When Disasters Come Home: Making and Manipulating Emergencies In The West Cloth

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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 the migration crises, from assaults on democracy to Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine — the West is in the grip of multiple, overlapping crises that keep its citizens in a state of perpetual fear and distraction. While some of the threats are real enough, David Keen shows in this disturbing and original book how disasters to which key Western governments and opinion-shapers have significantly contributed are being manipulated by many of these same players for political advantage. Drawing on his first-hand experience of wars and famines in the Global South, Keen reveals how these crises, whether slow-burning or sudden and dramatic, are reinforcing each other in ways that protect vested interests while bolstering the toxic politics that helped to generate them. One key problem here is the use of emergencies to vilify many of 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.