A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilization. This book argues that climate change, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system.


Most accounts of contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area or another to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their specialisations explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a 'clash of civilizations', as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilization itself.


This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London. He has taught international relations, contemporary history, empire and globalisation at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex and the Politics & History Unit, Brunel University. His previous books include The War on Truth: Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (2005) and Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (2003).