In the history of capital, militarism has become a province of capital accumulation (Luxemburg 1913 (2003)). Militarism and wars – alongside waste – have become a key domain of capitalist accumulation in the age of US imperialism (Capasso and Kadri 2023). To remind the public that the war in Ukraine is not the only ongoing war, we stick to our remit: we keep eyes on Sudan, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Libya, Western Sahara. Our eyes get tired from the feeling of powerlessness that this state of constant war produces.
War is the ultimate tragedy for the people – yet it is very good for business. Militarism remains a core element of the capitalist system and the wars that it sustains. The imperialist power of the US has been founded on a permanent war economy (van der Linden 2025) and liberalism has succeeded in normalising permanent war and militarisation, while desensitising people about it (Amin 2006). In early March 2025, the EU shakes its magic money tree (yes, there is a magic money tree!): a new rearmament programme is announced, ReArm Europe (EU 2025), freeing up €800 billion from other national budget allocations, and redirecting it towards public financing of European defence, including a plan to borrow up to €150 billion to lend to national governments to fund weapons production (Bahceli 2025). Given that the EU massively relies on the import of US weapons, European leaders rapidly reacted to the US withdrawal of military aid to Ukraine. In Germany, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) are negotiating to form a coalition government and seemingly agree on the creation of a €500 billion fund for investment and infrastructure spending (Rinke, Alkousaa and Marsh 2025). The presumed future chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) justifies this with the need for more spending on ‘defence’: ‘In view of the threats to our freedom and peace on our continent, the same must now apply to our defence: whatever it takes’ (Deutschlandfunk 2025). Economists have been quick to stress the potential economic benefits of the new EU defence plan: this surge in public investment in the defence sector could ‘help jumpstart Europe’s flat economy’ (Bahceli 2025), as the weapons industry could boost interconnected industrial sectors that have been declining for decades and absorb the job losses in the EU automotive sector.
Beyond the policy jargon, we are looking at a significant policy shift: the EU gives the green light to national governments that are willing to direct public financing to national factories of deadly weapons – and betting on weapons export to boost declining national economies. If this plan has the intended consequences, it will represent a major shift, one that is bound to have long-term repercussions at the global level, and particularly in Africa, which is one of the main recipients of EU arms trade. As documented by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), from 2020 to 2022 the EU exported a total value of €27 billion in arms and licences to Africa and the Middle East only, with Italy, France and Germany being the biggest exporters, and Egypt the largest buyer (CAAT 2025). This policy shift will probably encourage a trend of global rearmament, fuelling permanent war while most likely leading to more financial austerities for education, health services and welfare. Marx insisted on the necessity to interpret and analyse each war and its significance from the point of view of the working class, and distinguish between imperialist wars and revolutionary wars that unleash the potential of the working class to seize state power. We reiterate the importance of careful analysis of the relation between specific conflicts and imperialism, as, for example, in the current war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
War in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Goma and Bukavu are the two largest cities in the eastern DRC, lying on the northern and southern shores of Lake Kivu respectively. Each city is home to somewhere between one and two million residents, and both are situated on the border with Rwanda. On 27 January 2025, as part of a renewed offensive that had seen it capture strategic towns and cities across eastern DRC since 2022, Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) took control of Goma. Three weeks later, on 16 February, it took Bukavu. The DRC army, Forces armées de la RDC (FARDC), put up little resistance. Reports indicate that M23 has since been moving north to Butembo and south to Uvira, with some signs that it has also begun to move west. M23 has been fighting not only FARDC but other armed groups, most notably the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a militia founded by members of the Interahamwe, who committed the 1994 Rwandan genocide against Tutsis and afterwards fled to the eastern DRC to seek refuge.
These latest events follow a decades-long history of continuing war and conflict in the region (Muhindo 2014; Stearns 2022). While the context today is different, we have been here before. M23 formed in 2012, following the failed integration into FARDC of militia soldiers, many of whom were former members of the Tutsi-dominated Congrès national pour la défense du people. Today, its ranks remain heavily populated by Congolese Tutsi, including its military leader Sultani Makenga. Beginning in March 2012, M23 led an offensive across eastern DRC culminating in the capture of Goma in November. This proved short-lived, lasting just a few weeks before M23’s withdrawal and eventual surrender.
