Pepe Escobar's brilliant tour of the globalized world as it dissolves into Liquid War.

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Product Description

Globalistan weaves three parallel and intersecting themes: globalization, energy wars and the Long War. It shows how globalization is not proceeding according to the myth of "everyone profits": instead, it is fragmenting the world into even more explosive inequality, into "stans" - some stans configured as fortresses, some stans at war with others. Energy wars, and the multiple intersections of globalization and war, only increase the polarization. Globalistan argues that the world is being dissolved into Liquid War - a natural consequence of "liquid modernity" , a concept formulated by Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. The book is 80% based on reportage - from China to Central Asia and Russia; before, during and after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; in Iran and in the Middle East; in Western Europe, Western Africa and South America. Compounded with news analysis, it advances possible trends based on how geopolitics is developing now. It is also an Atlas - with maps - of the world in conflict.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #91164 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Wayne Madsen, Journalist and author of "Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil."
Now we can better peer through the opaqueness of the "flat earth" of Lexuses and olive trees; a must read.

Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com and The Nation
Pepe Escobar is always provocative, always surprises, and so I read his essays at Asia Times without fail.

From the Back Cover
You are holding a warped travel book. This warped travel book remixes three main themes: globalization, energy wars and the Pentagon's Long War, originally packaged as the "war on terror." Call it a--what else--war travel book. Or a warped geopolitical travel book.

You will be traveling mostly in the arc from Middle East to Central Asia, but also in China, Russia, Western Europe, Western Africa, South America. You're going to revisit the asymmetrical wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You're going to crisscross the Islamic world. You're going to follow a lot of pipelines. You'll be acquainted with the Iran the next war will probably hit. You'll see how national resistance wars have nothing to do with "terrorism." You'll be confronted over and over again with "strategic competitor" Asia--where the future of the 21st Century is being played out. You're going to revisit how, where and who profits from economic globalization and especially war corporatism. You'll see how more trade does not necessarily mean more peace. You'll see how and where possible New Orders are emerging, and Old Orders disintegrating. And you will finish the pilgrimage back in the middle of a--predictable--global war of the privileged few against the excluded many.

9/11 was the first globalization war. Our warped travel book argues we are now living an intestinal war, an undeclared global civil war. In this early 21st Century context of re-medievalization, where those who control power control weapons, money and The Word, this book also aims to provide a counter-narrative.

You will cross a lot of "stans." The re-medievalized world is being fragmented into "stans," some very exclusive (Pipelineistan, Europeistan, Nuclearistan), some feeding on war (Talibanistan, Americastan in Iraq), some regarded as a supreme threat (Shiiteistan), some spreading like a virus (Slumistan). We still live in a world of nation-states. But you will see that as civilian peace between nations and their populations is being slashed, basically because of economic imperatives, now virtually everyone seems to be threatened by a permanent state of emergence--which is just another way of referring to a global state of siege. This includes of course the plural culture of Islam constantly demonized in a lethal magma as The Barbarian Other--that silly "clash of civilizations" working out as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You may ask where I'm coming from. Well, to talk about nomad global wars it helps being a nomad--and a pure product of globalization. As a writer I have lived and worked in North and South America, Western Europe and all across Asia and Islam; since the end of the Cold War I have been tracking the West drunk on its own secular mission civilisatrice, eager to globalize Russia, China, Islam/Arabia, Africa. Home is wherever I happen to be. Not accidentally this short introduction comes from one of the great world cities, to the sound of electronic tango. Or as they say in Bangkok and Hong Kong, it comes from "the other side of the world." For me it makes perfect sense being in the Paris of South America dreaming of Asia and selected cities of the heart (and work)- Kabul, Baghdad, Tehran, Peshawar.

You should know that I do not answer to any corporate sponsor; no political party; no intelligence agency; no academic body; no think tank. And I got nothing to spin. The online publication I write for--Asia Times, owned by a Sino-Thai visionary businessman and based in Thailand/Hong Kong--allows me total freedom of expression.

This book is another way to tell a story--dissected by towering figures like Immanuel Wallerstein, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrick Beck or Gabriel Kolko--from the ground level. Bauman's concept of liquid modernity gave me the inspiration for "Liquid War." Only then I found out there was already a videogame called Liquid War. Pop culture rules! The game, whose basic rules are inspired by Japanese go, is described as a sort of "psychedelic action" where strategy is crucial. Sounds like a definition of the world out there. Indonesia would say the world out there is like wayang theatre--we see the shadows, but we never see the puppeteer.

Beyond strategic and political conflict, Liquid War tends towards the destruction of singular cultures and everything capable of resisting globalization. Its optimum is anthropological genocide. If the future is being configured by Liquid War all actors are positioning themselves for the decisive moment, the catharsis in Greek drama, when Liquid War boils to the point of Hot War. Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is a weak link; his acts are very revealing, denouncing real fears. So are Hugo Chávez's.

Revered Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh prays that we may all escape the wheel of samsara--our addiction to nefarious vicious circles. If only we could accumulate enough compassion--instead of designer weapons: "touched by the Dharma", we would have an instrument to cut through the wheel of samsara, we would not legate so much bad karma for future generations, we would escape this demented war logic.

Hope lies in selected humanitarian, social, juridical and ecological NGOs, and the emergence of globally connected civil society. Even Professor Stephen Hawking, with his global-sized brain, does not know "how can the human race sustain another 100 years." He admitted: "I don't know the answer," suggesting improvements in genetic engineering to make humans less addicted to war.

