World Book Day 2024: 8 great books about global justice
By: Global Justice Now
Date: 7 March 2024
Campaigns: General
These reviews first appeared in Ninety-Nine, the magazine for Global Justice Now members. To purchase any of the books reviewed, you can use the links to Bookshop.org – part of the cover price goes to Global Justice Now and part to a fund supporting local bookshops. (The best way to support your local bookshop, though, is to go to it!)
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World
Antony Loewenstein
Anthony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory is a powerful exposé of the centrality of the arms industry in maintaining Israel’s economy. Examining Israel’s defence policy over the last 75 years, Loewenstein argues that lack of accountability for Israel’s actions in 1948, which saw the forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, emboldened successive Israeli governments to use Palestinians as test-subjects to sell their military technology globally. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about Israel’s historic role in arming repressive regimes abroad, including apartheid South Africa, Pinochet’s Chile, and Rwanda. Ultimately, The Palestine Laboratory forces readers to interrogate how the global security market relies on the dehumanisation of people of colour – most notably Muslims and/or Arabs.
Review by Meena Ghani
The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
Jack Farchy and Javier Blas
Commodity traders, the giant corporations whose business it is to buy and sell huge quantities of natural resources, like to think of themselves as ‘non-political’. They go wherever there is profit to be made, seeking out grain, minerals, and oil with no care about the story behind each commodity. Through their openness to dealing with anyone, commodity traders have helped Cuba’s government work around trade sanctions and bought oil from Kurdish separatists in Iraq when no one else would. They’ve also helped prop up apartheid South Africa and been held liable for child and forced labour. Is this apolitical? The World for Sale tells the story of corporations using their immense size and power to extract wealth from every corner of the world. It’s a story where small or indebted countries are beholden to corporate power and fortunes accumulate in the hands of a few. An essential and eye-opening read.
Review by Tim Bierley
Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health
Nick Dearden
Untangling the web of greed and corporate power at the heart of the modern pharmaceutical system without boosting anti-scientific conspiracy thinking is no small task – so I was excited but a bit apprehensive about Nick Dearden’s Pharmanomics. It’s a book worth reading for three reasons. Firstly, it aims to dispel myths, like the idea that there once was a golden age when the benevolent scientific minds of pharma companies invested heavily in public health and not in their profits. Once we let go of such illusions, we can embrace the possibilities of rebuilding a collective approach to health and knowledge – this is the second reason. Thirdly, Dearden engages with the racist, neocolonial assumptions that underpin today’s dominant pharmaceutical model, as well as the implications of defeating it for other existential challenges like inequality and climate breakdown. In doing so, the book can help spark movement conversations about what we truly value and how we gain control of it.
Review by Alena Ivanova
The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism
Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen
To anyone familiar with anti-imperial thinking, the argument in The Imperial Mode of Living is not altogether new: the way we in the global north live our everyday lives has huge social and ecological costs which are externalised, within societies and internationally, and rendered invisible. But what’s particularly interesting about Brand and Wissen’s approach is that they expose the way our individual decisions—for example on car ownership—are influenced by many factors existing beyond the individual. From “a road system built to the detriment of public transport” to habitually internalised ideas like “dominant images of masculinity and representations of individual freedom”, these decisions are normalised and their consequences concealed from the consumer. While this book can feel at times unnecessarily academic, the framing is ultimately an incredibly helpful one that, rather than blaming the individual, points out the social structures and patterns of inequality that condition the choices we make.
Review by Daisy Pearson
Price Wars: How Chaotic Markets Are Creating a Chaotic World
Rupert Russell
In Price Wars Rupert Russell lays out his theory of how price movements triggered by financial speculation are at the heart of so many crises we’ve faced in recent decades, from the Arab Spring, to economic collapse in Venezuela and ISIS’s brutal rampage through Iraq. Particularly relevant, Russell’s work debunks the dominant view that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the cause of the cost of living crisis. Rather, he argues, price rises empowered Putin to attack his neighbours, just as they’ve empowered the aggressiveness of numerous leaders of oil and gas-rich states. For Russell, prices are like the butterfly wings in chaos theory, with price rises setting off a seemingly unrelated chain of events which can cause immense suffering around the globe. At times, as in his description of Brexit, he overplays the theory. But Russell’s very readable analysis underlines the overwhelming importance of financial markets in our world, and the urgent need to constrain them.
Review by Nick Dearden
My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route
Sally Hayden
In this shocking investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa, journalist and author Sally Hayden puts the voices of migrants and refugees front and centre. She follows the experiences of those seeking sanctuary, while also surveying the wider picture, from the negligence of NGOs to the economics of the 21st-century slave trade. The book tells of an unwinnable system, one so cruel and dysfunctional that it is barely comprehensible. In this game, nobody comes out a winner – not the EU, not the UN, not the politicians. But none lose more than the migrants. It is by no means an easy read and there is no happy ending. Hayden makes no qualms about placing the reader in a position of abject hopelessness, so effectively communicating the desperation of the people in the book’s pages. It is a vital chronicle of the ongoing migrant crisis and urgent reading for anyone who wishes to understand the moral depravity we find ourselves facing.
Review by Frances Leach
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis
Amitav Ghosh
Nutmeg originally only grew in the tiny archipelago of Banda (part of Indonesia today). In 1621, the Dutch East India Company got tired of trying to negotiate with the people who lived there and instead killed and expelled them and took over running the islands as plantations. Ghosh starts with the story of this all too routine, colonial act of genocide. From these roots he expands into tackling the systemic crises of the present. Fossil fuel, climate, trade, migration, militarism, racism; Ghosh draws out the historical threads he sees connecting it all, always looping back to Banda. Written during lockdown, this is a massive outpouring in a demand for change and a ‘vitalist’ politics. Who is allowed to make meaning and who is dismissed as uncivilised, is at the heart of it all for Ghosh. This book seeks to remake both the meaning of our history and how we define the problems that face us now.
Review by Jean Blaylock
Butler to the World: How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals
Oliver Bullough
The British government’s reluctant pivot to trash-talking (and eventually sanctioning) Russian oligarchs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine must have caused sleepless nights in Whitehall. After all, as Oliver Bullough reveals in this finely-told account of how Britain stumbled into a new global role in the aftermath of the Suez crisis, impeccable manners in the face of financial skulduggery are fundamental to the business model. His central metaphor, of the UK as a butler helping some of the world’s worst people get away with whatever they will pay to get away with, might initially feel too soft. But it captures the combination of consigliere and smooth talker that only the City of London can provide. In doing so it punctures the self-importance of ‘Global Britain’ – we now have the freedom to be even more subservient to the global super-rich. Though, as Bullough stresses, we have long had the freedom to choose the opposite course.
Review by Jonathan Stevenson
These reviews first appeared in Ninety-Nine, the magazine for Global Justice Now members.
Join as a member today to receive it three times a year in the post.
