Author Archives: Juan Manuel Cincunegui

Ethics or Geopolitics: The Buddhist Community in the Face of the Genocide in Gaza

There are circumstances in which a tradition is exposed to its own moral standards. Not because its principles have changed, but because they must be applied outside the conditions in which they were originally formulated. Gaza is one of those moments for contemporary Buddhism.

The Israeli offensive following October 7, 2023 did not begin in a historical vacuum, as Israeli propaganda would have it. In 1948, around 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes and livelihoods. Today, around 5.9 million Palestinian refugees receive assistance from UNRWA [1]. Since 1967, Israel has occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful and pointed, among other things, to settlement expansion, land confiscation, forced displacement, and discriminatory measures imposed on the Palestinian population [2].

In December 2024, Amnesty International concluded that Israel had committed and was continuing to commit genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza. Its report documented the killing of civilians, destruction of infrastructure, forced displacement, restrictions on water, food, energy, and humanitarian aid, and considered those practices together with statements by Israeli political and military leaders [3].

Independent access to Gaza has also been severely restricted. During the war, Israel has prevented international journalists from entering freely, so much of the documentation has depended on Palestinian journalists working inside the territory. By June 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists had verified that 209 journalists and media workers had been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and in Israeli detention facilities since October 2023 [4]. After reviewing its own database, CPJ continued to report in September 2026 that Israeli forces were responsible for the overwhelming majority of journalists killed in Israel and the Palestinian territories since 2023 [5].

The recent controversy surrounding the documentary NAZA reveals another aspect of the problem. Directed by Israelis Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the film draws on testimony from within Israel’s own military and intelligence apparatus about the procedures used to select targets in Gaza and to calculate civilian casualties in advance, defined by the acronym NAZA as “collateral damage.” As the directors recently explained in an interview with The Guardian, the documentary reconstructs a system in which the projected number of civilian deaths forms part of the process by which attacks are selected and authorized [6]. The film received the Special Jury Prize in Venice in September 2026 [7]. The political response inside Israel was immediate. Culture Minister Miki Zohar announced that he would seek to revoke Abraham’s and Szor’s Israeli citizenship and accused them of treason. Benjamin Netanyahu called the film intolerable [8]. The controversy is significant because it shows that the debate over Gaza concerns not only the facts themselves, but also the conditions under which those facts can be investigated and publicly presented.

It was in this context that Bhikkhu Bodhi published No Time for Silence in 2024. Bodhi is a Theravada monk, one of the leading contemporary translators of the Pali Canon, and a prominent figure in American Buddhism. He is also of Jewish background. His criticism was directed at his own community. From the first weeks of the offensive, he had searched for statements on Gaza from Buddhist teachers, centers, and publications. He found some exceptions. What predominated, by his account, was silence [9].

Bodhi also noted a difference between rank-and-file practitioners and institutional leaders. A petition for a ceasefire that he drafted with Alan Senauke gathered nearly two thousand signatures in a few weeks, yet Bodhi continued to observe a strong reluctance among Buddhist teachers and leaders to intervene publicly.

A few months later, Gaza: Calling for a Dharma Response appeared, a collective publication by teachers, monastics, sangha leaders, and practitioners. Its introduction explicitly stated that the silence of teachers and centers had left many members of Buddhist communities feeling abandoned. The publication sought to respond to that silence and to the quietism it identified within Dharma institutions [10].

The issue Bodhi raised was doctrinal as well as political. In his view, equanimity does not require suspending moral judgment. It can coexist with compassion and with action intended to prevent or redress harm. This observation is relevant because the language used by Buddhist communities in response to political conflicts often appeals precisely to equanimity, dialogue, overcoming hatred, and the need to avoid polarization [9].

The contrast with the political activity of Tibetan institutions in exile is clear. For decades, the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, and the Offices of Tibet have actively sought international support in denouncing Chinese policies in Tibet. Their work includes contacts with governments, parliaments, and international organizations. The Office of Tibet in Washington lists among its functions mobilizing the executive and legislative branches of the United States and Canada in support of resolving the Tibetan issue [11]. The Office for Latin America defines an equivalent mission: mobilizing the executive and legislative branches of Latin American governments [12].

These are not, therefore, institutions that have traditionally understood Buddhist practice as a withdrawal from politics. The defense of human rights, religious freedom, cultural preservation, and nonviolence has been central to their public activity. In 2025 and 2026, the Tibetan Parliament continued to conduct political advocacy campaigns, meet with parliamentarians, and appeal to foreign governments for support for the Tibetan cause [13].

The difference with Gaza is visible. In the public institutional Tibetan documentation reviewed since October 2023, we found no comparable mobilization on behalf of the Palestinian population. This does not mean that individual Tibetan practitioners or teachers have made no statements. When they do appear, however, they can take the form of general statements that avoid assigning responsibility. This is the case with the Dalai Lama himself. In March 2025, he expressed sadness at the suffering of innocent people in Gaza and called for dialogue and negotiation. A year later, he again referred to conflicts in the Middle East, calling for dialogue, diplomacy, and mutual respect [14] [15]. In neither statement did he mention the Israeli government or assign any responsibility for the killings and destruction in Gaza.

