Today we live in times of proliferating fears. The daily updates on the ongoing 'war on terror' amplify fear and anxiety as if they were necessary and important aspects of our reality. Concerns about the environment increasingly take center-stage, as stories and images abound about deadly viruses, alien species invasions, scarcity of oil, water, food; safety of GMOs, biological weapons, and fears of overpopulation. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties addresses how such environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the 'enemy Other'. In these highly original and thought-provoking essays, Making Threats focuses on five themes: security, scarcity, purity, circulation and terror. No other book has systematically examined the proliferation of fear in the context of current world events and from such a multidisciplinary perspective. It consolidates in one place cutting edge research and reflection on how the contemporary landscape of fear shapes and is shaped by environmental and biological discourses. By uncovering the linguistic tools that make fear resonate in the public consciousness, by identifying the interests that create or are sustained by fears, in short by giving fears histories, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties engages with some of the most potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.

Drone warfare described from the perspectives of drone operators, victims of drone attacks, anti-drone activists, international law, military thinkers, and others. "[A] thoughtful examination of the dilemmas this new weapon poses." -Foreign Affairs Drones are changing the conduct of war. Deployed at presidential discretion, they can be used in regular war zones or to kill people in such countries as Yemen and Somalia, where the United States is not officially at war. Advocates say that drones are more precise than conventional bombers, allowing warfare with minimal civilian deaths while keeping American pilots out of harm's way. Critics say that drones are cowardly and that they often kill innocent civilians while terrorizing entire villages on the ground. In this book, Hugh Gusterson explores the significance of drone warfare from multiple perspectives, drawing on accounts by drone operators, victims of drone attacks, anti-drone activists, human rights activists, international lawyers, journalists, military thinkers, and academic experts. Gusterson examines the way drone warfare has created commuter warriors and redefined the space of the battlefield. He looks at the paradoxical mix of closeness and distance involved in remote killing: is it easier than killing someone on the physical battlefield if you have to watch onscreen? He suggests a new way of understanding the debate over civilian casualties of drone attacks. He maps "ethical slippage" over time in the Obama administration's targeting practices. And he contrasts Obama administration officials' legal justification of drone attacks with arguments by international lawyers and NGOs.

Militarization: A Reader offers a range of critical perspectives on the dynamics of militarization as a social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental phenomenon. It portrays militarism as the condition in which military values and frameworks come to dominate state structures and public culture both in foreign relations and in the domestic sphere. Featuring short, readable essays by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, cultural theorists, and media commentators, the Reader probes militarism's ideologies, including those that valorize warriors, armed conflict, and weaponry. Outlining contemporary militarization processes at work around the world, the Reader offers a wide-ranging examination of a phenomenon that touches the lives of billions of people. In collaboration with Catherine Besteman, Andrew Bickford, Catherine Lutz, Katherine T. McCaffrey, Austin Miller, David H. Price, David Vine

Militarization: A Reader offers a range of critical perspectives on the dynamics of militarization as a social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental phenomenon. It portrays militarism as the condition in which military values and frameworks come to dominate state structures and public culture both in foreign relations and in the domestic sphere. Featuring short, readable essays by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, cultural theorists, and media commentators, the Reader probes militarism's ideologies, including those that valorize warriors, armed conflict, and weaponry. Outlining contemporary militarization processes at work around the world, the Reader offers a wide-ranging examination of a phenomenon that touches the lives of billions of people. In collaboration with Catherine Besteman, Andrew Bickford, Catherine Lutz, Katherine T. McCaffrey, Austin Miller, David H. Price, David Vine

Americans are feeling insecure. They are retreating to gated communities in record numbers, fearing for their jobs and their 401(k)s, nervous about their health insurance and their debt levels, worrying about terrorist attacks and immigrants. In this innovative volume, editors Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman gather essays from nineteen leading ethnographers to create a unique portrait of an anxious country and to furnish valuable insights into the nation's possible future. With an incisive foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, the contributors draw on their deep knowledge of different facets of American life to map the impact of the new economy, the "war on terror," the "war on drugs," racial resentments, a fraying safety net, undocumented immigration, a health care system in crisis, and much more. In laying out a range of views on the forces that unsettle us, "The Insecure American" demonstrates the singular power of an anthropological perspective for grasping the impact of corporate profit on democratic life, charting the links between policy and vulnerability, and envisioning alternatives to life as an insecure American.

