itself a challenge due to our very limited luggage restrictions. Taking old clothes that we could discard along the way was going to help.
In Ushuaia, we discovered we were going to need many of those layers we had brought. Flying in, we could see plenty of snow on the mountains surrounding the city. And the low for the day that we were arriving was just 2 above zero, even though, with the sun out, the weather was quite lovely.
We walked from the airport to our accommodation, after which I walked up the mountains backing the city, visiting a nearby glacier and treating myself to a rather spectacular view of the town, as well as of the Beagle channel, the water separating Argentina from Chile.
Just as I arrived at the viewpoint, a hailstorm made it impossible to see anything for some 15 minutes. I waited it out under the umbrella I had wisely brought, after which the sun came out again.
It seems like every couple of years, Argentina is now going through a financial crisis (as well as a political one). The US and Europe are, now, moving closer to breaking point, with later stage capitalism capturing the political process, squeezing more and more out of the people and subverting the people’s potential for influencing the political and social future of the majority. But, with a backdrop of racialised colonialism, countries in Latin America have a long legacy of the white elite trampling on the indigenous, black, and coloured majorities.
In Argentina, successive presidents, flipping between left and right, have seen, as a rule of thumb, the right enrich themselves at the expense of the people, which the successive left then attempting resolve this in the next cycle. Currently, the leftist Vice President has just been sentenced to 6 years in jail by a judge favouring the right.
Either way, Argentina, like the last time I was here some 8 years ago, is going through a financial crisis. It’s amazing that the country still hasn’t fallen apart.
Last time, international money exchanges were restricted, resulting in an official exchange rate, and a street rate. Typically, this is a recipe for disaster, with last time the difference being over 50%. I was under the impression that, this time, there was no street rate, also because the country has even more tightly been integrated into the global financial system.
Our first few days, not having seen an exchange office, we had been paying by card. I had seen exchange rates posted, and was worried that, perhaps, the rate I was getting on my card was going to be less. But, not so.
Then, having a chat with a tour operator in Ushuaia, he offhandedly mentioned the street rate, the ‘blue dollar’, using the same term for it as the last time I visited, and things clicked into place.
We had thought prices high, but the street rate is, again, around double the official rate. From an expensive country, Argentina became reasonably affordable.
Our second day, I walked up to the Emerald Lake, an easy hike, and a very pretty lake. But though the region is relatively quiet in terms of tourism, those that do visit, all do the same trips.
Our last full day, Natalia finally was able to extract herself from work, and we spent a full day in the Tierra del Fuego National Park. Luckily, almost no rain, and gorgeous green settings. Also, somewhat surprisingly, very reminiscent of the Scottish highlands. Interestingly, the rocks and beaches all have a blue hue.
Taking a break, halfway down the route, a bird of prey kept us company. Three times, we fed it some snacks, and, each time, it took the bait and flew off with it, presumably bringing it to her nest to feed her offspring.
Brazil has several far flung World Heritage Sites. One of them is the old town of Goiás, in the state of Goiás. These names matching is no coincidence; the town was the capital of the state until the 1930s, with the population of the state being small, in Brazilian terms and, mostly, the only thing of importance in the state being the town. Goiânia, newly constructed, just a few hours away from the future capital of the country, took over the honours as the cultural and professional center of the state in 1937.
Founded by a Bandeirante, one of the Portuguese colonisers responsible for Brazil’s expansion westward, Goiás briefly flourished, mostly in the 18th century, because of nearby gold mines. As a consequence, the town strongly resembles other colonial settlements in the country which flourished around the same time, like Ouro Preto, and Paraty, though Goiás is quite sleepy. Even during a weekend, very few tourists show up.
A more recent claim to fame of the city is that it was the birthplace and home of the poet Cora Coralina, who only starting publishing her work at 75, and survived through pioneering the manufacturing and sale of crystallised sweets, for which the town is now well known. Strangely, Cora’s house museum spends very little time on either sweets or poems, but some of those sweets, which are sold throughout the town, are quite excellent. Though some others, like the crystallised cheese, are… an acquired taste… perhaps.
The height of the tourist season is the time around the Procession of the Fogaréu, when locals, dressed up like predecessors of the Ku Klux Klan, chase the devil out of the city.
We stayed on the edge of town, where a small lake contained a few scores of massive tambaqui, fish from the Amazon that can grow to be 30 kilos. They eat a kilo, each, per day, and we got to feed them, by hand, with fruits. When, afterwards, I was sitting on the jetty with one of my feet in the water, one of them started snacking on my toes. Thankfully, though there is some resemblance between tambaqui and piranhas, they have no teeth. Perhaps this could be a new kind of massage.
Goiás only has some 22000 inhabitants, whereas the capital Goiânia has over 1.5 million, with the metropolitan area adding another million. That city is quite green, but in contrast to the nearby Brasilia, is architecturally not very interesting, even if it has a few dozen remarkable enough art deco structures.
Goiânia is also somewhat notorious for the Goiânia accident, which reads like a true-crime novel with dramatic outcomes. In 1987, a forgotten radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital. It was then handled by a bunch of people, resulting in four deaths. Afterwards, over 110,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination with a few hundred of them coming up positive. Topsoil was removed from several sites, and a number of constructions were raised, with all objects within those houses seized and incinerated.
The culprit was not even 100 grams of the radioactive caesium-137.
One of the thieves at some point succeeded in puncturing the container that held the caesium with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created. He then scooped out some of the glowing substance, and tried to, crazily, ignite it, thinking it might be gunpowder.
He sold the container on to a scrapyard, where the owner of that yard also noticed the blue light and considered a supernatural source. Then, the material was handled by multiple individuals, before being sold off to another scrapyard. Only after more and more people had fallen ill, and some sought medical support, did a visiting medical physicist confirm the presence of radioactivity, with city, state, and national governments being alerted on the same day.
A month later, a six year old child who had played with some of the radioactive material, died of radiation poisoning and was buried inside a lead-lined fibreglass coffin in Goiânia. A total of 4 people died because of radiation poisoning, but many more were effected.
The capsule that contained the caesium is now on display in Rio de Janeiro.
Not that much excitement in the sleepy town of Goiás, and certainly not any of the radioactive kind. But we did have quite a lot of very good food. Not just some of the sweets, but also peixe na telha, a stewed fish served on a roof tile, and empadão goiano, a kind of soup in bread.
For Sound Walk September 2022, the main event organised by walk · listen · create was 30 Days of Prompts, a continuous, 30-day event, where participants were given two prompts per day, with the aim of exploring the urban space around them.
The platform, naturally, was going to be Dérive app, though I also published all 60 tasks on a dedicated Twitter account, in case having to install an app was going to put off too many people.
Signups were promising, but, in the end, participation was limited. Except that I myself, always a sucker for events resembling a photomarathon, made a point of completing the full exercise.
My original plan was to have the event consist of 30 prompts. I upped this to 60, one every 12 hours, but I found that this was not ideal. The darker 12 hours of each day make it difficult to complete tasks, and I often found myself completing two tasks in short succession during daytime, an argument for not two prompts a day, but just one.
For myself, I’d happily redo a similar event. The marathon nature makes it challenging, and its integration into day-to-day activities livens up the daily grind, while its long duration generates variety.
If you develop for WordPress, you’re bound to occasionally have to migrate the content of a WordPress website from one place to another.
The simplest approach is to ‘just’ copy the database to a new location, and then solve for problems arising at your website’s new location. However, if your origin installation is having hard-to-identify issues, you’ll also likely take these issues with you to the new location.
WordPress’ native export/import should be the clean solution for migrating content between WordPress installations, but, using this has so often not worked for me that I no longer even try; Imports often time out, and importing content in custom fields is even more of a challenge.
I very recently needed to migrate a bunch of websites out of a WordPress Multisite installation, into their own installations. Once, Multisite seemed like a good idea, but, things change, and Multisite is particularly top-heavy, while also not quite as well supported. So, once more, I had to shop around for a practical, reliable, and reasonably fast way for migrating content from one WordPress installation to another.
Also, although I was backing up the sites in this multisite installation with Updraft, I’ve found Updraft to be slow and not very reliable. And, either way, it backs up the whole underlying database, leaving me with the problem described above, when wanting to move content around and relying on Updraft as the source of the data to move. As an aside, Jetpack’s backup feature, though recently doubled in price, works well, but does not support multisite.
There is no shortage of plugins that claim to be able to do WordPress migrations. I tried a number of them, but avoided plugins for which I had to pay before being able to try them out. Considering that most of the free ones failed in what they are supposed to do, I expected that many of the paid ones were not going to be any better, not in the least because several of the paid ones are the ‘pro’ versions of their free counterparts.
However, I did find a plugin with which migrating content between WordPress installations was massively simplified. The plugin is WP Import Export Lite. There’s a pro version of the plugin, selling at 109 USD. I have not yet found the need to go with the pro version, but with the experience I’ve had, so far, I won’t hesitate to fork over this money, when needed.
Here’s the step-by-step process I used for migrating content from one WordPress installation (within multisite) to a standalone WordPress installation.
Perform a clean WordPress install.
To the clean install, add all plugins you need. Then activate, and configure them. If you use Wordfence, or the Jetpack firewall, be advised that, if you have put your install in a subfolder and you later change the subfolder (like when going ‘live’), you will probably need to update the Wordfence-created user.ini to reflect the change.
If you use custom post types, I typically use CPT UI, migrate your custom post types. CPT UI has a simple export/import feature for this.
If you use ACF, or ACF Pro, migrate your custom fields. ACF also has a simple export/import feature for this. In the past, I’ve also played around with Pods, but their functionality has been lagging behind, compared to ACF.
Migrate users, using WP Import Export Lite.
Consider including the ‘User role’ of each user.
Consider including the password for each user.
Consider migrating the ID to a ‘Legacy ID’ custom field.
Add custom fields. Some custom fields you might have to import to a temporary field, for processing in the target WordPress installation.
Migrate taxonomies, one taxonomy at a time, using WP Import Export Lite.
Migrate content, one post type at a time, using WP Import Export Lite.
You can include authors in the migration by including an export field which contains the email address of the author, and then using that to match the author by email, at the time of import.
Include the custom fields. Some might have to go to a temporary field, for processing in the target WordPress installation.
Configure menus, widgets, settings, etc.
Migrate your theme.
Notes
When exporting, make sure you include custom fields, if any.
If you include images in your export, set the step size to a low number, on import, to avoid timeouts. Perhaps just set it to ‘1’, to minimise the risk of timeouts.
One part of the migration which still needs some custom work, as far as I can tell, is when your custom fields, or post/taxonomy parents, reference other content by ID. The only way I can see in which this can be resolved, is by storing the old reference, as well as the old ID, with the imported content, and then writing a custom function, or using the REST API to rebuild these hierarchies, based on these imported, old, IDs. Storing the old ID with the imported data also is useful when you need to re-import the same data, as you can use that old ID to match the already imported records with the re-import.
WP Import Export Lite allows you to export the output of a PHP function which takes the value of a field. One way to use this, is to output an image URL, when an image ID is referenced.
WP Import Export Lite nicely imports images embedded in content, but I don’t believe these imports come with titles or captions, or other media-specific data. WordPress offers an export/import for media (as for other content), but exactly these imports often fail through timeouts. However, imports can be run multiple times, without the import generating duplicates, but this then ends up being a cumbersome process, particularly if your media library is large. This also complicates a situation where a custom field contains references to IDs of media objects. However, there’s another plugin, Moving Media Library, which seems to work well in moving the data of your media library. Pleasantly, the plugin allows for mapping old user IDs to new user IDs, even if you have to move the files yourself. Worse, custom fields are not migrated.