The contrast becomes still more significant when we consider the language used to address Tibet itself. When the subject is Tibet, both the Dalai Lama and the institutions of the exile community identify actors, describe specific policies, assign responsibility, and formulate precise political demands. They do not limit themselves to generic calls for dialogue, peace, or mutual consideration between the parties. The difference, therefore, is not that Tibetan Buddhism rejects the political attribution of responsibility in principle, but that such attribution is explicit in the case of Tibet and disappears in the case of Gaza.

The geopolitical situation of the exile community helps explain the context of this difference. Tibetan institutions regularly express gratitude to India, the United States, Europe, and Japan for the support they have received since 1959. In July 2025, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile explicitly thanked those governments and societies for more than six decades of humanitarian assistance, political support, and help in preserving Tibetan religious and cultural identity [16]. In June 2026, the Speaker of Parliament again thanked the U.S. government for its sustained support and specifically highlighted USAID’s relationship with the Central Tibetan Administration [17].

The relationship is not merely symbolic. In November 2024, USAID, The Tibet Fund, and the Central Tibetan Administration jointly launched a five-year program intended to strengthen the economic, social, and cultural resilience of Tibetan communities in India and Nepal [18]. India, for its part, remains the principal territorial base of the Tibetan exile community and hosts its main political, educational, and religious institutions.

These dependencies do not in themselves establish a causal explanation for the silence on Gaza. They do, however, place it within a concrete structure of political relationships. The continuity of Tibetan institutions depends on states that play a central role in their international protection and that have their own alliances and interests in the Middle East. This is the material context in which both their statements and their silences take shape.

There is also a historical feature specific to the Tibetan system. For nearly four centuries, political and spiritual authority were combined in the institution of the Dalai Lama. The current Dalai Lama formally relinquished his political authority in 2011 and transferred those responsibilities to democratically elected leaders. At the time, he described personal rule by a religious authority as anachronistic and defended the separation of spiritual leadership from political responsibility [19].

Institutional democratization is a fact. Yet so is the persistence of a close symbolic relationship among religious authority, national identity, and political representation. The Office of Tibet in Latin America defines itself simultaneously as the representative of the Dalai Lama and of the Central Tibetan Administration. Its functions include both promoting his spiritual commitments and mobilizing political support for Tibet, as well as strengthening relations with Tibetan Buddhist centers [12].

For Western practitioners, this overlap poses a problem. The reception of Tibetan Buddhism was accompanied, in many cases, by a particular understanding of Tibetan political history. Solidarity with Tibet, denunciation of Chinese repression, and the spiritual authority of teachers became closely associated. The formal separation of religion and politics introduced in 2011 does not automatically dissolve this cultural configuration.

The phenomenon is particularly visible in Latin America today. Between June and September 2025, a delegation of monks from Drepung Loseling, accompanied by representatives of the Office of Tibet, traveled through Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The tour visited twenty-one cities and combined teachings, ceremonies, cultural activities, and an institutional presence [20].

The Office of Tibet itself states that one of its objectives in the region is to secure support from Latin American governments and parliaments for the Tibetan cause [12]. This expansion coincides with a period of growing competition between the United States and China in Latin America. A May 2026 Congressional Research Service report notes that the second Trump administration made the Western Hemisphere a foreign-policy and defense priority and explicitly intensified efforts to limit Chinese and Russian influence in the region [21].

This does not mean that Tibetan activity in Latin America is automatically an extension of U.S. policy. It does show that this activity takes place in a setting in which the Tibetan issue also has geopolitical value in the competition between Washington and Beijing. In Latin America, this context also has a specific history. During the Cold War, religious, educational, and humanitarian initiatives originating in the United States frequently overlapped with the objectives of U.S. foreign policy. The historical literature has documented, for example, the close relationship among sectors of American evangelicalism, anticommunism, and State Department activity in the region. Billy Graham and other evangelical leaders publicly presented their missions as religious while maintaining contacts with U.S. officials and participating in a shared language of democracy, religious freedom, and anticommunism [22].

Ivan Illich had earlier warned of a similar problem from within Catholicism. His critique of U.S. missionary programs in Latin America argued that a religious presence could function, even without direct political coordination, as a vehicle for values, social models, and forms of authority originating in the United States [23]. In different terms, later studies have also shown how the growth of American evangelical networks in Latin America became connected to circuits of foreign policy, human rights, anticommunism, and transnational power [24].

Brazil provides a particularly clear case. Relations between conservative religious organizations in Brazil and the United States have a long and well-documented history. Those networks cannot be reduced to an operation directed from Washington, but neither can they be fully separated from the hemispheric circulation of resources, organizations, discourses, and political projects [25]. In that context, the current Tibetan expansion in Latin America deserves to be examined not only as a religious or cultural development, but also as a presence entering a space historically shaped by the relationship among mission, cultural influence, and international politics.

For a contemporary Buddhist practitioner, these elements can be distinguished. Religious practice, solidarity with the Tibetan people, the political position of the Central Tibetan Administration, and that administration’s international alliances are not the same thing. Nor is there any doctrinal reason why they must be accepted together.

The issue raised by Gaza can therefore be stated quite simply. For decades, Buddhist and Tibetan institutions have developed a public language of compassion, nonviolence, human rights, and international responsibility. They have also called on foreign governments and societies to apply those principles to Tibet. In the case of Gaza, some of those same institutions have offered a far more limited and cautious response, calling their equanimity into question.

