Product Description

From the bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth comes a fascinating new book on the imminent global chaos that is as brilliant as it is necessary, as original as it is controversial.

The end of the Cold War has not ushered in the global peace and prosperity that many had anticipated. Environmental degradation is causing the rampant spread of famine and disease, and a rising number of nations are being torn by violent wars of fierce tribalism and trenchant regionalism. Our newest democracies, such as Russia and Venezuela, are bloody maelstroms of violence and crime, while America is beset with an alarmingly high number of apathetic citizens content to concern themselves with matters of entertainment and convenience. Bold, erudite, and profoundly important, The Coming Anarchy is a compelling must-read by one of today's most penetrating writers and provocative minds.

"Analytically daring.... Informed by a rock-solid, unwavering realism and an utter absence of sentimentality.... Kaplan is a knowledgeable and forceful polemicist who mixes the attributes of journalist and visionary." —The New York Times

"Ambitiously eclectic.... [Kaplan] is one of America's most engaging writers on contemporary international affairs." —The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57458 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-13
• Released on: 2001-02-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
Robert Kaplan warns of a "bifurcated world divided between societies like ours, producing goods and services that the rest of the world wants, and those mired in various forms of chaos." This is a familiar theme for previous Kaplan readers (Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth). For those unacquainted with Kaplan, however, The Coming Anarchy is a fine introduction to one of the most important voices on the future of society and international relations. Kaplan mixes the intense reportage of a travel writer with the sharp wisdom of a foreign-policy expert to deliver what he calls "an unrelenting record of uncomfortable truths, of the kind that many of us implicitly acknowledge but will not publicly accept." The Coming Anarchy is also a disturbing book: Kaplan's vision of the future is a bleak one, full of ethnic conflict as the world falls away from a cold war that at least provided a kind of stability in even the shakiest of countries. That's gone now, of course, and Kaplan's descriptions of life and politics in Sierra Leone, Russia, India, and elsewhere are keenly troubling. Much of the book--but not all of it--has already seen print, mainly on the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and The Wall Street Journal. It is brief in length but not in importance. --John J. Miller

From Library Journal
Lest anyone still maintain the illusion that the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of "good times," these nine provocative, thoughtful, and very speculative essays (most of which previously appeared in periodicals) should set the record straight. Here Kaplan (The End of the Earth; Balkan Ghosts), a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, describes his Clockwork Orange-like vision of the world's future--in which societies are permeated with violence, crime remains unabated, and official corruption and anarchy run rampant. Using West Africa and Turkey as his primary examples, he argues that "environmental scarcity," ethnic strife, overcrowded living areas, and the changing nature of war will irreparably tear the social fabrics of societies all over the world--in places as far apart as India, Canada, South America, Yugoslavia, Africa, the Far East, the Middle East, and even the United States. Kaplan further suggests that democracy will not protect us from this apocalypse; indeed, he notes, it could even help cause it. His experiences as a journalist in the world's hot spots corroborate his pessimistic conclusions, and the clarity of his vision serves as a wake-up call. For most public and academic libraries.
-Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Adam Garfinkle
Kaplan merges literature and analysis, storytelling and philosophy, observation and history in a way that few writers even dare nowadays.

Customer Reviews

Kaplan has seen the Future and it is Dark and does not Work
Few books will set the hair on fire and make us stand to attention as will this book. In very much the same vein as Amy Chua's "The World on Fire," Kaplan too has seen the future: and it is dark and does not work. Having traveled across Africa myself, I can attest first hand to the fact that much of what he says is not hyperbole but is the "cold-blooded truth."

As but one example, when I returned to Bamako Mali, for about the fifth time (one of the more stable African countries by the way), I sought out the Artisans who made the many famous and familiar wooden Dogon artifacts: They had been mostly men in their 20-40s; on my last trip, they all were gone: Lost to AIDS; gone too were most of the skills handed-down for centuries that produced this art. Soon, most African handicrafts will have to be purchased from China, like everything else is. For not only will there be no more Artisans, but also no more raw materials like wood.

