Nafeez Ahmed
Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an investigative journalist and complex systems social scientist. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University's Global Sustainability Institute.
Ahmed’s academic work revolves around the historical sociology and political ecology of mass violence in the context of civilizational systems. He has taught international politics, contemporary history, empire and globalisation at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies – where he obtained his PhD in International Relations and his MA in Contemporary War & Peace Studies – and Brunel University’s Politics & History Unit.
Ahmed’s writings have been translated into French, German, Italian, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese. His books have been reviewed positively in the Journal of Peace Research (Sage); Development and Change (Wiley-Blackwell); Middle East Journal (Middle East Institute), Socialism and Democracy (Routledge); Library Journal (Reed Elsevier); among others – and his work is widely cited in high-quality peer-reviewed social science literature. His international security research has been used by the Coroner’s Inquiry into 7/7; the US Army Air University’s ‘Causes of War’ collection (2007); the UK Ministry of Defence’s Joint Services Command & Staff College Research Guide on Counter-Terrorism and the GWOT (2008); Chatham House’s Middle East Programme; the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) ‘World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization’ social science bibliography on impacts of globalization (2003); the Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (2010), among others.
Ahmed has advised the British Foreign Office, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the UK Defence Academy, the Metropolitan Police Service on delivery of the Home Office’s Channel Project, and the UK Parliamentary Select Committee for Communities & Local Government in its Inquiry into the government’s ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ (PVE) programme, for which he gave written evidence. He has also consulted for projects funded by the US State Department and the UK Department for Communities & Local Government. In 2005, he testified in US Congress on Western security policy toward al-Qaeda.
Supervisors: Benno Teschke and Martin Shaw
Ahmed’s academic work revolves around the historical sociology and political ecology of mass violence in the context of civilizational systems. He has taught international politics, contemporary history, empire and globalisation at the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies – where he obtained his PhD in International Relations and his MA in Contemporary War & Peace Studies – and Brunel University’s Politics & History Unit.
Ahmed’s writings have been translated into French, German, Italian, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese. His books have been reviewed positively in the Journal of Peace Research (Sage); Development and Change (Wiley-Blackwell); Middle East Journal (Middle East Institute), Socialism and Democracy (Routledge); Library Journal (Reed Elsevier); among others – and his work is widely cited in high-quality peer-reviewed social science literature. His international security research has been used by the Coroner’s Inquiry into 7/7; the US Army Air University’s ‘Causes of War’ collection (2007); the UK Ministry of Defence’s Joint Services Command & Staff College Research Guide on Counter-Terrorism and the GWOT (2008); Chatham House’s Middle East Programme; the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) ‘World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization’ social science bibliography on impacts of globalization (2003); the Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (2010), among others.
Ahmed has advised the British Foreign Office, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the UK Defence Academy, the Metropolitan Police Service on delivery of the Home Office’s Channel Project, and the UK Parliamentary Select Committee for Communities & Local Government in its Inquiry into the government’s ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ (PVE) programme, for which he gave written evidence. He has also consulted for projects funded by the US State Department and the UK Department for Communities & Local Government. In 2005, he testified in US Congress on Western security policy toward al-Qaeda.
Supervisors: Benno Teschke and Martin Shaw
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Books by Nafeez Ahmed
Political Marxist theory offers the conceptual tools to mobilise a social theory capable of interrogating the historically-specific socio-political relations by which imperial geopolitical orders are constituted and transformed in the context of strategic violence. Integrating this with Raphael Lemkin's sociological conceptualization of the interconnections between colonization, inter-communal contestations and genocide,
makes it possible to distinguish the differential dynamics of mass violence in different empires based on their distinctive constitutive social relations, exemplified in precapitalist Spain and capitalist England. It also allows for the re-integration of the central role of violence in the formation and re-consolidation of empires at points of crisis.
This revised historical sociology of empires and imperial violence clarifies the evolution of the postwar US liberal imperial system, including the theorization of the post-9/11 'War on Terror' as a radicalized response to a global systemic crisis in the US empire's constitutive social relations, exemplified in the projected depletion of hydrocarbon energy reserves in predominantly Muslim peripheries. This reveals and explains
concurrent tendentially genocidal escalatory logics of Othering targeted principally against Muslim communities.