Perhaps Groovemaster General James Brown had come up with the best answer after all: it's time to get funky. But on a less escapist level, maybe what we need is a post-modern Paolo Ucello. We have to come up with a different real time perspective for virtual space, learn how to deal with the telecity, the metacity, telesex, telepolitics, telewar. Paul Virilio warned us that the end of geopolitics is leading us to metropolitics. The enemy is undeclared. The logic is of fear. And widespread urban panic is already drowning for good the political character of the City.

Military/intelligence elites of Globalistan are all immersed in electronic tracking of deterritorialization, monitoring every turbulence caused by globalization--local conflicts, the shrinking of the middle classes, abysmal poverty, incipient civil wars, Salafi-jihadist reaction. Conflicts should be perpetuated, just about anywhere, but without turning into irreparable catastrophe. For these elites, this is just a technical matter. A question of managing chaos.

Robert Musil wrote that parallel universes could be as relevant as reality. Physic-ists go for a Multiverse that resembles boiling water (where, in Michiko Kaku's words, "the Judeo-Christian genesis takes place within the Buddhist nirvana, all the time"). In philosophical terms, the universe itself may even be a dream. I wonder what Jorge Luis Borges would make of all this. Against our world of nomad wars and Liquid War he would probably counterpunch with a dazzling play on cultures, History and signs. Could it be Kim Jong-il drinking an absinthe at the café La Puerto Rico? Could it be George W. Bush browsing books on Islam at the venerable Libreria del Colegio? Could it be Osama bin Laden dancing a tango with one of his wives at the ultra-atmospheric Bar Sur?

If only Liquid War was no more harmful than a drink. So here's to you, dear reader, a glass of fabulous Malbec. Cheers. Now let's hit the road.

Buenos Aires
September 2006

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Customer Reviews

Review of Kindle Edition Only
This review is on the Kindle edition of this work. The book has been pulled in from PDF format to the Kindle and the publisher didn't bother to even look at the result. There is no working table of contents and the format is full of random line breaks and run together words on nearly every line. Unreadable. I can't speak to the content, which I was interested in reading just as a contrast to some of the other views on the subject, because the Kindle edition is unreadable (though sold at full price).

A Must Read
This book describes in apt detail the minimalist morality and crass materialism of the glitzy and high tech age of mass consumerism and "disposability" that has come to characterise the world since the world's second incarnation of "British" power, the US Imperium, won the cold war back at the end of 1991 and took on its final form which people commonly refer to as "neo-con". This initiated the present violent epoch of chaos characterised by the typical but merciless Anglo robber capitalism at its peak that can be summed up as a "dog-eat-dog" creed of selfishness, greed, apathy, cynicism and devil-may-care ignorance. Its policies have caused social decay and explosive upheaval and instability leading to breakdown of order in backward countries and cultures - as we are witness to here in Pakistan. The Anglo powers and the West in general support corrupt westernised ruling elites in Third World countries that suck the blood of their own people, but who maintain a local status quo favourable to the interests their Western patrons and masters. For this, these toady elites are awarded a place at their masters'grand table. The West once even supported militant Islam as a geopolitical tactic (against their Soviet rivals) - till 2001 that is, when it turned around and bit its master like some diseased dog on 9/11. That is why Al-Qaeda exists today. Nowadays, as a result of all these policies and actions, within a short span of just fifteen years, the world has ended up as a dangerous, explosive and uncertain place which is on the boil as never before in recorded Human history. It is a sad fact that nowadays the only effective opposition to Anglo-American "globalism" comes from raving Islamist fanatics. It is clear that globalism as it exists is destined for destruction. We only hope that it doesn't take the world, as well as modern (European) mankind's positive technological, scientific and cultural achievements along with it. This globalism is surely the forerunner of the future system of all mankind; but it is defective and will need destruction and replacement after the rapacious Anglo powers are defeated, shorn from it and done to the dust. Then only can a true Eurasian-African-American global dispensation of the whole of humanity replace it.
The summary on globalism which I have given above is fully documented in the book under review, Globalistan by Pepe Escobar. Escobar is an intrepid Latino globetrotter and reporter from the USA who not only has an accurate grasp of the regions he visits, but he has also employed a unique glossary of terms in his book with which to describe the idiosyncrasies of this topsy-turvy bad new American world. In the process of doing so, he leads his readers to accurate new insights. His contextual reportage and background information are highly accurate and well researched. His style is somewhat jocular, but that again is a "modern" trend in today's informal and casual world, that can be forgiven. As I noted above, the world has been reduced to "black and white" when dealing with opposing issues such as Anglo-American globalist capitalism and Islam, both of which are reprehensible with one being worse than the other. But Escobar falls in neither category, and this fact strikes one as refreshing. This book is not a hyped-up criticism-for-criticism's-sake account of the type that we are nowadays deluged with by the Anglo-American corporate media nexus; it is a quality analysis. It is an original and contemporary work on the current state of the world and should therefore be read by all. Aside from the content of the book, I also consider the quality of its cover, printing, type-setting and paper: I must say that this edition excels in this aspect too.

Globalistan
Pepe Escobar is a virtuoso of the pen ! Globalistan is a must read... a beautiful fusion of 'Stan politics and history all to a back beat of James Brown and Bob Dylan... A real eye opener... even for those experineced on the global stage...

I hope this remarkable book brings Mr Escobar to the attention of the American public... "Yeh boy!"