In When Disasters Come Home: Making and Manipulating Emergencies In The West, David Keen considers how powers in the Global North exploit, or even manufacture, disasters in the Global South for political or economic gain. Though taking issue with Keen’s engagement with psychoanalysis, Daniele-Hadi Irandoost finds the book an insightful exploration of the global power dynamics involved in disasters and their far-reaching repercussions.

When Disasters Come Home: Making and Manipulating Emergencies In The West. David Keen. Polity. 2023.

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In When Disasters Come Home: Making and Manipulating Emergencies In The West anthropological writer David Keen attempts to show how disasters are exploited for political and economic gain. A disaster, as defined by Keen, is “a serious problem occurring over a short or long period of time that causes widespread human, material, economic or environmental loss”. Keen’s analysis deals with two types of disaster in the Global North. The so-called “sudden” or “dramatic” disasters are caused by stark terrorism (eg, the 9/11 attacks), natural causes (Hurricane Katrina), financial and economic recessions (crash of 2007–8), migration crises (Calais), Covid-19, and the war in Ukraine.

Keen attempts to show how disasters are exploited for political and economic gain.

On the other hand, “extended” or “underlying” disasters derive from long-smouldering conditions of economic disparity (eg, globalisation and inequality), considerable changes in climate (deficiencies in the domestic infrastructure), as well as political fragmentation (erosion of democratic norms, etc).

Colonial historiography assumed that disasters were usually confined to the Global South. Incidentally, in his investigative research in the Global South, especially in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Keen discovered that the politics of that world were disposed to deliberately make, manipulate and legitimise “famines, wars and other disasters”. This state of affairs enabled certain beneficiary actors to extract political, military and economic benefits.

In his investigative research in the Global South, especially in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Keen discovered that the politics of that world were disposed to deliberately make, manipulate and legitimise famines, wars and other disasters

Here, Keen sounds a note of warning. Democracies provide only a fragile protection against disasters, and for six reasons (according to examples across the globe): disasters might be deemed “acceptable”, vulnerable groups do not always have the “political muscle” to guard against disasters, opportunists may seek to maximise profit through the suffering of certain groups, “elected politicians” may “distort” information about a disaster, democracies “may give false reassurance in terms of the apparent immunity to disaster” (emphasis in original), and, finally, a democracy may itself erode over time.

In theorising disasters, Keen endeavours to advance beyond the traditional distinction between the Global North and the Global South.

In theorising disasters, Keen endeavours to advance beyond the traditional distinction between the Global North and the Global South. His purpose is to show that, in the Western world, disasters have “come home to roost”, that the violence of “far away” countries (“whether in the contemporary era or as part of historical colonialism”) has found its way back into the Global North in the form of “various kinds of blowback”.

These “boomerang effects”, to use Keen’s words, “take a heavy toll on Western politics and society” when they are “incorporated into a renewed politics of intolerance” (“internal colonialism”). In particular, Keen says that, in the Global North, we find there is an increasing drive for security by “allocating additional resources for the military, building walls, and bolstering abusive governments that offer to cooperate in a ‘war on terror’ or in ‘migration control’ – … [which] tend not only to bypass the underlying problems but to exacerbate them” (emphasis in original). Additionally, Keen alleges that the expenses of “security systems” suck “the lifeblood from systems of public health and social security, which in turn feeds back into vulnerability to disaster”.

there is an increasing drive for security […which] tends not only to bypass the underlying problems but to exacerbate them

As Keen sees it, disasters either “hold the potential to awaken us to important underlying problems”, or “keep us in a state of distraction and morbid entertainment”, finding it important to consider their causes rather than their consequences.

Keen draws upon a wide selection of literature, covering authors including Naomi Klein, Mark Duffield, Giorgio Agamben, Ruben Andersson, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, as well as Michel Foucault, Susanne Jaspers, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Richard Hofstadter, and Nafeez Ahmed, among others. He pays particular attention to the work of Hannah Arendt. Her 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism is a powerful and permanently valuable account of the way in which politics is framed “as a choice between a ‘lesser evil’ and some allegedly more disastrous alternative”.

[Arendt’s] 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is a powerful and permanently valuable account of the way in which politics is framed ‘as a choice between a ‘lesser evil’ and some allegedly more disastrous alternative’.

Keen competently summarises her exposition of “action as propaganda,” upon which reality is prepared to conform to “delusions”. From his point of view, “action as propaganda” is represented by five distinct methods namely, “reproducing the enemy” (war on terror), “creating inhuman conditions” (police attacks in Calais), “blaming the victim” (austerity programmes in Greece), “undermining the idea of human rights” (the growing emphasis on removing citizenship in the UK), and “using success to ‘demonstrate’ righteousness” (Trump’s self-proclaimed powers of prediction).

