Description
Book SynopsisWar-torn deserts, jihadist killings, trucks weighted down with contraband and migrantsfrom the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote danger zones. Instead of buying into apocalyptic visions, Andersson takes aim at how Western states and international organizations conduct military, aid, and border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world's rich and poor. Using drones, proxy forces, border reinforcement, and outsourced aid, risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger. The result is a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders, with national and global politics riven by fear. Andersson contends thatwe must reconnect andsnap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects uswhether we live in Texas or Timbuktu. Only by developing a new cartography of hope can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us.
Trade Review"
No Go World is an ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of how risk, danger and fear are ‘remapping’ the world with dire ethical and practical consequences. In examining how ‘remote zones of insecurity are becoming central to our new world disorder’ (p. 3), the book seizes an ambitious remit and is a worthwhile read for a broad range of readers interested in security studies, insurance, risk, human geography and questions of social-science method itself." * Journal of Refugee Studies *
"The history of Western map making serves Andersson as a particularly powerful metaphor throughout the book. It allows him to illustrate the Western gaze, time horizons, beliefs, hopes, and fears in relation to the Orient." * American Anthropologist *
"Vividly and convincingly,
No Go World describes a global shift toward cordoning off more and more zones labeled violent and high-risk, making them inaccessible to outsiders. . . . Andersson’s argument is devastating and crucial." * Public Books *
"Andersson’s adventuring is almost impossible to contain in just one sentence, as it weaves in and out of locations, through maps both real and those mappae mundi full of monsters he was obsessed with as a child. . . . The value, ultimately, and there is real value, in
No Go World is in the discovery of the mostly unseen everyday that refuses to be defeated by the military border." * Society and Space *
Table of ContentsList of Figures
List of Maps
Preface
Introduction: Into the Danger Zone
PART 1: THE STORY OF THE MAP
1. The Timbuktu Syndrome
2. Remoteness Remapped
3. The Tyranny of Distance
Interlude: The Drone, the Web, and the World of Mirrors
PART 2: CONTAGION
4. Wolves at the Door
5. The Snake Merchants
6. Where the Wild Things Are
Conclusion: Danger Unmapped
Acknowledgments
Power of Narration, Narration of Power: An Anthropological Appendix
Notes
Works Cited
Index
