Power and Need in Africa (1988) examines the mechanisms for giving the poor of Africa the means to develop their own future – a renaissance which has as its constituent elements environmental sustainability, women’s emancipation and social justice.

This book is a festschrift in tribute to Ben Wisner’s contributions to disaster studies and adjacent fields of scholarship such as political ecology, development and sustainability.This festschrift for Ben, and so The Benschrift, revitalises, promotes and critiques a selection of six foundational articles that span Ben’s 50-year career. Each article is reproduced integrally and followed by a commentary by an expert in the field and a response from Ben. As a result, this book not on...

The term 'natural disaster' is often used to refer to natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes or floods. However, the phrase 'natural disaster' suggests an uncritical acceptance of a deeply engrained ideological and cultural myth. At Risk questions this myth and argues that extreme natural events are not disasters until a vulnerable group of people is exposed.The updated new edition confronts a further ten years of ever more expensive and deadly disasters and discus...

Published with ProVention Consortium, UNDP and UN-Habitat'This excellent book is essential reading for those concerned with urban risk and its reduction in Africa, the most rapidly urbanizing region of the world.'Professor Jo Beall, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics'At last a book that recognizes the impacts of disasters on Africa's 350 million urban dwellers, including the many disasters that get overlooked and go unrecorded. But also a book ...

'The big, era-defining questions and, at last, the subtle, tenable answers, teased out without clich or compromise. A vital volume at a critical moment.'Dr Augustus Casely-Hayford, Director, Africa '05'This book dispels the myth of a uniformly hopeless, hungry continent. It shows just how extraordinarily diverse Africa is and how much it has changed in the last 20 years.Full of fresh thinking on problems that face Africa and new African approaches to development.'Rich...

In Understanding and Addressing Disaster Risk, the authors explain how people modify the environment and exert power over each other in ways that make nature potentially harmful and put people in harm’s way. Opportunities and challenges faced by those engaging with disaster risk are explored.Across 11 chapters, the authors show that disasters are not natural, are not events, and do not happen quickly. Instead, they are the result of chronic societal processes emerging from...

Named one of the top religion books of 2002 by USA Today, Philip Jenkins's phenomenally successful The Next Christendom permanently changed the way people think about the future of Christianity. In that volume, Jenkins called the world's attention to the little noticed fact that Christianity's center of gravity was moving inexorably southward, to the point that Africa may soon be home to the world's largest Christian populations. Now, in this brilliant sequel, Jenkins tak...

Tar sands “development” comes with an enormous environmental and human cost. In the tar sands of Alberta, the oil industry is using vast quantities of water and natural gas to produce synthetic crude oil, creating drastically high levels of greenhouse gas emissions and air and water pollution. But tar sands opponents—fighting a powerful international industry—are likened to terrorists, government environmental scientists are muzzled, and public hearings are concealed and rushed.Yet...

This essential text addresses the growing need for a dedicated coursebook for students and teachers of world development. As the source of the most respected international magazine on world development issues, the publishers have created a highly credible and accessible text to illuminate this increasingly important subject.Thematic chapters cover globalization, population, the millennium development goals, and eleven other vital topics. It distils them down to their essentials, ou...

The concealment of income, wealth and profits in tax havens has brought the topic of offshoring into public debate, but as John Urry shows in this important new book offshoring is a much more pervasive feature of contemporary societies. These often secretive activities offshore also involve relations of work, finance, pleasure, waste, energy and security. Powerful and pervasive offshore worlds have been generated, posing huge challenges both for governments and for citizens.This bo...

For many, Africa is regarded as a place of mystery and negative images, where reports of natural disasters and civil strife dominate media attention, with relatively little publicity given to any of the continent’s more positive attributes. Africa has at last begun to receive the depth of interest it has long deserved, in the shape of debates about trade, aid and debt, the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign, and the UK's ‘Commission on Africa’. But, behind the superficial media façade, Africa...

Established indicators of development suggest that, as a group, African countries lag behind their counterparts in other regions with respect to public health. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the public health problems of these countries are rooted in preventable causes associated with hygiene and sanitation. It is customary to attribute the problems that ail Africa to the lack of financial resources. This book deviates from convention by suggesting non-financial factors as the so...