ABSTRACT
The political violence and environmental degradation are not related to larger economic processes anywhere in this text. This is not to suggest that the legacy of colonialism, or the subsequent neo-colonial economic arrangements, are solely to “blame” for current crises, although the history cannot be ignored as Kaplan is wont to do. It is to argue that these sections of Kaplan’s text show a very limited geopolitical imagination, one that focuses solely on local phenomena in a determinist fashion that ignores the larger trans-boundary flows and the related social and economic causes of resource depletion. Kaplan ignores the legacy of the international food economy which has long played a large role in shaping the agricultural infrastructures, and the nutritional levels of many populations of different parts of the world in specific ways. He also ignores the impact of the economic crisis of the 1980s and the often deleterious impact of the debt crisis and structural adjustment policies. He completely misses their important impact on social patterns and the impact on rural women upon whom many of the worst impacts fell (Mackenzie, 1993).