The contradiction need not be overstated. It is enough to set it out. If the principles invoked in defense of Tibet are universal, their scope cannot depend on where violence occurs or on the identity of the state responsible. Gaza allows us to observe the extent to which that universality is maintained when it comes into contact with the alliances, dependencies, and actual political conditions of the institutions that proclaim it.

References

[1] United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. (n.d.). Palestine refugees. UNRWA. https://www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees

[2] International Court of Justice. (2024, July 19). Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024: Legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176

[3] Amnesty International. (2024, December 5). Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/

[4] Committee to Protect Journalists. (2026, June 25). CPJ undertakes review of its documentation of journalists killed in Israel-Gaza war since 2023. https://cpj.org/2026/06/cpj-undertakes-review-of-its-documentation-of-journalists-killed-in-israel-gaza-war-since-2023/

[5] Committee to Protect Journalists. (2026, September 24). CPJ completes review of journalists killed in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. https://cpj.org/2026/09/cpj-completes-review-of-journalists-killed-in-israel-and-the-occupied-palestinian-territory/

[6] Brooks, X. (2026, September 11). ‘They know the house they are bombing is full of children’: NAZA’s directors on their devastating film about Israeli intelligence. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/11/naza-directors-film-israeli-intelligence-rachel-szor-yuval-abraham-

[7] La Biennale di Venezia. (2026, September 12). Official awards of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/official-awards-83rd-venice-international-film-festival

[8] RTVE.es. (2026, September 13). Israel amenaza con retirar la ciudadanía a los directores del documental ‘Naza’, premiado en Venecia. https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260913/ministro-cultura-israeli-amenaza-con-retirar-ciudadania-a-directores-del-documental-naza-premiado-venecia/17223333.shtml

[9] Bodhi, B. (2024, July 29). No time for silence. One Earth Sangha. https://oneearthsangha.org/articles/no-time-for-silence/

[10] Sacred Justice Coalition. (2024, April 27). Gaza: Calling for a Dharma Response [Webzine]. https://alokavihara.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Gaza-Calling-for-a-Dharma-Response-updated-april-27-2024.pdf

[11] Office of Tibet. (n.d.). Office mission and role. https://tibetoffice.org/office-mission-and-role

[12] Oficina del Tíbet para América Latina. (n.d.). Misión y rol. https://spanish.tibetoffice.org/about/mision-y-rol

[13] Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile. (2026, March 10). Statement of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile on the commemoration of the 67th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising. Central Tibetan Administration. https://tibet.net/statement-of-the-tibetan-parliament-in-exile-on-the-commemoration-of-the-67th-anniversary-of-the-tibetan-national-uprising/

[14] Dalai Lama. (2025, March 14). A prayer for peace. The Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. https://www.dalailama.com/news/a-prayer-for-peace

[15] Dalai Lama. (2026, March 31). Message. The Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. https://www.dalailama.com/news/message

[16] Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile. (2025, July 6). Statement of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile on the occasion of the commemoration of the 90th birthday of His Holiness the Great 14th Dalai Lama. Central Tibetan Administration. https://tibet.net/statement-of-the-tibetan-parliament-in-exile-on-the-occasion-of-the-commemoration-of-the-90th-birthday-of-his-holiness-the-great-14th-dalai-lama/

[17] Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile. (2026, June 23). Speaker Dolma Tsering Teykhang meets US Embassy delegation. https://tibetanparliament.org/speaker-dolma-tsering-teykhang-meets-us-embassy-delegation/

[18] Central Tibetan Administration. (2024, November 25). Five-year programme to strengthen economic, social, and cultural resilience of Tibetan communities in India and Nepal launched. https://tibet.net/five-year-programme-to-strengthen-economic-social-and-cultural-resilience-of-tibetan-communities-in-india-and-nepal-launched/

[19] Dalai Lama. (2011, March 19). His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s remarks on retirement. The Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. https://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/biography-and-daily-life/retirement/retirement-remarks

[20] Central Tibetan Administration. (2025). His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday celebrated across Latin America. https://tibet.net/his-holiness-the-dalai-lamas-90th-birthday-celebrated-across-latin-america/

[21] Congressional Research Service. (2026, May 26). U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere: Issues for Congress (R48960). https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R48960.html

[22] Kirkpatrick, D. C. (2023). The Latin American bullring: US evangelicals and the reception of anti-Protestant violence from Cold War Colombia. Journal of American Studies, 57(4), 513–539. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875823000257

[23] Illich, I. (1967, January 21). The seamy side of charity. America. https://www.americamagazine.org/from-our-archives/1967/01/21/seamy-side-charity/

[24] Lahr, A. M. (2007). Putting the trumpet to their lips. In Millennial dreams and apocalyptic nightmares: The Cold War origins of political evangelicalism (pp. 75–100). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195314489.003.0004

[25] Cowan, B. A. (2021). Moral majorities across the Americas: Brazil, the United States, and the creation of the religious right. University of North Carolina Press. https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469662077.001.0001

Conditional Sovereignty. Notes on the Malvinas and Ceuta

Some coincidences do not mean much. But when coincidences accumulate and point in the same direction, they cease to look like mere accidents and begin to demand an explanation.

