Professor David Keen tells us about the three books he published last year. Wreckonomics, Shame and When Disasters Come Home collectively critique how language, emotions, and crises are utilised by those in power to maintain and expand their control. All three books offer in-depth insights into the dynamics of contemporary politics and society

Keen, David

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LSE Research Online

Professor David Keen on Wreckonomics,Shame and When Disasters Come HomeProfessor David Keen tells us about the three books he published last year. Wreckonomics, Shameand When Disasters Come Home collectively critique how language, emotions, and crises areutilised by those in power to maintain and expand their control. All three books offer in-depthinsights into the dynamics of contemporary politics and society. Professor Keen will be talking about Wreckonomics and Shame at the Oxford literary festival onTuesday 19 March 2024.   Wreckonomics: Why it’s Time to End the War on Everything (Oxford UniversityPress, 2023), co-authored with Professor Ruben Andersson of Oxford UniversityDrawing on our experiences of wars and migration emergencies, social anthropologistRuben Andersson and I saw an intriguing pattern. We looked at the wars and fights onterror, drugs, illegal migration and Covid, and we found that ‘war’ framings have beenserially unhelpful. Meanwhile, flawed and failing policies have been repeatedly gamedby those who stand to benefit; in many cases, beneficiaries have stoked the problem soPage 1 of 4Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 19/04/2024they can extract the maximum price for promising to address it.The result is that a wide range of problems — and enemies — are being predictablyreproduced, while failure — helped by a rather systematic manipulation of information —has become a peculiar kind of success. We stress the need to recognise the skeweddistribution of costs and benefits within these ‘failing-but-succeeding’ systems. Weconclude that by challenging the damaging rhetoric of war, we can open up the politicalspace in which dissent and progress become more realistic possibilities. Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion (Princeton University Press, 2023)Most of the world — and perhaps half of America — continues to be astonished that aserial liar, a man who faces multiple legal actions, and a man who openly pushed tooverturn the 2020 Presidential election results can be a serious candidate for anotherterm of office. Trump’s toxic combination of popularity and shamelessness finds manyechoes elsewhere — Johnson to Meloni and even Putin. In these circumstances, someobservers have spoken of ‘the death of shame’.But is shame really passé? Have we really moved on? The book argues that in order tounderstand — and resist — our current crop of shameless leaders, we should notassume that shame has somehow been banished. Rather, we need a much betterPage 2 of 4Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 19/04/2024understanding of profound role that shame and its manipulation is playing in modernadvanced democracies. While ‘shame and honour cultures’ have often been seen asconfined to the past or to distant lands, manipulating shame is actually proving central tothe current ascendancy of right-populism. A key move — and a tactic that has long beenprofitable in the field of consumerism — has been to offer an escape from shame whilesimultaneously stirring up that shame. In this mode, shame does for politicians what feardoes for the mafia.In the face of conspicuously shameless leaders like Trump and Johnson, a commonresponse has been to intensify the shaming — not least through the online shamingindustry. Yet this reflex has itself been repeatedly instrumentalised by these skilledmanipulators of shame, as when they have insisted that shaming them means shamingtheir supporters. What is emerging is a kind of politics of non-apology that drawsstrength precisely from opponents’ attempts to mobilise shame, whether this is shame forthe sins of the present or the colonial/racist/fascist sins of the past. This is part of whatmakes these shameless leaders so scary.The book also looks much more broadly at the manipulations — and perversedistributions — of shame that accompany violence and inequality. It examines civil war inSierra Leone, shame in civil and international wars more generally, violent crime, Brexit,the legacies of empire, consumerism, and the peculiar honour-and-shame of USveterans. When Disasters Come Home: Making and Manipulating Emergencies in the West(Polity, 2023)Page 3 of 4Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 19/04/2024Populist turmoil, pandemic chaos, embattled borders… It seems that Westerndemocracies are increasingly falling foul a problem that has long beset the global South— the opportunism of politicians and other elite actors when confronting disasters. Muchof classical thinking about politics and economics suggests self-correcting systems thatbenefit from in-built ‘checks and balances’, and democracies have been widely held tobe better insulated from disasters than autocracies. But today, the book argues, we havea disaster-producing system that seems to be self-reinforcing, a politics that thrives onthe very crises it is helping to produce.As Western politicians turn to a politics of distraction and a theatre of cruelty in whichmagical solutions are persistently peddled, a number of overlapping disasters —including a crisis of democracy, global warming, and forced migration — are being usedto bolster the toxic politics that helped to generate them. The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not reflect thoseof the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economicsand Political Science.Page 4 of 4Permalink: undefinedDate originally posted: undefinedDate PDF generated: 19/04/2024

Professor David Keen on Wreckonomics, Shame and When disasters come home

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Professor David Keen on Wreckonomics, Shame and When disasters come home

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