Ecuador Enters “Trump Mode” with Noboa Victory

Authoritarian drift and political blackmail shape the runoff election in Ecuador, where incumbent President Daniel Noboa won Sunday’s vote.

By Ociel Alí López

April 21, 2025

Source: NACLA

Incumbent President Daniel Noboa won Ecuador’s Presidential runoff vote on Sunday, defeating his opponent Luisa González of the Citizens’ Revolution party. (Flickr/Casa de América/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

On Sunday, Ecuador’s National Electoral Council announced the results of the runoff election for the 2025 to 2029 presidential term. Incumbent President Daniel Noboa emerged victorious, earning 55 percent of the vote, while his opponent, Luisa González, trailed behind with 44 percent of the vote. González immediately declared electoral fraud, citing a series of irregularities including Noboa’s declaration of a “state of exception” in seven strategic provinces two days before the elections. Now the world is asking: What scenarios are emerging in Ecuador given the country’s deepening political polarization?

Two weeks ago, during the final stretch of the runoff campaign, U.S. President Donald Trump privately received Noboa at Mar-a-Lago. While the details of that meeting have not been made public, Noboa appears to have received the “green light” to accelerate the country’s authoritarian drift. Following this meeting, a series of actions by the Noboa government evidenced this turn. Although Trump stopped short of endorsing Noboa explicitly, the mysterious meeting symbolized Noboa’s adoption of the “Trump Way”: a “right-wing populist” style that relies on blackmail as its central tool. Noboa left the meeting promising that the United States would exclude Ecuadorians from mass deportation lists —something Washington never confirmed— a critical issue for a country in which a significant percentage of the population receives remittances from abroad, especially from the United States.

Noboa exploited the fear that Ecuadorian migrants would end up in detention centers like Guantánamo or prisons in El Salvador—thus jeopardizing the crucial flow of remittances. The threat of mass deportations was instrumentalized to influence the vote. Noboa exploited the fear that Ecuadorian migrants would end up in detention centers like Guantánamo or prisons in El Salvador—thus jeopardizing the crucial flow of remittances. This blackmail, although subtle, struck a sensitive nerve: Ecuador has been a producer of migrants for decades, and the United States has long been the most sought-after destination.

In the first round of voting on February 9, Noboa was surprised by a “technical tie” with González, the candidate from the Citizens’ Revolution (CR) party. In the following weeks, González gained unprecedented backing from the Pachakutik Indigenous movement, which garnered five percent of the vote in the first round and has historically clashed with the RC. Facing mounting pressure, Noboa needed to turn the campaign around. To do so, he had to put more “meat on the fire,” which meant offering spectacular responses to Ecuadorians’ foremost concern: criminal violence.

After winning fewer votes than González in the first round, the first thing Noboa did was hire Erik Prince, founder of the controversial mercenary company Blackwater. Prince, who arrived in Ecuador in early April, interfered directly in the electoral campaign, unleashing a media offensive against González.

Then, two days before the Sunday’s runoff vote, Noboa decreed a 60-day “state of exception” in seven of the country’s 24 provinces, as well as in the metropolitan district of Quito. All of these territories are strategic in the electoral arena, including districts that support the RC. The decree grants enhanced military powers, suspends the right to free assembly, and authorizes warrantless searches. Furthermore, Noboa withdrew González’s public security detail the day before the runoff election, a move widely interpreted as a political intimidation tactic in a country where violence against political figures has surged. In 2023, presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated just two weeks before the election, and dozens of mayors and congressmembers have been killed over the last five years.

A Conservative Project with Long-Term Ambitions

The son of Ecuador’s richest man, Noboa was unexpectedly chosen by conservative sectors in the first round of elections in 2023, after former President Guillermo Lasso triggered snap elections through a constitutional mechanism called the “muerte cruzada” or “mutual death,” Now, Noboa has positioned himself to serve until 2033 if he’s able to secure reelection in 2029.

Noboa represents an opportunity for stability for a right wing that, until now, has failed to consolidate its position. This follows the short-lived administrations of Lenín Moreno (2017-2021), who broke with former president Rafael Correa’s party but governed weakly, and Lasso (2021-2023), who was forced to call early elections following protests and threats of impeachment. Noboa is now completing Lasso’s term.

