In his 2011 book Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti explored the incipient era of climate wars, in which extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. Traveling along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe–the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet’s multitudes, Parenti found both failed states amid climatic disasters but also the unsettling presence of Western military forces that see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Arguing against this political hardening of wealthy states, Parenti presented a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies  to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence .

In this talk, Christian Parenti returns to the themes of Tropic of Chaos in order to critically examine how climate wars have shaped and been shaped by global projections of American power.

Christian Parenti, teaches in the Liberal Studies Program at NYU, is a contributing editor at The Nation, and is the author of four books, the most recent being Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books, June 2011). He has a PhD in Geography and Sociology from the London School of Economics.

Read more and RSVP at the CIS event page.

Free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the Global Voices Lecture Series, the Center for International Studies, the Program on the Global Environment, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.