Global Crisis and Insecurity : The Human Condition, Darkly

While it makes for difficult reading, documenting global insecurity, violence, genocide, refugee displacement and technoscientific intrusion demands thorough analysis. This landmark book maps the contours of global change, offering a comprehensive and integrated account of the global crisis that we face in the world today.

From the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, to the escalating effects of climate change, public consciousness of existential threat waxes and wanes. Despite the occasional intense capacity to imagine the global consequences of our cumulative actions, we seem to lack a collective will to act alternatively and systematically to conserve the fundamental conditions for human life. This book confronts the basic challenges of insecurity, violence, genocide, refugee displacement and technoscientific intrusions on embodiment and identity – but it also points to alternative ways of thinking and practicing in an unsettled world. It argues for an engaged cosmopolitanism, grounded in place and guided by local and global debates around principles of what constitutes good ways of living. In order to create a positive change, we must better understand the human condition in crisis, the causes of the global crisis and the possible pathways to human flourishing.