In its latest offensive, as was the case back in 2012 (UN Security Council 2012), M23 has received direct backing from the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by President Paul Kagame. In June 2024, according to a UN Security Council (2024) report, the Rwanda Defence Force (RDF) deployed an additional 3,000 to 4,000 of its troops to eastern DRC – around one-sixth of Rwanda’s military – to provide further support to M23 operations. This has taken place alongside RDF’s deployment of drones, armoured vehicles, GPS-jamming equipment and surface-to-air missiles (Kennes 2024). M23 is also a member of Alliance du Fleuve Congo, a Congolese coalition of political parties and armed groups formed in 2023.
More than 700,000 people have been displaced by the conflict since January 2025 alone (United Nations 2025) and several thousand people have been killed (Livingstone 2025). Newspaper reports and residents’ testimonies in February and March suggest a climate of fear and uncertainty in the DRC’s Kivu provinces. On 22 February, 12 young men were shot dead in Goma, thought to have been killed by M23 for refusing to join its ranks (Maludi 2025). Five days later, on 27 February, an explosion occurred at Bukavu’s Independence Square during a meeting held by Alliance du Fleuve Congo’s leader Corneille Nangaa, killing 11 people and injuring many more (Barhahiga and Pronczuk 2025). Most shops and banks remain closed. Many parents fear sending their children to school, preferring to keep them at home.
While the RPF denies its support to M23, the latest offensive appears to have come at a cost to both the ruling party and its armed forces. Hundreds, if not thousands, of RDF soldiers have reportedly been killed since its increased operations with M23 began around three years ago, according to high-ranking intelligence officials (Townsend and Wrong 2025). With international aid representing around US$1.3 billion of Rwanda’s US$4 billion annual budget (Afrique XXI 2025), in March 2025 the Western states of Belgium, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Canada had stopped delivering certain (but not all) forms of aid. (In the case of Belgium, Rwanda took the first step in suspending this relationship.) In addition, the EU had sanctioned three senior RDF officials and the US had imposed sanctions on Rwanda’s State Minister for Regional Integration, James Kabarebe (who served as Rwandan Minister of Defence from 2010 to 2018), and M23 spokesperson Kanyuka Kingston. The Rwandan government has spoken out strongly against these measures. It summoned the Canadian High Commissioner in Kigali to express its displeasure at the measures taken and to argue that the crimes it stands accused of ‘are committed in broad daylight by FARDC and DRC government militias’ (Gahigi 2025). This refers to FARDC’s reported collaboration with FDLR, which Rwanda sees as an ally of the Congolese army. Germany and the UK received a similar response. On March 17, the Rwandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation released a statement announcing that the Rwandan government was severing all diplomatic relations with Belgium, requiring all Belgian diplomats to leave the country within 48 hours (Government of Rwanda 2025).
Two related questions will be explored here. First, how might we think about the timing and possible objectives of M23’s latest offensive? Second, how do ongoing events in the DRC relate to the broader forces and structures of the imperialist world economy within which they are taking place? While the first question has been the primary focus of recent commentary by close observers, the second question has been mostly absent (see Serumaga 2025, for a notable exception). This reflects Ray Bush’s (2024, 357) observation, writing in the editorial of a recent issue of ROAPE, that while imperialism provides ‘the structural underpinning to the world economy that produces and reproduces inequality, poverty, war and famine’, it ‘is omitted from almost all analysis of Africa’. Meanwhile, some international anti-imperialist groups have been quick to frame M23’s offensive as part of continuing imperialist violence against the people of the DRC, driven by the need to exploit the country’s mineral riches for imperial gain, and in which Rwanda is acting as ‘a proxy for Western interests’ (Progressive International 2025).
Events of recent years have arguably provided fertile ground for this interpretation. According to Eric Kennes (2024), the RDF today has become
an important instrument for the implementation of aspects of UN, USA and EU policy in the region, including the struggle against Islamist movements in the region of Cabo Delgado in Moçambique, or the delivery of troops for UN missions in CAR and South-Sudan.