According to a 2010 constitutional ruling, when a head of state completes their predecessor’s term following the application of a muerte cruzada, that period does not count towards constitutional term limits. That means Noboa will be eligible for reelection in 2029.

To this end, Noboa is courting Washington’s support by offering two strategically located military bases: in Manta and the Galápagos Islands. The proposal to reopen the Manta base revives a long-standing dispute between the United States and the Correa administration, which expelled the U.S. military from the area in 2009. Meanwhile the Galápagos Islands, situated offshore in the Pacific Ocean, lie near the China-Peru trade route—boosted by the Chinese megaport in Chancay, north of Lima, inaugurated by Chinese President Xi Jinping in November 2024.

Noboa strategically blurs the line between the fight against drug trafficking and targeting his political opponents—a tactic he may pursue with even greater vigor now that the official results have been announced.Amid a climate of widespread violence, and under the pretext of combating drug gangs—which have turned Ecuador, a country that had remained relatively immune to the ravages of drug trafficking, unlike its neighbors Colombia and Peru, into a site of unprecedented violence—Noboa is promoting exceptional measures that also aim to neutralize his political rivals. One only needs to recall the Noboa administration’s raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito in 2024 to arrest the former Correa-era Vice President Jorge Glass, which triggered a diplomatic rupture with Mexico that remains unresolved. Noboa strategically blurs the line between the fight against drug trafficking and targeting his political opponents—a tactic he may pursue with even greater vigor now that the official results have been announced. Given the RC party’s refusal to acknowledge the results, a further escalation of political conflict appears likely.

The RC Rejects the Results

On Monday, González claimed fraud, refused to recognize the result, called for a recount, and called the president a “dictator.” The RC is the majority party in the National Assembly and has a significant number of governorships (9 of 23) and mayoralties (50 of 221). González’s biggest challenge now is to maintain party, as several RC leaders who recognize her as their candidate have chosen to accept the results.

Ahead of the vote, González established an unprecedented alliance with an old adversary: the powerful Indigenous movement, a ley political force whose mass mobilizations have overthrown governments in the past (such as Jamil Mahuad in 2000 and Lucio Gutiérrez in 2005) and brought others like Lenín Moreno (2017-2021) to the brink of collapse. In October 2019, Moreno was forced to relocate government headquarters amid massive protests. The same occurred with Lasso’s government, which ultimately called early elections due to conditions of ungovernability.

For Ecuador’s right, these episodes represented failed attempts to consolidate long-term rule. Now, they look to Noboa to deliver a durable conservative project capable of resisting the inevitable waves of protest that will emerge from progressive sectors in response to his neoliberal and repressive agenda. Social movements—especially the Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador (CONAIE), denounced in a statement released Wednesday Noboa’s’ plans for harsh economic adjustment and the expansion of large-scale mining projects.

This coalition between Correísmo and the Indigenous movement could ignite a major political crisis if it decides to openly challenge the government, as González has indicated since the night of the runoff. All of this points to a new, volatile chapter in Ecuadorian politics, just as Noboa seeks to impose contested economic and geopolitical measures, including the construction of foreign military bases, the expanded mining concessions, and partnerships with mercenary companies.

What’s Next in Ecuador?

Sunday’s result entrenches Noboa’s conservative and authoritarian project, offering the right a rare opportunity for stability after decades of struggling to maintain power beyond isolated, crisis-ridden terms.

Regardless of whether fraud allegations gain traction, what is clear is that Ecuador has become the first domino to fall in the region under the renewed influence of Trumpism in Latin America. Regardless of whether fraud allegations gain traction, what is clear is that Ecuador has become the first domino to fall in the region under the renewed influence of Trumpism in Latin America. Trump’s return to the White House has emboldened repressive tactics, legitimized political blackmail, and is likely to impact upcoming elections across the region.

Ecuador is now emerging as a regional laboratory for rapprochement with Trump’s political style: the politics of spectacle (exemplified by the May 2024 “mano dura” referendum) and alliances with controversial actors like Erik Prince. Although there is no evidence of massive fraud, the election results reveal how Trumpism can influence democratic processes.

According to his campaign promises, Noboa’s next step will likely be to reform the 2008 constitution, drafted during the Correa administration, which will surely provoke confrontation. Already, the president has articulated plans to authorize foreign military bases, in the country—expressly prohibited under the current constitution,—and to toughen criminal penalties.