Keen’s discussion of these strategies to exert control resonates with contemporary politics in the UK. One is reminded of the retrogressive character of Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s article for the Times on 8 November 2023, in the context of the Israel-Hamas war and the Armistice Day, suggesting that pro-Palestine protesters are “hate marchers”, and that the police operate with a “double standard” in the way they handle pro-Palestinian marches. This is, of course, one example of the insidious process of “painting dissent as extremism”.

Nevertheless, Keen’s use of “magical thinking”, or “the belief that particular events are causally connected, despite the absence of any plausible link between them”, is one aspect of his argument that struggles to convince. Keen is persuaded that “magical thinking” links up with a well-developed science of psychoanalysis in accordance with Sigmund Freud’s conception of the magical and how people affected by neurosis may turn away from the world of reality. But the impression given by Keen’s economic or anthropological perspective is that he may have overlooked the complexity of psychoanalysis.

Keen is persuaded that “magical thinking” links up with a well-developed science of psychoanalysis in accordance with Sigmund Freud’s conception of the magical and how people affected by neurosis may turn away from the world of reality

Here, we come to two of the chief problems of what “magical thinking” really means. First, according to Karl S. Rosengren and Jason A. French, magical thinking is “a pejorative label for thinking that differs either from that of educated adults in technologically advanced societies or the majority of society in general”. Second, they found, “it ignores the fact that thinking that appears irrational or illogical to an educated adult may be the result of lack of knowledge or experience in a particular domain or different types of knowledge or experience”. It is necessary, therefore, to understand the writings of Freud as the product of their locus nascendi. That is to say, it is dangerous to politicise the processes of psychology, or, to be more exact, to apply them outside the formalities of therapy.

To conclude, When Disasters Come Home is a book to which all those interested in current affairs, geopolitics and development studies must come sooner or later, abounding in illuminating extrapolations on the ruling and official class’s exploitation (or even manufacture) of disasters.

This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

Image Credit: Kenneth Summers on Shutterstock.

Geopolitics of knowledge is a fact. Only few (conservative) colleagues would contend otherwise. Ingrid Robeyns wrote an entry for this blog dealing with this problem. There, Ingrid dealt mostly with the absence of non-Anglophone colleagues in political philosophy books and journals from the Anglophone centre. I want to stress that this is not a problem of language, for there are other centres from which we, philosophers from the “Global South” working in the “Global South”, are excluded. In political philosophy, the centre is composed of the Anglophone world and three European countries: Italy, France, and Germany. From my own experience, the rest of us do not qualify as political philosophers, for we are, it seems, unable to speak in universal terms. We are, at best, providers of particular cases and data for Europeans and Anglophones to study and produce their own philosophical and universal theories. I think most of you who are reading are already familiar with the concept of epistemic extractivism, of which this phenomenon is a case. (If not, you should; in case you don’t read Spanish, there is this).

Critical political philosophy is one of the fields where the unequal distribution of epistemic authority is more striking. I say “striking” because it would seem, prima facie, that political philosophers with a critical inclination (Marxists, feminists, anti-imperialists, etc.) are people more prone to recognising injustice than people from other disciplines and tendencies. But no one lives outside a system of injustice and no one is a priori completely exempt from reproducing patterns of silencing. Not even ourselves, living and working in the “Global Southern” places of the world. Many political philosophers working and living in Latin America don’t even bother to read and cite their own colleagues. This is, to be sure, a shame, but there is a rationale behind this self-destructive practice. Latin American scholars know that their papers have even lesser chances of being sent to a reviewing process (we are usually desk-rejected) if they cite “too many” pieces in Spanish and by authors working outside of the academic centre.

In many reviews I’ve received in my career, I have been told to cite books by people from the centre just because they are trending or are being cited in the most prestigious Anglophone journals, even if they would contribute nothing to my piece and research. I have frequently been told by reviewers to give more information about the “particular” social-historical context I am writing from because readers don’t know a lot about it. This is an almost verbatim phrase from a review I got recently. I wonder if readers of Anglophone prestigious, Q1 journals stop being professional researchers the instant they start reading about José Carlos Mariátegui or Argentina’s last right-wing dictatorship. Why can’t they just do the research by themselves, why should we have to waste characters and words to educate an overeducated public? This is as tiresome as it is offensive. When I cite the work of non-Anglophone authors from outside of the imperial centres (UK, USA, Italy, Germany, and France, no matter the language they use to write), reviewers almost always demand that I include a reference to some famous native Anglophone (or Italian / German / French, without considering gender or race; the power differential here is simple geographical procedence) author who said similar things but decades after the authors I am quoting. I’ve read all your authors. Why haven’t they read “mine”? And why do they feel they have to suggest something else instead of just learning about “our” authors? This is what I want to reply to the reviewers. Of course, I don’t. I dilligently put the references they demand. I shouldn’t have to, but if I don’t, I don’t get published. There’s the imperial trick again.

