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Tropic Of Chaos: Climate Change And The New Geography Of Violence (2011)

by Christian Parenti(Favorite Author)

3.72 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1568586000 (ISBN13: 9781568586007)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Nation Books

review 1: This book brings into sharp focus the aspects of conflict and sustained humanitarian crisis that are made worse by Global Warming, with special attention to the theaters of the Middle East. It's a gripping, eye opening, and incredibly galvanizing read. If you ever wanted to think very clearly about how the daily choices we make in the first world affects the actions of those half a world away, I would absolutely recommend this book. Prepare to feel an uncomfortable pit of energy gnawing in your stomach to change things.
review 2: A decent journalistic account of how climate change is driving conflict, a classic example of an author thinking that the plural of anecdote is evidence. What's more interesting is the way Parenti argues that the sorts of conflicts tha... moret will be created (or at any rate exacerbated) by climate change will be low intensity & urban and that therefore the COIN technologies being developed to deal with the post-9/11 GWOT will actually find a second life as a way to contain and manage the malign political effects of climate change. But Parenti also makes the acute observation that unless COIN-style pacification is accompanied by effective state capacity building what ends up left behind (assuming successful suppression of the ideologically motivated insurgency) is a battered social fabric subject to centrifugal, unaccountable, violent, criminogenic forces -- in other words, the central forces that drive deviant globalization. Parenti also argues that the "matrix of governance" (police, courts, taxes, age labor, ID mgmt, conscription, jails, health care, water mgmt, primary education, veterinary svcs, etc) is moving away from the state toward non-state actors and shifting away from the modernist paradigm of "control" toward a process of "containment." Social breakdown and erosion of state capacity form a mutually reinforcing vicious cycle (p 85). "In failed states social breakdown is the norm; yet, governance and administration are never totally absent. They exist, but in spectral form. It is as if the failed state has reverted to older, tributary methods of domination and reciprocity. Because state failure is relative, in most so-called failed states government is a semifunctional ruin--the state as improvised afterlife... Among the ruins of modernity past, the institutions of sovereignty rot and fade like old documents and the colonial offices that house them." Parenti argues that state collapse represents a "bizarre inversion" of Rostow's "stage theory" of development: gradual decline, with each loss building on the last.Finally, Parenti puts all this in the right historical frame by showing how it was the neoliberal deconstruction of the state (privatization of production & downsizing of safety nets) over the course of the 1980s and 1990s that eroded the centralized political authority and governance capacity, leaving societies unable to deal with the forthcoming biopolitical crises that climate change will cause or exacerbate. People will turn to whatever nonstate actors, often criminal, who can provide them a modicum of shelter from the coming storms, both physical and political. less

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