In Cabo Delgado, French and other Western multinationals are making huge profits from gas and oil exploitation (Makonye 2022) and are seeking to develop new offshore gas mega-projects. Currently, a major TotalEnergies gas project worth US$20 billion is on hold because of the ongoing insurgency there. In 2022 and 2024, the EU twice provided the Rwandan army with €20 million to support its peacekeeping operations in Mozambique. In late 2023, the EU announced an investment of €900 million in Rwanda through its Global Gateway programme, and in 2024 it signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Rwanda for a strategic critical minerals partnership (Titeca and Kennes 2025).
Yet to read the RDF-backed offensive in the DRC as Rwanda acting ‘as a proxy for Western interests’ seems an analytical misstep that fails to take the question of Rwandan agency seriously, however constrained this might be by the country’s subordinate position in the world economy. In addition, it’s not readily apparent how Western imperialist interests are any further served by M23’s latest offensive than was already the case. While some coltan, gold and other minerals in eastern DRC might now come under more direct Rwandan control, at least in the short-term, these minerals were already flowing freely to international markets via Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda prior to the latest offensive. Moreover, Congolese copper and cobalt, the DRC’s two major exports, are located outside the Kivu region to the southeast of the country. Their continued ownership, control and exploitation by mostly Chinese industrial mining companies (alongside Anglo-Swiss mining giant Glencore) has been unaffected by recent events.
So, what might the RPF be seeking to achieve through its latest support to M23’s advance, and why now? Following the 1994 Rwandan genocide, pro-Hutu extremist soldiers and militias who committed the genocide fled to eastern DRC seeking to escape reprisal. This led to the formation in 2000 of the Hutu-dominated FDLR. M23 has long claimed it is fighting in the eastern DRC to protect the Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese Tutsi communities from persecution by the FDLR (and to a lesser extent local Mai-Mai groups) who have threatened to expel or eliminate them (Ntanyoma 2023). For its part, as Frederick Golooba-Mutebi (2023) has noted, successive DRC governments have failed to neutralise FDLR and the militia’s continued persecution of Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese.
It is in this context that, in recent years, the idea of the Rwandan government using eastern DRC as a buffer zone to protect its own political, security and economic interests has seemingly begun to gain traction (Kennes 2024; Manzi 2024) and has reportedly become openly discussed in Kigali (Titeca 2025). Taking this further, some analysts see Rwanda as having more permanent and long-lasting expansionist ambitions. This idea dates to the colonial period, with several Rwandan government planning documents, such as ‘Rwanda Vision 2020’, noting that in 1910 ‘a big part of Rwanda was annexed to neighbouring countries. This caused the loss of one-third of the Rwandan internal market and a large part of its natural resources’ (Government of Rwanda 2000, 7). When Rwanda launched its first offensive in the DRC in 1996, officials reportedly ‘showed diplomats a map of a Rwanda 50 percent larger than its current borders, extending into the DRC’ (Stearns and Titeca 2025). During an official visit to Benin in 2023, President Kagame commented that ‘a big part of Rwanda was left outside, in eastern Congo, in south-western Uganda … this is a fact’ (Tampa 2025). In 2025, Theogene Rudasingwa, President Kagame’s former chief of staff and a former Rwandan ambassador, told the New York-based Foreign Affairs magazine that ‘within the inner kitchen cabinet I belonged to, Kagame constantly alluded to the Greater Rwanda idea’ (ibid.). Influenced by these notions of a Rwandan ‘buffer zone’ and a ‘Greater Rwanda’, Jason Stearns and Kristof Titeca (2025) have argued that early indications suggest
that this rebellion wants to reshape the region. The rebels have begun to set up administrative structures – a population census, tax offices, and even new customary chiefs – that suggest that they are here to stay. They have recruited – sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not – local leaders to undergo political and ideological training in the various camps, and they have set up their own police force.
According to some, and linked to these ideas of Rwanda’s expansionist objectives, recent events in the US have had a determining impact on the timing of M23’s latest offensive. For Murithi Mutiga, the Africa director at International Crisis Group, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency and Trump’s assertions that the US can expand its territory to Canada, Greenland, Panama and elsewhere, are likely to have influenced the timing of President Kagame’s decision-making (Peltier 2025). Whether or not any of this will materialise remains an area for speculation.
