A twice-monthly systems read of the continent — twelve domains, one signal. Edition 01 June 2026 · covering ~16 May–18 June 2026 ~9 min read Subscriber edition How to read this. We track the African continent as one system across twelve domains — the big moving parts of development, from money and minerals…
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The architecture of risk and reward. In 2015, Beijing published a document called Made in China 2025. It named ten industries: advanced manufacturing, aerospace, biotech, new-energy vehicles, AI hardware, robotics, and several others. It set targets, timelines, and financing. It coordinated ministries, state-owned enterprises, banks, universities, and provincial governments around…
Comments closedA Boeing 787, an ore-testing lab, and the chemistry behind half your dinner. Three things held up by villages of expertise no country could replicate — and what happens when one thread breaks. Bernard Philippe Markowicz May 16, 2026 In March 2021, a fire broke out in a single building…
Comments closedIt’s the topology, not the geography Post 4 of a series on globalization, concentration, and strategic de-risking. On July 19, 2024, a flawed software update from a single cybersecurity vendor, CrowdStrike, took roughly 8.5 million Windows machines offline in about two hours: Hospitals turned away patients. Delta cancelled thousands of flights and…
Comments closedHow Countries Make What They Make The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) holds roughly seventy percent of the world’s mined cobalt, a metal essential to lithium-ion batteries, aerospace alloys, and a growing share of medical devices. It does not refine most of it. The ore leaves the country in trucks, crosses into…
Comments closedWe have always traded across distances. The hard questions are not whether, but on whose terms, and for whose benefit. Post 2 of a series on globalization, concentration, and strategic de-risking. See the first post on Substack here. Early on… Archaeologists found obsidian tools at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in central…
Comments closedRare earth minerals are shaping new global alliances and redefining the balance between energy transition and geopolitical control.
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