But resistance is already coalescing. At the end of March, the RC and CONAIE declared their opposition to constitutional changes that would “restrict the rights of nature or violate the social achievements gained by Indigenous, Black, Cholo, and Montubio peoples.” The movements are concerned that the plurinational and intercultural nature of the current Constitution will be eradicated.

The looming question is whether these forces will clash violently or force a tense coexistence. Meanwhile, Ecuador navigates turbulent waters: between the shadow of a new authoritarianism and the memory of its powerful social movement.

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Ociel Alí López is a sociologist and winner of the Clacso-Sida award for young researchers and the Caracas municipal literature award. He is a professor at the Central University of Venezuela and writes about Latin America.

AU CONTRAIRE

Russia’s Security Concerns Before the War in Ukraine Were Plain to See

By Cory Sinclair

April 21, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image supplied by author.

Look closely, and it becomes hard to justify. It is increasingly clear that the Biden Administration made a series of policy decisions concerning Ukraine that gave the Kremlin little choice but to either defer to Washington at the expense of Russian security or resist. There is much to say about the background to this conflict, described in depth by such scholars as Richard Sakwa and John Mearsheimer, the latter in a widely cited 2014 article in Foreign Affairs. But the focus here is on former President Joe Biden’s stewardship of the Ukraine crisis leading up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022 and two pivotal moments that followed.

In his 2020 presidential run, Biden took a tough stance against Russia, and against President Vladimir Putin in particular—the two leaders have long had frosty relations. Seeking to distinguish himself from then-President Donald Trump, Biden criticized the Kremlin’s alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election and expressed outrage at Trump’s inaction on reports of possible Russian bounties paid to Taliban militants for killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan. 

Once in power, the Biden administration quickly set the tone in U.S.-Russia relations. The State Department issued a press release on January 23 strongly condemning “the use of harsh tactics against protesters and journalists … in cities throughout Russia.” The protesters were reacting to the arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who had just returned to Moscow from Germany where he had received medical treatment for a near-fatal poisoning. A German military lab determined the poison to be Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent closely tied to Russian security services.

Later in January, Courtney Austrian, head of the U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), denounced “Russia’s obstinacy in fueling the fighting in eastern Ukraine and obstructing progress toward a lasting and peaceful resolution of the conflict.” 

On February 4, 2021, Biden gave his first foreign policy speech as president and began by extending an olive branch to the international community: “America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” He announced a five-year extension of the New START Treaty, the only remaining nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia. But the president’s tone changed when he came to Putin, the only foreign leader he mentioned by name. He said that he told the Russian president “that the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions—interfering with our elections, cyberattacks, poisoning its citizens—are over.”

Tensions become tangible

In February 2021 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made two moves that sounded the alarm in Moscow, starting with the ban of three television networks in the country that were considered too Russia-friendly. This ban was not without domestic controversy, particularly for residents living in the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine where the Russian language is widely spoken. Elsewhere, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell expressed concern about the curb on press freedom. In Washington, however, where free speech issues are sport … crickets.

Second, Zelensky signed a decree pledging to take measures to recapture the Crimean Peninsula, and he began to deploy forces to the south of the country. That same day—the seventh anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Crimea—Biden released a statement that made clear that the United States would never recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea and would continue to support Ukraine against Russian belligerence. Soon after, the U.S. Department of Defense announced a new $125 million military aid package that included both equipment and training to enhance Ukraine’s interoperability with NATO. 

Tensions continued to rise in March when NATO forces conducted a training exercise with the Ukrainian Navy. This exercise was part of Defender Europe, one of the largest U.S. Army-led military exercises in decades that ran from mid-March to June—with 28,000 troops from 27 countries taking part. March also saw a sharp increase in fighting in the Donetsk Region in eastern Ukraine, bringing an end to the ceasefire that had been negotiated in July 2020. 

None of this escaped Russia’s notice. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called the joint maneuvers threatening and confrontational, to say nothing of the longstanding buildup of NATO military forces near Russia’s border. In March and April the Kremlin responded by deploying tens of thousands of Russian troops to Crimea and along the Russia-Ukraine border.