Meanwhile, there are some signs that the broader Alliance Fleuve du Congo political coalition of Congolese political parties, groups and armed militias, of which M23 is a part, wants to continue further onto Kinshasa and overthrow President Félix Tshisekedi’s government. This is, after all, the coalition’s stated ultimate objective. Here, President Kagame’s reach and influence might not be as all-encompassing as is often assumed. In addition, regional forces remain a factor, with thousands of Burundian and Ugandan troops operating in the DRC. This has led some commentators to note that the RDF-backed offensive might escalate into another regional war on a scale not seen since the official end of the Second Congo War in 2003 (Dutta et al. 2025). The gradual withdrawal of the Southern African Development Community’s troops from the region, announced on 13 March, has been welcomed in some quarters as de-escalating this tension (Ngorora 2025). However, while the Angolan presidency says that direct peace talks between the DRC government and M23 will begin on Tuesday 18 March in Luanda, it remains uncertain whether President Tshisekedi will support these talks. According to Patrick Mundeke, a politician with the DRC opposition party Ensemble pour la République, ‘The whole world thinks we need a negotiated solution, except Mr Tshisekedi’ (Ngorora 2025).
While the regional dimension is critical to unlocking the analytical puzzle of understanding the timing and motivations behind recent events, the structuring role of imperialism in continually creating the conditions for war is ever present, on both sides of the border. This dates from the colonial carving up of land and the reification, racialisation and institutionalisation of ethnic identity divisions (Purdeková and Mwambari 2021) to postcolonial external interventions in various guises. In the DRC, this has included the assassination of the DRC’s first prime minister and nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba (De Witte 2001), structural adjustment programmes that produced ‘widespread social and economic suffering’ (Moshonas 2018, 3), and the opening up of the national economy to the benefit of foreign capital (Kabongo 1999; Boyce and Ndikumana 2012; Trapido 2015; Radley 2023a, 2023b).
This context matters when seeking to understand the war in all its dimensions. Many commentators raise the weakness of the Congolese state and FARDC’s inability to neutralise FDLR or defend its borders as part of the explanation for the ongoing crisis. Seen through only a regional lens, a reader might be inclined to attribute this as solely due to internal DRC governance failures. Seen through the wider lens of imperialism, a more nuanced reading is opened up. Similarly, seeing African states, governments or political parties as only agents or victims of imperialist powers erases more complex realities. Even in instances where this has appeared more clear-cut, such as Rwanda’s military presence in Mozambique, it is worth pausing to consider the possibility that, here too, Rwanda has been pursuing its own interests and agenda by seeking to bolster its international reputation and develop future diplomatic leverage for precisely such a moment as this (or other purposes).
In locating analytically, then, the role of imperialism in the current crisis, we are perhaps best served by recalling Bush’s (2024, 357) observation that the imperialist world economy structurally reproduces inequality, impoverishment and war. Placed in its long-run history, eastern DRC has been the locus of precisely this reproduction of war and impoverishment for nearly three decades now, a war over which colonial legacies and neocolonial interventions cast a long shadow. Meanwhile, the world economy has been continually served by the free flow of coltan, gold and other minerals extracted and exported from the eastern DRC through an imperialist process of appropriation and unequal exchange (Ilonga 2024). At the same time, as Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka has argued in relation to the DRC and Rwanda following the most recent fall of Goma and Bukavu,
it is essential to understand this violence within the framework of political actors’ calculations. This agency of political actors – as a capacity for action despite structural constraints – is influenced by a constantly evolving conjuncture and structures that are certainly stable but always navigable. (Bisoka 2025, 6–7, translated from the original French by B. Radley)
Such an understanding requires leaving behind a rigid framework that only understands the actions of African countries as either serving or suffering from Western imperialism, and embracing a more dialectical materialist perspective that opens up the space for tension and contradiction to emerge. Any attempt to understand recent and ongoing events in the DRC cannot ignore its regional dimension, and the calculations and decisions made by the range of local and national political actors operating in the country.
