Nafeez Ahmed | Anglia Ruskin University

Nafeez Ahmed

Anglia Ruskin University, Global Sustainability Institute, Faculty Member

Anglia Ruskin University, Global Sustainability Institute, Faculty MemberUniversity of Sussex, Department of International Relations, Post-DocInstitute for Policy Research & Development, International Relations, Post-Doc |

Genocide Studies

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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

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Books

THE VIOLENCE OF EMPIRE: THE LOGIC AND DYNAMIC OF STRATEGIES OF VIOLENCE AND GENOCIDE IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY IMPERIAL SYSTEMS

The post-9/11 US imperial turn is not a reversion to empire, but rather a global strategy of viol... more The post-9/11 US imperial turn is not a reversion to empire, but rather a global strategy of violence in response to a crisis of empire. Orthodox IR theory is unable to grasp this because it largely projects empire and imperial violence, as inexplicable pathologies diverging from geopolitical realities - when it is in fact orthodox IR, not imperialism, which is thus diverging. 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.

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Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (SPRINGER BRIEFS IN ENERGY)

Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social unres... more Since the 2008 financial crash, the world has witnessed an unprecedented outbreak of social unrest in every major continent. Beginning with the birth of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, the eruption of civil disorder continues to wreak havoc unpredictably from Greece to Ukraine, from China to Thailand, from Brazil to Turkey, and beyond. 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.

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A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilization. This book argues th... more It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilization. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system. Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their specialisations explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a "clash of civilizations," as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilization itself. This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world.

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The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry

At first, the police were sure that the bombers used weapons-grade plastic explosives and sophist... more At first, the police were sure that the bombers used weapons-grade plastic explosives and sophisticated timers. Two weeks later, they changed their minds - the bombs were home-made and were detonated manually. Since then the official account has changed repeatedly and remains riddled with anomalies and confusion. The government is resisting calls for a full inquiry and instead intends to present a 'narrative' written by a civil servant that will stand as the definitive account of what took place. As Mosaddeq demonstrates in this exhaustive investigation, such an approach cannot hope to provide the public with an adequate explanation of what took place. He further shows how the attacks can only be fully understood in the light of extensive co-operation between the Islamist extremists and Western Intelligence in Central Asia, and U.S. - U.K. state interests. The London bombings, much like the attacks on New York in 2001, were a widely predicted consequence of the West's global strategy. If we do face a future of terrorism we should at least understand the extent to which our governments have accepted this as the price of business as usual.

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The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism

In The War on Truth – the long-awaited sequel to The War on Freedom – Nafeez Ahmed provides the m... more In The War on Truth – the long-awaited sequel to The War on Freedom – Nafeez Ahmed provides the most comprehensive and controversial critique of the government’s official version of what happened on 9/11. In this extensive new analysis, Ahmed doubles the data and investigates the worldwide web of terrorist networks across space and time. Deconstructing the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report and the Joint Congressional Inquiry, he exposes disturbing liaisons between American, British, and European intelligence services and al-Qaeda operatives in the Balkans, Caucasus, North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Asia-Pacific-- liaisons linked not only to 9/11, but also to prior terrorist attacks including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 US embassy bombings. 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.

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Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq

Following the U.S. declaration of a "war on terror," Washington hawks were quick to label Iraq pa... more Following the U.S. declaration of a "war on terror," Washington hawks were quick to label Iraq part of an "axis of evil." After a tense build-up, in March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, purportedly to protect Western publics from weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But was this the real reason, or simply a convenient pretext to veil a covert agenda? 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.

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The War on Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001

A disturbing expose of the American government's hidden agenda, before and after the September 11... more A disturbing expose of the American government's hidden agenda, before and after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A wide range of documents show US officials knew in advance of the 'Boeing bombing' plot, yet did nothing. Did the attacks fit in with plans for a more aggressive US foreign policy? Nafeez Ahmed examines the evidence, direct and circumstantial, and lays it before the public in chilling detail: how FBI agents who uncovered the hijacking plot were muzzled, how CIA agents trained Al Qaeda members in terror tactics, how the Bush family profited from its business connections to the Bin Ladens, and from the Afghan war. A 'must read' for anyone seeking to understand America's New War on Terror.

