The Coming Anarchy

The Coming Anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet was written by journalist Robert D. Kaplan and was first published as an article in the February 1994 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. It is considered to be one of the fundamental theses on the state of current world affairs in the Post-Cold War era, and is ranked^{[by whom?]} on the same level of doctrinal importance as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man theses. It has also been criticized as a Malthusian reading of the world, for blaming the situation on its victims and for overlooking possible political and economical causes such as neoliberal policy.^[1]

The original article

Fukuyama believed that the end of the Cold War would bring about a new era of peace in world affairs. Kaplan argued that the Cold War was the closest the world would ever get to Utopia. The new struggles were no longer neatly ideological, but cultural and historical. New tensions such as population increases, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining fragile governments across the developing world.

The book

The article was republished as the first chapter of the book The Coming Anarchy in 2000. The book also included the controversial article Was Democracy Just A Moment? and several others by Kaplan.

See also

• The End of History and the Last Man
• Clash of civilizations
• Cultural evolution
• World peace
• War to end all wars
• Democratic peace theory

External links

• The Coming Anarchy

References

1. ^ Harvey, David (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. p. 185. ISBN 978-0-19-928326-2.