The United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara when Morocco normalized relations with Israel. A few years later, Washington began using the question of the Malvinas as an instrument of pressure on the United Kingdom for its reluctance to go along with American military adventures. Almost simultaneously, a committee of the U.S. Congress began discussing the “future status” of Ceuta and Melilla while Spain was going through one of its most serious diplomatic confrontations in decades with Washington and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Taken separately, these events admit different explanations. Taken together, they suggest a pattern: territorial disputes are beginning to function as bargaining chips within an increasingly transactional system of international relations.

The clearest precedent is Morocco. In December 2020, Rabat joined the architecture of Arab-Israeli normalization promoted by Donald Trump. Morocco was not the only Muslim-majority country to participate in the so-called Abraham Accords—the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had preceded it—but it was the only one in the Maghreb [1]. Its participation also had a decisive feature: the United States accompanied Morocco’s normalization of relations with Israel by recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. On December 10, 2020, Trump formally proclaimed that Washington recognized the entirety of the Sahrawi territory as part of Morocco [2].

The importance of the episode lies in the logic it reveals. A question involving the right of a people to self-determination, and which the United Nations continues to regard as an unfinished process of decolonization, was thereby incorporated into a geopolitical negotiation. The formula can be stated simply: normalization with Israel in exchange for a territorial diplomatic gain. Territory itself becomes a negotiable asset within a regional architecture designed by Washington.

From that point on, Spain found itself facing a more unfavorable balance of forces. Madrid had never formally recognized the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, but for decades it had maintained a position closer to the principle of self-determination promoted by the United Nations. That position changed substantially in 2022, when Pedro Sánchez began describing Morocco’s autonomy proposal as “the most serious, credible and realistic basis” for resolving the conflict [3]. The shift came after a prolonged confrontation with Rabat and the 2021 Ceuta crisis. By then, Morocco had already obtained from the leading Western power something it had sought for decades—and had obtained it in the context of its strategic rapprochement with Israel.

This precedent is crucial to understanding what happened in 2026. U.S. territorial policy once again takes on an openly instrumental character.

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Under the Volcano

On Recovering Realism

A few years ago, while I was living on the island of La Palma, in the Canary archipelago, the Tajogaite Under the Volcano

A few years ago, while I was living on the island of La Palma, in the Canary archipelago, the Tajogaite volcano erupted. The images were colossal; I am not exaggerating. Yet none of them was sufficient to reproduce the bodily experience of being in situ before the “event,” using the term here in a philosophical sense.

What impressed me most was the continuous movement of the earth beneath my feet. At night, I would wake up again and again and watch the house sway gently, as though we were sailing across a lake. I was also struck by the volcano’s persistent roar. Together with the enormous plume that rose above the island and seemed to extend into the stratosphere—as we were later able to see in satellite images—that roar gave the eruption an almost stellar dimension, something out of science fiction.

What interests me here, however, is something else. There stood the volcano, in all its metaphorical majesty, in its immense indifference toward us, oblivious to our fears and trembling. The volcano did not debate its existence with us. It required neither our interpretation nor our consent in order to have occurred and to continue occurring, while we remained incapable of doing anything to stop it.

Nor could it be reduced to the spectacular images captured by our cameras or to the data obtained through our technological devices. The volcano obeyed processes and laws for which we did not even constitute a significant exteriority. From its perspective—if I may be allowed the metaphor—we were less than nothing.

From a philosophical point of view, the volcano thus became the culmination of a turn toward realism that had begun several years earlier and on which I had been working while writing my third major research project, later published under the title Mind and Politics: Dialectics and Realism from the Perspective of Liberation.

That turn entailed recognizing that the world is not a docile colony of our conceptual schemes. We think about, classify, interpret, and narrate reality, but this does not mean that we sovereignly produce it through those acts. There is something that confronts us, limits us, surprises us, and disrupts our expectations; something on which we depend and which, in the final analysis, will destroy us.

This recognition is elementary. Yet much of modern and contemporary philosophy appears to have turned the relationship between thought and reality into a practically insoluble problem. After Descartes and Kant, philosophy learned to distrust not only the possibility of perceptually accessing things as they are in themselves, but also—under the spell of idealism—the possibility that they might exist in complete independence from the subjective conditions of their appearance. The subject, its categories, its language, and its historical determinations moved to the center of philosophical reflection. The question of what exists was progressively displaced by the question of how we know, categorize, or articulate that whose existence we affirm.

Undoubtedly, this displacement was intellectually fruitful and politically effective. It allowed us to understand that no knowledge is entirely neutral, that all our perceptions must be understood from situated perspectives, and that representations are constructions emerging within historically constituted relations of power. Yet it also succumbed to a temptation: that of confusing the impossibility of perceptually accessing reality without mediation with the nonexistence of a reality independent of those mediations.

The volcano was a reminder that something decisive is lost when we forget what is elementary: the material conditions of possibility of our existence as embodied and finite beings.

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What Have You Done with My Name? Argentina, the World Cup, and the Struggle over Representation

1. The Dilemma: Soccer or Politics?

The 2026 World Cup began long before the opening match. If one had to assign it an inaugural date, December 5, 2025, would be a plausible choice. On that day, FIFA presented Donald Trump with the first edition of an award it had itself created: the FIFA Peace Prize.[1]

The episode had an immediate precedent. Trump had repeatedly expressed his desire to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In October 2025, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award it to María Corina Machado—a choice that was itself open to question, given the Venezuelan opposition leader’s political record and her positions regarding the Israeli government. Two months later, Gianni Infantino presented Trump with an alternative award during the World Cup draw.