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Papers

How better development could yet save Afghanistan

Europe S World the Only Europe Wide Policy Journal, 2012

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Water, oil and demographics: The Arab world´s triple crisis

Europe S World the Only Europe Wide Policy Journal, 2011

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Capitalism, Covert Action and State-Terrorism: Towards a Political Economy of the Deep State

In the name of fighting the post-9/11 “War on Terror” Western states have with increasing impunit... more In the name of fighting the post-9/11 “War on Terror” Western states have with increasing impunity bent, stretched and broken the rule of law on the pretext of defending national security: the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; the politicisation and fabrication of intelligence on WMD; the routine use of torture in Iraqi prisons; the violation with impunity of the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan; the arbitrary labelling of ordinary citizens as “terror suspects” without evidence, their kidnapping and human trafficking in the form of extraordinary rendition, their indefinite detention in inhumane conditions; Guantanamo Bay; military commissions run by military officers outside the jurisdiction of domestic and international law; the regular input of false information gleaned from torture into the production of “intelligence” to justify new counter-terror and surveillance operations; and so on. The persistence and proliferation of these crimes is prima facie evidence of an increasing criminalisation of Western state practices, consistent with mounting empirical and historical evidence that state military and intelligence practices intersect systematically and institutionally with a wide variety of extra-legal non-state actors, such as transnational corporations and lobbies, private mercenaries, terrorist networks, organised criminal syndicates, drugs and arms trafficking groups, and so on. Although analysis of the criminalisation of the state remains a marginal endeavour within political science and IR, the seminal work of Canadian political scientist Peter Dale Scott stands out for its focus on framing this phenomenon within a more systematic framework. This paper explores the implications of Scott’s concept of “deep politics” for understanding covert action and state-sponsored terrorism, through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s theories of the sovereign, as well as the Copenhagen and Paris schools of Security Studies. These different but converging theories of state securitisation will be critically reformulated against the insights of a political Marxist approach to understanding the evolution of modern state-sovereignty in the context of capitalist social-property relations. This leads to an exploration of the shifting parameters of political violence under capitalism, and the need under capitalist crisis to resort to novel forms of covert action. This illustrates how capitalism’s eminent compatibility with deep political and economic activities, and its co-optation of criminal economic networks, has through the post-war period increasingly elevated the power of a U.S.-dominated transnational capitalist class. Two major cases of international terrorism – Cold War communism and post-Cold War Islamist extremism – become explicable within this framework.

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THE VIOLENCE OF EMPIRE: THE LOGIC AND DYNAMIC OF STRATEGIES OF VIOLENCE AND GENOCIDE IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY IMPERIAL SYSTEMS

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Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (SPRINGER BRIEFS IN ENERGY)

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A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It

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The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry

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The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism

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Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq

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The War on Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001

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How better development could yet save Afghanistan

Europe S World the Only Europe Wide Policy Journal, 2012

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Water, oil and demographics: The Arab world´s triple crisis

Europe S World the Only Europe Wide Policy Journal, 2011

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Capitalism, Covert Action and State-Terrorism: Towards a Political Economy of the Deep State

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Radical Political Dynamics of the Prophetic Model: Toward a Public Theology of Social Activism and Political Inclusion in Secular, Liberal Societies

The problematique of how Islam is to be situated in the context of a secular public space is an u... more The problematique of how Islam is to be situated in the context of a secular public space is an urgent question. It is central to resolving what the future of Islam and Muslims in Britain and across the West might hold, and in particular what Muslim diasporas in the West should aspire to be. How, indeed, should Islam and Muslims approach the secular public space? Is there an inherent incompatibility between Islam and the secular public space? And depending on how one answers this question, how should Muslim communities and individuals best navigate this space? Can this even be done in a way consistent with Islamic traditions and values, or do those values necessarily implicate the inevitability of mutual tension between Western and Islamic values? The central argument of this paper will be that Islamic traditions and values are not only compatible with a modern secular public space, but that some of the most progressive dynamics of this space were in fact integral to the Prophetic model of community governance established by Muhammad in Medina. This does not, however, indicate the basis for a simple equivalence between modern Western and pre-modern Islamic political ‘systems’, but rather establishes the basis for a progressive, radical yet flexible Islamic politics which works precisely to enhance the political, cultural and economic institutions of the contemporary secular public space.

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Islamophobia and Insecurity: The Exclusionary Logic of Imperial Geopolitics

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The International Relations of Crisis and the Crisis of International Relations: From the Securitisation of Scarcity to the Militarisation of Society

The twenty-first century heralds the unprecedented acceleration and convergence of multiple, inte... more The twenty-first century heralds the unprecedented acceleration and convergence of multiple, interconnected global crises – climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity, and economic instability. While the structure of global economic activity is driving the unsustainable depletion of hydrocarbon and other natural resources, this is simultaneously escalating greenhouse gas emissions resulting in global warming. Both global warming and energy shocks are impacting detrimentally on global industrial food production, as well as on global financial and economic instability. Conventional policy responses toward the intensification of these crises have been decidedly inadequate, because scholars and practitioners largely view them as separate processes. Yet increasing evidence shows they are deeply interwoven manifestations of a global political economy that has breached the limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which it is embedded. In this context, orthodox IR’s flawed diagnoses of global crises lead inexorably to their ‘securitisation’, reifying the militarisation of policy responses, and naturalising the proliferation of violent conflicts. Global ecological, energy and economic crises are thus directly linked to the ‘Otherisation’ of social groups and problematisation of strategic regions considered pivotal for the global political economy. But this relationship between global crises and conflict is not necessary or essential, but a function of a wider epistemological failure to holistically interrogate their structural and systemic causes.