After two weeks in Portugal, Natalia had to face the real world, and head back to Brazil to get back to work. I did a quick jump to The Netherlands, to say hi to my mom, and followed that up with a month-long visit to Spain. For pleasure, but also because our European visit nicely worked together with the dates of the walking conference Walking Art and Relational Geographies, in the towns of Girona, Vic, and Olot, in north-eastern Spain, which I was very happy to attend, representing walk · listen · create.
After the conference, I made my way back to Lisbon, from where I was going to fly home a good month after having said goodbye to Natalia. Not direct, but, as a kind of cost-saving measure, via Luanda, Angola.
My first stop on this route was Barcelona. There, in my hostel, young US tourists, in two groups of around 40 kids each, got an extensive introduction on what it means to travel in Barcelona, and, by extension, Europe. They were ‘backpacking’ for 35 days, apparently together, very organised. The talks had a vibe, somewhat like an American introduction to some MLM scheme; too positive, fake sincerity. But the kids were lapping it up.
“In Europe, they don’t care too much for AC.”
“Ice cubes are hard to find.”
“You will be surprised that, sometimes, you will have to pay for using a toilet.”
My next stop was Pamplona, home of the running of the bulls. Accommodation was limited and very expensive. So, I took a night bus from Barcelona, which saw me arrive very early in the morning. The running of the bulls happens every day for a good week, in the early mornings. So, even with only one booked night in the city, I was able to attend two bull runs.
I arrived at 4am, and the streets were a mess, but already started to get busy. Everyone was wearing white and red, the ‘official’ colors of the festival, and lots of twenty somethings were sleeping off their hangovers all over town.
Before getting to the center, I walked on to the city walls to get a rather stunning view of the lower quarters of the town, slowly waking up under the early sunrise, a rooster repeatedly announcing the start of the day. I was hoping to grab a coffee somewhere, but the places that were open catered to the party goers who had survived the night.
At the start of the run, some two hours early, a few dozen revellers were already waiting for the event to begin. As were the bulls. The route is lined with wooden fences, creating a corridor for the bulls, and people, to run through, while also providing opportunities to escape.
To participate, all you need to do is stand in the street when the bulls start running. Then, it’s your call as to what to do next; you can start running, or just hop through the fence and get out of the way.
Near the end of the route, close to the bull arena, where the day’s bulls end up, and will suffer death in a bullfight later in the day, Red Cross staff was busying themselves to get ready.
A Twitch streamer was recording the proceedings, when another streamer showed up, with a significantly more elaborate collection of tech. They battled it out, Twitch style.
I settled in, on the edge of one of the fences, near the start, close to the Museo de Navarra, where someone thought they recognised me as a radio personality.
With just an hour to go, the streets were packed. Workers cleared the street with brooms and a leaf blower. The sun rose, the letters of the museum basked in a golden hue.
At 45 minutes before the start, loudspeakers started to proclaim a host of notices, ‘rules for the running of the bulls’. ‘Rucksacks are strictly forbidden’ (when running). “It is forbidden to remain in the central lane, unless it is intended to participate in the running of the bulls.” “The use of cameras, or recording equipment, whilst running, is forbidden.”
The vast majority of those remaining in the street are men. There are a handful of women.
Above the crowd, cameras are installed on ropes, able to follow the bulls as they rush through the street.
At 30 minutes before the start, a number of access points along the path were closed, in order to create safe spaces for the runners to escape to. As a consequence, I was kicked out of my spot. I left for the very start, where the first 70 meters or so were kept free of runners by security.
With perhaps 10 minutes to go, a few men in green, with sticks, or staffs, showed up. Some people applauded. They were going to be running after the bulls, hitting them with the sticks to keep them taking a break.
Then, it was getting noticeably quieter, until it was almost silent. With five minutes to go, the crowd started a song, repeating it 2 minutes later, and then again just before 8am.
Fireworks sounded, the bulls were released, and started running. A few had cowbells. The crowd went wild. Some, in the street, started running, other escaped immediately, some got hit, a corridor formed, the bulls ran through it.
In seconds, it’s over.
Then a second batch of bulls was released, but they just leisurely plodded on.
The bulls run to the arena, where, in the evening, they’ll be killed in a series of bull fights.
Perhaps 15 minutes after the run was over, I was in a bar getting breakfast, where I saw the replay of the run on television. I spotted myself in a corner, and noticed that many runners were hit, fell over, or ran into each other. I also saw the men in green, hitting the bulls from behind.
The whole event is, very literally, a spectacle, and exploited as such.
After a day’s hike to a nearby abandoned fort, in the evening, I checked out the bullpen at the start of the run, where workers were getting ready for the next day, and found the bulls were going to be herded into their enclosure. At 21:45, fireworks were lit, and fifteen minutes later, in a matter of seconds, the bulls ran by, into their pen.
The second morning I again attended the spectacle, but now from much more up close, on the edge of the central part of the corridor. The announcements started, the crowd sang, the fireworks went off, the bulls flashed by, the run was over.
In Bilbao, walking from the bus station to the center, I was surprised at how much the city reminded of Dublin.
The Guggenheim was a bit of a disappointment, and very busy; The art was a bit stale, the building surprisingly less impressive than I was expecting. There had been a recent controversy over a particular painting, which, according to news reports, was now on display with a disclaimer. However, when I found the painting, there was no disclaimer to be seen.
In the nearby port, a ‘flying ferry’ connects the two sides of the river. The ‘bridge’ is a World Heritage Site, and was built when the port was much more prominent. Now, the two sides of the river are sleepy tourist attractions.
I spent several hours around the bridge. Not once did a ship enter or leave the river.
In Portugalete on the western bank of the river, I stumbled upon a wedding party, fresh from the altar. On the steps of a municipal building, the newly weds were in the center of a half circle of attendees. Facing them, a young man, dressed in white with a green sash around his waist, was dancing to a flute and drum, in a style that reminded me of Irish step dancing. After each short song and performance, the crowd cheered and applauded.
In Burgos, my hotel was quite a bit out of the center. The caves outside of town, a world heritage site for their archeological discoveries of early man, are practically impossible to visit with no transport of your own, meaning I was limited to the associated museum in town.
Visiting the town of Segovia, for its aqueduct, I also check out the town’s cathedral, which has several ‘tapestry rooms’. Besides actual tapestries, it also shows off elaborate vests worn by bishops and priests. Essentially, these are tubular tapestries.
In Madrid, for the second time on this trip, I stumbled upon a monument to those who died during the COVID pandemic.
After an excellent night of drinking and eating with a local Dutch Hasher, my last of seven days in Madrid was recovery, celebrated with a wine tasting, joined by the same Dutch Hasher.
To take it easy afterwards, I finally went to the Prado, free during the last two hours of every day, to find a long, long queue, where, at the end, two staff of the museum were directing patrons where to queue up, making a snake around several corners.
Thankfully, it was mostly shade, as temperatures were reaching 40 degrees every day. So hot, that my iPhone refused to charge over 80%.
The town of Cáceres has a mix of Roman, Gothic, Moorish, and Spanish-Christian architecture. There’s also a cheese museum in honour of a famous local cheese, nearby.
For me, the highlight was the local museum, with bronze-age stelae, showing an artistic connection to ancient Scythian art, as well as perhaps some pre-Colombian art from the Americas.
From Cáceres to Évora, in Portugal, I took a Flixbus, the company that seems to have annihilated Eurolines. The passengers are not a tourist crowd; mostly East Asian, south Asian, and black. I got the impression they’re all working migrants.
The driver, Portuguese, is stressed out, or pretends to be. I’m reminded of when I once took the bus from Brussels to London, which was a chaos of tourists and migrants, with transport personnel severely understaffed, and migrants trying to stow away in the luggage compartment under the bus.
In the center of Évora, a Greek-style temple to Diana is the city’s piece de resistance, but the town is also a bit sedate. To keep myself busy, I rented a bike to cycle to some sights in the country side, megalithic structures, and a kind of Stonehenge. The heat, hills, and gravel roads made the 50km bike ride tough. And, on a downhill, a corner, shifting gravel, I made a nice somersault, and ate dirt.
Back in Lisbon, I staid at what is the closest I’ve seen in Europe to a Japanese pod hotel. A large number of Brazilians live in the hostel, while trying to make a living in the city. Perhaps half a dozen of them deliver for UberEats.
To get myself back to Brazil, I was flying TAAG, the National Airline of Angola, saving me about half the fare as compared to Natalia’s direct flight a month earlier. But it also meant I was going to have a 14 hour stopover in Luanda, for which I was told I was required to get a transit visa, something that only barely went well, taking eight days at the consulate in New York, back in June.
It wasn’t quite clear whether I would also need to meet regular entry requirements, which would mean that, after Angola had started requiring a negative COVID test again only a week before, I had to get a test in Lisbon.
In Luanda, however, it seemed that neither the immigration documentation I had had to fill in online, nor the COVID test, not the visa, were necessary at all. Everyone in transit was chaperoned through the airport in a way that saw them bypass immigration. But, I had also purposefully gotten my visa to be able to leave the airport and go for a walk. So, I headed out, and was stamped in.
A while later, I was stamped in.
So, it appears I hasn’t needed a visa. With the visa, I still didn’t need the COVID test, nor the documentation I had needed to procure online.
At 7:30 in the morning, Luanda was fairly quiet, fairly clean, fairly poor, but also quite accessible. Though finding a place to exchange money was a challenge.
Banks were not changing money, or rather, not the ones I visited. A little shop wanted to give a horrible rate, and I settled on a street exchanger, next to a Dia supermarket, a chain popular in Brazil and Portugal, giving me a terrible, but not horrible, exchange rate. As Visa, not MasterCard, was king, I needed the cash. The supermarket had a popular in-house cafe which sold sweet croissants of the brand name ‘Hungaro’.
Their in house cafe, very popular with locals and foreigners alike, had decent coffees and pasteis de nata, the signature Portuguese sweet.The supermarket had a popular in-house cafe which sold sweet croissants of the brand name ‘Hungaro’.
The city is fairly modern, with lots of modernist apartment buildings, moderately dilapidated, and, at times, a dash of Portuguese colonial architecture, hidden between bland facades.
The absolute unit of Luanda is the afrofuturist memorial to Augustino Neto, the father of the nation. The memorial is a multi pronged concrete needle pointing to the heavens, halfway between the new, mostly pink, parliament, and the shore. Both sides have an embossed star, and the structure is surrounded by a walled empty park where taking photos is not allowed. Walking into the monument, I was asked to pay 200 kwanza, and requested to wait 15 minutes, in case a group would form to join me on the guided visit. No one showed up, as no one had during the 20 minutes or so I had enjoyed the sea breeze on the monument’s steps. I got a private tour of the mausoleum.
Angola is well known for its corruption, particularly under the previous president, when the president’s daughter became the richest woman in Africa, on the back of oil revenues. Another consequence of that was the hyper development of a strip of land, a peninsula, in front of the capital. Or so I thought. This area had fairly recently been cleared of favelas, and in my mind’s eye, I had envisioned something resembling a Dubai in waiting. Not so; projects on the strip of land seemed, at best, partially under construction.
In my mind’s eye, this step resembled an African Dubai, and I’m sure I’ve seen photos claiming this tongue of lalla to be such.
Then, I had a lovely lunch at the nearby main post office, or perhaps what once was the main post office, walked over to check out Lenin Square, and headed back to the airport. It was time to go home.
With 5 friends from university, we spent a week in Lisbon to celebrate our, on average, turning 50, giving us a combined 300 years, or so, of revolutions around the sun.
Natalia and I followed this up with a visit to Porto, together with Benno and Gitta, and Natalia and I then went on to Coimbra, roughly halfway between Porto and Lisbon. Coimbra was an early capital of the country, has a large student population, and, it is said, together with some venues in Porto, modelled for a number of features cast into the world’s consciousness through the works of J.K. Rowling, who resided in Portugal when writing parts of the Harry Potter series.