At a time when backchannel diplomacy might have eased tensions and paved the way for a drawdown of Russian forces, Washington and NATO turned up the heat:

• On May 27, 2021, the Biden Administration notified Russia that it would not rejoin the Open Skies Treaty that allowed unarmed reconnaissance flights over participating countries to survey their military activities. 
• At the Brussels Summit in mid-June, NATO continued to describe Russia’s actions as “a threat to Euro-Atlantic security” and emphasized the importance of partnerships with non-member countries. 
• On June 23, 2021, the British destroyer H.M.S. Defender sailed provocatively close to the coast of Crimea, sparking an international incident. The Russian Navy reportedly fired warning shots at the destroyer with an estimated 20 Russian warplanes buzzing it as a warning to alter course. 
• Several days later, the United States and 31 allied countries conducted the largest-ever “Sea Breeze” military exercises in the Black Sea. The Kremlin viewed the exercises as a thinly veiled ruse to transport military equipment into Ukraine.

U.S.-Ukraine agreements signed; Russian security proposal declined

In the fall of 2021 the Biden Administration established two partnership agreements with Ukraine. The first, a Joint Statement on the U.S.-Ukraine Strategic Partnership announced on September 1, included a $60 million security assistance package. Among the lines in the document: “We intend to continue our robust training and exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced Opportunities Partner.” 

November’s U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership reinforced the September Joint Statement, calling for “Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions” and renewing support for the country to join NATO. 

In addition to misgivings about these agreements, Russia had sources that reported unusual military maneuvers from within Ukraine as well as suspicious naval activity by U.S. warships in the Black Sea. Moscow’s answer: another major troop deployment along the Russia-Ukraine border beginning in October. At the Valdai Discussion Club that month, Putin said that whether or not Ukraine formally joined NATO, all signs increasingly pointed to a de facto membership of the alliance.

In December 2021, Russia called on NATO, and especially Washington, to respect its security concerns, guarantee an end to the alliance’s eastward expansion, and agree to Ukrainian neutrality. While U.S. State Department officials made clear in their response that they were open to discussing a number of issues with the Kremlin, Ukrainian neutrality was not one of them. 

In Putin’s annual news conference on December 21, 2021, he addressed this matter, and his frustration was palpable: “You [the West] promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly: there have been five waves of NATO expansion, and now the weapons systems I mentioned have been deployed in Romania and deployment has recently begun in Poland. This is what we are talking about, can you not see?”

With the Russian troop count continuing to rise, along with military supplies and equipment near the Ukrainian border, Kyiv and Western officials feared that an invasion may be imminent. When asked about the state of play in a January 2022 news conference, Biden said, “My guess is he [Putin] will move in, he has to do something.” With this in mind, the State Department gave the greenlight to the Baltic countries to send U.S.-made weapons to Ukraine.

Several days later, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken submitted a written response to the Russian Foreign Ministry that formally rejected their demands for Ukrainian neutrality. In his public comments, Blinken reiterated the “open door” principle, maintaining that Ukraine was a sovereign country that had the right to choose its own security arrangements and alliances.

Go hard or go home

February 2022 was not an easy month to take in. Biden, Blinken, and former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan each continued to telegraph a possible Russian invasion, increasing the pressure on Putin to either take action or drawdown his forces. At the same time, the OSCE reported a sudden surge in military activity (see below) on Ukraine’s eastern border, most of it coming from the Ukrainian side of the ceasefire line. The United States had considerable leverage with the Ukrainian military, given that it was supplying them with weapons, training, and intelligence. Biden’s team could have called on them to tamp down the hostilities and avoid a more serious confrontation. They did nothing of the sort. As international affairs scholar Nina Krushcheva said in a recent interview: “Joe Biden was baiting him [Putin].”

On February 21, amid unchecked violence, Putin recognized the independence of the two Kremlin-backed separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, signaling that Russian troops would move in to restore peace. Biden condemned Putin’s decision as “a flagrant violation of international law” and imposed new sanctions on the two separatist regions. Three days later, the Kremlin launched a widespread assault on Ukraine, prompting NATO to increase military support to the country and impose additional sanctions on Russia. 

