David Keen Livres

Focusing on the persistence of ineffective policies, the authors analyze how pseudo-wars against terror, migration, and drugs have become entrenched in political practices and profit motives. By examining various global cases, they reveal the incentive systems that sustain these destructive policies. The book also proposes strategies for collectively addressing and dismantling the reliance on militarized responses, advocating for a reevaluation of current approaches to societal challenges.

"In The Politics of Shame, Keen explores the functions of the modern epidemic of shaming. He shows how shame has routinely been weaponised during civil wars, and how the public and private shaming of women has, for centuries, been a major tool of patriarchal control. He examines how and why people are shamed into purchases they cannot afford by a society and economic system predicated on continuous consumption. And he considers how social media has contributed to a spiral of shame, in which those who have been shamed often react by shaming others. Crucially, he also considers the interplay between shame (as a positive and progressive emotion, indicating a desire to move towards collectivism) and shamelessness (as a negative and regressive emotion, indicating a preference for individualism), and whether shame works to improve or worsen behaviour. Keen's narrative is informed by an engaging combination of fieldwork, interviews, and analysis of the theoretical literature on shame across multiple disciplines"--

In the late twentieth century, disasters seemed like distant happenings in countries far away from the prosperous West. But today they are ‘coming home’ with a vengeance. From global warming to the migration crises, from assaults on democracy to Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine — the West is in the grip of multiple, overlapping crises that keep its citizens in a state of perpetual fear and distraction. While some of the threats are real enough, David Keen shows in this disturbing and original book how disasters to which key Western governments and opinion-shapers have significantly contributed are being manipulated by many of these same players for political advantage. Drawing on his first-hand experience of wars and famines in the Global South, Keen reveals how these crises, whether slow-burning or sudden and dramatic, are reinforcing each other in ways that protect vested interests while bolstering the toxic politics that helped to generate them. One key problem here is the use of emergencies to vilify many of those who are trying to relieve them or to highlight their root causes. Unless these voices and alternative perspectives find a way to break through, we risk being locked into a system of emergency politics that is self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting — and that routinely manufactures its own legitimacy.

There are currently between twenty and thirty civil wars worldwide, while at a global level the Cold War has been succeeded by a "war on drugs" and a "war on terror" that continues to rage a decade after 9/11. Why is this, when we know how destructive war is in both human and economic terms? Why do the efforts of aid organizations and international diplomats founder so often? In this important book David Keen investigates why conflicts are so prevalent and so intractable, even when one side has much greater military resources. Could it be that endemic disorder and a "state of emergency" are more useful than bringing conflict to a close? Keen asks who benefits from wars--whether economically, politically, or psychologically—and argues that in order to bring them successfully to an end we need to understand the complex vested interests on all sides.