In all three towns, we fell with our noses in butter.
In Lisbon and Porto, ‘Festa Junina’ was in full swing. Brazil also celebrates the saints around which these festivities take place, but in Brazil, June is winter, while in Portugal, we were baking in the sun almost everyday.
In Lisbon, the festivities were centred on the suburb of Alfama, the oldest neighbourhood of the city, where its name is derived from the Arabic for ‘hot fountains’, or ‘baths’, similar to the origin of the word ‘hammam’.
In Porto, as part of Festa Junina, we enjoyed the most important celebration of the year, the ‘Festa de São João’. Here, we let fly some paper lanterns, which required a collective effort, including the injection of local expertise. The day, with tens of thousands of people on the streets (and a surprising lack of public toilets), finished with an excessive fireworks show, which we were able to enjoy from the top floor of Benno and Gitta’s hotel.
In Coimbra, we managed to capture the last day of the city’s biennial. Held, mostly, in a large monastery, the installations were perhaps not spectacular, the venue certainly was. And we had fun singing Frank Sinatra songs in the building’s empty cistern.
The societal contrast between Portugal and the US, where we had just spent some four months, was stark. Friendly, sociable, pretty, superb food, affordable, it was an excellent place to recover.
The Nieman fellowship which my wife received to study at Harvard was so generous, it extended to her partner. This meant that, after COVID moved our year abroad from the 2020/21 academic year to the 2021/22 academic year, we were set to get ourselves to Cambridge in August of last year.
Like Natalia, while waiting for my visa, if it would come, I was still able to follow any class I wanted. However, though during 2020/21, pretty much all classes had been online, for the 2021/22 year, almost no classes were. So, this one year fellowship, for me, was quickly proving to be almost dead in the water.
Almost: The Harvard Extension School, kind of like a hodgepodge of all of Harvard’s classes, is set up to consume its classes remotely, online.
Access to information at Harvard, as well as the Nieman foundation, isn’t quite always as easy or obvious, which meant we only found out about the Harvard Extension School, shortly before the deadline for picking classes. As a result, I only managed to get one class in, in my first semester.
Yet, this class, lead by the excellent Bakhtiar Mikhak, was a joy. With a focus on digital prototyping using modern design tools, I enjoyed it so much, I enrolled in the follow up class, during the second semester, in which students expand their digital prototype into a working product. More, we got along so well that I ended up getting a speaking part in the summer school version of the first class.
I used both these classes to rethink Dérive app, which resulted in a completely updated interface for the app, new functionality, with more on the horizon.
Natalia and I being apart for months, we spent our autumn break together in Costa Rica, privileged to be able to stay with great friends. For Christmas and new year, Natalia came back to Brazil, when we both ended up with COVID. And then, close to when Natalia was set to return to the US for the year’s second semester, the American consulate contacted us to say it was time for me to move to the next stage of my visa-application procedure. This was promising, and unexpected, and after a first visit, it turned out that, indeed, the US government had chosen, in all their magnanimity, to issue me a student visa, after all.
Wonderful news indeed; I was finally going to be able to get a whiff of the famous Cambridge smells, and meet the fellow fellows of Natalia. Wonderful, but the deadline to select classes for the second semester had already passed, which meant that, although I was now going to spend some three and a half months in Cambridge, all my classes were still going to be online.
Also, as I had decided to get as much out of this opportunity as possible, I had signed up for 5 classes. And I participated in an unofficial creative writing class with a former Harvard professor, and granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. And though, as fellows and affiliates, we supposedly were only allowed to audit classes, meaning we were allowed to sit in class and listen, not do any of the assignments, I had managed to sign up as a graduate or undergraduate for my classes, which meant I was expected to do all the necessary work. Sure, there would be no real consequences if I didn’t, but I had signed up to learn, not to faff around. It was going to be busy for me.
All classes ended up being a lot of fun, some more than others. For all, the workload was immense, unreasonably so. For two of my classes, I had to read a total of around 12 books, over a period of about 3 months. Adding to that the papers I had to write, and all the work I still had to do for the other classes I was following, it meant I was feeling the brunt of elitist education. Indeed, these insane workloads are par for the, haha, course. Virtually all Harvard classes are intense, and it’s a common complaint that professors assign too much. Odd, as this makes it very difficult for students to internalise the material, and it makes it nearly impossible, to properly synthesise the contents, and to critically respond to claims, theories, and ideas.
Three of my classes were on global politics, with a focus on populism, cyberpolitics, and the governance and politics of world regions. For each of these, because of my own pre-existing knowledge and expertise, I arrived to these classes not as a tabula rasa, but with opinions and some decent knowledge, allowing me to not completely be overwhelmed, as well as to challenge many of the students, and be challenged, at an excellent level, by the presiding professors.
The outcomes were great. I had fun writing papers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) which were well received, and saw Dérive app spill over in to the real world. The latter through two interventions, one after a conceptual discussion with Bakhtiar, the other as part of one of my other classes, in which half the students were from MIT (and myself), and the other half were juvenile inmates in a correctional facility in Maine. The latter saw the creation of a collaborative deck of task cards, the former culminated in an intervention in Brooklyn and Manhattan, using Little Free Libraries as a vehicle for distribution of Dérive app task cards.
A lot of fun, though I was also expecting more from this time at Harvard, in part due to the perceived legendary status of this educational institution. Harvard is considered the cream of the crop, if not the best university to attend. Instead, I found, and other foreigners I talked to about this found this too, a good university that’s immensely overpriced. ‘Good’, but comparable to many other educational institutions. And perhaps for its sense of exceptionalism (more on that below), not always actually the best.
Meanwhile, Natalia and I spent the little free time we had as well as we could. We didn’t nearly travel as much as we would have liked, but New York featured twice on our visits, as did trips to Salem, and Portland in Maine. But hopes of going further afield had to be abandoned; there simply wasn’t enough time, while everything, everything(!), was also painfully expensive; Dinner for two in a not exceptionally expensive restaurant can run up to the equivalent of the Brazilian monthly minimum wage. We steered clear of these absurdity, meaning we developed a love for readymade soups from the Daily Table, and others.
But wait, there’s more!
I could have divided up this article into three sections, the “good”, “bad”, and “ugly”. The above was (mostly) the “good”, but where the “bad” ends and the “ugly” starts is harder to determine. And, a lot of the “good” is intrinsically connected to both the “bad” and “ugly”, while quite a bit of the “good” appears to currently be breaking down, with the “bad” and “ugly” slipping below what have apparently been acceptable levels, due to the world’s dominant economic model becoming more and more exploitative, in part exposed by challenges posed by the COVID pandemic, on a backdrop of a new gilded age, facilitated by scorched earth capitalism.
Boston, and Cambridge more so, are very wealthy. Both towns are lovely, almost sedate, very green, quiet, well kept, well organised, liberal. Also, New Englanders secretly want to be English, perhaps British. Secretly, because of that whole Tea Party thing, which played out around Boston, with Boston cemeteries still actively identifying deceased who were involved in that uprising against colonial masters. People are friendly and educated, there is very little of the dark, and very large, underbelly of the central feature of the United States, exploitative, late-stage capitalism.
But, if you know where to look, Boston isn’t quite immune to the capitalism’s dark side. One day I cycled down to a nearby town to visit the first and oldest Dunkin’ Donuts (which, incidentally, was closed). On my way back, I passed an area of Boston which resembled Cracolândia, the few dystopian blocks in downtown São Paulo, where homeless drug addicts roam the streets. Admitted, the Boston version was smaller, but they were also openly injecting drugs into their arms.
Still, in the end, my experience in the US was better than I had expected; I simply was assuming I was going to be much more confronted with the societal horrors of unbridled capitalism. New England’s agreeable context nicely shielded me from the worst. On the other hand, Natalia’s experience was worse than she expected; particularly the hyper-individualism, and the feigned, insincere, concerns, even, or perhaps even more so, in the academic circles we briefly got to roam around in, got to her.
When it was time to go, we had the advantage that we were able to stay in the house of a friend in Brooklyn for two weeks, which allowed us to wind down, and appreciate just how attractive the city that never sleeps, is. If you have the money, of course. Though public transport is pleasantly affordable, it’s also pretty much the only thing that is. Unless you shop at Goodwill, which we did. Juicy tidbit: Our friend is working on a documentary on Evo Morales and left the house to us while he headed to Bolivia. After a housewarming party, he ended up with COVID, which he discovered after arriving down south. A few days later, Evo also came down with COVID.
When we were in New York in March, the city felt quiet, mellow, clean, almost. Quite different from how it came across the first time I visited, just before 9/11. Now, I did not have the impression I was walking into a movie set, nor did the city’s inhabitants strike me as extras from some film I had stumbled into.
In part, this might have been because I no longer immerse myself much in American visual culture. That is, I watch few movies and little television. Another aspect must be that global culture has flattened rapidly over the last 25 years; everyone more and more shares the same cultural shorthand, a ‘nice’ cafe in New York pretty much is identical to a ‘nice’ cafe in Berlin, Delhi, or Tokyo.
Thankfully, it’s not quite that this flattening has been a one-way export of a certain, western, American, cultural standard. Though a lot is coming from America to the rest of the world, there’s also a reverse trend. For one, I couldn’t help but notice that downtown New York has gotten much more walkable, and there are lots of bike lanes, now, too. Like in Boston and Cambridge. Then again, many of the agreeable spaces that appear to be ‘public’, are in fact ‘public-private’, meaning that, when you do something which private security doesn’t like, or when you just look out of place, you can be kicked out without recourse. In a public-private space, you have no rights.
Also in New York in March, we stumbled upon a little shop, ‘Pepper Palace’, which had a huge range of pepper sauces. We tried the hottest pepper sauce in the house, a mix of the three hottest peppers in the world. After a careful taste, I felt nothing, so I went in for a drop or two. Only to, panicking, quickly leave the store, tears running down my cheeks. I considered violently throwing up on the curb, but failed. The experience was so crushing, I literally felt like I was going to die. So far, I haven’t.
When we discovered the shop was a chain, I had asked where they were located. “Oh, we’re all over the world!” Pleasantly surprised (and not yet dying), I asked in which countries they had branches. “Oh, Canada…”
A kind of jumble of other experiences:
Very early on, I noticed that the vast majority of rank-and-file workers in the hospitality sector are African American, or Asian immigrants. Boston has the largest community of Brazilians outside of Brazil. Many work in construction, home improvement, and cleaning. Weirdly, among them, there’s very strong support for Bolsonaro. While we were in the US, a newly established union at Starbucks underscored the abysmal context, and lack of security, “low-skilled” workers have to put up with. Also while in the US, Roe vs Wade (the ruling providing legal abortions) came apart. Starbucks came out to say it will cover abortion travel… for those not unionised.
Nothing is clearly priced. Often, things, in cafes and whatnot, are not priced at all. Starbucks (are they the devil?) recently moved to only listing the price of one of their three sizes of coffees on their announcement boards. Then, there’s always tax, and almost always a push for tipping, even when staff doesn’t leave their counter, and you’re expected to clean up after yourself, with the suggested low end now starting at 18%, sometimes higher.
Of course, minimum wage in the US is a joke. Tipping, for many in the hospitality sector, is the means through which they survive, if barely. There are plenty of drives for increasing the level of tipping, these same people apparently not realising that pushing the burden of providing a living wage to the consumer, also absolves the state from its responsibility.
In many places around the world, a type of hidden joblessness is identifiable through the large number of employees in some sectors of the economy. Restaurants and cafes in Brazil are one example. Because capitalism is all about optimization and continuous growth, I was not prepared to find here, too, many institutions and businesses deploying an overkill of staff, often many of them not doing value-added work. The many chaperones at airports and museums, for example.
