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“‘The story of a world gone wild,’ writes Ruben Andersson. To this global wilderness, the anthropologist’s craft must adapt, in field research and in reporting. No Go World shows a way to do it and is destined to draw a wide readership.”—Ulf Hannerz, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, and author of Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios
“One of the best books available on what is commonly perceived in the West as the ‘refugee crisis’ but is in fact a world rent by fear and conflict, with refugees as one symptom.”—Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University, and former Director of the London School of Economics
“An impressive and wide-ranging tour de force. With great panache and critical thinking, Andersson explores the ideas and practices behind our current ‘global map of fear’ and how it must be rethought and challenged.”—Hans Lucht, author of Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today
“This beautifully written book takes us on a journey through the distanced interventions of the ‘war on terror,’ showing how, in these global times, efforts to push risk ever further away end up bringing it closer—creating the basis for a no go world. Full of ideas and stories, and with hope as well as pessimism, it is the sort of book that needs to be read slowly.”—Mary Kaldor, Professor of Global Governance, London School of Economics, and author of New and Old Wars
“No Go World provides a geopolitical map of security investment and withdrawal, hot spots and danger zones. An important study and an engaging read.”—Mark Maguire, author of Bodies as Evidence: Security, Knowledge, and Power
List of contents
List 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
About the author
Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. He is the author of Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe and the winner of the BBC Thinking Allowed Award for Ethnography in 2015.
Summary
War-torn deserts, jihadist killings, trucks weighted down with contraband and migrants—from 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 that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects us whether 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.
Additional text
"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."
