About

This is not a blog in the traditional sense. No daily commentary, no news roundups, no personal diary.

Luxzenburg.org is a place for essays. About geopolitics, society, history, and the connections between them that are rarely named. Written from the conviction that most problems of our time do not stand alone — and that they cannot be understood in isolation.

I am Erik van Luxzenburg. By training a social geographer, specialising in political and cultural geography, geopolitics, and macro-history. By nature a systems thinker who struggles with loose pieces. By disposition someone who thinks by writing and talking, not before.

The essays here move between the large and the small: from prehistoric forms of governance to the contemporary crisis of democracy, from Islamic anarchist traditions to the question of why the Netherlands has a constitution that has been frozen since 1848. Sometimes an essay begins with a news item. Sometimes with a book that dislodged something. Always with the question: how does this connect to everything else?

Some of the articles here are old — some date from the nineties, others from the early 2000s. They are presented here as historical documents: this is how I thought then, this is how those ideas have grown. It is not an archive of completed work but a trail of continuous thinking.

Responses, counterarguments, and additions are welcome.