Jo M. Sekimonyo is a heterodox political economist working outside dominant paradigms, as well as a social philosopher and theorist. His work unfolds at the intersection of economics, history, and lived experience, grounded in a sustained refusal of self-contained abstractions when they no longer illuminate the material conditions of human life. A merchant of ideas in the demanding sense of the term, he treats theory not as refuge, but as an instrument for testing reality.
Engaged in a genuinely transnational intellectual space, he has distinguished himself by interrogating the stabilizing narratives of contemporary economic discourse and exposing their blind spots. Rather than refining existing models at the margin, his work seeks to displace their foundations through rigorous empirical reasoning, comparative historical analysis, and sustained attention to the institutional structures that organize production, distribution, and the legitimation of value.
His central theoretical contribution, Ethosism, breaks with the twin orthodoxies of capitalism and socialism, which he treats as historically contingent responses that now reproduce the very crises they purport to resolve. By reclassifying the modern firm as an infrastructure for generating human capabilities, he argues that labor should not be treated as a cost center, but as the primary and legitimate beneficiary of value creation. This reorientation reveals persistent structural imbalances in the distribution of surplus between labor and capital.
Within this analytical framework, Sekimonyo develops an original theory of economic cycles, rejecting explanations that attribute crises primarily to exogenous shocks or policy errors. In his account, cycles are endogenous to the economic system itself. They arise from durable distributional asymmetries, institutions oriented toward extraction rather than participation, and a breakdown of reciprocity between productive contribution and surplus sharing. Economic crises thus appear not as anomalies, but as predictable moments in which structurally weakened demand is temporarily sustained through debt.
Extending this systemic approach to global governance, Sekimonyo has also proposed a new architecture for global climate finance grounded in universal citizen responsibility rather than carbon markets, voluntary pledges, or conditional aid. This framework links climate finance to global consumption through a uniform contribution and allocates resources according to ecological value, energy transition performance, and climate vulnerability, directing funds toward the subnational jurisdictions that exercise real stewardship over ecosystems. The proposal reflects the same theoretical commitment that underpins his work on economic cycles, namely the treatment of global crises as institutional and structural imbalances rather than accidental failures.
At the behavioral level, his Propensity to Act (threshold) model complements this macroeconomic analysis by redefining the conditions under which individuals engage in action. Individuals are understood as rational minimizers of existential burden who act only when material need, subjective sentiment, and social proximity converge to overcome indifference. This framework helps explain both the frequent failure of incentive-based policies and the capacity of seemingly minor triggers to generate collective mobilization.
He also develops the Social Contract Ratio, a comparative framework designed to measure dignity, reciprocity, and political sustainability within postcolonial states.
Founder of En Charge and Chancellor of Université Lumumba, Jo M. Sekimonyo is committed to transforming theory into public debate, debate into institutional architecture, and architecture into social practice. His works, translated into more than ten languages, address poverty, global debt, and performative egalitarianism, while affirming human creativity as the decisive engine of development and collective dignity.
"Socialism and Communism have failed, but now Capitalism is failing us."
Jo M. Sekimonyo
