Wreckonomics
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The United States' ignominious exit from Afghanistan in 2021 topped two decades of failure and devastation wrought by the war on terror. A long-running "fight against migration" has stoked chaos and rights abuses while pushing migrants onto more dangerous routes. For its part, the war on drugs has failed to dampen narcotics demand while fueling atrocities from Mexico to the Philippines. Why do such "failing" policies persist for so long? And why do politicians keep feeding the very crises they say they are combating?
In Wreckonomics, Ruben Andersson and David Keen analyze why disastrous policies live on even when it has become apparent that they do not work. The perverse outcomes of the fights against terror, migration, and drugs are more than a blip or an anomaly. Rather, the proliferation of wars and pseudo-wars has become a dangerous political habit and an endless source of political advantage and profit. From combating crime to the war on drugs, from civil wars to global wars and even "covid wars," chronic failure has been harnessed to the appearance of success. Over a wide variety of spheres, problems have persisted and worsened not so much despite the "wars" and "fights" waged against them as thanks to these floundering endeavors.
Covering a range of cases around the world, Wreckonomics exposes and interrogates the incentive systems that allow destructive policies to flourish in the face of systemic failure—while offering strategies for tackling our addiction to waging war on everything.
Ruben Andersson is a professor of social anthropology at the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. His research has been concerned with borders, migration and security, and he is the author of No Go World (2019) and Illegality, Inc. (2014), winner of the 2015 BBC Ethnography Award.
David Keen is a professor of conflict studies at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has researched civil wars, global wars and disasters. He is the author of The Benefits of Famine (1994) and Useful Enemies (2012), among other books, and winner of the Edgar Graham prize.