Download or read book Doom written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.
Download or read book Doom The Politics of Catastrophe written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Magisterial ... Immensely readable' Douglas Alexander, Financial Times 'Insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant' New York Times A compelling history of catastrophes and their consequences, from 'the most brilliant British historian of his generation' (The Times) Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline. 'Stimulating, thought-provoking ... Readers will find much to relish' Martin Bentham, Evening Standard
Download or read book Politics of Catastrophe written by Claudia Aradau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that catastrophe is a particular way of governing future events – such as terrorism, climate change or pandemics – which we cannot predict but which may strike suddenly, without warning, and cause irreversible damage. At a time where catastrophe increasingly functions as a signifier of our future, imaginaries of pending doom have fostered new modes of anticipatory knowledge and redeployed existing ones. Although it shares many similarities with crises, disasters, risks and other disruptive incidents, this book claims that catastrophes also bring out the very limits of knowledge and management. The politics of catastrophe is turned towards an unknown future, which must be imagined and inhabited in order to be made palpable, knowable and actionable. Politics of Catastrophe critically assesses the effects of these new practices of knowing and governing catastrophes to come and challenges the reader to think about the possibility of an alternative politics of catastrophe. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, risk theory, political theory and International Relations in general.
Download or read book Disaster Writing written by Mark D. Anderson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011-10-17 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of disaster, literary and other cultural representations of the event can play a role in the renegotiation of political power. In Disaster Writing, Mark D. Anderson analyzes four natural disasters in Latin America that acquired national significance and symbolism through literary mediation: the 1930 cyclone in the Dominican Republic, volcanic eruptions in Central America, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and recurring drought in northeastern Brazil. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the disaster narratives, Anderson explores concepts such as the social construction of risk, landscape as political and cultural geography, vulnerability as the convergence of natural hazard and social marginalization, and the cultural mediation of trauma and loss. He shows how the political and historical contexts suggest a systematic link between natural disaster and cultural politics.
Download or read book Disasters and Democracy written by Rutherford H. Platt and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-07-16 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the number of presidential declarations of “major disasters” has skyrocketed. Such declarations make stricken areas eligible for federal emergency relief funds that greatly reduce their costs. But is federalizing the costs of disasters helping to lighten the overall burden of disasters or is it making matters worse? Does it remove incentives for individuals and local communities to take measures to protect themselves? Are people more likely to invest in property in hazardous locations in the belief that, if worse comes to worst, the federal government will bail them out? Disasters and Democracy addresses the political response to natural disasters, focusing specifically on the changing role of the federal government from distant observer to immediate responder and principal financier of disaster costs.
Download or read book Doom written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.
Download or read book Famine Crimes written by Alexander De Waal and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is responsible for the failures? African generals and politicians are the prime culprits for creating famines in Sudan, Somalia and Zaire, but western donors abet their authoritarianism, partly through imposing structural adjustment programmes.
Download or read book A Magnificent Catastrophe written by Edward J. Larson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-09-18 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title "They could write like angels and scheme like demons." So begins Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Larson's masterful account of the wild ride that was the 1800 presidential election—an election so convulsive and so momentous to the future of American democracy that Thomas Jefferson would later dub it "America's second revolution." This was America's first true presidential campaign, giving birth to our two-party system and indelibly etching the lines of partisanship that have so profoundly shaped American politics ever since. The contest featured two of our most beloved Founding Fathers, once warm friends, facing off as the heads of their two still-forming parties—the hot-tempered but sharp-minded John Adams, and the eloquent yet enigmatic Thomas Jefferson—flanked by the brilliant tacticians Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, who later settled their own differences in a duel. The country was descending into turmoil, reeling from the terrors of the French Revolution, and on the brink of war with France. Blistering accusations flew as our young nation was torn apart along party lines: Adams and his elitist Federalists would squelch liberty and impose a British-style monarchy; Jefferson and his radically democratizing Republicans would throw the country into chaos and debase the role of religion in American life. The stakes could not have been higher. As the competition heated up, other founders joined the fray—James Madison, John Jay, James Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, George Clinton, John Marshall, Horatio Gates, and even George Washington—some of them emerging from retirement to respond to the political crisis gripping the nation and threatening its future. Drawing on unprecedented, meticulous research of the day-to-day unfolding drama, from diaries and letters of the principal players as well as accounts in the fast-evolving partisan press, Larson vividly re-creates the mounting tension as one state after another voted and the press had the lead passing back and forth. The outcome remained shrouded in doubt long after the voting ended, and as Inauguration Day approached, Congress met in closed session to resolve the crisis. In its first great electoral challenge, our fragile experiment in constitutional democracy hung in the balance. A Magnificent Catastrophe is history writing at its evocative best: the riveting story of the last great contest of the founding period.
