Statecraft

Standalone publications

Essays around the argument

Pieces written occasioned by a specific event, dossier, or reading — alongside the series, not inside it.

The papers gathered here are not part of Series I — Dissociated Organisations. They sit alongside it, and use the same diagnostic method on subjects the series does not enter directly: AI in the Dutch executive apparatus, the sociology of the senior cadre, the limits of organisational visualisation, digital exclusion as institutional production, the failure of youth-care reform.

Each piece is occasioned: by a Court of Audit report, by a newspaper edition, by a documentary, by the publication of a colleague's book. The diagnostic vocabulary is the same as in the series; the registers and entry points differ. They can be read in any order, and each is self-contained.

Where a Dutch source is the original, the English translation is published alongside and the cross-link appears at the head of each paper.

May 2026 essay

The State at the Controls

AI in an apparatus that can no longer interrogate its own assumptions

In the spring of an interim assignment at a municipality, a decision was placed on my desk for signature. It concerned the procurement of an AI tool. The document contained everything — supplier, costs, legal framework, efficiency gains — except an assessment of what the instrument would do to the work itself. From an NRC edition in which adjacent pages carried Mensvoort and Heijne on AI, a diagnosis of the page that was missing in between: how the dissociated organisation absorbs AI.

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May 2026 EN NL
May 2026 essay

The diploma democracy of the apparatus

How a sociological cleavage within execution deepens the dissociated organisation

The MT of the social domain sat with seven highly educated members at the table. Below in the organisation, three hundred professionals worked, predominantly with vocational and applied higher-education backgrounds. The distance between the two tables was not only hierarchical — it was also sociological. A diagnosis of the second diploma democracy within the Dutch executive apparatus, building on Bovens and Wille and on the closed Statecraft series Dissociated Organisations.

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May 2026 EN NL
April 2026 essay

Statecraft in the Interregnum

Three layers of erosion and the craft of public administration in a time without a grand narrative

Dutch public administration operates in an interregnum. The post-war narrative of institutional optimism has exhausted itself; a replacement grand narrative is absent; and the attempts to fill that vacancy with technological nationalism work on a register against which the polder bureaucracy is largely defenceless. A three-layered diagnosis — physiological, social, institutional — and the craft that statecraft can practically mean under these conditions.

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April 2026 EN NL
April 2026 essay

The architects of digital exclusion

Why the work of Arjan Widlak and the Kafkabrigade is among the sharpest analyses of what Dutch public administration is doing wrong in execution

A woman from Amersfoort becomes the victim of car theft and is then pursued for ten years by tax assessments for a vehicle she does not own. No civil servant acts in bad faith, no organisation breaches its competence, and yet the whole produces an outcome no one designed and that no one can reverse. The Kafkabrigade diagnoses what is almost never named in policy documents: that execution has long ceased to be shaped by who works there, but by how registers are interlinked.

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April 2026 EN NL
April 2026 analysis

The state you cannot draw

What a British visualisation teaches us about the Netherlands

A British developer put the entire Whitehall machine on a single screen. A Dutch equivalent would be illegible — not because of technical limits but because of what it would show: 438 inter-municipal partnerships, three thousand hub-and-spoke connections, a state that can no longer draw itself.

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April 2026 EN NL
31 March 2026 analysis

When the state starts to feel: Rousseau, Weber, and the failure of youth care

Youth care is not failing because there is too little empathy — Rousseau will not save Lex without Weber

On 26 March 2026, Zembla documented in "Children Nobody Wants" how at least 400 young people over the past three years ended up in solo placements at holiday parks, campsites and rented chalets. The reflexive response to such broadcasts is predictable: more money, more places, more empathy. That reflex is understandable. It is also part of the problem.

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31 March 2026 EN NL