Negotiations soon begin

Within a couple of days, delegations from both countries entered into peace talks, initially in neighboring Belarus. The talks soon broke off, though, as Russia’s demands were not acceptable to the Ukrainian negotiators. After more inconclusive rounds of talks in Belarus, the parties moved to the resort town of Antalya, Türkiye, and in late March to Istanbul. Russian negotiators’ central demand was a neutral Ukraine, while the Ukrainians insisted on security guarantees in the event of another Russian attack.

By early April, the negotiators had reached a tentative peace deal, but a surprise visit to Kyiv from former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson nipped it in the bud. According to Davyd Arakhamia, Ukraine’s chief negotiator at the rounds in Istanbul and the leader of Zelensky’s party in the Ukrainian Parliament, “Boris Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we won’t sign anything at all with [the Russians]—and let’s just keep fighting.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who was invited to Istanbul as a mediator, said much the same thing in a February 2023 interview—that a peace deal was close but was blocked by Washington in consultation with other NATO members. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, another mediator at the talks, reinforced these comments and summarized the essential terms of the draft agreement.

1. Ukraine would not pursue NATO membership;
2. The Ukrainian bans on the Russian language would be lifted;
3. The Donbass would continue to be part of Ukraine but as an autonomous region (e.g., Italy’s South Tyrol);
4. The United Nations Security Council plus Germany should offer to supervise the security agreements; and
5. The Crimea problem would be set aside for another time.

If Schroeder’s summary captures what the negotiators nearly settled on—the draft agreement had reached the point of being initialed by them on the essential terms—then it becomes difficult to account for the three years since.

Approaching Armageddon

By the late summer of 2022, Ukraine’s counteroffensive had had remarkable success in the southern and eastern regions of the country, reversing many of Russia’s earlier gains. They recaptured Kherson, the regional capital, prompting the Russian military to send forces south. This Russian redeployment left the northeastern region undermanned, and the Ukrainian army took advantage of it with a decisive military operation near Kharkiv—almost certainly the high-water mark of the country’s defense.

But these setbacks for Russia only strengthened the Kremlin’s resolve, evidenced by its partial mobilization of 300,000 reservists and the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts—a dire escalation of the war. In a nationally televised address, Putin was resolute: “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff.” 

At an October 2022 campaign fundraiser in New York, Biden expressed his uneasiness over Putin’s comments. “We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” Biden said. “He’s not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons… I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”

The president’s comments prompted the Congressional Progressive Caucus to send the White House a letter urging the administration to pursue negotiations with Russia and try to wind down the conflict. The CPC faced a furious backlash from fellow members of Congress, donors, and the media, and the letter was retracted in a matter of hours. 

If there was ever a time to take a principled stand on an issue—regardless of risk—that was it.

A week or so later, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took another tack with a strategic argument, recommending that now was Ukraine’s chance to capitalize on its battlefield gains and hold talks with Moscow. Blinken and other Biden advisers remained unconvinced, though, and pressed to keep up the fight.

In Bob Woodward’s 2024 book, War, he writes that U.S. intelligence assessed that when Russia was on its back foot in Kherson and Kharkiv, there was about a 50 percent possibility that Putin would use a nuclear weapon to rescue the situation: “The assessment had gone from around a 5 percent chance to a 10 percent chance to now a coin flip.” 

The Biden Administration decided to ride out the uncertainty, risking irreversible consequences, not for the sake of an existential threat to the United States, not even a vital U.S. interest, but for a principle—the “open door” policy—and a questionable one at that.

Why did we accept that?

Cory Sinclair is a freelance writer and nonprofit consultant for S. Sutton & Associates. He has done pro-bono work for several nonprofits in the Los Angeles area, and previously worked as a writer for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, UCLA Performing Arts, and Habitat for Humanity. His area of research concerns the cultural and nonprofit sectors, public-private partnerships, and related government policy. He holds a Ph.D. in music and nonprofit management from Claremont Graduate University.

How to Kidnap an Audience

On breaking the spell of our training as consumers

By Dougald Hine

April 21, 2025

Source: Writing Home

Teatro de los Sentidos, Heart of Darkness (Copenhagen, 2014). | Image courtesy of Dougald Hine

One morning last spring, I was on a Zoom call with my friend Deepa. I could see packing boxes in her living room, so I asked her what was up, and she said, “I’m giving away all my books.”

