No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics

by Ruben Andersson

War-torn deserts, jihadist killings, trucks weighted down with contraband and migrants—from the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote “danger zones.” Instead of buying into apocalyptic visions, Andersson takes aim at how Western states and international organizations conduct military, aid, and border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world’s rich and poor. Using drones, proxy forces, border reinforcement, and outsourced aid, risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger. The result is a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders, with national and global politics riven by fear. Andersson contends that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects us whether we live in Texas or Timbuktu. Only by developing a new cartography of hope can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us.

Genres: Nonfiction

355 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 2, 2019

Reviews

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book but reads more like lost opportunities with regards to what the book could have been as opposed to what it is.
Nonetheless worth reading as it does touch upon important threads that are dictating politics & economics not just in the periphery but also in the centre.

[David Lambert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas, particularly about how humanitarian agencies prioritize security of Western personnel at the expense of effectiveness and the safety of local staff.

[Mills College Library]

306.2 A5525 2019