Policymakers and media observers have largely missed the biophysical triggers of this new age of unrest – the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for the Earth’s climate, industrial food production, and economic growth.
This scientific monograph for the first time develops an empirically-ground theoretical model of the complex interaction between biophysical processes and geopolitical crises, demonstrated through the analysis of a wide range of detailed case studies of historic, concurrent and probable state failures in the Middle East, Northwest Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Geopolitical crises across these regions are being driven by the proliferation of climate, food and economic crises which have at their root the common denominator of a fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization.
This inevitable energy transition, which will be completed well before the close of this century, entails a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity’s embeddedness in the natural world. While geopolitics cannot be simplistically reduced to the biophysical, this book shows that international relations today can only be understood by recognizing the extent to which the political is embedded in the biophysical.
Although the book offers a rigorous scientific analysis, it is written in a clean, journalistic style to ensure readability and accessibility to a general audience. It contains a large number of graphical illustrations concerning oil production data, population issues, the food price index, economic growth and debt, and other related issues to demonstrate the interconnections and correlations across key sectors.
Against this background, Ahmed accomplishes the most detailed and wide-ranging study to date of the powerful vested interests and intrigues responsible for the collapse of US national security in the years and months leading to 9/11. Government documents, whistleblower testimony, and the findings of official inquiries are scrutinized to trace the innermost workings of the intelligence community, revealing precisely which government policies and operations facilitated the 9/11 intelligence failure, and pinpointing the specific agencies, individuals and decisions that emasculated the US air defense system. Finally, Ahmed unlocks the underlying geostrategy of the War on Terror - the culmination of a decades-long plan to secure and expand an increasingly unstable system. For anyone who remains uneasy about government policies on, and after, 9/11, The War on Truth is an invaluable resource that will radically alter perceptions of international terrorism, national security, and the clandestine machinery of Western power.
Using official sources, Ahmed investigates U.S. and British claims about Iraq’s WMD programs and in the process reveals the hidden motives behind the 2003 invasion and the grand strategy of which it is a part. He shows that the true goals of U.S.-British policy in the Middle East are camouflaged by spin, P.R. declarations and seemingly noble words. The reality can only be comprehended through knowledge of the history of Western intervention in the region. Ahmed demonstrates that such intervention has been dictated ruthlessly by economic and political interests, with little regard for human rights. He traces events of the past decades, beginning with the West’s support for the highly repressive Shah of Iran, his subsequent usurpation by the Ayatollah’s Islamist regime and the West’s resultant backing of Saddam Hussein. The sponsorship of Saddam’s tyranny—a self-serving tactic intended to strategically counterbalance Iran—included the supply of technology to build WMD, as well as tacit complicity in their use against Iranians and Kurds.
Ahmed’s meticulous research into the secret history of Western maneuverings in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire reveals the actual causes of the first Gulf War, the humanitarian catastrophe created by the 12-year sanctions policy against Iraq, and the consistent obstructions of the Oil for Food program. He also provides information on the West’s own widespread use of WMD, and the likely culprits of the 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S.
Papers by Nafeez Ahmed
Political Marxist theory offers the conceptual tools to mobilise a social theory capable of interrogating the historically-specific socio-political relations by which imperial geopolitical orders are constituted and transformed in the context of strategic violence. Integrating this with Raphael Lemkin's sociological conceptualization of the interconnections between colonization, inter-communal contestations and genocide,
makes it possible to distinguish the differential dynamics of mass violence in different empires based on their distinctive constitutive social relations, exemplified in precapitalist Spain and capitalist England. It also allows for the re-integration of the central role of violence in the formation and re-consolidation of empires at points of crisis.
This revised historical sociology of empires and imperial violence clarifies the evolution of the postwar US liberal imperial system, including the theorization of the post-9/11 'War on Terror' as a radicalized response to a global systemic crisis in the US empire's constitutive social relations, exemplified in the projected depletion of hydrocarbon energy reserves in predominantly Muslim peripheries. This reveals and explains
concurrent tendentially genocidal escalatory logics of Othering targeted principally against Muslim communities.
Policymakers and media observers have largely missed the biophysical triggers of this new age of unrest – the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels, and its multiplying consequences for the Earth’s climate, industrial food production, and economic growth.