Surveillance everywhere. At the Boston marathon, I went out to mile 20, where the Boston Hash House Harriers traditionally hand out beer to runners. Along the route, undercover, but obvious, FBI agents eyed everyone with suspicion. Or maybe they were just eying me. All of them.
Earlier, we had attended the largest, but very underwhelming, St. Patrick’s Day parade in the world. Pretending to resemble a carnival parade, it was mostly military, mostly Irish, frog marches before an ecstatic crowd, many very young, of Irish decent, taking the opportunity to drink in public. Not really allowed, but apparently tolerated during the parade, it also meant many kids emptying their guts violently along the route. The parade was a bore. Here, too, the undercover secret agents were obvious, though the public got their money’s worth; a group of Neo-Nazis, sporting a banner proclaiming that Boston should remain Irish, were arrested and removed from the scene.
The sense of American exceptionalism is strong. Surprisingly, for me, we also encountered this in the highly educated, and the well-traveled. I was expecting this, perhaps, in the younger American students in my classes, against which it was fun to push back. But, it was everywhere.
We thankfully had little interaction with representatives of the military-industrial complex, nor the prison-industrial complex. That said, one of my classes involved incarcerated juveniles, and on one occasion we attended a quiz night with a few higher-level military officers also studying at Harvard, including one person who had been stationed for a number of years in the Middle East, and who’s job it had been to plan assassinations, not thinking much of the ‘necessary’ civilian casualties this required. To justify his actions, he wanted us to think of the most corrupt Brazilian person, and how many regular civilians would be ok to murder, if that would also mean killing the corrupt Brazilian. Natalia (mostly internally) fumed. I was kind-of entertained, in the way it’s difficult to take your eyes of a train wreck, by this actualisation of American caricature.
Intellectually, one knows that Americans consume vasts amounts of… stuff. To see this in person was still jaw-dropping. The amount of plastic our basic shopping generated was baffling. The extent to which single-use plastic and paper is used, everywhere, is incredible. Waste, as a corollary to convenience, seemingly one of the pillars of America’s capitalism, is integral to American life. We were asked to keep our central heating running, in winter, when away for a few days, as otherwise the neighbours would end up having to turn up their heating to compensate for the heat leaking out of the building for its bad insulation. The house, like all others in our street, was a good 100 years old. Instead of a structural solution, insulation, they choose convenience, and waste.
Everything, or perhaps nearly everything, is seen through a racial lens. There are, very obviously, tons of problems around ‘race’, in the US. The disenfranchisement of the black population, the role of the GOP in politically sidetracking the same societal abuse, inequality, etc. But, ‘race’ also enters the discussion unwarranted. Or, it’s required that issues are to be seen through a racial lens, when there is no need for this. One contributor to this is the emphasis which is put on who is ‘black’, and who is not. Like how Obama, who is as white as he is black, is never called ‘white’. At the St. Patrick’s Day parade we attended, we were joined by a number of Natalia’s fellow fellows, including a couple which is black. I was talking to the woman of the two, and we were discussing the different groups of the parade; many were flavours of military, many were students, musicians, cheerleaders, etc. For me, the whole experience was anticlimactic, boring, uneventful. At some point, I mentioned that she must have seen ‘this’ su many times, my point being that, for her, this parade was one like many others, to which she responded affirmatively, but, to my ears, also a bit oddly. After a few seconds, I realised that what she was actually responding to was her thinking that I referred to the particular troupe that had just passed us by, a group of African-American kids who had done a cheerleader routine based around R&B music. To me, this particular troupe was just one of the many that had already passed by, and the many that were still to come, in no meaningful way different from all the others. Yet, for her, my comment could only have meant that I was referring to this particular group, of African-American girls, emphasising the racial aspect of this particular section of the parade.
Public transport in New York is great. In Boston it’s pretty good, and I’m sure that in several metropolitan areas, it’s not bad at all. But, on the whole, public transport is horrible. For some research, Natalia had to be in a small town some 40 minutes away… by car. It took her three hours to get there by public transport. Many small towns are not practically connected to a public transport network.
Sure, as with many of the troublesome features of ‘Murica, they are not unique to this country. Yet, most of these downsides are more typical of developing countries, not of countries that America, to a minor extent, considers its peers.
In the end, we had a nice time, though both of us were hoping, expecting, to get more out of this year at Harvard. Specifically in terms of making professional connections. I was crippled by my classes being online, and my being there for only three and a half months. Natalia found it particularly difficult to establish professional relationships with non-Brazilians. The interest, even courtesy, simply didn’t exist.
Now, both of us have a stronger, more negative, impression and understanding of the United States; how it operates internally, as well as the role it plays on the international stage. This, while neither of us was unfamiliar with US history, and even the personal affect this has had on our own lives, with my roots in Iran, and Natalia’s continent having been manipulated, for decades, by American foreign policy. ‘Americans’ can be pleasant, yes, but politically, professionally, I’m not sure redemption is possible. It’s perhaps a worn-out talking point of the International left, but, truly, the world is in the mess it is in primarily because of the role, attitude, and arrogance of the United States.
Our final two weeks in New York, were a pleasant winding down. This, followed by another two weeks in Portugal, a reunion with good friends, was re-energising.
I’m following a class at Harvard, on The Governance and International Politics of World Regions. I have to write a number of articles for this course, each connected to a particular class, also meaning each connected to a particular region. I had been keen on writing a response to the readings on Africa, but before that, the class on the Middle East demanded I put some thoughts on paper. Somewhat thankfully, the readings on Africa turned out to be primarily focused on the AU, meaning I didn’t think them that arousing.
But, as I also had to write a final, longer, paper, and because particularly West Africa, but not only West Africa, has been seeing a large number of coups in a short period of time, I decided that that was a worthy line of investigation to take for this final paper.
The text below looks at the recent series of coups in Africa, as well as some recent elections, and what outside forces, if any, are orchestrating, or involved in, these events, or their aftermaths.
Background
Already, the 2020s have seen a large number of coups, and coup attempts, in Africa; nine at the last count, and many in short succession. U.N. chief Antonio Guterres referenced this spate of coups, calling it, in late 2021, “an epidemic of coup d’états”.
Nevertheless, the 2010s also saw a good number of coups and attempts in Africa, 25 total, though these included those sparked by the Arab spring, and its aftermath.
The western mainstream media has reported that several of the coup leaders were trained by US forces. Specifically, Damiba, Goita, and Doumbouya, of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Guinea, respectively. This made me wonder whether the US is, once again, exerting clandestine influence in the global south, through the installation, or facilitation, of autocrats favourable to its policies. There is plenty of historical precedent for this, while, more recently, with the removal of Imran Khan as president of Pakistan, there is also contemporary suggestive evidence for ongoing radical US involvement in foreign politics, at the highest level. To my knowledge, there is no broad comparative analysis of the contexts of the recent coups, and attempts, in Africa.
International politics can change rapidly, brought home by, in just the last 12 months alone, the US withdrawing from Afghanistan, the introduction of the AUKUS deal, and Russia invading Ukraine. So, it’s not straightforward to determine a reasonable cutoff date for what coups, and attempts, should be included in this analysis for a better understanding of the current situation. A reasonable ‘low end’ could be el-Sisi’s election in 2014, following the military coup he was involved in, in 2013, as a mark of a kind-of normalisation of (north-)African politics. 2014 also saw two attempted coups in Libya, as well as attempted coups in Lesotho, and Gambia. Libya saw another attempted coup in 2016, while 2015 saw attempted coups in Burundi and Burkina Faso.
I decided for a cutoff in 2017. This results in a 5-year timespan from today, starting with the successful coup in Zimbabwe in 2017, the first successful African coup since Egypt in 2013.
In my research, I found that outside influence was also present in at least two elections. The first following the coup in Zimbabwe, the other the Madagascar elections in 2018. As a consequence, I chose to include Madagascar in the list of analyses for this paper.
I was hoping to identify indicators for foreign involvement, even though suggestive evidence of foreign involvements in African politics in the last few decades shows influence is often fairly low key, opportunistic, and facilitated by comparatively small budgets and fairly low stakes. An excellent example of this is the well-documented failed coup in 2004 in Equatorial Guinea, partially funded by the son of Margaret Thatcher, Mark Thatcher.
Coups in more detail
To my knowledge, very little academic research exists on the background of these recent coups. So, I’ve tried to synthesise contemporary journalistic resources. For each coup, or attempt, to the extent possible, I provide background and context, after which I try to analyse whether indications exist for outside influence. I close with attempting to draw overarching conclusions for foreign influence in these coups, and coup attempts, in the countries investigated for this paper.
I look at these events in reverse chronological order.
2022 Guinea-Bissau coup attempt
A coup d’état was attempted in Guinea-Bissau on 1 February 2022. After only a few hours, president Umaro Sissoco Embaló declared the coup over, stating the attempt may have been linked to drug trade and was also an assassination attempt: “It wasn’t just a coup. It was an attempt to kill the president, the prime minister and all the cabinet.” He went on to say that the army was not involved.
Drug trafficking is a major challenge in Guinea-Bissau, and in the 2000s, the country became known as a transit point for cocaine between Latin America and Europe. Western governments believe members of the country’s military are complicit in the drug trade.
Embaló, a former army general, compares himself to Lee Kuan Yew and Rodrigo Duterte, and was educated in Lisbon and Madrid, and studied in Brussels, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg, Japan, and Paris. In the 2019 elections, Embaló came in second in the first round for the presidential vote, but won in the second round. The results were contested by the runner-up, Domingos Simões Pereira, after which Embaló organized his own swearing-in ceremony to announce himself as president of the country. The prime minister accused Embaló of arranging a coup, but the outgoing president stepped down, effectively recognising the transition of power.
Before the elections, Embaló split off from the party he had been a member off, to effectively run against his former allies.
A few days after the coup, Embaló said three soldiers who were arrested by U.S. drug authorities in a 2013 sting operation and pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking, had been detained in connection with the attempted coup. Though the details are contested, most people in the country’s capital believe the five-hour gun battle, the coup attempt, was, in one way or another, tied to narcotics and the drug trade.
Analysis
No background information is available on those who attempted the coup. There appears to be a reasonably firm consensus the attempted coup was connected to players in the drug trade. There’s no documented indication that outside political actors played a role.
2022 Burkina Faso coup
The coup d’état against President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré on January 23 was led by military officer Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who is now interim president of Burkina Faso. This followed a planned coup in August 2021, and a thwarted coup in early January.
Damiba graduated from the École Militaire in Paris. He holds a master’s degree in criminology from the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers in Paris, and a defense expert certification in management, command and strategy. In 2015, he declined to support a coup attempt which failed after 7 days.
Damiba took part in “numerous” American military courses and exercises between 2010 and 2020, and, according to a spokesperson for US Africa command, received instruction on the law of armed conflict, civilian control, and respect for human rights. After the coup, supporters of Damiba called for Russia to step in, and, earlier, Damiba himself had asked the now ousted president to call in Wagner, Russian mercenaries, twice, which Kaboré, the president, had declined.
Damiba has close ties with army colonels Assimi Goita and Mamady Doumbouya, the military rulers of Mali and Guinea respectively, both of whom seized power from civilians leaders in their countries in 2021 (see below). Damiba, Goita and Mamady participated in the same US-led military exercise ‘Flintlock’, an annual special operations exercise hosted by the US, in Burkina Faso.
Damiba’s relationship with Doumbouya dates back to 2017 when both men attended training at the École Militaire in Paris.