Now, my eyes widened at this. What can I say? I’m a writer, books are… not something I’d willingly give away. I asked her, “Why?”

She said, “Didn’t you know, Dougald? I’m dying.”

And just for a moment, I wasn’t sure what kind of conversation we were about to have. Then I saw the edge of a smile on her lips, and she started to explain about this programme she’d joined called A Year to Live, where a group of you go through a whole twelve months, living as though this were the last year of your life.1

On the 12^th of January this year, I spoke to Deepa. She had four days left. It was one of those conversations where time slows down. We said the things we’d say if we were speaking for the last time. I don’t think I was ready for how real it would be. We haven’t spoken since, and somewhere deep in my heart and my guts, it’s like I know that she is gone.

So the next time I give her a call, I guess it will feel pretty weird.

The theatre-maker Mark Ravenhill gave a speech at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years ago. He said something I keep coming back to. “To be a good artist,” he said, “you have to be … the most truthful person in [the] room.” When you walk out on stage, that’s your duty. It’s what earns you the right to ask everyone else to listen while you speak, or sing, or dance.

I was talking about this recently with another brilliant British theatre-maker, Luca Rutherford, and we found ourselves agreeing that there’s a world of difference between being “the most truthful person in the room” and being the person who walks into a room convinced that they are in possession of “the truth” and everyone ought to listen to them. There’s nothing artful about that way of entering a room.

What Ravenhill is getting at, I think, is that art has no room for calculation. If you’re a politician or a campaigner or a marketing strategist, then you can try to calibrate your message; there can be a gap between what you know in your heart and what you decide to say. But as an artist, that gap will kill you. It will drain the life out of your work. Because, when you walk out on stage, your truthfulness is all you have.

And it occurs to me now that this state of truthfulness has a lot in common with what I felt in that last call with Deepa. We could take Ravenhill’s words as an invitation to walk out on stage, or to have a conversation, or to give a talk, the way you would if you knew that this would be the last time.

So much for the person who’s on the stage – how about everyone else in the room?

In the autumn of 2014, soon after I took the call from Måns Lagerlöf asking me to come and join the artistic team at Riksteatern, I was teaching at the Kaospilot school in Aarhus. One of the students said, on your way back, you have to go to this show that’s on in Copenhagen.

It was a show by a theatre company from Barcelona, Teatro de los Sentidos, “the theatre of the senses”. Their work is usually full of shimmering beauty, but this time they had been challenged by the artistic director of the theatre that brought them to Denmark. “We don’t live in a time of shimmering beauty,” he said. “Can you use your art to make something that explores darkness?”

So they had taken Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and turned it inside out, creating an immersive performance in which the audience is led into a destroyed landscape, drawn deeper into the dark, and the climax is an industrial ritual in which we are all complicit in the horror at the centre of the story. It was, for me, one of those artistic experiences that tears you open, that leaves you raw and tender.

And afterwards, I found myself alone in the theatre foyer. The friends who were going to take me for dinner were late. So I started talking to other members of the audience, asking them, you know, “How was that for you?”

And people were saying, “Yeah, that was cool!” “That was fun!”

And I wondered, is this just because we’re strangers in a theatre foyer and we don’t know how to talk about what just happened, or had their experience of that evening been wildly different to mine?

And here’s the thought that was planted in my mind that night in Copenhagen. What if those of us who go to the theatre, to the openings and exhibitions, to the rooms where art happens – what if we’re so well trained as consumers of culture that even the most powerful work going on in those rooms will struggle to break through, to get past our training, to go from an object of consumption to an experience that might tear us open, shake us, move us, leave us changed?

In the months that followed, I couldn’t let this question go. To tell you why it had a hold on me, I need to rewind a bit.

Most of the work I’ve done comes back, in one way or another, to the role of culture in a time of crisis. When and I wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto, it was because we had a sense, as writers, that the literature of the early 21^st century was failing to face what we already knew about the depth of the mess the world was in. People would look back on the books that were celebrated in the Culture section of the newspapers and ask, how could you write this stuff when the world was on fire?

And you know, Greta Thunberg has said a lot of this more eloquently than we ever did. But when you see the placards that say “Unite Behind the Science”, I’m not sure that covers it. Because having worked with climate scientists, I’m convinced that there are parts of the story that science can’t help us tell and questions that science doesn’t know how to ask. This is where the work of culture comes in.

