Robert D. Kaplan - "The Coming Anarchy"

"The Coming Anarchy"

His article "The Coming Anarchy" published in The Atlantic in February 1994 about how population increase, urbanization, and resource depletion are undermining fragile governments across the developing world and represent a threat to the developed world was hotly debated and widely translated. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called Kaplan one of the "most widely read" authors defining the post-Cold War era, along with Francis Fukuyama, Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington, and Yale Professor Paul Kennedy. Kaplan published the article and other essays in a book with the same title in 2000, which also included the controversial article '"Was Democracy Just a Moment?" His travels through the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Middle East at the turn of the millennium were recorded in Eastward to Tartary. Also written in 2000 was another controversial essay, entitled "the Dangers of Peace," in which he described an America falling under peacetime's "numbing and corrosive illusion."

Writing in the New York Times, reviewer Richard Bernstein notes that Kaplan "conveys a historically informed tragic sense in recognizing humankind's tendency toward a kind of slipshod, gooey, utopian and ultimately dangerous optimism."