English is also always a problem, but not for everyone who is not Anglophone. In 2020 I was in London doing research at LSE. I attended a lecture by a European political theorist. They gave the talk in English. Although they work at a United Statian University, their English was poor. The room was packed. The lecture was mediocre. I was annoyed. “Why do they feel they don’t have to make an effort to pronounce in an intelligible way?”, I thought. When I speak they don’t listen to me like that, with concentrated attention and making an effort to understand me. The reason is in plain view: coloniality of power. If you come from powerful European countries, you don’t need to ask for permission. You don’t need to excel. You don’t need to have something absolutely original to say. You just show up and talk. If you are from, let’s say, Argentina, and you work there (here), you have to adapt to the traditional analytic way of writing and arguing so typical in Anglophone contexts, including citing their literature, if you want to enter the room in the first place. You are not even allowed to use neologisms, although the omnipresent use of English as a lingua franca should have already made this practice at least tolerated. One cannot expect everyone to speak English and English to remain “English” all the same. Inclusion changes the game, if it doesn’t, then it is not isegoria what is going on but cultural homogenisation. (Here is a proposal for inclusive practices regarding Enlgish as a lingua franca). The manifest “Rethinking English as a lingua franca in scientific-academic contexts” offers a detailed critique of the idea and imposition of English as a lingua franca. I endorse it 100 %. (Here in Spanish, open access; here in Portuguese).

In my particular case, I am frequently invited to the academic centre, sometimes to write book chapters, encyclopaedia entries, and papers for special issues, sometimes to give talks and lectures. Not once have I not thought it was not tokenism. Maybe it is my own inferiority complex distorting my perception of reality, but we know from Frantz Fanon which is the origin of this inferiorisation.

I used to be pretty annoyed by this whole situation until I realised that I don’t need to try to enter conversations where I am not going to be heard, understood, or taken seriously. The fact is that we don’t need to be recognised as philosophers by those who willingly ignore our political philosophy. And this is why it is hard for me to participate in forums such as this blog. I just don’t want to receive the same comments I get when I send a paper to an Anglophone, Q1 journal, to put it simply.

But I also want to keep trying, not to feel accepted and to belong, but because I do believe in transnational solidarity and the collective production of emancipatory knowledge. It is a matter of recognition, and a question of whether it is possible for the coloniser to recognise the colonised, to name Fanon once more.

Pair charged ludicrously with criminal damage for putting sauce on a statue have been found not guilty

Protestors who squirted tomato ketchup on to a Commons statue of Arthur Balfour, after whom the UK’s commitment to the creation of an Israeli state on Palestinian land is named, have been found not guilty of criminal damage by a unanimous jury decision.

The protest by the two women took place on the 105th anniversary of the ‘Balfour Declaration’ by the British Government in 1917:

Video released by Palestine Action

According to the defendants’ legal firm,

this case is thought to have been the first trial to take place in the Crown Court as a result of Section 50 of the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 – which amended the mode of trial for low value criminal damage to memorials.

Legal argument during the trial included whether the protest amounted to damage, whether the defendants had a lawful excuse in accordance with their right to freedom of expression protected under Article 10 of the EHRC, and also due to their belief that the public would consent to their protest as a form of expression and if they were aware of the history, consequence and legacy of the Balfour Declaration.

The pair were defended by Hamish McCallum of Garden Court North Chambers’ protest rights team.

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David Marr, Killing for Country: A Family Story, Black Inc. (2023)

Family histories about the involvement of one’s grandparents in the Holocaust and the fascism of twentieth-century European history have become a minor literary trend. Two recent examples of the genre have emerged out of the United States—Linda Kinstler’s Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (2022) and Burkard Bilger’s Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets (2023)—and I myself have contributed to it with my book Opi—The Two Lives of My Grandfather published earlier this year.

Examining genocidal history through the lens of ancestry research is, however, less common in Australia. Killing for Country (subtitled A Family Story) by renowned journalist and broadcaster David Marr, published this spring, is one of the very few publications in this vein.

Marr’s initially personal research into the life of his great-grandmother revealed that two of his great-great-uncles had been officers in the Native Police—small paramilitary units made up of Indigenous troopers deployed far away from their ancestral lands under the command of white officers. Tasked with protecting settlers from the ‘natives’, they in effect became mobile killing squads engaged in numerous massacres to clear the land for white squatters. Taking his family history as a starting point, Marr’s book is an extensive account of colonial dispossession and violent displacement of First Nations people from their traditional lands, and in its accumulative detail a litany of landgrabs and massacres.

