When Disasters Come Home Making and Manipulating Emergencies In The West

by Keen, David

• ISBN13: 9781509550630
• ISBN10: 1509550631
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781509550647
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-06-26
• Publisher: Polity
• More Book Details

Summary

In the late twentieth century, disasters seemed like distant happenings in countries far away from the prosperous West. But today they are ‘coming home’ with a vengeance. From global warming to migration crises, from assaults on democracy to Covid-19 and the fall-out of war in Ukraine – the West is in the grip of multiple, overlapping crises that keep its populations in a state of perpetual fear and distraction.  

Disasters should be awakening us to the need to reform our disaster-producing system. Yet instead, as David Keen shows in this disturbing and original book, they are routinely being exploited for political as well as economic gain. A number of crises, whether slow-burning or sudden, are not only reinforcing each other but also bolstering the toxic politics that helped to generate them. One key problem here is the use of emergencies to vilify those who are trying to relieve them or to highlight their root causes. Unless these voices and alternative perspectives find a way to break through, we risk being locked into a system of emergency politics that is self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting – and that routinely manufactures its own legitimacy.

Author Biography

David Keen is Professor of Conflict Studies at the London School of Economics (LSE). A former researcher, consultant and journalist, he is a leading authority on the politics of contemporary conflict and humanitarian disasters. He is the author of numerous books on conflict, including The Benefits of Famine (1994), Useful Enemies (2012) and the ground-breaking text Complex Emergencies (2007) which explored the multifaceted interaction between conflict and its benefactors.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Disasters Coming Home

Chapter 2: Lessons from the ‘Far Away’

Chapter 3: A Self-reinforcing System?

Chapter 4: Emergency Politics

Chapter 5: Hostile Environments

Chapter 6: Welcoming Infection

Chapter 7: Magical Thinking

Chapter 8: Policing Delusions

Chapter 9: Action as Propaganda

Chapter 10: Choosing Disaster

Chapter 11: Home to Roost

Bibliography

Notes