When art gets asked to respond to the climate crisis, most often this is an invitation help “deliver the message”. And we want to help, we’re as scared as anyone, but there’s a problem, because art isn’t really about delivering messages. That’s not what we know how to do. We’re not a cheap alternative to an advertising agency, or a sophisticated extension of the communications department.

So then you get projects that put a lot of hope in the imagination: we’re going to get people together and help them imagine a better future, a sustainable transition. And again, something about this never rang true for me, but the person who put her finger on it is Vanessa Andreotti of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. The futures worth trying to bring about, she says, are “presently unimaginable futures”.

For these futures to become imaginable, we would have to become other than who we are: we would have to lose our entitlements, our desires, the things we take for granted, our stories of who we are and where history is headed. And that’s a journey we can go on, a journey we can take people on. But it doesn’t look like assembling a group of us who are going to be, almost by definition, among the beneficiaries of the way the world works today, where we’re asked – in the words of Grist magazine’s climate fiction contest – “to make the story of a better world so irresistible, you want it right now.” Something more costly than that is called for.

It’s like the storyteller says: “I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.”

And that’s what brings me around to the power of those cultural encounters that can break you open, that shake you and take you off balance. If everything was fine, then maybe it would be enough to make work that’s “cool” and “fun”. But everything isn’t fine.

So it’s 2015 and I go to work at Riksteatern, still carrying this question: how do we make work that breaks through these habits, this way of consuming culture that leaves us untouched, where we don’t become vulnerable, don’t risk being changed by the experience?

And not long after I start, we have a conversation about – maybe we need to physically take people away? To create an event that goes further in time and space, beyond the comfort zone of a couple of hours in a darkened theatre space?

So I get excited and I write a proposal where what we’re going to do is we’re going to kidnap an audience. When you buy a ticket, you’re told to show up at such-and-such-a-station at this time on a Friday afternoon, and you know it’s going to last two days. We’ve chartered a train and you get on board and the announcements give you the impression of a long journey ahead. But then the train comes to a halt on a siding in the middle of nowhere, and everyone’s ordered off and into trucks.

I’m not going to tell you the rest of it, you probably get the picture. And it’s an absurd idea, the kind you get excited about for five minutes and afterwards you feel embarrassed every time you remember that you actually shared it with anyone. Or, you know, talked about it in front of an audience!

But part of what’s going on there is that, this was me aged 37, having done all my work up to that point with these tiny organisations that I’d been part of creating, where you could get everyone involved around a table and share a meal, and we’d created projects that caught people’s imaginations and got international attention, doing all this on a shoestring. So suddenly, for the first time, I’m inside a large cultural institution, and you go, “Wow! If we could do so much with so little resources, imagine what’s possible here?” And of course, it’s not that simple.

In fact, my advice would be, if you really wanted to kidnap an audience, the only way to pull off a project that wild would be to work with a small crew of collaborators who trust each other and don’t have the responsibilities of an established institution.

But if you want to kidnap an audience, my main advice would be, “Don’t!” Because what came home to me as I went on digging at that question was that there’s no value left in shock, it’s a bankrupt currency.

I mean, think about the kind of performance work that people were making in the 1960s and 70s, The Living Theatre or the Viennese Actionists. It’s not just that it’s hard to push things any further than the artists of that generation did. It’s that they were doing these things in an era when a British publisher had to go to court to challenge the obscenity laws in order to publish a novel that had the word “fuck” in it. The power of breaking taboos depends on the power of the taboos, and when you can get all the obscenity you can dream of on the phone you carry in your pocket, there’s not much power left in shock.

So what is powerful now? What has the capacity to shift us out of the comfort zone of cultural consumption?

There’s not going to be just one answer, but my breakthrough with this came in a conversation with the artist Rachel Horne.

I was working on another idea involving trains. This one had more mileage in it than the kidnapping. It’s an idea for a rail-based touring network across Europe. It started from the question: how does culture travel across borders, when we can’t go on jumping on and off planes like there’s no tomorrow? We were talking about having these local nodes where people host an event once a month, and each month a different artist travels this circuit and is the guest artist at that month’s event.