Wars and a radically different future
Keeping an eye on the constant state of war also means reasoning about what needs to be done, what the future looks like if we are imagining a deep systemic change. ROAPE has most recently focused on the relevance of permanent war as a stable element of the inter-imperialist state system, for example, in Libya (Capasso 2020). The US global ‘war on terror’ has a profound impact on Africa, yet it receives little attention. Take the secretive US war in Somalia, ongoing since 2001. As Mueller has most poignantly argued, justice and liberation will at a minimum require establishing and delivering full US reparations to the Somali people (Mueller 2023). We are at a moment where imagining the end of class relations is hard, because the imagination is stifled by the class victory of the bourgeoisie. The most immediate example is the dismissal of any serious attempt to address the climate and environmental crises – the ultimate betrayal of future generations.
Future generations! The humankind we haven’t yet met: this boundless invisible potential, existing in possibility; a long line of descendants that constitute the invisible yet real human community – a community that exists beyond individuality, and bound nonetheless by its constraints but ridden of individualism. Future humanity is at the heart of communism: liberation of the human community, where concepts like radical kinship (Aouragh 2023) would become superfluous because new social relationships are at their very core liberated. A long path of regenerative and detoxifying practice lies ahead of us: of the environment and of people – the regeneration brought about by the abolition of the class relation. Coupled with that, the enormous work of carrying out historical reparations, that Africa can spearhead. This goes against the interests of the ruling class; and political imagination is so constrained because constrained are the material lives of the majority in this political phase. Gramsci called the social groups that professionally produce knowledge and tend to represent the interests of the ruling class specialised intellectuals, to contrast them with organic intellectuals, who rise from the rank and file of the working class and, while often lacking formal education, have the ability to develop not only class consciousness but also the political and organisational skills to mobilise the majority. In this issue, Bond reminds us of Fanon’s indictment of specialised intellectuals in the South: Fanon’s sharp pen wrote that
the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle, will give rise to tragic mishaps. (in this issue, 102)
And many of the specialised intellectuals, the educated class, are servants; and so they serve.
On comradeship
Fostering comradeship means fostering those – especially the youth – who are refusing to become servants, understanding and analysing the past to understand the present while keeping alive the perception of awareness of our human continuity with the future human community – this whole new world that is ours to build. This is an unlikely call at a time when escaping from distraction, being present and showing up has become a challenge for many: precarious lives and the cumulative effects of the pandemic have left many feeling ‘out of it’ (Bissel 2025), deflating radical activist communities too.
Reflecting on the longer process of decline of one such community – the Tanzanian radical left-wing activist network – Nyamsenda and Chachage ask the crucial question of how to revive comradeship (Nyamsenda and Chachage 2024), in Tanzania and beyond. Since independence, Tanzania has provided a learning political space and an experience of politicisation for so many. Incidentally, in this issue of ROAPE Sam Chian recalls that it was in mid-1960s Dar es Salaam that Immanuel Wallerstein, during his frequent visits to Giovanni Arrighi, met Walter Rodney; and this is only one example of the importance of creating spaces of resistance, protecting them and fostering them, sustaining the networks of resistance (Bush 2011). This sparks a realisation of the desert we are living in: a desert that has been made by the class victory of the bourgeoisie – with how many imprisoned, disappeared, killed? How many marginalised and criminalised? How many simply converted to a quiet life of individualism and consumerism, for the sake of survival – because the price to pay just became too high? Chian poignantly adds that Wallerstein’s daughter Katharine observed that it was thought that about half of the comrades who attended her father’s wedding in 1964 ‘were at some future point assassinated’ (71). Observing the criminalisation of pro-Palestine activism and engaging with comradeship now is very much reflecting about survival; in many places, many feel that resistance is no longer an option if one is to keep body and soul together. Walter Bgoya, a first-generation Tanzanian activist and comrade, responds to Nyamsenda and Chachage by thinking through three generations of comrades in Tanzania. Comradeship, he says, does not end when political meetings are over. He vividly concludes with an exhortation of what is a complete description of radical comradeship: ‘Let’s meet, eat, drink together. Let’s laugh and be happy, help each other when needed. Let’s comfort each other in difficult times’ (Bgoya 2024).