What Kaplan tells us here is that the larger systemic forces of the world are conspiring and converging against us: "The revenge of the poor" is becoming a stark and rapidly emerging reality. "Fortress America" (or better yet "Fortress First (or Western) world") will be coming sooner rather than later.

Africa, and the Third World more generally, no longer works -- if they ever did. The third World is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal dysfunction, disorder and stress, in which criminal anarchy and environmental devastation is emerging as the rule rather than the exception, and as the real "strategic" danger to the U.S. and the rest of the West.

Kaplan's clarion call is like Pat Buchanan on steroids. As he puts it beautifully: "Man is challenging nature far beyond its limits, and nature is now beginning to take its revenge." While we in the West are busy counting how many angels we can get on the heads of our latest consumer fashion labels and SUVs, hordes of young men throughout the Third world, but especially Africa, like loose molecules in a hot fluid, are ready to ignite.

One-by-one, and country-by-country, Kaplan shows us how the "Somaliatization" of the "rest of Africa, and then the rest of the world" is inexorably coming about: The world is becoming much, much younger and thus inherently much less stable; resources are being depleted and the environment is being degraded at a much more alarming and faster rate than even the best scientists had at first predicted; old structures of socialization, government and family and religion are breaking down much more rapidly than anyone thought could happen; and there are no countervailing forces, structures or processes to correct this descent into a global social and political abyss.

Not surprisingly, the model of many of the cities in Africa (Cote D'Ivoire is a good example) is the social melt-down in America's own inner cities. Some of the ghettoes of Abijan, for instance are given American names. There is a "Chicago," "Detroit," and "Washington, DC." However the similarities are so eerily similar that this naming convention could not have been a joke, or come about by accident: All across the Third World we see large numbers of single men with nothing to do, so they just make more babies and use the remainder of their testosterone to cause trouble, and that is the subtext of the agenda for the new world order.

The only answer there is for the more enlightened of these young men is to run as fast as they can in the other direction, and find a reason and an explanation for their misery: So far only fundamentalist Islamic religions provide even a patina of an answer: And their answer is always that: "the greedy Westerners are grabbing up everything and hoarding it in their bank accounts to help impoverish the rest of us." So there will be a "cottage industry in the Osama bin Ladens of the world. Anti-American and anti-Western demagoguery will survive and thrive.

Welcome to the 25th Century. Five Stars.

Important but flawed
This book is an easy and important read, but its obvious flaws undermine its overarching - and, in many respects, valid - thesis. For example, Kaplan cites on serveral occassions the present hardening of America along racial lines as though it were a given, and while there is increasing friction between blacks and Latinos in this country, relations between blacks and whites are arguably the best they've ever been. His confident prediction, at one point, that Quebec will secede is becoming less likely every year, as Canadian immigration policy fills that province with third world immigrants who have no loyalty to Francophone culture and no desire to vote for secession. Such blatant misreadings of situations close to home lead the reader to question, perhaps unfairly, the reliability of his other interpretations.

Having said that, he is clearly correct in his main argument that we are entering a bifurcated world, and the pragmatic steps he offers to dealing with the situation are a welcome alternative to the endless, pie-in-the-sky calls from those on the left and the right to cure the third world of its ills immediately through foreign aid and foreign intervention, respectively.

Well written and engaging
Kaplan most reminds me of VS Naipaul by the scope of his travels, the depth of his experience, and his sometimes pessimistic view of human nature. In this and more recent articles in the Atlantic Monthly, Kaplan tends towards worst-case scenarios and disasters. Perhaps this is because of his circle of contacts, especially in the Pentagon, where the worst-case is a necessary part of planning.

However, he is not a policymaker or planner, and offers no suggestions for how to manage the problems of environmental degradation, state decline, ethnic strife, and other aspects of the coming anarchy. Thomas Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map is somewhat better in this regard.

Kaplan's work is solidly in the field of travel writing and journalism, filled with historical, literary, and personal anecdotes, and should be read as such. He argues that fiction and anecdotes often contain more truth than statistics and the "methodology" (his quotes) of social science. That may or may not be, but try turning a work of fiction or an anecdote into an actual policy.

The book is wonderful in the questions it raises and vivid in its descriptions, but it would be intellectual laziness to base one's understanding of future global challenges on it alone.