User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilisation. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.Most accounts of our contemporary global crises focus on one area, such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to consider crises from an interdisciplinary perspective, has resulted in their failure to understand historical events. From ecology and the environment, to political governance, the global economy and international relations, Ahmed investigates contemporary crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. Ahmed posits that we are therefore not dealing with a 'clash of civilisations', as Samuel P. Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilisation itself.

'Forceful, with particularly good sections on agribusiness, US policies of 'energy security', and what the author terms the 'securitisation' of ordinary life by Western governments', 'This important analysis exposes vital truths and challenges much conventional wisdom. It deserves to be widely read', 'Important ... the first book to systematically explore their interconnections and place them within a single comprehensive narrative. That makes it a very worthwhile read for policy-makers everywhere', 'Few thinkers weave as many threads into a tapestry as Nafeez Ahmed has done so superbly in this book', 'Confronts the reader with the stark message that life as we know it is unsustainable'

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London. He is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization (Pluto, 2010), The War on Truth: Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (2005) and Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (2003).