The global south as a transcalar geopolitical construction site: african profiles. – The last two years, with the post-Covid adjustments, the climate transition and two ongoing wars of global impact, have been marked by intense international attention towards the African continent, despite its vastness and diversity. On the one hand, this may please Africans, for the help that can come to the solution of their many problems; on the other hand, it worries them, given the historical precedents. There seems to be a new scramble for Africa underway due to the crumbling of the European and, more broadly, Western presence, against the backdrop of a more general reshuffling of the international order. In this reshuffling, the “Global South” seems to be playing an increasingly important role. Who will lead and how will the world’s economic, cultural and political evolution unfold? The game is complex, but Africa is certainly one of the main arenas of contention. As an immense reserve of raw materials - minerals, energy, agro-forestry - the Continent is emerging as the world’s leading area of demographic development while acquiring growing geopolitical relevance, due to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian crisis, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but also, due to the conflicting profiles that are emerging in the Indo-Pacific, between China and the United States. In this fermenting context, heterogeneous events have taken place over the past couple of years (2023/24) that have recorded an impressive acceleration: two coups in Francophone Africa, three world summits that evoke a pan-African partnership (Russia-Africa, China-Africa, Piano Mattei), two geopolitical summits in Johannesburg and Nairobi (unified African position on climate change, September 2023). It is worth trying to trace a coherent geopolitical profile of this heterogeneous set of events.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the semantic question

The Gaza War: how the language of destruction on Israel and the Palestinians overlooks the greater tragedy of the Nation-state. – In the global battle over public opinion regarding the 2023-24 Gaza War, and more specifically within U.S. university campuses, the historical complexities of the geopolitical situation have been reduced to slogans asserting the absolute “right” of one side or the other not only to disregard but also to potentially eliminate the other. Consequently, the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is often interpreted as advocating the removal or destruction of the approximately seven million Jews currently residing in the region, just as the Islamist group Hamas is equated with all Palestinians, rendering them collectively deserving of elimination-a nihilistic claim to destruction mirrored by the opposing side.
The historical reality, however, is far more complex. The creation of the State of Israel was intended to serve as a refuge from persecution for a widely dispersed group, offering Jews protection from the hostility and consequences of historical anti-Semitism. In doing so, however, any possibility of a collective Palestinian political future was necessarily compromised for the population that had historically predominated in the area. The competing claims to the same territory that this process entailed cannot simply be resolved through the adoption of “better language.”
The war over language obscures the fundamental issue at stake: both Israelis and Palestinians are inheritors of the logic of the territorialized (ethno) nation-state, imported from nineteenth-century Europe. This underscores the broader tragedy of the nation-state that the Gaza War exemplifies. A shared political space remains inconceivable as long as this logic prevails.

Recensione a: DANIELA SANTUS, LAURA BELTRAMO, HaTikva - Spazio e percezione nel Tanakh e in Eretz Israel. Collana “Geografia, culture e società”, Torino, Nuova Trauben, 2021.