Download or read book Catastrophe and Redemption written by Jessica Whyte and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been "biopolitics" since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben's thought as a call for the creation of new political forms.
Download or read book The Age of Catastrophe written by Heinrich August Winkler and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 1013 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Germany's leading historians presents an ambitious and masterful account of the years encompassing the two world wars Characterized by global war, political revolution and national crises, the period between 1914 and 1945 was one of the most horrifying eras in the history of the West. A noted scholar of modern German history, Heinrich August Winkler examines how and why Germany so radically broke with the normative project of the West and unleashed devastation across the world. In this total history of the thirty years between the start of World War One and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Winkler blends historical narrative with political analysis and encompasses military strategy, national identity, class conflict, economic development and cultural change. The book includes astutely observed chapters on the United States, Japan, Russia, Britain, and the other European powers, and Winkler's distinctly European perspective offers insights beyond the accounts written by his British and American counterparts. As Germany takes its place at the helm of a unified Europe, Winkler's fascinating account will be widely read and debated for years to come.
Download or read book Catastrophism written by Sasha Lilley and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in catastrophic times. The world is reeling from the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, with the threat of further meltdowns ever-looming. Global warming and myriad dire ecological disasters worsen—with little if any action to halt them—their effects rippling across the planet in the shape of almost biblical floods, fires, droughts, and hurricanes. Governments warn that there is no alternative to the bitter medicine they prescribe—or risk devastating financial or social collapse. The right, whether religious or secular, views the present as catastrophic and wants to turn the clock back. The left fears for the worst, but hopes some good will emerge from the rubble. Visions of the apocalypse and predictions of impending doom abound. Across the political spectrum, a culture of fear reigns.? Catastrophism explores the politics of apocalypse—on the left and right, in the environmental movement—and examines why the lens of catastrophe can distort our understanding of the dynamics at the heart of these numerous disasters—and fatally impede our ability to transform the world. Lilley, McNally, Yuen, and Davis probe the reasons why catastrophic thinking is so prevalent, and challenge the belief that it is only out of the ashes that a better society may be born. The authors argue that those who care about social justice and the environment should jettison doomsaying—even as it relates to indisputably apocalyptic climate change. Far from calling people to arms, they suggest, catastrophic fear often results in passivity and paralysis—and, at worst, reactionary politics.?
Download or read book From Utopia to Apocalypse written by Peter Yoonsuk Paik and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010-03-18 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I read Peter Y. Paik’s lucid, graceful, ruthless book in one single astonished sitting. I scarred it all over with arrows and exclamation points, so I can read it again as soon as possible." —Bruce Sterling Revolutionary narratives in recent science fiction graphic novels and films compel audiences to reflect on the politics and societal ills of the day. Through character and story, science fiction brings theory to life, giving shape to the motivations behind the action as well as to the consequences they produce. InFrom Utopia to Apocalypse, Peter Y. Paik shows how science fiction generates intriguing and profound insights into politics. He reveals that the fantasy of putting annihilating omnipotence to beneficial effect underlies the revolutionary projects that have defined the collective upheavals of the modern age. Paik traces how this political theology is expressed, and indeed literalized, in popular superhero fiction, examining works including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novelWatchmen, the science fiction cinema of Jang Joon-Hwan, the manga of Hayao Miyazaki, Alan Moore’sV for Vendetta, and the Matrix trilogy. Superhero fantasies are usually seen as compensations for individual feelings of weakness, victimization, and vulnerability. But Paik presents these fantasies as social constructions concerned with questions of political will and the disintegration of democracy rather than with the psychology of the personal. What is urgently at stake, Paik argues, is a critique of the limitations and deadlocks of the political imagination. The utopias dreamed of by totalitarianism, which must be imposed through torture, oppression, and mass imprisonment, nevertheless persist in liberal political systems. With this reality looming throughout, Paik demonstrates the uneasy juxtaposition of saintliness and cynically manipulative realpolitik, of torture and the assertion of human dignity, of cruelty and benevolence.