In March, a coalition of over 100 (or 72, depending on the source) “pan-Africanist” civil society organisations, which had formed after the coup, demonstrated and collectively asked the new government to ask Russia to step in; secretary general of the coalition of organisations, Somaila Nana, said “the authorities must diversify their partners in this fight against terrorism by allying themselves with countries such as Russia, China, and North Korea”. At the demonstration, dozens of Russian flags were waved about.
Analysis
The connection between Damiba, Goita, and Mamady, and their military training under US direction, is suspicious. Yet, notwithstanding potential ‘4D chess’ played by the Americans, Damiba’s request for his former president to call in Wagner would fly in the face of US interests, suggesting that a connection between the US and Damiba is weak, if anything but opportunistic on Damiba’s side.
The rapid establishment of a very broad coalition of civil society organisations is very suspect. Their calling for Russian intervention, as well as their waving of numerous large Russian flags, feels like their actions and resources are funded by outside forces.
2021/19 Sudan coup
Before Omar al-Bashir was ousted in a coup on 11 April 2019, he had called in the help of Yevgeny Prigozhin, “Putin’s chef”, to spread misinformation on social media, supposedly with the objective to protect Prigozhin and the Kremlin’s interests in Sudan, and to keep al-Bashir in power, supplying private contractors in return for commercial concessions.
After the coup, as part of a civilian-military power-sharing-deal, Abdallah Hamdok, a civilian politician, governed the country (supposedly to prepare a transition towards free and fair elections).
Hamdok was kidnapped in another coup in 2021, after being arrested by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, but was soon released, and reinstated as prime minister, only to resign in early 2022. Hamdok has a doctorate from the University of Manchester, and has had a career as a diplomat in several African institutions.
The second coup happened hours after Jeffrey Feltman, the US’ top regional envoy, had left the country, trying to dissuade the military leadership from seizing power, in the wake of Trump removing Sudan from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Al-Burhan has ties with Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. He studied in Jordan and Cairo, in the latter at the same institution as Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with Al-Burhan and el-Sisi being longstanding friends. Al-Burhan had been stationed as an attache in Beijing, and played prominent roles in South Sudan, Darfur, and Yemen, while describing Saudi Arabia as an ‘eternal ally’. Al-Burhan is considered “Egypt’s man”, where Al-Burhan’s co-conspirer, Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo ( known as Hemeti) is closer to Saudi Arabia, with access to the profits of gold mines in Darfur.
In Yemen, Al-Burhan oversaw Sudanese fighters, operating on Saudi Arabia’s behalf. He’s involved in normalising ties with Israel, meeting Netanyahu in February 2020, which was followed by a call from Secretary of State??? Mike Pompeo, where Pompeo thanked Al-Burhan “for his leadership in normalizing ties with Israel”. Both Al-Burhan and Hemeti have a troubling record in violating human rights in the areas they operate in.
Some analysts suggests that Al-Burhan is worried that putting al-Bashir on trial will expose his own roles in the last few decades.
Analysis
A picture emerges where a number of external political actors are jostling for influence, mostly through opportunistic connections. Russia was more closely involved with al-Bashir. The US jockeys for influence, but seems to play second fiddle to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where the current Sudanese leaders have stronger connections.
2021 Guinea coup
On September 5, Colonel Mamady Doumbouya seized power from Alpha Conde. Doumbouya had attended the Ecole de Guerre in Paris in 2017-18, trained in Israel and Senegal, is a former member of the French Foreign Legion, serving in Afghanistan and Ivory Coast, and received training from the U.S. and in Israel, before being handpicked in 2018 by Conde to lead the nation’s elite military unit. In 2019, Doumbouya participated in the U.S.-led military exercise, ‘Flintlock’, in Burkina Faso, with Assimi Goita, the man who led the Malian military coup in August 2020, and Damiba, of Burkina Faso, above. Doumbouya stated that, at Flintlock, “We learnt from each other”. More salient, Doumbouya, and fellow officers, were being trained by US green berets, on the border with Sierra Leone, when they ‘skipped class’ to stage a coup. He’s a French citizen. He’s been looking towards Russia for military support.
Guinea is a major exporter of bauxite, used to produce aluminium, and the biggest bauxite exporter to China. Of the two largest bauxite producers, one is a joint venture with a Chinese company, which is the largest aluminium producer in the world. The other is co-owned by the Guinean government, Alcoa, and Rio Tinto.
Before the coup, a former Russian ambassador who praised the country’s then-president, backing a constitutional change to allow the president to run for a third term, was named head of a major Russian aluminum company, in Guinea.
Analysis
As with Burkina Faso, above, the American connection is suspect, specifically because of Doumbouya’s ‘skipping class’ during military exercises.
However, Doumbouya’s interest in involving Russian support, as well as Chinese and Russian economic interests and influence, paints a picture where multiple political actors are looking for opportunities to increase their political and economic influence, one way or the other.
2021 Chad soft coup
After three decades of rule, president Idriss Déby, trained as a pilot in France, and supported by France and the US, died of wounds sustained in a battle with rebels allegedly trying to overthrow his government in April 2021. Quickly, and unconstitutionally, his son, who briefly trained at a military school in France, and worked closely with French troops in 2013/14, was installed as the head of a transitionary military council, in preparation for elections in late 2022. This was followed, in late April, by installing a Déby ally Albert Pahimi Padacke as prime minister of a transitional government.
Upon his death, Macron called Déby a ‘couragous friend’, despite numerous human rights violations. Analysts say it appears his death was a “self-inflicted error by France”; The rebels accused of killing Déby are based in Libya’s south, under Khalifa Hifter (or Haftar) who has received French, US, and Russian support in the past. The US has hosted counterterrorism exercises in Chad drawing in up to 2000 participants, both African and western.
Between 2005 and 2019, Timan Erdimi, the (former) president’s nephew, oversaw multiple incursions, from Libya, into Chad, making it to the capital in 2008 and 2009. Erdimi has been supported by Sudan in the past, which supported Déby, and Erdimi and his twin brother, when they first took control of the country in 1990.
Erdimi, living in Qatar, talked to Wagner, to start a rebellion to overthrow the current transitional government. Wagner is also supporting the interim president of the country. Erdimi’s brother, now MIA, was based in the US for a period, where he is said to have received some support from American players, particularly operating in oil extraction.
Analysis
The events in Chad seem, in part, a consequence of France’s desire to decrease its responsibilities in its former colonies, with other players looking for opportunities to fill the gaps that open up.
It’s probable that, via Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are looking to extend their influence, but, at the moment, the best cards seem to be held by the Russians, through Wagner.
2021 Niger coup attempt
On 31 March, 2 days before the planned inauguration of the newly elected president Mohamed Bazoum, Sani Saley Gourouza attempted to stage a coup. Gourouza was captured in Benin in April, and handed over to Nigerien authorities.
Gourouza was a minor figure in Niger’s armed forces.
Bazoum is a sunni muslim, and has filled prominent political positions since 1991, when he served as Secretary of State for Cooperation.
Niger’s most important export is uranium.
The previous president, Mahamadou Issoufou, had completed the constitutional limit of two presidential terms (and received the Ibrahim Prize shortly after leaving office). The Economist at one point described Issoufou as a ‘staunch ally of the west’.
Bazoum’s opponent was Mahamane Ousmane, a former president, who was deposed in a military coup in 1996.
Turkey has a, seemingly small, strategic interest in Niger, particularly around Niger acquiring Turkish weapons.
Analysis
There appears to be practically no information on details of who played a role in this coup attempt.
2021/0 Mali coup
Assimi Goïta emerged on Aug. 18, 2020, when he teamed up with Russian-trained army colonels Malick Diaw and Sadio Camara, training which was sponsored by the Russian armed forces, launching a coup against elected President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, following weeks of mass protests over perceived corruption.
A month later, he set up a transitional government with himself as vice president, but he seized power again in May 2021 after accusing the president, Bah N’Daou, a retired military officer and former defence minister, who was appointed in October of 2020, of failing to consult him regarding a cabinet reshuffle.
Goita invited the Wagner Group to take an increasingly prominent role in the country. Oumar Cissé, a Malian peace campaigner said that “Russia has no interest in Malian politics unlike France, which manages the conflict according to its economic and political interests”, pointing to a more widely held belief that, because Russia is only being hired for their services, they can be trusted more than the French.
Analysis
The invitation of Wagner, by Goita, seems to dovetail with Mamady’s and Damiba’s actions following this coup. Russia’s involvement seems to be primarily ad-hoc, or, reactive, even if, from a Russian perspective, promising.
2020/13 CAR coup and elections
The country has been embroiled in civil unrest since President François Bozizé was overthrown in 2013. Faustin-Archange Touadéra, in power since a 2016 election, had struggled to defeat rebel forces despite the presence of French troops and a UN force, and the CAR government believes the Russian mercenaries, now also stationed in the country, have had more success.
Touadéra studied in Bangui and Abidjan, receiving doctorates in France and Cameroon. After Touadéra was sworn in for his first term, France confirmed that it would end its military intervention in the country and France withdrew its forces in 2016.
Wagner is believed to have started working in the CAR in 2017, after the UN Security Council approved a Russian training mission there and lifted the arms embargo imposed in 2013.
In 2017, Touadéra travelled to Russia, to request for military support, in exchange for access to the CAR’s significant deposits of diamonds, gold and uranium. He met with Russia’s foreign minister, Lavrov, and signed a military cooperation agreement. Specifically, Touadéra involved Russia to wrest control of its diamond trade from rebels, and Russians have struck deals with the government to mine diamonds.
Elections were held in the Central African Republic (CAR) on 27 December 2020 to elect the President and National Assembly. Voting was not able to take place in many areas of the country that are controlled by armed groups, resulting in 14% of the polling stations not opening. President Touadéra won reelection with 54% of the vote.
Before the election, Facebook suspended 500 troll accounts associated with both Russian and French authorities.
In March 2018, Wagner sent 170 advisors to the CAR to train government forces, and to provide a security detail to the president and to protect the country’s gold mines, augmenting these in July with an additional 500, on the Sudanese side of the border, in Darfur, and adding another 300 in December 2020. In a direct response to Russia’s involvement, France came back on its decision to withdraw and, in November 2018, announced its own delivery of arms to the CAR, as well as new bilateral aid. A Russian, Valery Zakharov, is Touadéra’s national security advisor. This, after Touadéra fired his own top adviser after a video was leaked showing the adviser displaying piles of hundreds of diamonds, leading to his arrest.
Rebel factions are combating state forces, mobilised by the former president François Bozizé.
In 2019, the government cancelled a Canadian company’s licences for the Ndassima gold mine in order to hand them to a Malagasy company that reportedly has links to Russian interests.
Analysis
Well documented, the events in the CAR seem to have been the initial ‘battleground’ for French and Russian influencers in the region, after which Russia appears to have worked on expanding their influence to other countries; France withdrawing, then Russia stepping in and gaining ground quickly, followed by France, in part, going back on their initial decision.
The arrival of the Malagasy company is interesting, in the light of the events surrounding the elections in Madagascar in 2018, explained below.
2019 Gabon coup attempt
On 7 January 2019, military officers claimed that they had ousted President Ali Bongo, who was re-elected in 2016 after a controversial election and protests. The day before, Donald Trump had sent 80 US troops to Gabon amid fears of violent protests in the nearby DRC.
At the time of the coup, the president was in Morocco for medical treatment, after he had suffered a stroke while visiting Riyadh.
The coup was neutralised the same day. There is speculation the coup was orchestrated to increase support for Ali Bongo.
Ali Bongo, with two short interruptions, has been president since 2009, following a short interruption after his father had been president since 1967. Ali Bongo was educated in France and China (and released a funk album in 1977, and also orchestrated a visit by Michael Jackson in 1991).