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The Socio-Political Relations of Climate Catastrophe: Towards Systemic Transformation

Anthropogenic global warming is perhaps the most well-known crisis facing the human species, alon... more Anthropogenic global warming is perhaps the most well-known crisis facing the human species, along with all other species, this century. Yet despite the gravity and urgency of the crisis, international attempts to prevent or mitigate climate change have so far failed dismally. This article begins by examining the recent scientific evidence on the scale of the climate crisis, arguing that conventional policy-making approaches fatally underestimate the reality of our predicament. While the latest studies indicate that we are in grave danger of breaching a global climate tipping point, the inadequacy of the human response is itself symptomatic of the deeper civilizational crisis of which climate change is merely one manifestation. The paper then interrogates this stark contradiction between official government recognition of the potentially devastating security implications of climate change and the continued abject failure to mitigate these security implications, by moving beyond a symptom-oriented approach, and confronting the following question: how has the present structure of the international system itself contributed to the acceleration of climate change while inhibiting effective national and international responses? This article thus investigates the systemic context of climate change using a combination of theoretical approaches, including Complexity Theory, Historical Sociology and Political Marxism. It argues that unless the structure of the global political economy, its ideology, and its value-system undergo are fundamental transformation, policy efforts to prevent, mitigate or even adapt to climate change cannot succeed.

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Colonial Dynamics of Genocide: Imperialism, Identity and Mass Violence

Conventional definitions of genocide, in particular the United Nations Convention standard, are s... more Conventional definitions of genocide, in particular the United Nations Convention standard, are state-oriented and primordialist. Genocide is seen primarily as the outcome of extremist ideology linked to undemocratic modern bureaucratic nationstates, whose homogenizing structures generate conflict with pre-existing minority groups. The UN definition of genocide imposes unwarranted politicized constraints on Lemkin’s wider original sociological conceptualization of genocide as a colonial form. For Lemkin, perpetrators of genocide could be states as well as decentralized and dispersed groups such as settler-colonists. The need for a return to Lemkin’s Historical Sociological theory of genocide, now increasingly recognized among genocide scholars, demonstrates not merely that specific cases of European imperial violence can potentially be understood as genocidal, but that this is precisely because genocide can best be understood as an extreme form of colonization. A strong case has now been made by several scholars that while this does not mean that all colonialism is genocidal, it is unequivocally clear that genocides are comprised of distinctively colonial dynamics. These colonial dynamics emerge due to the radicalisation of identity politics in the context of historically-specific sociopolitical contestations leading to major social crises, which drive the construction of new bifurcated “inside” and “outside” group identities. This speaks to the need for a new research agenda in Genocide Studies, focusing specifically on the dynamics that link socio-political crisis with exclusionary identity constructions and regressive political programmes which legitimize mass violence. By identifying how and when social crises can lead to the ‘Otherization’ of communities, it may become possible to develop more robust early warning systems for genocide prevention.

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Globalizing Insecurity: The Convergence of Interdependent Ecological, Energy and Economic Crises

Increases in United States-led Western military expenditures ostensibly vindicate the fear of int... more Increases in United States-led Western military expenditures ostensibly vindicate the fear of international terrorism as an escalating imminent threat to U.S. and Western national security. However, the most urgent dangers to security come not from terrorism per se, but from the converging impacts of global systemic crises, including climate change, hydrocarbon energy depletion, economic and financial breakdown, and plummeting food production. Conventional security approaches, viewing these non-traditional insecurities as separate processes, evade their inherent interdependence rooted in the structure of the global political economy. Holistic, integrated and systemic responses transcending military solutions are required, based on fundamentally reconceptualizing security.

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Structural Violence as a Form of Genocide: The Impact of the International Economic Order

Structural violence is rarely seen as a form of genocide. Significant deficiencies in existing co... more Structural violence is rarely seen as a form of genocide. Significant deficiencies in existing conceptualizations of both genocide and structural violence suggest that this is unwarranted. The concept of genocide must be expanded to include a wider variety of target human groups, whereas the concept of structural violence must be extended to include a greater appreciation of the role of agential intent in the production and reproduction of unequal violent structures. This reveals logical and analytical connections between structural violence and genocide in several historical cases, including episodes of capitalist imperialism and communist collectivization. Applying this theoretical framework to an analysis of the structural violence of the international economic order indicates that its impact possesses distinctly genocidal features.

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