Bgoya points towards the work of care. There is a point of realisation: we have been waking up for too many months to experience the powerlessness of witnessing the genocide of Palestinians, and the silencing, defamation, slandering and imprisonment of comrades who have denounced it. Yet the dismantling of class relations can only happen if we start from building and rebuilding these networks of resistance and question our own comrades when they silently reproduce racial and patriarchal structures. Part of rebuilding comradeship means that the work of deep thinking and the work of deep caring go together; developing an awareness of one’s racial, gender and class position and critically allying with comrades who refuse to exploit their own position of power and instead commit their energies to erode them. In intellectual work, be it a collective or a research group, it means men doing the secretarial and administrative work that is still very much until today shouldered by female academics, and that brings with it the emotional work of communicating with tact, respect and awareness, freeing up black, brown and white female academics to do the heavy lifting of theoretical and applied research. It means prioritising payment for racialised comrades, reflecting critically on how research projects are structured and budgeted, and developing the ability to manoeuvre and bend budgeting rules, very often within the constraints of neocolonial institutions that fund the majority of research, pushing against the boundaries of a majority of institutions that remain neocolonial in their functioning. The work of comradeship means remaining supportive while handling disagreement and debate and doing all this while knowing that changing individual behaviours is not enough to challenge the structures that oppress us: that collective change – a change from and for the majority – is the goal. It is the way to open up the other to our own lived experience and its internal contradictions that will inevitably exist as we are constrained by, but also part of, a majority who are crushed by capitalist realism – that is based on the generation of continuous contradictions – even when that means suspending judgment. Racism, patriarchy and class relations are structures of domination that cannot be changed through individual behaviour; deepening our own perception and caring deeply about how they affect us all, even within comradeship, means rejecting identity politics. Identity politics transformed some networks of resistance into yet another form of exclusionary socialisation, one that isolates rather than connects. We refuse to let ideology prevail over the lived human togetherness that binds us as the majority of humankind.
In this issue
Mnqobi Ngubane brings to light the intrinsic connection between land and labour questions by sketching an innovative and politically daring trajectory towards addressing these interwoven questions. His paper presents new evidence on Basotho immigrant workers on farms located on the border between Lesotho and South Africa in Eastern Free State province. He sees them as being part of the footloose army of labour that expresses a global crisis of social reproduction, stressing the gender component. He also argues that labour performed by Basotho farm workers is the contemporary expression of a neocolonial pattern of land expropriation. These farm workers, who are victimised and criminalised, are the historical descendants of the Basotho who have been evicted from those same lands that constitute contemporary South Africa. To add to the political complexity, these workers are often hired by black beneficiaries of the land reform in South Africa, highlighting the limits of the market-based neoliberal land reform in the country and more broadly in the region. Ngubane challenges the South African left from the left, and does so in a politically compelling way. The real challenge, he proposes, is to recognise the interconnectedness of land and labour questions in Lesotho and South Africa, acknowledging that both countries have so far not resolved their land questions, and considering the implications of this recognition to deliver historical justice and reparation to the Basotho. Crucially, Ngubane argues against productivist understandings of land reforms and in favour of land redistribution as a measure to support the social reproduction of workers. With all the limits and obstacles faced by land reform debates in South Africa, the inclusion of Basotho beneficiaries seems a remote possibility to many; yet Ngubane proposes that this would pave the way for working class redistribution and true transhistorical justice in this border region.
ROAPE has widely documented the 1996/97 protests against structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in Zimbabwe. Antonater Tafadzwa Choto analyses the leadership of these protest movements as working-class organic intellectuals, rising from the rank-and-file leadership of the working class. In this respect, Choto’s application of Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectual is coherent not only with Gramsci’s original theorisation but also with the political practice – which is to be praised, given the often derivative use of Gramscian concepts outside political economic analyses. Choto sees these workers and the ordinary urban working class deploying their political and organisational skills to make a revolt succeed: very much what Gramsci observed in the Italian worker-led revolts of 1919/20. Basing her research on original primary evidence, such as interviews with organic intellectuals and first-person participation in the movements, she argues that working-class organic intellectuals were marginalised at the 1999 National Working People’s Convention (NWPC) by another group of intellectuals from the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) whom the workers saw as middle-class intellectuals. The sidelining of these organic intellectuals is very significant, given that the NWPC led to the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) – a liberal formation that became the leading opposition party – instead of the worker-based party that had been called for by the organic intellectuals who led the protests.