The decision did not result from a public procedure. No candidates, comparative criteria, deliberations, or independent evaluation process were disclosed. FIFA created the prize, and its president bestowed it upon the president of the principal host country. Infantino’s conduct was challenged by civil society organizations, national federations, and members of the European Parliament, who called for an investigation into whether it violated the political neutrality required by FIFA’s own regulations.[2]

The principal question is not whether Trump deserved a peace prize. To frame the debate in those terms would be to accept too quickly the moral authority FIFA decided to confer upon itself. The problem comes earlier: a sports organization converted its institutional authority into the power to confer moral legitimacy upon a head of government.

FIFA did not merely express an opinion. It created an honor, organized a ceremony, and used one of the World Cup’s central events to confer public recognition upon the president of the United States. It placed the symbolic resources of global soccer at the service of an operation of political legitimation.

The gesture anticipated the general structure of the tournament.

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The Songlines

What Does “Australia,” the Land of the Antipodes, Mean?

1

I read The Songlines in the 1990s, during my long wanderings through South and Southeast Asia. As a long-term traveller, I found the book captivating. In many ways, it confirmed—and even justified—the restlessness that had driven me onto the road: the suspicion that sedentary life, borders, and property did not exhaust the human possibilities of inhabiting the world.

Since then, Bruce Chatwin’s work has been subjected to incisive criticism. His way of blending observation, invention, appropriation, and literary stylisation has been examined with a severity that, to a large extent, it deserves. In Argentina, his vision of Patagonia also aroused strong objections among those who had spent years reconstructing the region’s history of exploitation, workers’ resistance, and state violence. The distance between these approaches was profound. Where committed historical research encountered a story demanding restitution and remembrance, Chatwin found material for a literary composition governed by the traveller’s gaze and obsessions.

None of this erases the impact his work had on my own imagination. That travelling imagination also fitted the cultural background taking shape during those years: a world of apparently more permeable borders, global communications, and incessant movement; the world that the “new world order,” geopolitically proclaimed by George H. W. Bush, presented as the horizon of a finally unified humanity, and that we now recognise as the cultural configuration of neoliberal globalisation.

The traveller of the 1990s could imagine himself as an inhabitant of a planet that was beginning to open up. Travel appeared as a form of liberation from inherited identities, compulsory allegiances, and national borders. Movement promised a broader life, a receptiveness to difference, perhaps even an elementary form of cosmopolitanism.

Today, it is difficult to recover that innocence. We know that mobility was never distributed equally. While some of us crossed borders in search of experience, learning, or adventure, others were displaced by war, hunger, expropriation, or economic necessity. The same world that celebrated the circulation of commodities, capital, and travellers turned those who moved without the appropriate documents, money, or nationality into objects of suspicion. The road could be a choice for some and a sentence for others.

Australia occupied a particular place within that imagination. It was the land of the antipodes: the remote edge of the world, the place where it might be possible to begin again. In Mondays in the Sun, directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, even those expelled from the productive order by industrial restructuring can imagine Australia as a way out, as the name of a different life beyond the immediate horizon. That Australia belongs to the imagination of those seeking escape: a distant territory onto which the possibility of another existence can be projected.

But seen from Alice Springs, the image is reversed. Australia ceases to be the other side of the world and becomes the name of the political order that turned the first inhabitants of that territory into second-class citizens. For some, a promise of escape; for others, a historical form of dispossession. And perhaps it is precisely this reversal that forces us to ask what “Australia” really means.

2

This essay emerges from the intersection between my memory of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and a recent report by Cédric Gouverneur published in Le Monde diplomatique. Returning to Australia through that report also compels us to read Chatwin differently.

Where the European traveller found a powerful metaphor for human nomadism, Aboriginal peoples recognised—and still recognise—a concrete web of territories, ancestors, obligations, memories, and forms of life. The songlines were not a romantic invitation to set out on the road. They were, and remain, a way of relating to the land and of keeping a world alive.

Gouverneur’s report begins in Alice Springs, in the heart of Arrernte country. There, Brian Youngy explains:

“Where the white man sees a desert, we see resources. We read the sand like a book and, when you use your GPS, we have our songlines.”

The scene condenses two radically different ways of inhabiting the world. One conceives the land as available space, property, and resource; the other recognises it as memory, relation, and home.

These are not merely two intellectual conceptions of territory. They are two practical worlds, two ways of understanding who we are, what we owe to those who preceded us, and what it means to belong to a place. For the colonial gaze, the land appears as an external surface that can be measured, divided, bought, and exploited. For Indigenous peoples, territory is not something possessed from the outside. It is a web of relations within which life acquires orientation and meaning.

3

Colonisation begins when one of these ways of inhabiting the world claims a monopoly over reality.

Indigenous land can be declared empty because it does not conform to the European form of property. Its inhabitants can be judged backward because they do not organise their existence around wage labour, the market, and the proprietary individual. Their knowledge can be reduced to mythology, while the coloniser’s knowledge presents itself as a neutral description of the world.

This is why the decisive issue in Gouverneur’s report is not simply the continued existence of two different ways of relating to the land. It is the question of what Australia has done with that difference.

4

Gouverneur describes a country that has incorporated Indigenous symbols into its public image for decades. Australia has celebrated Aboriginal art, recovered traditional place names, and turned certain elements of Indigenous cultures into part of its international identity. In Alice Springs, murals reproduce Indigenous motifs and galleries sell works by Aboriginal artists. The antiquity of these cultures forms part of the story through which Australia presents itself to the world.