So I’m telling Rachel about this, and she says, “Oh Dougald, we did this event last month, and it was like organising a wedding!”

And I knew exactly what she meant. Months of build-up towards a big day. And afterwards you’re all exhausted.

And I thought, weddings are great, but how many of them do you want to have in your lifetime? You can probably count the answer on the fingers of one hand.

And it hit me, as artists we’re good at “weddings”. It often seems like that’s the default form of a cultural event. But what is a wedding, really? Well, traditionally, at least, it was a special kind of service that happens in a church. And then I came across a passage from the theatre-maker Andy Smith, where he describes an event that happens in the village where he grew up:

Every week my mum and dad and some other people get together in a big room in the middle of the village … They say hello to each other and catch up on how they are doing informally. Then some other things happen. A designated person talks about some stuff. They sing a few songs together. There is also a section called “the notices” where they hear information about stuff that is happening. Then they sometimes have a cup of tea and carry on the chat.

And what he’s describing is the weekly church service, but what’s hit him is how close this is to the kind of space he is trying to create with theatre.

So the conversation I started having more and more with the artists – and the non-artists – that I work with is: what if the default model of cultural event wasn’t a wedding, a big production with a long build-up to it, but the weekly service? A gathering that happens regularly, where people keep coming back, where a lot of the work that goes into it can be done by the community of people to whom it matters, without anyone burning out, but it also matters enough that people are willing to support the work of those who need to be paid.

And once you start looking through this lens, you realise there are whole layers of culture that do work like this. I think of the folk clubs I grew up singing in when I was teenager, the small stand-up comedy club where I used to help out in my twenties. You’ll have your own examples.

Here in Sweden, I see it in the work of artists like Ruben Wätte and Per Hasselberg who are drawing on the traditions of folkbildning and the folkrörelse.

And it’s at the heart of what we’re doing with a school called HOME. Not least, over the past two years, in the strange space of Zoom, working with groups that gather week by week or month by month, and through that process of repetition there’s a deepening that happens, a deepening into trust.

Something I’ve heard a lot over the years, from the work we did with Dark Mountain to what we’re doing now with HOME, is people tell us, “I feel less alone because I found this.” When someone tells you that, you know that we’ve left the territory of consuming culture, we’re somewhere more vulnerable. Maybe somewhere there’s a chance of being changed by what happens to us.

In the summer of 2020, I heard this question from the Inuit poet Taqralik Partridge: “What if the pandemic is just a warning shot?” Not the big event that changes everything, but the first in a chain of crises. Some days I can picture them, lined up like storms on a satellite picture of the Atlantic in hurricane season, rolling in, one after the other, to make landfall along the coastline of the future.

In a time of crisis, we can get focused on our own survival. People sometimes talk as though culture is this fragile thing, a soft surface layer over the harder social, economic and material realities, a high achievement that can only flourish when all the more basic human needs are met. But that’s not true: culture doesn’t come last, it’s there from the beginning.

Look through the archives of archaeology and anthropology, and nowhere will you find humans who don’t have some form of dancing, singing, storytelling, making images, symbols and meaningful objects, woven through their ways of living. The work of culture is not a luxury, it’s where we find and create meaning, and meaning is what makes the difference between going on and giving up when times are hardest.

And if you look at the work of culture through the lens that anthropology gives us, you see that human communities in all times and places have created experiences of initiation that involve a staged encounter with the reality of one’s own death, an encounter that leaves those who pass through it changed. When I think about the spaces of culture that seem worth making now, ’s line comes back to me: “I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.”

People get broken all the time, there’s no art in that, but there is an art in making spaces where we can be broken open with a chance of healing. Encounters that leave us changed, with a chance of becoming the people we’d need to be to bring about those “presently unimaginable futures”. That feels like work worth doing, in a time when the world is on fire.

Author’s note:

Today’s offering started out as a talk in front of an audience of Swedish culture-makers. It was February 2022, a couple of days before I started work on the first draft of At Work in the Ruins, so this is a glimpse of where I was at as I started to write that book. I hope you enjoy it.

I was taken back to this talk because, three years on, we had a visit this week from Deepa Patel whose journey through A Year to Live was one of its inspirations. I’m glad to report that she’s alive and well and our conversations were as generative as always.