Gabon’s economy is entirely devoted to the production and export of natural resources. The country is run by Bongo as well as members of his direct family, though with 52 recognised brothers and sisters, this is not necessarily a smooth ride. Gabon is important to France because it has a pliant political elite, whose primary role is to facilitate the exploitation of natural and mineral resources. The country has been called a ‘neo-colonial’ entity.
Analysis
France’s connections with Gabon are still strong. Virtually no information appears available on the context of the coup, or the source of support of the coup plotters, if it happened.
2018 Madagascar presidential elections
A team of at least 30 Russians published their own newspaper in Malagasy and hired students to write fawning articles about the president to help him win another term. Skirting electoral laws, they bought airtime on television stations and blanketed the country with billboards. They paid young people to attend rallies and journalists to cover them. They showed up with armed bodyguards at campaign offices to bribe challengers to drop out of the race to clear their candidate’s path, started a troll-factory, and recruited an apocalyptic cult leader, Pastor Mailhol, in a strategy to split the opposition vote.
Interference started in Madagascar a few weeks after Putin sat down with Madagascar’s president, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, in Moscow in 2018, and included Yevgeny Prigozhin, in the talks.
Some sources suggest Prigozhin might have gone to Madagascar, solely for profit, a company said to be owned by him acquiring a stake in a Chromium mine. Either way, a fact is that the president quickly showed little chance of winning, with the Russians shifting their support to Andry Rajoelina, the eventual winner, and formerly Hery’s opponent. Hery came in a distant third, the cult leader fourth, and despite worker protests, Prigozhin’s company maintained control of the Chromium mine.
Analysis
Russia’s influence after the visit of the president of Madagascar is revealing in that it suggests a strategy of opportunism on Russia’s side, in terms of jockeying for influence on the African continent.
Because this occurred after the Russian arrival in the CAR, the move into Madagascar could have been triggered by the successful entry into the CAR, which showed that relatively small expenditures can have disproportionally positive outcomes.
2017 Zimbabwe coup
In November 2017, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was removed as president and party leader of ZANU-PF, and replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa. Shortly before, in a conflict over whom should succeed the 93 year old Mugabe, Mnangagwa had just been fired as ‘first’ vice president, and had fled the country, to China, essentially conceding the succession battle to Grace Mugabe, Mugabe’s wife. Grace might have attempted to poison Mnangagwa in 2017.
A week prior to the coup, Zimbabwean army chief General Constantino Chiwenga was on an official visit to China, meeting generals Chang Wanquan and Li Zuocheng, and Mnangagwa. Here, Chiwenga was advised by the military intelligence wing that Mugabe had ordered his arrest upon his return to Zimbabwe. But, soldiers loyal to Chiwenga, disguised as baggage handlers, overpowered the police at the Harare airport and cleared the way for his arrival.
Both men, Mnangagwa and Chiwenga, had been trained at China’s Nanjing Military School.
After Mangagwa assumed presidency of ZANU-PF, and the country, Chiwenga is now ‘first’ vice president.
There’s been speculation Chiwenga explicitly sought Chinese approval for the coup, that country being Zimbabwe’s largest foreign investor, and second largest trading partner. Between the two political factions, one around Mnangagwa, the other around Grace, China has favoured the former. Already in 2012, there were suspicions that money was being siphoned off from Zimbabwe’s Marange diamond fields, where China’s Anjin Investments is the largest diamond company, partly in exchange for Chinese weapons, and reports of Zimbabwean military commanders securing diamonds-for-guns deals with Chinese officials are publicly available.
China had refused to support Mugabe in his 2016 crackdown on the opposition, after protesting against Zimbabwe consolidating control of the Diamond mines through a legally enforced majority stake, while Mnangagwa’s involvement with the diamond trade goes back to at least 2002, when the UN accused him of profiting from illegally traded diamonds obtained through Zimbabwe’s involvement in the war in the Congo.
In 2015, some sources stated that Mnangagwa was urged by China to ensure that Zimbabwe maintains an investment-friendly climate and that Chinese interests and property rights remained secure.
An alleged coup attempt in 2007 was said to have planned to ask Mnangagwa to form a government.
In the 2018 presidential elections, Mnangagwa fairly narrowly beat Nelson Chamisa for the top spot. (Still a bit of a surprise, considering Mnangagwa’s role in the Matabeleland massacres of the 1980s.) Chamisa represented the MDC, long the party of Morgan Tsvangirai, who had died a few months prior. The opposition stated, shortly after the vote, that Russia had interfered in the election. Although the new head of state rejected these charges, political strategists associated with Prigozhin allegedly participated in the election campaign, confirmed one of Prigozhin’s consultants.
This, after in early 2018, Zimbabwe’s electoral commission head Priscilla Chigumba and presidential advisor Christopher Mutsvangwa visited Moscow, as well as that, around the same time, Sergey Lavrov visited Zimbabwe, followed in April by Sergei Ivanov Jr., CEO of Russian diamond miner Alrosa. “64 Russians in a suburb of Harare [were] working for […] Mnangagwa [during the elections]” and there are now indications that Russia facilitated ‘fake’ election observers during the presidential elections. Meanwhile, according to Jonathan Moyo, also a presidential candidate and once a political star under Mugabe, claimed that Chinese-affiliated experts had hacked into biometric voter registration systems to manipulate turnout figures and votes for the ruling party’s candidates.
After the elections, with Chiwenga as ‘first’ vice president, Chiwenga flew to Russia with a “special message” for President Vladimir Putin. Chiwenga took part in the closing ceremony of the International Army Games and met with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Earlier, Mnangagwa had met with Putin in South Africa, and some analysts suggests that, at least in part, Zimbabwe welcome’s Russia’s involvement as a counterweight to China’s role.
Analysis
With its long, and politically relevant role in Southern African history, Zimbabwe has been a more important meeting ground for international political players for longer than most other African countries.
Mugabe’s alienation from the global political community briefly drove the country towards North Korea, before settling on China. It seems beyond a doubt that China was involved in the preparations for the coup, but perhaps less interested to provide support after the government takeover.
Russian and Chinese influence seems to have played a role during the elections, and it appears that Russia might have been more on hand than China.
Conclusions
One observation is that virtually all recent coup leaders have strong connections with institutions and political players outside of Africa, particularly with France and the US, but also with others, Russia, China, and less so, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. For historical reasons and an ever more globalist world, this can not be surprising.
With the intended withdrawal from its former colonies, we are also seeing a rising dissatisfaction with France’s current and former role.
What is emerging is that other political actors have started to step into the void that is left behind, playing on dissatisfaction, geographical insecurity, and the potential of accessing raw materials. However, when this happens, activities seem, so far, to be mostly ad-hoc and opportunistic.
That said, particularly Russia’s desire to step in appears to be, in part, influenced by a wish to be once more seen as a global player, on par, in Africa, with France, and the US, and perhaps China. But, for all, pragmatic justifications exist, too, particularly in accessing extractive resources through exclusive access to the continent’s mining operations.
Revealing is that, in 2019, documents leaked from the office of Prigozhin’s political consultants showed Russia’s strategy for intervention in African politics; to incite anti-Western sentiment and revive old territorial disputes. But, they also showed that Russian expansion was hampered by unprofessionalism, corruption and alcohol. The above underscores this campaign’s relatively low investments and lack of professionalism, which seems to be paralleled by the actions of the other foreign political players in the region.
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In this last semester at Harvard, I’ve been following a class at Harvard, on Cyberpolitics, offered by Ruxandra Paul. For the final paper, the students were quite free to pick a topic of their choosing. The scope of the course is quite broad, which meant the range of possible subjects was significant. So, I did what I figured was the only sensible option, which of course is to try and make clear that all problems on the cusp of ‘cyber’ and ‘politics’ are caused by capitalism.
Abstract
In recent years, a growing number of analysts and academics have exposed endemic problems in how online and mobile technologies are deployed, ostensibly with the objective of creating value for the end-user, but at obfuscated and not always fully understood costs. The critique which has garnered the most public attention has perhaps been Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. However, though she and others bring up the context of ‘capitalism’ as a driver for the problems they identify, none directly point a finger at capitalism as the actual source of the problem.
Here, I show that capitalism is at the root of tech’s evils.
I will argue that the challenges society experiences in relation to where ‘cyber’ and ‘politics’ meet, are driven by features inherent to capitalism, particularly unrestrained capitalism. I first identify a number of problems residing on the cusp of technology, and politics. I will then look at the features of capitalism, and how they are responsible for these problems. Finally, I briefly discuss alternative sociocultural systems to replace capitalism.
What is the problem?
There is no shortage of societal problems on the cusp of technology and politics. An abridged list:
The extensive, unjustified, and illegal, pervasive surveillance evidenced by the Snowden Leaks, amongst others documented by Glenn Greenwald.
Maximisation of the ‘data exhaust’, and the consequential manipulation, if not abuse, of individuals, as described by Shoshana Zuboff. This includes the curation, automated or not, of social media feeds in order to maximise engagement.
Soft censorship, as described by Margaret Roberts. Her focus is on China, but the forms of censorship she describes, of ‘friction’ and ‘flooding’, have examples in shadow banning and overloading of hashtags. Shadow banning is actively used by most, if not all, major platforms (Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, etc.). Flooding is practiced by content farms and trolls, often hired to manipulate discourse.
The implicit and difficult to objectively identify bias, and racism, in algorithms and AI, as documented by Sofiya Noble and Cathy O’Neill.
‘Truth decay’, as defined by Mazarr et al, as the combination of increased disagreements on facts, a blurring of the line between opinion and fact, the increasing relative volume, and influence, of opinion, followed by a declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.
Exploitation in the gig economy.
I will consider it beyond the scope of this paper to also show that ‘crypto’ and ‘web3’ is, by design, detrimental in every way, while deeply connected to core features of capitalism. This is extensively argued elsewhere, for example by Ledesma et al, Diehl, and O’Reilly.
What capitalism?
Many varieties of capitalism exist. I will use the description below.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor.
In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by the owners of wealth, that is, property, through the ability to manoeuvre capital or production ability in capital and financial markets, while prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
Due to the rapid historical emergence of the internet, and related technologies, and due to lack of regulation, the manifestation of capitalism through technology has typically operated under forms of ‘free-market capitalism’, in which prices for goods and services are set by the forces of supply and demand. Or by those able to manipulate the market with the objective of maximising profit. But, importantly, with little intervention by government policy. This is evidenced by the historical strong pushback against attempts at government regulations by major (western) internet companies such as Google, Facebook (Meta), Twitter, and others.
Meanwhile, particularly since the end of the Cold War, society at large has come to function, at best, under a form of ‘advanced capitalism’, characterised by Habermas through the following:
Concentration of industrial activity in a few large firms.
Constant reliance on the state to stabilise the economic system.
A formally democratic government that legitimises the activities of the state and dissipates opposition to the system.
The use of nominal wage increases to pacify the most restless segments of the work force.
Besides that many have argued that this system is at breaking point, evidenced by shifts in political polarisation, stagnated wages, and rising, in some cases exploding, inflation, what needs to be observed is that even ‘advanced capitalism’ is a tempered form of pure capitalism. In essence, ‘advanced’ refers to ‘capitalism’ being adjusted for its excesses, the state regulating those aspects that are the unsustainable features of the capitalist model.
It has been argued, recently by Varoufakis, that the West’s shift towards social democracy, mitigating the worst of capitalist systems, was fuelled by the mere existence of the Soviet Union. The continuous shift away from this model, since the fall of the Soviet Union, supports this. This could make one wonder whether rise of social democracies in Western Europe were primarily an accident of history.
Though it might be possible to limit the excesses of capitalism through regulation, capitalist society, by design, shifts towards its own extreme, implying that no form of capitalism can counter the excesses we encounter. To meaningfully survive, can we only replace capitalism with a more equitable economic system?
