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