New book by Ruben Andersson explores how the West has created a 'political geography of fear'
A new book by Ruben Andersson – No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics – has been published by University of California Press
Ruben Andersson is Associate Professor of Migration and Development at ODID.
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, Professor Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a new understanding of what is happening in remote 'danger zones'. Instead of accepting these apocalyptic visions, he takes aim at how Western states and international organisations 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.
Professor Andersson contends that we must reconnect and step out of this dangerous spiral, in order to move beyond the political geography of fear.