The Coming Anarchy

[Maureen Anderson]

>Just finished "The Coming Anarchy" by Robert D. Kaplan, author of 
>several books, also writes for The Atlantic.  He's sort of a travel 
>writer, except he travels to places most people don't go it. then 
>writes perceptively about the culture and politics. 

Bob,

Haven't read Kaplan's book, but a few years back I had all too much 
truck with the Atlantic article that preceded it.  The mag piece was 
published in 1994, was also entitled "The Coming Anarchy" and was 
tellingly subtitled, "How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, 
and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet."

As you might guess from the subtitle, the article was awful, 
infamously so among scholars of post/colonialism, Africa, etc. 
Though being a stellar example of how colonial imagery still churns 
out commonsense explanations for conditions in poorer regions of the 
world, it at least provided lots of educators with a nice reading 
exercise for their students. 

In the original article, by Kaplan's own account "Africa" was the 
linchpin in his global doomsday scenario.  And that Africa wasn't an 
emblem of global inequalities, economic dislocations, post-colonial 
power structures or anything else that might have required an iota of 
historical nuance. Instead pseudo-environmentalism (overpopulation, 
disease, environmental degradation) + Heart of Darkness = Africa. 
The root causes of the continent's problems lie in "ancient tribal 
hatreds," "animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society," 
"extended families structures yielding moral degeneration," "juju 
warriors and other irrational spirit powers," "communalism," and so 
forth, because "[in] places where the Western Enlightenment has not 
penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty...people find 
liberation in violence." (= random Kaplan quotes)

And notwithstanding the impression he apparently gives in the book, 
in Africa at least, he talked to very few people outside of embassy 
wonks and their, um, ilk, during his couple week tour of the 
continent.  Or rather, during his quick tour of the West African 
coastal road between Lagos and Abidjan, which became "Africa," which 
in turn became root and harbinger of the world's impending moral 
decay. 

He filtered his impressions through neo-con authors like US policy 
advisor Samuel "The Clash of Civilizations" Huntington, and other 
such elks I now forget.

So unless Kaplan had a Road to Damascus conversion between the 
penning of the article and the penning of the book, I'll go out on a 
limb and suggest that this may not be the most promising book from 
which to cull insights on culture and globalization.

Which raises the question of whether other book-length accounts, 
targeting the same general audience, do rise to the task.  Offhand I 
can't think of any.   Which might say as much about the politics of 
commercial publishing as about my ignorance in this area.

Maureen