Skip to main content
University of California Press

No Go World

How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and Infecting Our Politics
by Ruben Andersson (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $29.95 / £25.00
Publication Date: Apr 2019
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 360
ISBN: 9780520967700
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 12 maps, 6 charts, 6 photos
Read an Excerpt(opens in new window)
Recommend to your Library (PDF)(opens in new window)Rights and Permissions

About the Book

War-torn deserts, jihadist killings, trucks weighted down with contraband and migrants—from the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote “danger zones.” Instead of buying into apocalyptic visions, Andersson takes aim at how Western states and international organizations conduct military, aid, and border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world’s rich and poor. Using drones, proxy forces, border reinforcement, and outsourced aid, risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger. The result is a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders, with national and global politics riven by fear. Andersson contends that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects us whether we live in Texas or Timbuktu. Only by developing a new cartography of hope can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us.

About the Author

Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. He is the author of Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe and the winner of the BBC Thinking Allowed Award for Ethnography in 2015.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
List of Maps
Preface

Introduction: Into the Danger Zone

PART 1: THE STORY OF THE MAP
1. The Timbuktu Syndrome
2. Remoteness Remapped
3. The Tyranny of Distance

Interlude: The Drone, the Web, and the World of Mirrors

PART 2: CONTAGION
4. Wolves at the Door
5. The Snake Merchants
6. Where the Wild Things Are

Conclusion: Danger Unmapped

Acknowledgments
Power of Narration, Narration of Power: An Anthropological Appendix
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Reviews

"No Go World is an ambitious and wide-ranging exploration of how risk, danger and fear are ‘remapping’ the world with dire ethical and practical consequences. In examining how ‘remote zones of insecurity are becoming central to our new world disorder’ (p. 3), the book seizes an ambitious remit and is a worthwhile read for a broad range of readers interested in security studies, insurance, risk, human geography and questions of social-science method itself."
— Journal of Refugee Studies
"The? ?history of Western map making serves Andersson as a particularly? ?powerful metaphor throughout the book. It allows? ?him to illustrate the Western gaze, time horizons, beliefs,? ?hopes, and fears in relation to the Orient."
— American Anthropologist
"Vividly and convincingly, No Go World describes a global shift toward cordoning off more and more zones labeled violent and high-risk, making them inaccessible to outsiders. . . . Andersson’s argument is devastating and crucial."
— Public Books
"Andersson’s adventuring is almost impossible to contain in just one sentence, as it weaves in and out of locations, through maps both real and those mappae mundi full of monsters he was obsessed with as a child. . . . The value, ultimately, and there is real value, in No Go World is in the discovery of the mostly unseen everyday that refuses to be defeated by the military border."
— Society and Space
“‘The story of a world gone wild,’ writes Ruben Andersson. To this global wilderness, the anthropologist’s craft must adapt, in field research and in reporting. No Go World shows a way to do it and is destined to draw a wide readership.”—Ulf Hannerz, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, and author of Writing Future Worlds: An Anthropologist Explores Global Scenarios
 
“One of the best books available on what is commonly perceived in the West as the ‘refugee crisis’ but is in fact a world rent by fear and conflict, with refugees as one symptom.”—Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University, and former Director of the London School of Economics
 
“An impressive and wide-ranging tour de force. With great panache and critical thinking, Andersson explores the ideas and practices behind our current ‘global map of fear’ and how it must be rethought and challenged.”—Hans Lucht, author of Darkness before Daybreak: African Migrants Living on the Margins in Southern Italy Today

“This beautifully written book takes us  on a journey through the distanced interventions of the ‘war on terror,’ showing how, in these global times, efforts to push risk ever further away end up bringing it closer—creating the basis for a no go world. Full of ideas and stories, and with hope as well as pessimism, it is the sort of book that needs to be read slowly.”—Mary Kaldor, Professor of Global Governance, London School of Economics, and author of New and Old Wars
 
“No Go World provides a geopolitical map of security investment and withdrawal, hot spots and danger zones. An important study and an engaging read.”—Mark Maguire, author of Bodies as Evidence: Security, Knowledge, and Power