Yet the same report shows that this cultural visibility coexists with profound social, political, and legal inequality. Many Aboriginal people live in deteriorated settlements, are vastly overrepresented in the prison system, and are frequently treated as a security problem. Aboriginal culture can be celebrated while actual Aboriginal people continue to be ignored, placed under supervision, or criminalised.

A fundamental distinction emerges here: some transformations alter the appearance of a society, while others alter its character.

The first are visible and easily incorporated into the story a community tells about itself. Names are changed, monuments are erected, festivals are organised, ceremonies are adopted, language is revised, and representations of diversity multiply.

None of this is necessarily irrelevant. Symbols can repair silences, restore visibility, and alter the limits of what can be said. It would be a mistake to dismiss them as merely decorative gestures.

But these transformations can coexist with structures that remain largely intact. A society can admire a culture, appropriate its stories, and commercialise its images without recognising its members as political interlocutors. It can celebrate difference so long as that difference remains confined to food, art, spirituality, spectacle, or heritage.

In this way, the culture of others appears as something visible and particular: their food, ceremonies, languages, clothing, kinship systems, and songlines. The dominant form of life, by contrast, remains invisible. It does not recognise itself as one historical culture among others. Private property, individualism, the market, the state, and a particular conception of citizenship simply appear as the neutral reality within which other ways of life must accommodate themselves.

This asymmetry makes it possible for a society to be multicultural without ceasing to be colonial. It can tolerate a plurality of cultural expressions so long as the dominant culture retains the exclusive power to determine the conditions of tolerance. It can invite others to share their customs without allowing them to participate in defining the common rules.

Deep transformations operate at another level. They do not merely alter the signs through which a society represents itself. They change how its members perceive others. They alter what a community considers intolerable, which voices it recognises as authoritative, and which forms of suffering it feels obliged to answer.

In other words, they transform its moral character.

The character of a society is neither a national essence nor a psychological disposition shared by all its members. It is the historical result of institutions, habits, affects, and narratives that teach us who fully belongs to the common world and who remains at its margins. It reveals itself in what arouses compassion or fear, in the inequalities that provoke outrage, and in those that come to be accepted as part of the natural order of things.

A society changes deeply when it ceases to tolerate practices it once considered normal. When it learns to listen to those it had reduced to silence. When the humiliation of others ceases to appear as someone else’s problem. When it understands that equality does not mean treating identically those who have been placed in radically unequal historical positions.

5

The failure of the referendum on The Voice, held on 14 October 2023, makes it possible to measure the distance between these two forms of transformation.

As Gouverneur recalls, the proposal did not grant Indigenous peoples a right of veto or a separate sovereignty. It sought to establish a constitutionally recognised advisory body through which they could express their views on policies affecting them. Even so, 60 per cent of voters rejected the reform.

For many Aboriginal people, the defeat was not simply an institutional disagreement but a new humiliation: confirmation that Australia was prepared to celebrate their culture, but not necessarily to listen to their voice. “Why do they hate us so much?” asks social worker Walbira Murray in the report.

The campaign against the reform succeeded in presenting the specific recognition of Indigenous peoples as a threat to the equality of all Australians. The attempt to repair a historical inequality was translated into the language of privilege. Giving a particular voice to those who had been dispossessed and silenced for generations appeared to violate the neutrality of common citizenship.

This reversal is one of the most characteristic political operations of our time. Inherited inequality becomes invisible, while any attempt to correct it appears as preferential treatment. The majority presents itself as the potential victim of minorities. Reparation becomes discrimination. Memory is interpreted as resentment. The demand to be heard becomes a threat to national unity.

Abstract equality can thus become a mechanism for preserving concrete inequality.

The Aboriginal person can be accepted as an ancestral figure, an artist, or the custodian of an ancient spirituality. It is more difficult to accept that person as a contemporary subject, a citizen with a specific history, and an interlocutor whose words should acquire institutional form.

Societies tend to accept those they have excluded more readily when they appear stripped of demands. The other can be recognised as heritage, memory, or cultural identity so long as they do not challenge the existing distribution of power. Symbolic inclusion then becomes a form of neutralisation: the other is honoured precisely where they can no longer call us into question.

This is why The Voice, despite its institutional modesty, raised a qualitatively different issue. It did not merely ask that Aboriginal peoples be represented. It asked that they be heard.

And listening means something more demanding than tolerating. It means accepting that the other may say something capable of changing our decisions, our understanding of history, and the image we have of ourselves. It means recognising that the common world is not finished, and that those placed at its margins possess a word without which that world remains mutilated.

The referendum’s defeat therefore forces us to ask a more uncomfortable question: what does “Australia” really mean?

Does it mean belonging to a nation whose history begins with British colonisation and whose citizens appear before the law as formally equal individuals?

Or does it mean recognising that this nation was built on lands inhabited for tens of thousands of years by peoples whose sovereignty was never voluntarily ceded?

Can Australia incorporate the art, names, and stories of its Indigenous peoples without acknowledging that those cultures also contain conceptions of land, community, and authority capable of calling the existing order into question?

6

The question does not concern Australia alone.