Sam Chian’s fascinating account of Immanuel Wallerstein’s engagement with Africa highlights the influence of his African studies – which constituted the first two decades of his intellectual work – on the development of his later thinking and the elaboration of world-systems theory, driven by the need to develop an effective theoretical framework that explains the radical interconnectedness and the global nature of multiple crises occurring in different parts of the world.
Patrick Bond’s analysis discusses resource nationalism, seen as drawing on Fanon’s disgust for the national bourgeoisie – a series of pitfalls misleading the educated classes, using GDP as a measure of prosperity. Samir Amin argued against erasing Marx’s analysis on resource exploitation; Bond argues that resource nationalism – with its blend of national sovereignty and ‘damage control’ reforms of extractive industries – is a symptom of what Marx called the ultimate bourgeois attitude of acting in total disregard of future generations: ‘après moi, le deluge’. The bourgeoisie is a class that is relentlessly acting in the pursuit of immediate capital accumulation, with complete disregard for the effects of present actions on future generations. Bond attacks the analytical erasure of the social and environmental damage of resource nationalism: the depletion of non-renewable resources, aggravating the use of fossil energy and greenhouse gas emissions in extraction and smelting, generating multiple pollution crises and biodiversity loss at the local level in extraction zones, and causing massive social impacts on local residents. These issues have been prioritised by anti-extractivism social movements, which are also regularly erased by intellectuals defending resource nationalism as a progressive agenda.
Ben Radley analyses the Program of Action on the Construction of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that was presented in September 2024 by the Havana Group of the Progressive International, timed to match the fiftieth anniversary of the 1974 UN’s original NIEO programme. This is of prime importance to our journal, as the ROAPE collective is a member of the Progressive International, though it did not participate in the initiatives of the Havana Group. Radley observes that while the Third-Worldist spirit is retained with a strong focus on how to bridge the North–South developmental divide, capitalism itself as a workable system remains unquestioned. Although the Progressive International lists anti-capitalism among its guiding principles, the Program presents itself as a top-down vision that sees workers as recipients of policies, rather than as key movers and makers of historical change. This implicit erasure of class relations at the global level, deriving from the Program’s almost exclusive concern with North–South divides, risks the Programme ultimately becoming politically disempowering.
The issue includes a review by Mari Engh of African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories, by Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruhe. It discusses in some detail the considerable empirical material presented in the book and the interdisciplinary collaborations that led to this collective publication. Engh draws attention to the book’s original contribution on football as a sport that condenses the social mobility aspirations of the youth, focusing on ‘how the desire to “become somebody” animates the lives and focus of young men’ (129). The role of football as a symbol of social mobility is heightened by the loss of confidence in the formal education system, which is seen as unable to offer secure pathways to desirable jobs.
The review is followed by a tribute by Dale McKinley to Prishani Naidoo, a radical activist and tireless comrade, remembering her journey of politicisation and how she relentlessly sought out and continued to find new spaces for activism. The obituary commemorates Naidoo’s life of radical comradeship.
Jens Sörensen’s article underlines the self-serving nature of the humanitarian aid industry, arguing that most of the humanitarian funding entering South Sudan ends up fostering the service sector in the ‘aid hub’ of Juba rather than serving the people of South Sudan at large. In South Sudan this has created a ‘humanitarian permanence’, that is, a vicious circle of humanitarian aid financing the service sector in Juba city. This article will provoke debate in several respects – it already has, within our own collective. In particular, it raises the question as to whether our understanding of South Sudan can – following De Waal – be reduced to that of a state functioning as a ‘political marketplace’ which depends on international aid and, more specifically, humanitarian funding for its very existence, and where sovereignty is the ultimate commodity. We look forward to a debate around this question and remind readers of ROAPE’s commitment to nuanced and carefully researched analyses of complex social realities on the ground (Allen 1995), also on the role of war, warfare and violence in the collapse of some African states (Allen 1999) and in Sudan (Duffield and Stockton 2023).