In this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits. This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world. Available: November 2004 Pub Date: January 2005

Computerized processes are everywhere in our society. They are the automated phone messaging systems that businesses use to screen calls; the link between student standardized test scores and public schools' access to resources; the algorithms that regulate patient diagnoses and reimbursements to doctors. The storage, sorting, and analysis of massive amounts of information have enabled the automation of decision-making at an unprecedented level. Meanwhile, computers have offered a model of cognition that increasingly shapes our approach to the world. The proliferation of "roboprocesses" is the result, as editors Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson observe in this rich and wide-ranging volume, which features contributions from a distinguished cast of scholars in anthropology, communications, international studies, and political science. Although automatic processes are designed to be engines of rational systems, the stories in Life by Algorithms reveal how they can in fact produce absurd, inflexible, or even dangerous outcomes. Joining the call for "algorithmic transparency," the contributors bring exceptional sensitivity to everyday sociality into their critique to better understand how the perils of modern technology affect finance, medicine, education, housing, the workplace, food production, public space, and emotions--not as separate problems but as linked manifestations of a deeper defect in the fundamental ordering of our society.

We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945. It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it's our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? -E. L. Doctorow

This book tells the story of how-like it or not, know it or not-we have become "the people of the bomb." Integrating fifteen years of field research at weapons laboratories across the United States with discussion of popular movies, political speeches, media coverage of war, and the arcane literature of defense intellectuals, Hugh Gusterson shows how the military-industrial complex has built consent for its programs and, in the process, taken the public "nuclear."

People of the Bomb mixes empathic and vivid portraits of individual weapons scientists with hard-hitting scrutiny of defense intellectuals' inability to foresee the end of the cold war, government rhetoric on missile defense, official double standards about nuclear proliferation, and pork barrel politics in the nuclear weapons complex. Overall, the book assembles a disturbing picture of the ways in which the military-industrial complex has transformed our public culture and personal psychology in the half century since we entered the nuclear age.

Hugh Gusterson is associate professor of anthropology and science studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and professor of public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (1996) and coeditor of Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (Minnesota, 1999). Lynne Cheney's American Council of Trustees andAlumni named him one of the most dangerous intellectuals in the United States today.

Based on fieldwork at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - the facility that designed the neutron bomb and the warhead for the MX missile - "Nuclear Rites" takes the reader deep inside the top-secret culture of a nuclear weapons lab. Exploring the scientists' world of dark humor, ritualized secrecy, and disciplined emotions, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson uncovers the beliefs and values that animate their work. He discovers that many of the scientists are Christians, deeply convinced of the morality of their work, and a number are liberals who opposed the Vietnam War and the Reagan-Bush agenda. Gusterson also examines the anti-nuclear movement, concluding that the scientists and protesters are alike in surprising ways, with both cultures reflecting the hopes and anxieties of an increasingly threatened middle class. In a lively, wide-ranging account, Gusterson analyzes the ethics and politics of laboratory employees, the effects of security regulations on the scientists' private lives, and the role of nuclear tests - beyond the obvious scientific one - as rituals of initiation and transcendence. He shows how the scientists learn to identify in an almost romantic way with the power of the machines they design - machines they do not fear. In the 1980s the 'world behind the fence' was thrown into crisis by massive anti-nuclear protests at the gates of the lab and by the end of the Cold War. Gusterson links the emergence of the anti-nuclear movement to shifting gender roles and the development of postindustrial capitalism.