Download or read book The Shock Doctrine written by Naomi Klein and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.
Download or read book Inside Sudan written by Donald Petterson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sudan, governed by an Islamist dictatorship, became a pariah nation among the global community not because of its religious orientation but because of its record of human-rights abuses and its fostering of notorious international terrorists. As the last American ambassador to complete an assignment in Sudan, Don Petterson provides unduplicated insights into how Sudan became what it is. Petterson recounts the consequences of the execution of four Sudanese employees of the U.S. government by Sudanese security forces in the southern city of Juba. He relates the experiences of Americans in Khartoum after Washington put Sudan on the black list of state sponsors of terrorism. He offers his personal observations on war-devastated southern Sudan. In this newly revised edition of Inside Sudan, Petterson recounts the events in Sudan from 1998 to the present, considers Sudan’s connections to international terrorists, including Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden, and assesses the changes in the relationship between Sudan and the United States after 9/11.
Download or read book From Recovery to Catastrophe written by Ben Lieberman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1998-09-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of the stabilization phase of Weimar Germany tend to identify German recovery after the First World War with the struggle to revise reparations and control hyperinflation. Focusing primarily on economic aspects is not sufficient, however, the author argues; the financial burden of recovery was only one of several major causes of reaction against the republic. Drawing on material from major German cities, he is able to trace the emergence of strong local activism and of comprehensive and functional policies of recovery on the municipal level which enjoyed broad political backing. Ironically, these same programs that created consensus also contained the potential for destabilization: they unleashed intense debate over the needs of the consumersand the purpose and extent of public spending, and with that of government intervention more generally, which accelerated the fragmentation of bourgeois politics, leading to the final destruction of the Weimar Republic.
Download or read book Catastrophe written by Dick Morris and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 New York Times Bestseller! In Catastrophe, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann—authors of the megabestsellers Fleeced and Outrage—take a hard look at America in free fall and at how Barack Obama is transforming a vulnerable U.S. into a socialist state. Their seventh consecutive New York Times bestseller, Catastrophe is a call to arms for every American skeptical of Big Business and politics as usual—and a must read for fans of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bernie Goldberg, and Glenn Beck.
Download or read book Lessons of Disaster written by Thomas A. Birkland and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-07 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even before the wreckage of a disaster is cleared, one question is foremost in the minds of the public: "What can be done to prevent this from happening again?" Today, news media and policymakers often invoke the "lessons of September 11" and the "lessons of Hurricane Katrina." Certainly, these unexpected events heightened awareness about problems that might have contributed to or worsened the disasters, particularly about gaps in preparation. Inquiries and investigations are made that claim that "lessons" were "learned" from a disaster, leading us to assume that we will be more ready the next time a similar threat looms, and that our government will put in place measures to protect us. In Lessons of Disaster, Thomas Birkland takes a critical look at this assumption. We know that disasters play a role in setting policy agendas—in getting policymakers to think about problems—but does our government always take the next step and enact new legislation or regulations? To determine when and how a catastrophic event serves as a catalyst for true policy change, the author examines four categories of disasters: aviation security, homeland security, earthquakes, and hurricanes. He explores lessons learned from each, focusing on three types of policy change: change in the larger social construction of the issues surrounding the disaster; instrumental change, in which laws and regulations are made; and political change, in which alliances are created and shifted. Birkland argues that the type of disaster affects the types of lessons learned from it, and that certain conditions are necessary to translate awareness into new policy, including media attention, salience for a large portion of the public, the existence of advocacy groups for the issue, and the preexistence of policy ideas that can be drawn upon. This timely study concludes with a discussion of the interplay of multiple disasters, focusing on the initial government response to Hurricane Katrina and the negative effect the September 11 catastrophe seems to have had on reaction to that tragedy.
