Eurasia’s Future
An Equatorial Belt without ‘Pyramids’: African Curse or Blessing of History?

The “certificate of maturity” awaits not only the system of international relations as a whole, but also specific regions and country’s societies, which must learn to build new types of order without elite hierarchies - and here Russia and Africa are again capable of becoming a global example, writes Nikita Ryabchenkoresearcher of international relations and world development (Belarus).

An important new international trend is that an increasing number of countries and peoples are pursuing more and more sovereignty in various aspects of their social existence. African countries are also increasingly beginning to pursue this course as they free themselves from the invisible shackles of neocolonial dependence. Due to the natural course of events, they too are faced with the question of a model of sovereign socio-political development. Western social and political science can only offer new African rulers vertically integrated, pyramidal “centre vs. periphery” models. However, these are inconsistent with the deep cultural code of the Dark Continent - which prompts it to seek alternatives which aren’t always obvious.

From a larger historical perspective, Equatorial Africa did not follow the path of the ancient kingdoms in the great river valleys - the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Indus or Yellow River. Natural and climatic conditions made it both impossible and senseless to build multi-level social pyramids there with a rigid hierarchy of power, class division, and a multi-tiered gap between the quality of life of the ruling elite and its subordinates. Archetypes of the distant past often influence strategic choices in the present, and in the era of the crystallisation of the world order “from the bottom up,” societies not affected by pyramidal structures can yield an unexpected civilisational advantage.

Since the times of ancient Sumer and Egypt, the political organisation of many societies for thousands of years was based on the allocation of a managerial class, which held a monopoly on strategic knowledge, as well as the concentration of vital resources in the hands of this class and its dissociation from the rest of the population by means of ritual institutions. The emergence of royal-temple complexes and urban infrastructure led to an ever-greater specialisation of labour and its further division into classes, with professional, "guild" identities and the complication of the structure of social relations.

Indeed, this long-prevailing “pyramidal” type of development brought with it a strict social hierarchy, the ideological and semantic unification of society, a system of mass forced labour, high economic coherence and the military-political control of the territory. All this together ensured a high concentration of knowledge, technology and material resources at the top of the social pyramid, which made it possible to maintain and develop long-lasting, stable imperial powers in the ancient world.

But everything, as we know, has its price - the price for the geopolitical power of the “pyramidal” empires of antiquity was the extremely low efficiency of the part of humanity involved. Thousands of years of exploitation of the time, labour and mental strength of the overwhelming majority of people, coupled with the reduction and fragmentation of knowledge at the base of the social pyramid, tightly blocked any kind of mass realisation of intellectual and creative potential in a series of successive generations. 

A different situation has developed since ancient times in less historically “noticeable” regions of the world — in Northern Eurasia and in Black Africa. The climate and geography, vast spaces and abundance of food and natural resources have been on the side of a distributed organisation of society for centuries. Unlike the crowded settlements and complex irrigation agriculture of the Yangtze or Nile valleys, these lands have developed centuries-old traditions of free, “umbrella” settlement with variable economic connectivity, a more uniform development of the occupied territory and the collegial, communal adoption of strategic decisions.

Eurasia’s Future
Echoes of Wakanda in World Music: Will Africa Become a Laboratory for Unconventional Development?
Nikita Ryabchenko
The strategic future of Africa is not predetermined, and understanding the in-depth factors of prosperity and decline allows us to outline a prognostically probable and original trajectory of its renaissance, writes Nikita Ryabchenko, researcher of international relations and world development (Belarus). The author is a participant of the Valdai – New Generation project.  
Opinions

Researchers of the region rightly note the key features of Black Africa that once prevented the formation of “pyramidal” empires there. Among them are the lack of crops suitable for long-term storage (making appropriating resource surpluses impossible), the necessary animals suitable for domestication (natural limitations of transport connectivity), favourable conditions for various diseases (epidemiological risks for crowded settlements), high crop yields, and ease of obtaining food (making large urban settlements unnecessary).

