Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls

Description

"One of the best books about geopolitics you could imagine" - Nicholas Lezard, Evening Standard, on Prisoners of Geography Walls are going up. Nationalism and identity politics are on the rise once more. Over 6,000 miles of fences and barriers have been erected in the past ten years, and they are redefining our political landscape. There are many reasons why walls go up, because we are divided in many ways: wealth, race, religion, politics. In Europe the divisions of the past decade threaten not only European unity, but in some countries liberal democracy itself. In China, the Party's need to contain the divisions wrought by capitalism will define the nation's future. In the USA the rationale for the Mexican border wall runs deeper than the need to control illegal immigration; it taps into the fear that the USA will no longer be a white majority country during the course of this century. Understanding what has divided us, past and present, is essential to understanding much of what's going on in the world today. In ten chapters covering The Great Divides; China; the USA; the UK; Europe; the Middle East; India and Bangladesh; Africa; The Spaces In Between; and The Bridges Across, bestselling author Tim Marshall presents an unflinching and essential overview of the faultlines that will shape our world for years to come.

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than thirty years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News and before that worked for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from forty countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. He is the author of Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World; The Age of Walls: How Barriers Between Nations Are Changing Our World; and A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols. He is founder and editor of the current affairs site TheWhatandtheWhy.com.

**** "Informative and timely ... a readable primer on the world's biggest problems" - Daily Express; `A timely and exhilarating clamber over the walls of history' - Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads; "Striking words ... Tim Marshall performs the daunting, yet highly pertinent, task of trying to make sense of one of the biggest issues of our times: in a world that is increasingly globalised, a backlash apparently grows ever stronger. By taking a global view, Divided successfully brings some much-needed perspective" - Northern Slant