For several decades, it seemed that our societies were undergoing an irreversible moral transformation. The language of human rights became the shared vocabulary of public life. Freedoms were expanded, identities once persecuted were recognised, and openly expressing certain forms of racism, misogyny, or social contempt became unacceptable.

All this had real effects and should not be reduced to mere appearance.

But perhaps we mistook the modification of our forms of representation for a deep transformation of our character. Words changed, institutional codes changed, and the boundaries of what could publicly be said changed. It is less clear that the affects, hierarchies, and reflexes through which we decide who deserves protection, who may be heard, and which lives we consider expendable changed with the same intensity.

For years, the expansion of rights and the recognition of differences seemed to consolidate a culture of respect for human dignity, freedom, and equality. Seen retrospectively, many of those advances can be understood as superficial transformations in a precise sense: not because they were false or irrelevant, but because they did not completely transform the deeper dispositions on which our societies rested.

Today, we are witnessing a deeper transformation in the opposite direction.

Beneath the surface of that public culture of respect, a more visceral disposition is re-emerging. Fear of the other, the desire to punish, the defence of privilege, and impatience with demands for reparation no longer need to hide. What once had to be concealed now presents itself as candour. Cruelty is called realism. Indifference, common sense. Inequality, merit. Exclusion, self-defence.

We are not simply retreating on particular policies. The moral threshold of what can be tolerated is changing.

Entire populations can be treated as threats, burdens, or collateral damage. Those who claim rights are portrayed as privileged. Those who remember a historical injustice appear as enemies of social harmony. The majority imagines itself besieged by those it has kept in subordinate positions for generations.

The failure of The Voice belongs to this historical moment. Not because Australia is an exception, but because it shows with particular clarity the transition from superficial tolerance to a deeper reaction. Aboriginal culture may be celebrated so long as it remains in the museum, the mural, the festival, or the tourist narrative. It becomes threatening when it claims a voice capable of intervening in common decisions.

The problem of our time may not be that we have ceased altogether to believe in dignity, freedom, and equality. It is that we are discovering how far those words had been incorporated without fully transforming the dispositions that organise our relationship with others.

When conditions harden, the unresolved foundation reappears: the impulse to exclude, rank, and sacrifice.

That is the deep transformation we are living through.

And this is why the Australian question concerns us all. The issue is not simply what place Indigenous peoples occupy within a nation. It is what kind of society emerges when it ceases to feel ashamed of its own contempt.

The songlines made it possible to cross the land without reducing it to an empty surface. They recalled that the world was made of journeys, stories, ancestors, and obligations. They did not merely describe a geography. They taught a way of inhabiting.

Perhaps every society also possesses its own songlines: narratives that orient its steps, establish its forms of belonging, and determine who may appear within the common world. Some remind us that we depend on those who came before us and that no life sustains itself alone. Others repeat that the land is a resource, that everyone deserves what they possess, and that those who remain outside are a burden or a threat.

The question raised by Australia today is not whether it sufficiently appreciates Aboriginal culture. It is whether it is willing to be transformed by it.

And that question applies to all of us. A society does not change deeply when it adds new symbols to its public image. It changes when it allows historically excluded voices to alter its understanding of itself; when it ceases to turn difference into ornament and recognises in it an authority capable of calling the whole into question.

A community ultimately reveals its character not through the cultures it celebrates, but through the voices it is prepared to hear.

The quotations from Brian Youngy and Walbira Murray are taken from the report by Cédric Gouverneur listed below.

References

Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.

Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.

Gouverneur, Cédric. “La indignación de los aborígenes en Alice Springs: ‘Un racismo sin precedentes por parte de la Australia blanca.’” Le Monde diplomatique en español, July 2026.

León de Aranoa, Fernando, dir. Mondays in the Sun. Written by Fernando León de Aranoa and Ignacio del Moral. Spain, France, and Italy, 2002.

Uluru Statement from the Heart. 26 May 2017.

The Best Explanation?

Victoria Camps on the Decline of Social Democracy

Victoria Camps has recently published an opinion piece in El País entitled “The Decline of Socialism,” in which she reflects on the loss of historical momentum of European social democracy and on the current difficulties of sustaining an effective politics of equality. Her diagnosis begins from a legitimate concern: the achievements associated with the welfare state—public education, universal healthcare, pensions, and social protection—remain decisive, yet they appear insufficient to address contemporary forms of inequality. Housing, labour precarity, the deterioration of primary care, dependency, the crisis of care, and the vulnerability of broad sections of the young population reveal a growing gap between proclaimed rights and the material conditions necessary to exercise them.

Camps argues that social democracy has not necessarily exhausted its historical potential, but that it has become stalled in a model designed to respond to the challenges of industrial society. She therefore proposes updating the welfare state, shifting it from a merely assistance-based logic towards an “active welfare state,” and directing public policy towards social inclusion, employment, care, and effective equality. Her argument contains a fundamental insight: a just society should not merely prevent people from falling into destitution; it should create the conditions for them to participate genuinely in social life, work with dignity, receive and provide care, build ties, and project an existence not entirely subject to insecurity.

This essay begins by acknowledging that insight. I shall argue, however, that Camps’s explanation reaches a decisive limit when she interprets the crisis of social democracy primarily as a problem of political will, cooperation, institutional effectiveness, and the capacity to translate normative principles into outcomes. The question is not only why governments fail to do what they ought to do, but also which economic, legal, technological, and geopolitical structures restrict in advance the field of what is politically possible. At this point, moral reflection on justice must open itself to a material critique of the relations of power, accumulation, and exclusion that systematically produce what is subsequently presented as a deficit of will, civic-mindedness, or democratic responsibility.