The problem is capitalism
Bhasin, channelling Marx, states that “capitalism encourages monopolies”, and “companies which have monopoly exploit consumers”. Marx, and Lenin, warned against the problems of state-sanctioned capitalist models, through the concept of State Monopoly Capitalism, as a consequence of laissez-faire capitalism, dovetailing with the definition of State Capitalism of more anarchistic provenance.
Noble’s “we are the product that Google sells to advertisers” makes the citizenry the raw material from which a product is crafted which is being sold to advertisers. This is explicitly exploitation of the consumer, the citizen. Zuboff’s “Google, Facebook and Amazon have become modern-day robber barons, bending laws to themselves and their own” invokes the image of 19th century American industrialists who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth.
This positioning of the citizen as raw material in order to abstract profit is at the root of all capitalist abuse of the citizenry. Surveillance and exploitation of the ‘data exhaust’ are abuse of what we as consumers produce. And, as a business has no latent morals preventing them from being exploitative, the sole reason to refrain from exploitation is when meaningful, enforceable, and enforced laws prevent exploitation from happening.
As per Haque, capitalism has taught (Americans) that exploitation is good for them, also showing how productivity and worker compensation became disconnected in their growth trajectories in the 1970s, diverging ever since. Aggarwal et al sum up the ethical problems, with a particular focus on the gig economy: They are mechanisms of algorithmic control and managerial oversight, through the use of algorithmic reputation and rating systems. These systems permit invasive and unaccountable control of the work force, giving platform administrators unregulated power to manipulate the scoring and matching algorithms that govern the platform and influence job allocation decisions.
Job insecurity, as per Bhasin, is a feature of capitalist economies, as they see high unemployment as well as underemployment, because rapidly changing requirements of the market make it difficult to match skills with jobs.
As per O’Neill, the use of opaque algorithms can, and do, produce unfair outcomes, with the “best” (highest rated) workers receiving a greater and growing share of available work, while certain groups of workers, particularly women and ethnic minorities, are discriminated against. In addition, gig work is often unsavoury in nature, producing heightened emotional stress, with particularly content moderation, at scale, being known to cause PTSD in workers. The unsavoury nature of the work, and the need for a race to the bottom in terms of compensation, means that, whenever possible, gig work, whenever possible, is outsourced to the least regulated, cheapest jurisdiction. Because capitalists avoid providing social and legal protection, including the right to a minimum wage, health, and insurance benefits, casting these as external costs, the gig economy explicitly exploits gig workers due to their misclassification as independent contractors, rather than employees or workers, for whom some protection exists under many jurisdictions. Bhasin underscores this by pointing out that gig workers are paid less (than employees) and that government regulations, if existing and designed to protect employees, do not apply to gig workers, as independent contractors.
Agarwal et al point out that, as per Bill Gates in The Road Ahead, we have moved into a more and more friction-free economy, easily allowing capitalists, as I mention above, to outsource gig work to low-rights jurisdictions, that is, other countries, often in the Global South, in, what Aggarwal calls, ‘ethics dumping’, and, as per Spacey, results in the commoditisation of labour.
Ritchie explains that “capitalism is fundamentally unethical”, and “commodity exchanges on the market cannot be understood without recognising their human consequences”. Hence Aggarwal’s description of this outsourcing of work as ‘ethics dumping’, underscoring the need of ethical decision making.
Varoufakis coined the concept of ‘techno-feudalism’, as the current, next, step in capitalism’s shape shifting history; First from its competitive guise to oligopoly, with the second industrial revolution. Then, when the end of Bretton Woods in 1971 unleashed capitalism’s second transformation, Wall Street functionaries demanded deregulation, and oligopolistic capitalism morphed into financialized capitalism. After 2008, the G7’s central banks coalesced in April 2009 to use their money printing capacity to re-float global finance, and a deep discontinuity emerged: The global economy is now powered by the constant generation of central bank money, as opposed to private profit. Meanwhile, value extraction is shifting away from markets and onto digital platforms, like Facebook and Google, which no longer operate like oligopolistic firms, but rather like private fiefdoms. This, because digital platforms replace conventional markets as the locus of private wealth extraction: We all produce, for free, the capital stock of these large corporations. Zuboff calls this Surveillance Capitalism, which Varoufakis explains as techno-feudalism, where the individual is beholden to the institutions for whom he produces. Indeed, under this form of late-stage capitalism, we truly have become the raw material generating profits for the capitalist upper class. This societal model, driven by big tech, explains how, through institutional curation, and censorship, of content, the outputs from these raw materials, our activity, can be optimised.
Similarly, because resource extraction is optimised, the veracity of the input, that is, information, becomes irrelevant. As a consequence of this, we no longer can expect a societal regression to a shared understanding of reality; cohorts are ‘fed’ whatever optimises their output, and, through big tech, we abstract different versions of reality, which brings us ‘truth decay’.
Kwet broadens the exploitation of labour to a concept of digital colonialism, specifically when focusing on the role of big tech in the Global South. Kwet shows that (US) multinationals exercise imperial control at the architecture level of the digital ecosystem, giving rise to new forms of domination:
The monopoly power of multinational corporations, used for resource extraction through rent and surveillance, constitutes a new form of economic domination.
Controlling the digital ecosystem, big tech corporations control computer-mediated experiences, giving them direct power over political, economic, and cultural domains of life, creating a new form of imperial control.
Big tech, through usage of ‘big data’, violates our privacy and concentrates economic power into the hands of large corporations, facilitating a system of global surveillance capitalism. And, with agencies from the Global North dominant in this exploitation, the Global South in particular suffers from imperial state surveillance.
Kwet’s digital colonialism is directed at big tech’s role in the global south, but equally applies to big tech’s role in exploitation of consumers and workers in the north.
So it becomes obvious how, and why, as per Noble, “Commercial control over the internet, the commons, has moved it further away from the public.” and how, for commercial enterprises like Google, “the discussions about [the meaning of words, classification, is] situated under [the rubric of] free speech and protected corporate speech” such that it becomes “impossible with the current commercial practices” to ensure that “underrepresented ideas are included [and] have [big tech’s products] serve as a democratisation tool”. It’s not the citizenry who steer the discourse, it is the techno-feudalists.
Almost as an aside, Rushkoff, also deals with the perception that modern technology provides meaningful access to a much broader range of content. Originally focussing on the model of Spotify and similar platforms, Ruskhoff points out that “digital platforms amplify the power law dynamics that determine winners and losers. While [they] make space for many more [creators] to sell their [work], their architecture and recommendation engines end up promoting many fewer [creators] than a diverse ecosystem of [record stores] did [in the past]. One or two superstars get all the plays, and everyone else sells almost nothing.”
Per Spacey, capitalism allows for no alternative models operating in the market; Successful businesses control markets such that competition ceases to exist, resulting in higher prices, decreased product quality and unfair terms for the end user. Even more so for friction-free, digital, business models, this results in monopolies, as well as monopsony, when one employer is the only company in a particular geographical area. So, we see market control with uncompetitive practices as a consequence of market domination.
To the point of exploitation of consumers, Noble points out that “Google is prioritising predatory misrepresentations […] because it is profitable to do so.” As per Zuboff, and mentioned above, big tech does not care if news is fake, as long as it makes a profit. And, as neoliberal policies allow capitalists to disconnect their actions from their social context, they foster societal instability and social inequality.
Zuboff points out that the platforms which create value no longer have to own the means of production, as owning the means of behavioural modification, the algorithms influencing our behaviour, has eclipsed ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth and power. This, in accordance with Varoufakis’ points, above. And though Zuboff’s focus is on the tech industry, the same framework increasingly is applicable in other sectors.
Operating outside of a framework of accountability, (surveillance) capitalism is anti-democratic. O’Neill agrees, in that “we cannot count on the free market itself to right these wrongs” and “the free market [can] not control the excesses [of algorithmic abuse]”.
The above dovetails with the capitalist need to externalise implicit costs; Nestle (the author, not the company) shows how food is ‘cheaper’ because costs are externalised. Oxley expands this to a crisis of capitalism, underscoring Bhasin, who establishes that capitalists adopt malpractices without considering their effects on people or the environment. Because they can. Zuboff points out that the system we currently suffer under is “inherently” and “profoundly” undemocratic; A tyranny with the objective of dominating human nature.
Spacey agrees and explains how this leads to societal destruction through the gutting of the income of the state: It is common for wealth to use aggressive tax structures and strategies to avoid paying taxes, resulting in a high tax burden for the middle class and less resources for those in need, undermining democracy, and undermining the possibility of economic mobilities.
Per Bhasin, and many others, capitalism creates two classes in society; those with the means, and those without. This inequality, by design, helps those with the means to become wealthier, excluding, and pushing down, those who lack these means. Now, per Zuboff, our current model of capitalism no longer requires political reciprocity between labor and capital for large capitalist entities to flourish; The shift to individualism in western society has combined with the neoliberal economic paradigm of destroying individual agency, and results in a complete disconnect between wealth creation, for the rich, and societal development, for the poor.
With capitalism’s ever-larger reach, national politics, already slow to respond, can not keep up with the quickly changing scope. Nor are there usable global frameworks, nor is there international consensus, on countering the globally destructive influence of capitalism.
Capitalism is the problem. State-lead societal control, under capitalism, is more and more difficult to maintain, while only addressing the symptoms, not the core problems.
Alternatives to capitalism?
Few widely recognised contemporary frameworks exist that are able to ‘take on’ capitalism as a societal model, let alone have been proven to be workable. In communism’s most rudimentary definition, where all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs, is perhaps the most ideal solution, in theory, but so abstract that, in practice, no viable path towards realisation, at scale, appears to exist.
Political anarchists address this challenge of implementing a radically egalitarian society through the conceptualisation of non-bureaucratic systems in which decisions are made by the people. However, this, too, at scale, has not yet been shown to be viable.
A recently introduced post-capitalist model is detailed by Varoufakis in Another Now. With self-regulation, an abolished stock market, and company shares collectively owned by the workers, Varoufakis’ model is interesting, because it mixes elements of classic democracy, and communism, and uses technology to work towards a form of egalitarianism. But, Varoufakis’ model has also not been tested in practice.
What should be clear from my analysis above is that, even if alternative models might be elusive, capitalist society is so detrimental, requiring so much regulation to function, that capitalist society needs to cease to exist, if we want to put societal development, and most importantly people, front and center.
And, more and more clearly, we see that capitalism will not go down without a fight, willing to sacrifice the fuel of their economic engine. My hope is that we will find large enough numbers to fight that fight, and win.
Longley, Robert, 2021, What Is Anarchy? Definition and Examples. Retrieved May 8, 2022, from https://www.thoughtco.com/anarchy-definition-and-examples-5105250.
Taylor, Oxley. 2018. Externalized Costs: A Capitalism Crisis. Retrieved April 7, 2022, from https://geography101.blogs.bucknell.edu/2018/12/09/externalized-costs-a-capitalism-crisis/.
Varoufakis, Yanis, 2019, Another Now, Melville House.
Varoufakis, Yanis, 2021, Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over. Retrieved May 8, 2022, from https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalism-replacing-market-capitalism-by-yanis-varoufakis-2021-06.
I’m following a class at Harvard, on The Governance and International Politics of World Regions. I have to write a number of articles for this course, each connected to a particular class, also meaning each connected to a particular region. I was keen on writing a response to the readings on Africa, but before that, the class on the Middle East demanded I put some thoughts on paper. Somewhat thankfully, the readings on Africa turned out to be primarily focused on the AU, meaning I didn’t think them that arousing.