This scientific monograph for the first time develops an empirically-ground theoretical model of the complex interaction between biophysical processes and geopolitical crises, demonstrated through the analysis of a wide range of detailed case studies of historic, concurrent and probable state failures in the Middle East, Northwest Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America. Geopolitical crises across these regions are being driven by the proliferation of climate, food and economic crises which have at their root the common denominator of a fundamental and permanent disruption in the energy basis of industrial civilization.
This inevitable energy transition, which will be completed well before the close of this century, entails a paradigm shift in the organization of civilization. Yet for this shift to result in a viable new way of life will require a fundamental epistemological shift recognizing humanity’s embeddedness in the natural world. While geopolitics cannot be simplistically reduced to the biophysical, this book shows that international relations today can only be understood by recognizing the extent to which the political is embedded in the biophysical.
Although the book offers a rigorous scientific analysis, it is written in a clean, journalistic style to ensure readability and accessibility to a general audience. It contains a large number of graphical illustrations concerning oil production data, population issues, the food price index, economic growth and debt, and other related issues to demonstrate the interconnections and correlations across key sectors.
Against this background, Ahmed accomplishes the most detailed and wide-ranging study to date of the powerful vested interests and intrigues responsible for the collapse of US national security in the years and months leading to 9/11. Government documents, whistleblower testimony, and the findings of official inquiries are scrutinized to trace the innermost workings of the intelligence community, revealing precisely which government policies and operations facilitated the 9/11 intelligence failure, and pinpointing the specific agencies, individuals and decisions that emasculated the US air defense system. Finally, Ahmed unlocks the underlying geostrategy of the War on Terror - the culmination of a decades-long plan to secure and expand an increasingly unstable system. For anyone who remains uneasy about government policies on, and after, 9/11, The War on Truth is an invaluable resource that will radically alter perceptions of international terrorism, national security, and the clandestine machinery of Western power.
Using official sources, Ahmed investigates U.S. and British claims about Iraq’s WMD programs and in the process reveals the hidden motives behind the 2003 invasion and the grand strategy of which it is a part. He shows that the true goals of U.S.-British policy in the Middle East are camouflaged by spin, P.R. declarations and seemingly noble words. The reality can only be comprehended through knowledge of the history of Western intervention in the region. Ahmed demonstrates that such intervention has been dictated ruthlessly by economic and political interests, with little regard for human rights. He traces events of the past decades, beginning with the West’s support for the highly repressive Shah of Iran, his subsequent usurpation by the Ayatollah’s Islamist regime and the West’s resultant backing of Saddam Hussein. The sponsorship of Saddam’s tyranny—a self-serving tactic intended to strategically counterbalance Iran—included the supply of technology to build WMD, as well as tacit complicity in their use against Iranians and Kurds.
Ahmed’s meticulous research into the secret history of Western maneuverings in the Middle East since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire reveals the actual causes of the first Gulf War, the humanitarian catastrophe created by the 12-year sanctions policy against Iraq, and the consistent obstructions of the Oil for Food program. He also provides information on the West’s own widespread use of WMD, and the likely culprits of the 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S.
This must involve debt-free financing for the renewable energy transition, nationalisation and winding down of fossil fuel industries, as well as ecological restoration for clean manufacturing and agriculture. But most of all, we have to roll back the dangerous trajectory of deforestation through a radically different approach to commodities like palm oil to transition to sustainable production. That requires a new global pact on deforestation premised on ensuring that major commodities from beef to soy are produced within planetary boundaries based on consistent global standards.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed structural fragilities and interdependencies across global systems. But at the heart of these fragilities is the increasing dependence of industrial consumption on processes that are accelerating deforestation. That requires both enforcing sustainable practices by producers in the South while curtailing demand in the North.
The probability of a global pandemic was dramatically increased by relentless and unregulated industrial expansion, which has destabilized ecosystems critical for planetary life-support. The same processes are driving other ecological crises which threaten to permanently undermine the health of the global economy.
Without a transition to a ‘lifeboat economy’ where markets are “recalibrated” to protect public health and natural systems, humanity faces a heightening risk of cascading breakdowns across interconnected social, economic and political systems.