Reflections on "Disorder" by Helen Thompson (1)

Disorder

After learning about this book in the podcast, "taking politics" , I decided to have a read on this interesting topic. Since It will take some time to read through and understand what is being said, I will be dividing it up in some chunks over the next few months. 

First of all, the method to approach the problems in 21st century was captivating. As written in the introduction, when people try to explain the various disorders in the last decade, it is often given such as the financial crisis of 2007-8, rise of populist nationalism. But as the author argues, this is only the "product' of what have happened.  Borrowing some ideas to form a research question in science, the we can argue that variables aren't controlled in most discussions. To truly understand the systematic causes that lead to the product, "disorder in 21st' century" we need to control the factors, and specify how a single factor contributes to the outcome. Understanding systematic causes are valuable, as it can be used to project future problems, and fix faults in our modern system. Although it is said that maintaining political order can then create the next set of problems in the future, I strongly believe that it is still valuable as it could reduce the scale of the problem. In this case of the first chapter of the book, the specified factor is the geographic locations that hold oil. Additionally, the author recognises the assumption made to derive the conclusion,  in this case excluding religious and cultural factors out. As in the end it is humans who form politics, obviously not everything follows the logic of geography neither economy, and to understand the whole picture we can not  simply get rid of culture. 

An analogy I came up was this fictional mountain X, which stands for the big problem in this case, "Disorder in the 21st century" . Usually people would only look at this from above, which mixes up the factors involved and only provide a broad picture. However, dividing the mountain up to 4 sides, in this case "economics" "geography" "politics(democratic)" "culture&religion", we would get a detailed understanding of individual sides. If we can truly understand all the 4 sides, by combining we could have a better understanding than simply looking from above.

(Theory in process)