However, the modern view of the course of world history gives us reason to pose the question differently, perceiving the “pyramidal” type of development in a fundamentally different light. If, in essence, the historical process is moving towards mass emancipation, the release of time, resources, will, independent thinking and activity not only of individuals, but also of entire countries and peoples, then to what extent do the aforementioned “pyramidal constructions” generally remain consistent with the logic of development in the 21st century?

In this regard, it is noteworthy that many of the fateful achievements of human civilisation in the ancient era were already associated with the first deviation from the “main road” - when the ancient Greek city-states became a visible cultural and civilisational alternative to the "pyramidal" type of development that prevailed at that time throughout the Ancient East. To this day, in our philosophy, social structure, sciences and arts, we essentially use the legacy not so much of Harappa and Babylon as of Athens and Miletus, which did not share the standards of “pyramidal” empires.

However, such an understanding of the course of events allows us to rethink the very foundations of the “pyramidal” nature, previously perceived at least neutrally, if not as a fundamental geostrategic benefit. These foundations, not characteristic of either ancient Rus' or primeval Africa, will acquire a completely different interpretation in the new, “post-industrial” phase of development and in a world order not burdened by the spirit of hierarchy.

The first of these foundations is the concentration of resources at the top of the social pyramid, simultaneously with the concentration of people in large metropolitan agglomerations. For most of history, this concentration made it possible to produce reliable knowledge at the required pace and then apply it in society due to the sufficient quality of centralised political management. Whereas in the 21st century, the emergence of global instant information connectivity is already making the process of knowledge production largely remote. The automation of production, modular closed-loop nuclear energy and additive technologies in the near future will radically change the nature of our territorial production systems, leaving giant factories and slums of working-class neighbourhoods in the past.

The second foundation of the "pyramidality" is the high specialisation of labour, with the formation of a strong workshop identity. Along with the well-known advantages, this type of organisation of society's activities also has its downside, which will become especially relevant in the new phase of development based on the economy of sublimated knowledge. The basic problem is that specialisation with the "division and deepening of labour" fragments knowledge, leading away from integrity, whereas with low specialisation, holistic knowledge, thinking and worldviews are preserved in society.

It is very likely that the future of Africa, Russia and humanity as a whole extends precisely in the sphere of holistic knowledge - in the process-figurative synthetic, and not discrete analytical plane.

Finally, the third feature of the “pyramidal type of development” is the presence of dogmatic cult doctrines and the deep religious divisions generated by them. For a long time, this factor allowed the ruling elites of “pyramidal” empires to maintain the controllability of subject societies according to the principle of divide and conquer, based on the predictability of the behaviour of adherents of mass religions. The downside in this case was the irreconcilable, “eternal” nature of conflicts based on rigid dogmatic contradictions. However, unlike the ancient Abrahamic cultures with their thousand-year-old antagonistic dogmas, the current conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa are more mundane and are primarily related to the access of certain ethnic communities to certain development resources, natural and climatic zones - and therefore such conflicts are practically and administratively quite solvable.

In general, the “pyramidal” structure of human societies had very different prospects at the dawn of history. In the near future, the universal availability of energy and information will open up alternatives to this seemingly so familiar type of development. It is Sub-Saharan Africa, like Northern Eurasia, that has the best historical prerequisites here to practically demonstrate that the umbrella-type horizontal structure of societies is truly more democratic and progressive than what the Babylonians, Hittites and Assyrians left us as a legacy.

This is all the more true because the coming departure from the pyramidal structure is consistent with the world order dynamics - the “certificate of maturity” awaits not only the system of international relations as a whole, but also specific regions and country’s societies, which must learn to build new types of order without elite hierarchies - and here Russia and Africa are again capable of becoming a global example.

Economic Statecraft
A Civilisational Approach to State Building
Evgeny Tipailov
In the further formulation by Russia of its foreign and domestic policies in the context of the growing multipolarity of the world, it is advisable to take into account the number of other features of the functioning civilisational systems, and the civilisational approach itself is actively developed and applied as one of the promising integrated tools in the practice of state building, writes Evgeny Tipailov.
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Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.