This is not a blog in the traditional sense. No daily commentary, no news digest, no personal diary.
Luxzenburg.nl is a place for essays. About geopolitics, society, history and the connections between them that are rarely named. Written from the conviction that most of the problems of our time do not stand alone — and that you cannot understand them in isolation either.
I am Erik van Luxzenburg. By training a human geographer, specialising in political and cultural geography, geopolitics and macro-history. By character a systems thinker who struggles with loose fragments. By nature someone who thinks by writing and talking, not before.
The essays here move between the large and the small: from prehistoric governance to contemporary democratic crisis, from Islamic anarchist traditions to the question of why the Netherlands has a constitution frozen in 1848. Sometimes an essay begins with a news item. Sometimes with a book that loosened 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 They are here as historical documents: this is how I thought then, this is how those ideas grew. It is not an archive of finished work but a trail of continuous thinking.
Responses, counterarguments and additions are welcome.