(Not) predicting the future
Larry Diamond, writing in 2010, in Why Are There No Arab Democracies?, boldly sets the stage: “why is it the case that among the sixteen independent Arab states of the Middle East and coastal North Africa, Lebanon is the only one to have ever been a democracy?”
Iran is, of course, not Arab, but to purposefully exclude it in this context, presupposes some hidden feature of being ‘Arab’, which would not apply to Iran, which both has been a democracy, at least until the US led coup against Mossadegh in 1953, and, to some extent, even today. But, this does appear to be Diamond’s angle. Though Diamond refrains from mentioning Iran in his article, the country does come up in his conclusion, but only through a reference to the country’s Arab minority. Admitted, neither Turkey, nor Israel, features in the article, but then doesn’t Diamond’s point come close to simple cherry picking his focus?
That said, Diamond is correct in his observation that here’s a big ‘freedom gap’ between Arab and non-Arab Muslim-majority states. He suggests, though,that religion is not a likely major cause.
Diamond also dismisses ‘culture’ as the primary reason for this democracy deficit, drawing parallels with similar origin stories in multiple African and Asian states. Even if, by Diamond’s own admission, in surveys done between 2003 and 2006, support in five Arab countries was roughly evenly split between those favouring ‘secular democracy’ and those favouring a form of ‘islamic’ democracy, whatever that would mean in practice. Couldn’t this be an indicator for some cultural markers being at the root of this ‘freedom gap’, therefore exactly contradicting Diamond’s claim?
Diamond’s review of how ‘well-to-do’ Arab countries are, as an indicator for favouring, and keeping, democracy, is neither here nor there; Kuwait or Bahrain might be wealthy, but most of the Gulf states thrive on exploitation of a foreign lower class, who are suppressed by the grace of the authoritarian controls the elite thrive on. | Doesn’t this skewer the impact of what he sees as ‘well-to-do’?
The ‘oil curse’, of course, plays a role: the lack of necessity to tax its citizens, due to high oil revenues, obfuscates the sense of government accountability. And, where oil dominates, there is little wealth creation through investment or risk taking.
Diamond then makes an interesting observation on the ‘Arab pattern’ of ‘managed reform’, where autocrats facilitate a back-and-forth on liberalisation when coming under political pressure, either from within, or without. True, I suppose, but is this pattern ‘Arab’? Can this not be observed, as well, in more autocratic African states, particularly after the end of the colonial area? So, where Diamond positions this as ‘Arab’, is it, really?
Thankfully, Diamond does acknowledge the skewering influence the US has in the region, with its military and ‘development’ assistance, Jordan, for example, from 2001 to 2006, receiving 27% of its domestic revenues as foreign assistance. To what extent Jordan does is not in the scope of my review, here, but it’s difficult not to dance to the tunes of your paymaster. Similar numbers, incidentally, also have applied to Israel, which received 28% of its GDP in the form of American ‘assistance’ in the 1970s, though that dwindled to just 3% in 2000, even if in absolute terms the reduction was small. And, here, the close ties between these two countries are well known and obvious, and hugely influential in the trajectory of inter-regional politics in the Middle East.
Writing before the Arab spring, Diamond predicts change will happen, even if his predictions feel quaint: Looking towards Iraq as a beacon of hope, and to Egypt as an example of adaptive change. And, he predicts that dwindling oil prices, as a precursor to a shift towards renewables, will be the harbinger of the end of Arab political exceptionalism.
Lustick, in The Absence of Middle Eastern Great Powers: Political ‘Backwardness’ in Historical Perspective, puts a lack of integration in the Middle East, in part, at the feet of the former colonial powers’ divide and conquer tactics, as well as petty squabbles between differing factions, within and between countries in the Middle East, dovetailing with much of Diamond, and, then asks why there have been no Middle Eastern great powers, as emerged from Europe from the 1200s onwards.
I believe Lustick is on to something when he recounts, from Cohen, Brown, and Organski in The Paradoxical Nature of State Making: The Violent Creation of Order, that by 1900, there were around 20 times fewer independent polities in Europe than there had been in 1500. They did not disappear peacefully, or decay as nation states developed; they were the losers in multiple protracted wars.
And, even when conflict in the Middle East could emerge (again) in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this was under the watchful eye of greater international powers, as well as international institutions and norms, creating a wildly different context for both the conflicts and potential resolutions, compared to pre-modern Europe, bringing us to Lustick’s central claim, that these historical differences in the geopolitical context of European and Middle Eastern state system development constitute not the only but the single most important explanation for the contemporary absence of a Middle Eastern great power.
Or, loosely translated, if only the Middle East had had protracted conflict, earlier, as well as two ‘world wars’, it would be in much better shape, now. As per Tilly, in Reflections on the History of European State-Making and War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, war makes the state, and the state makes war. Conveying the status of ‘latecomer’ to the countries in the Middle East, Lustick explains they came too late to the international scene to make a meaningful dent in prospects of becoming ‘great powers’, through war.
Lustick recounts three examples to underscore his claim, Muhammed Ali, the once viceroy of Egypt, Gamal Nasser, also of Egypt, and, particularly, Saddam Hussein’s attempt at occupying Kuwait. Pleasantly, Lustick, writing before 9/11, is insightful, stating that “through the lens of late medieval and early modern Europe and America, the great powers’ aggressive self-interestedness comes into focus”, as “their enforcement of norms of peace and security among sovereign states, norms whose direct effect was to deny Arabs entry into the great power club by the only route ever taken into that club, is visible as a ‘vital interest’ in preserving petrodollar monarchies and sheikhdoms in the Gulf, whose very survival requires the most favourable and intimate of relationships with the Western powers”, so “it is the survival of these countries, in the same neighbourhood as Iraq (and Iran), that is the anomaly, not the Iraqi walkover into Kuwait”.
In other words, Lustick recognises that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, as well as, surely, that country’s invasion of Iran, were attempts, by Saddam Hussain, to establish his country as the regional power.
Gause, in Hegemony’ Compared: Great Britain and the United States in the Middle East, details the changing state of affairs in the Middle East, and shows that Britain was a more successful hegemon during the interwar period than the US, after the war. This because of changing comparative power relations; stronger individual states, through the ‘democratization of violence’, and more demanding, and powerful, international governing bodies. Through the power exerted by first the UK, then the US, this decreased the possibility of a regional great power emerging in the Middle East. This touches on one of Diamond’s points.
Gause does seem to have a slightly disjointed vision of some of the events that have shaped the Middle East in recent times, claiming that the US invasion of Iraq in 1990 was a moment where the American military invaded a Soviet ally, as evidenced by a friendship treaty dating back to 1972. Besides the fact in 1990, the Soviet Union was on its last legs, it was the US who supported Saddam in the 1980s, in his war with Iran. Whose ally was Saddam, really?
Barnett and Solingen, in Designed to fail or failure of design? talk about the 60-year (now 75) sedate history of the Arab League. The authors are surprised. But, my first impression is that they are not quite as familiar with how societal allegiances under islam are seen to be configured: strong familial connections, and a strong awareness of being part of the ummah, collective islam, less so, at least historically, of being a citizen of a particular country.
The authors do point to the competitive politics of regime survival as limiting national cooperation, showing that national regimes sought legitimacy through Arab nationalism and unity, emanating from the League, while also fearing its influence, in turn limiting the powers of regional bodies.
In addition, as trade between states in the Middle East is limited, in significant part due to the rent seeking behaviour of these governments as a consequence of the extensive oil wealth that a number of them rake in, the region sees very little cross-border economic exchange and, as a consequence, few grassroots calls for integration and unification as a means to reduce economic and social frictions.
Not addressed by either, though I can’t say to what extent this is relevant, is that, for centuries, much of the Middle East was united politically, but under nominal control of an ethnic outsider, the Turkish caliph. When the Arab League was established, this memory was still fresh. Could this have influenced the interest and perceived need of Arab unification?
The authors recognise that, starting in the 1980s, with increasing economic interdependence, and growing nationalism, room for intraregional cooperation saw the establishment of smaller, more active, regional bodies, in the shape of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and others, participating countries recognising the need for regionalism, but not necessarily through an alignment along racial lines. Though of these, only the GCC appears to have staying power.
Barnett and Stolingen touch on the stronger unification among Arab countries, against the American invasion of Iraq. However, writing in the middle of the 2000s, this prefaces the soon-to-follow Arab spring, causing upheaval throughout the region, and a break with the existing trajectory of seeking Arab unification.
Beck, in The End of Regional Middle Eastern Exceptionalism? builds on this, when writing in 2015, observing a renewed interest in empowering the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council. However, does Beck not believe that Saudi Arabia’s leading role in this is anything but a form of self preservation, while perhaps also, as per Lustick, realising that war is what is needed to establish the country as a regionally dominant player?
Beck posits that regionalisation may come as the result of two mutually reinforcing dialectical processes: the emergence of a regional power and the strengthening of regional institutions. Beck refers to Lustick and the need for war to see powers emerge, but suggests that other events of historic significance could also play this role.
Implying this could be the collective of Arab uprisings, Beck rightfully points to the Arab League’s changing role after the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, suspending both Libya and Syria from the League, and calling for votes in the UN Security Council. And, then points to Saudi Arabia as the national power gaining ground regionally.
This emergence indeed safeguarded the Saudi Arabian elite’s survival, and could also have been a reaction to Egypt’s weakened regional position. In addition, we can now look back at the near-decision of Saudi Arabia to invade Qatar, and the war, lead by Saudi Arabia, in Yemen. Beck seems correct, the Arab Spring might have been a major event prefacing the rise of a regional hegemon, Saudi Arabia is trying to help itself along through warfare, while being supported by the United States, who shifted a lot of allegiance away from Egypt, with the fall of Mubarak, to Saudi Arabia.
In his conclusion, Beck points out that Saudi Arabia’s position is precarious: There’s geopolitical influence from three other major players in the region: Iran, Turkey, and Israel. However, at the moment, Saudi Arabia has managed to strengthen its position in comparison to the historically stronger adversary Egypt, and, globally, is certainly perceived as a major regional player.
Going back to a point made above, Mandaville, in Islam and International Relations in the Middle East: From Umma to Nation State, discusses the ummah, but historically seems to situate its emergence after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, with the eventual rise of political islam. To me, this feels like an inverse characterisation of history; nationalism perhaps surged after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, but, in my understanding, before, regional identity was considered less important than either local, or global identity, that is, being part of the ‘world of islam’, the ummah.
But, Mandaville’s observation of the rise of political islam feels correct. But, as such, this islamism, because it, mostly, does not recognise a single overarching authority, seeks a different kind of universal identification, if any at all.
Mandaville suggests that Khomeini, after the Iranian revolution, competed with the Saudis and Zia ul-Haq for the mantle of Muslim leadership, but this seems like quite a stretch to me. Iran, and Khomeini, still receive credit in the non-aligned world, for their success in withstanding US hegemony, and, for all intents and purposes, thriving as a nation. But, few would consider Iran the flag bearer of Islam as a whole, probably not even Iranian clerics.
Mandaville does seem to acknowledge that the recent rise of islam-oriented political parties, might be a symptom of the shift towards a kind of cultural islam, even if he does not quite label this as such. Or, islam has become a tool for the ruling elites to entrench their position. Or both.
In the end, Diamond’s observation no longer holds; Tunisia and Egypt have significantly shifted away from autocracy, though the pendulum might already be swinging back. The region is still in flux, and displeasure is still brewing with a younger generation. It’s a bit of an open door, but recent events suggest Mandaville’s closing note is perhaps as good as our predictions can be at the moment, ‘Islam will remain an important feature of international relations in the Middle East and beyond’. I’ll add that I believe that the trajectory of shedding autocracy in the Middle East has not yet been completed. For one, what happens when ayatollah Khamenei passes away?
