About the Author
One of the world's great geopolitical analysts, Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, author, broadcaster, and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years. His column is published around the world, and he is the author of War: The Lethal Custom, Future: Tense, and The Mess They Made.
Featured books by Gwynne Dyer
Climate Wars The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats
Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Any of the expected consequences of climate change could - as Gwyne Dyer argues - tip the world towards chaos and conflict.
Other books by Gwynne Dyer
Growing Pains the future of democracy (and work)
We are now living in a world where Brexit and Trump are daily realities. But how did this come about? And what does it mean for the future? Populism and ultra-nationalism brought about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. Now, as Trump sits in the White House, Britain negotiates its way out of the EU, and countries across Europe see substantial gains in support for the extreme Right, award-winning journalist, author, and historian Gwynne Dyer asks how we got here, and where we go next. Dyer examines the global challenges facing us all today and explains how they have contributed to a world of inequality, poverty, and joblessness - conditions which he argues inevitably lead to the rise of populism. The greatest threat to social and political stability, he argues, lies in the rise of automation, which will continue to eliminate jobs, whether politicians admit that it is happening or not. To avoid a social and political catastrophe, we will have to find ways of putting real money into the pockets of those who have no work. But this is not a book without hope. Our capacity for overcoming the worst has been tested again and again throughout history, and we have always survived. To do so now, Dyer argues, we must embrace radical solutions to the real difficulties facing individuals, or find ourselves back in the 1930s with no way out.
War
Gwynne Dyer's War, now in its first UK edition, is widely regarded as one of the most compelling analyses of the history and psychology of armed conflict. Veteran political journalist and military historian Dyer argues against the inevitability of warfare in clear, intelligent and eminently accessible prose, submitting neither to resignation nor false optimism. The multipolar world that has arisen since the fall of the Iron Curtain has forced a re-examination of the accepted fundamentals of history. Dyer traces the psychology of soldiers to the workings of whole armies, and then to broader historical movements and how they change over time - or don't. He argues that war, as an act of mass violence, has remained unchanged; the only real change has been technological. Can shared values, widely disseminated, help us move beyond mass warfare? Does the endless threat of terrorism help preserve the military status quo? Are traditional military and administrative hierarchies still relevant? Why do humans fight wars? Is it even possible to tame the impulse? How can we unlearn war?War is essential reading on the way to resolving these perennial questions, and is a valuable historical treatise as well as a fervent, persuasive call to pacifism.
Don't Panic
The entity known (in one of many variants) as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has come to feature regularly in the news, and in our imaginations. The dreadful, Grand Guignol spectacle of beheadings, abductions, cages, flames and triumphalist proclamations arouses powerful emotions: disgust, rage, hatred, grief, a yearning for vengeance - and the sense that something must be done. Yet, argues veteran political journalist Gwynne Dyer in this short, sharp, new book, the Western tendency is to overreact, time after time, to the threat posed by Islamist terrorists. ISIS is the most repellent of the bunch by far, yet the common perception that it is run by crazed madmen with no coherent strategy is sorely misleading. Even more difficult to accept is that the attacks they perpetrate actually have nothing to do with the West, and do not significantly increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks in Western countries, either; rather, they are designed to use Western overreaction as a stepping stone to seizing power in the states they are trying to overthrow. Intervening militarily will give ISIS precisely what it wants: a glue with which to bind its infernal project more tightly. In failing to recognise the ISIS phenomenon as a revolution calculated to court foreign intervention, the Western countries currently pondering the scale of their response risk playing into the hands of the extremists. 'The revolution will eat its children,' Dyer writes - but only if the West resists the natural urge to do something big, and allows ISIS to play itself out.
Don't Panic! H/C Isis, Terror and Today's Middle East
The entity known (in one of many variants) as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has come to feature regularly in the news, and in our imaginations. The dreadful, Grand Guignol spectacle of beheadings, abductions, cages, flames and triumphalist proclamations arouses powerful emotions: disgust, rage, hatred, grief, a yearning for vengeance - and the sense that something must be done.Yet, argues veteran political journalist Gwynne Dyer in this short, sharp, new book, the Western tendency is to overreact, time after time, to the threat posed by Islamist terrorists. ISIS is the most repellent of the bunch by far, yet the common perception that it is run by crazed madmen with no coherent strategy is sorely misleading. Even more difficult to accept is that the attacks they perpetrate actually have nothing to do with the West, and do not significantly increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks in Western countries, either; rather, they are designed to use Western overreaction as a stepping stone to seizing power in the states they are trying to overthrow. Intervening militarily will give ISIS precisely what it wants: a glue with which to bind its infernal project more tightly.In failing to recognise the ISIS phenomenon as a revolution calculated to court foreign intervention, the Western countries currently pondering the scale of their response risk playing into the hands of the extremists. 'The revolution will eat its children,' Dyer writes - but only if the West resists the natural urge to do something big, and allows ISIS to play itself out.Intelligent and wryly articulated, Don't Panic! is one of few new books on ISIS that will not date as events change.
Climate Wars The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats
Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Any of the expected consequences of climate change could - as Gwyne Dyer argues - tip the world towards chaos and conflict.
After Iraq
"e;The Iraqi state that was formed in the aftermath of the First World War has come to an end. Its successor state is struggling to be born in an environment of crises and chaos."e;---Ali Allawi, Iraq's former Minister of DefenseAllawi is not exaggerating. The disastrous American invasion of Iraq that has led to the destruction of the Iraqi state and the subsequent defeat of U.S. military power has finally destabilized the entire Middle East---a region that has been tightly controlled by European and American powers and that has changed little, politically, in forty years. But, in losing the war in Iraq, the United States has lost the will to maintain the status quo in the Middle East, and the forces unleashed by the destruction of Iraq will go on to shape the future of the region in a way that no one can predict. As Gwynne Dyer argues in After Iraq, the Middle East is about to change fundamentally, and everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking orders within states, even national borders themselves are liable to change without notice. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, a Muslim cold war between Sunnis and Shias, almost anything you care to imagine.Written with clarity, intelligence, and Dyer's trademark dark humor, After Iraq is essential reading for anyone wanting an informed historical perspective on the future of one of the most important and volatile regions in the world.