Home

wreckonomics

I’m a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University’s Department of International Development, working on security, migration, borders and related topics. Browse this site for more information on my books and other publications (where I’ve also listed contact details). Or visit my Oxford site.

My latest book, coauthored with Prof David Keen of LSE, is Wreckonomics: Why it’s time to end the war on everything (Oxford University Press, December 2023). In it, we offer a comparative view on why various wars and security interventions have proven so profitable despite their frequently disastrous failures. Read an edited excerpt here.

My previous book was No Go World: How fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics (University of California Press, 2019). Based on research in the West African Sahel, along Western borderlines and in a range of other sites, the book reaches across distant conflict zones, and into colonial history, as it draws an anthropological map of the dangers and fears that haunt our politics today.

My first book, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (University of California Press, 2014) gave an ethnographic account of the new social realities generated by Europe’s ‘fight against illegal migration’ along the continent’s southern shores, a theme I have continued to explore in more recent work.

Over 2023-26, I will be working on a larger project on global security for a Leverhulme major research fellowship. The project is entitled ‘Apocalypse soon: Security, subversion and the struggle for a human future’ and I’ll post details as it progresses.

Para información en castellano, haz clic aquí

Comments are closed.