Kinstler, an American journalist of Latvian descent, also began with research into her family tree before her story broadened into a larger account of the history of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Latvia and the role locals played in it. While the figure of her grandfather Boris remained mysterious, another main character emerged from her research: Herbert Cukurs, a popular aviator and adventurer dubbed by the local press the ‘Latvian Lindberg’, who during the Nazi occupation joined a local killing squad, the Arājs Kommando, infamous for its role in the Rumbula and other massacres. After the war Cukurs escaped to Uruguay, where he was killed by Israeli Mossad agents in a botched operation in 1965.

Despite the vast differences in setting and historical context of nineteenth-century Australia and twentieth-century Latvia, there are eerie parallels between the two stories, most notably in how Kinstler and Marr explore the relationships between historical and legal truths and between our collective understanding of history, what we know to have happened, and what can be proven in a court of law.

Legally, both the Arājs Kommando and the Native Police operated in a grey area. Associated with but not part of the regular police force or the army, their extra-judicial killings were, strictly speaking, illegal, yet at the very least tolerated and frequently aided and abetted by the authorities. Immunity from prosecution was built into the design for the killings; in fact, the law was deliberately set up to make prosecutions virtually impossible.

Armenian-born philosopher Marc Nichanian identifies as one of the core characteristics of genocide that it ‘destroys the evidence of its crimes as it is committing them’. The aims of its perpetrators are twofold: eliminating an ethnicity and its culture, and rendering that elimination an unwitnessed crime that cannot be verified in legal terms.

In the Australian case, official documents are scarce, and if they do exist, references to killings are oblique. For example, Marr demonstrates how the verb ‘disperse’ was routinely used in both the media and official correspondence as a synonym for ‘massacre’. The colonial administration regularly promoted officers from the Native Police to the role of Magistrate, and in court proceedings the main witnesses, First Nations people, were prevented from giving evidence because as non-Christians they could not swear oaths on the Bible.

More fundamentally, though, the legalistic argument against the notion that white colonialists conducted a genocidal campaign against First Nations people in Australia rests to a large extent on the fact that they were considered ‘subjects of the Crown’, and as such, in theory, were owed protection. Land-lease agreements between squatters and the Crown had provisions for land use by Indigenous Australians, albeit deeply hidden in the fine print. Therefore, the logic goes, the killings that undoubtedly occurred did not constitute either a Frontier War or a state-sanctioned attempt at genocide.

Similarly, a hundred years later in Latvia, Cukurs was, surprisingly, exonerated posthumously in court, with the judge ignoring historical records and numerous written depositions by witnesses that placed him at the sites of massacres. The justification for this ruling was that these witnesses had since passed away and could not be cross-examined, and that despite Cukurs’s presence there was no firsthand eyewitness account of him actually carrying out any shootings. Curkurs’s rehabilitation to his prewar status of aviator hero can also be seen in the context of a country emerging from decades of Soviet occupation and hungry for home-made heroes to affirm a history of national accomplishment.

Despite these parallels, in Europe, with its brutal twentieth-century history so deeply ingrained in the public imagination, these attempts at legal revisionism rarely succeed. Concentration camp guards who get off lightly in court because of the legal burden of proof are not considered innocent by the general public outside of the neo-fascist fringe. The failure of the legal system to mirror what we know to be historically true is widely derided as a weakness—an unfortunate side-effect of the rule of law.

In Australia, our collective imagination rarely extends to our own bloodlands. Despite the overwhelming academic evidence and the plethora of popular films, books and articles, this part of our history remains contested in the public mind, as was most depressingly evident in the campaign against the Voice to Parliament and its subsequent rejection by an overwhelming majority of non-Indigenous voters. Not unlike in newly independent Latvia, it seems that here too a legal fiction is required to prop up what amounts to a fragile nationalism. Genocide constitutes an unacceptable stain on the foundation myth of Australia and our brittle sense of national identity. Submitting to the reality of this dark chapter in our past is considered damaging to the grand project of nation-building, and if spoken about at all, it must be hidden behind vague and bland euphemisms such as ‘the burden of history’ or ‘the injustices of the past’.

Genealogical research is popular among many, but Marr’s and Kinstler’s books are a far cry from poking around on ancestry.com or watching celebrities find out about minor family scandals on SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are? Yet what connects their work to the public imagination is, as Fintan O’Toole points out in a recent article for the New York Review of Books, ‘the core idea that one is, in some crucial sense, defined by one’s ancestry’.

It is this public fascination with ancestry research that makes a book like Killing for Country influential beyond its immediate story. Harnessing the widely held belief that identity is connected to ancestry might well have the potential to break the spell of the triumphalist version of our history, and so hopefully other such books will follow in its wake. Marr’s project of truth-telling is an important one. It contributes to a change in the collective imagination of Australia, from the cliched shorthand of Cook—convicts—sheep—settlers—gold—Gallipoli to the fact that, in his words, ‘we are a conquered country’. As such, it presents a way forward after the failed referendum on constitutional recognition.