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Who Is Against AI?

The Academic Aristocracy Rebels Against Its Executioner

The starting point for this reflection is Pierre Rimbert’s article, “Everyone Hates AI,” published in the latest Spanish edition of Le Monde diplomatique. Rimbert describes a growing resistance to a technological transformation that threatens skilled and administrative jobs, concentrates strategic decision-making in large corporations, and takes material form in data centers with high energy, water, and territorial costs. The opposition, therefore, is directed not only against automation, but against a model of power that combines labor substitution, the privatization of public decision-making, and the deterioration of the material conditions of life (Rimbert, 2026).

That resistance is fully justified. A technological transformation of this magnitude should not be imposed without democratic deliberation, especially when it concentrates benefits in large firms while shifting labor, social, and ecological costs onto workers, communities, and territories. There is also a distributive issue at stake. As Acemoglu warns, AI may widen the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor, even if its aggregate effects on productivity prove far more modest than corporate rhetoric suggests (Acemoglu, 2024).

But being against AI does not, by itself, imply an emancipatory position, or even a progressive one in the usual sense of our political map. Such opposition may express a defense of the commons, of the material conditions of life, or of democratic autonomy. But it may also defend professional privileges, monopolies over knowledge, institutional hierarchies, or threatened positions of authority. It may even present itself in progressive language while protecting class interests tied to the preservation of the bureaucratic-administrative apparatuses through which capital organizes and reproduces its power. Rimbert rightly notes that this opposition is politically heterogeneous and can be appropriated by nationalist and reactionary forces.

The question, then, is not whether one is for or against AI. The question is what social order is being defended or transformed when AI is rejected.

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Habermasians Do Not Throw in the Towel

Adela Cortina and Enrique Dussel in the Mirror of Gaza

Adela Cortina has published in El País a defense of social democracy that deserves consideration in our space. In “Saving Social Democracy,” published on June 24, 2026, she proposes separating the social democratic idea from party labels which, in her view, no longer adequately embody it. Her argument is, in essence, “reasonable”: in the face of widespread corruption, civic disaffection, pervasive public falsehood, institutional decay, and social and political polarization, Europe needs to recover a liberal-social democracy grounded in freedom, equality, solidarity, social rights, and a citizenry capable of assuming shared responsibilities.

The defense of the social democratic tradition is not irrelevant. It is difficult to deny the historical importance of the welfare state, public services, labor rights, health, education, and social protection, the democratic limitation of the market, and the very idea that citizenship is not exhausted by voting or by abstract legal status. European social democracy was, at least during its golden decades, a partial but effective response to the dispossession produced by industrial and financial capitalism. Even today, it retains normative and political resources worth defending against the far right, authoritarian neoliberalism, and the corporate reduction of every social relationship.

Yet the problem is not merely one of saving social democracy. It is a matter of determining whether the historical intuition from which social democracy emerged still possesses effective reality and, if so, under what historical judgment it must be rearticulated in order to move beyond its relative weaknesses and absolute limitations.

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What Does “Antisemitism” Mean Today?

Nancy Fraser, the Gaza Event, and the Memory of Human Rights in Argentina

In “Gaza as World Event,” published in issue 158 of New Left Review, Nancy Fraser argues that Gaza must be understood as a world event. She is not referring only to the war, the humanitarian crisis, or the regional catastrophe it entails. Gaza is a world event because it alters the moral categories through which the West has thought about genocide, the place of the victim, the responsibility of the perpetrator of a crime against humanity, memory, and repair.

Fraser formulates her thesis as follows. Gaza reveals a crisis in the moral order that took shape in the West during the second half of the twentieth century around Auschwitz. The extermination of European Jews became the emblem of radical evil and the limit from which extreme violence could be conceived. Auschwitz organized the language of “never again.” It named the prohibition against destroying a people, against making a state’s claimed security a sufficient reason for the extermination of a marked population.

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Who Is My Neighbor?

On the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

As I revisit the conclusion of my 2010 doctoral dissertation on Charles Taylor, originally written under the title Charles Taylor and Modern Identity, I realize that many of the problems that structured that work now reappear in the contemporary debate on artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is not only a new technology. Nor is it merely an ambivalent tool, capable of emancipatory or destructive uses depending on the political conditions in which it is embedded. It is also a new figure within a long history through which life, speech, the body, and suffering are translated into administrable categories. What appeared in Taylor as the problem of modern identity, and in the work of the theologian Ivan Illich as the institutional corruption of Christianity, reappears today in the form of an algorithmic bureaucracy capable of reorganizing the very field in which something can appear as visible, useful, communicable, governable, or recognizable.

The question that serves as the guiding thread is not new. It appears in the Gospel of Luke, when a lawyer asks Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” The question seeks to establish a kind of delimitation or boundary. The lawyer wants to know how far moral obligation extends. He wants to know who belongs within the circle of responsibility and who remains outside it. Jesus responds with the parable of the Good Samaritan: a man falls wounded on the road. A priest and a Levite pass by him, but they continue their way, indifferent to the man’s suffering. A Samaritan, however, stops, approaches him, bandages his wounds, takes him to an inn, and cares for him.

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