Photograph by Andrew Stern

LINKS:
- Naomi Klein's website
- Blackwell bookshop

Naomi Klein
The Shock Doctrine
23 May 08
Arnolfini, Bristol

Naomi Klein calls the story of how the ‘free market’ came to dominate the world from Chile to Russia, China to Iraq, South Africa to Britain the ‘shock doctrine’. Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that ‘free markets’ lead to ‘free people’. She argues that our world is increasingly in thrall to a little understood yet hugely influential ideology: the shock doctrine. This is a doctrine that sees moments of collective crisis as a ‘window of opportunity’.

With societies too terrified or disoriented to protect their own interests, the free market advances, using the trademark tactic of rapid-fire economic shock therapy. Often, a refusal to comply results in distinctly more corporeal shocks: the shock of the Taser gun, or the electric cattle prod. History is littered with events that have provided opportunities for the shock doctrine.

From the 1970s dictatorships of South America, through the Falklands War, Tiananmen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Naomi Klein reinterprets our past to trace the rise of disaster capitalism, a program of social and economic engineering advanced through shock. Playing out today around the world in Israel, Iraq, New Orleans and South-East Asia, The Shock Doctrine reveals the true beliefs that lie behind global policy.

Born in Montreal in 1970, Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international bestseller No Logo, which was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award and has been translated into 25 languages. No Logo was called "a movement bible" and placed Klein at the vanguard of a new wave of looking at globalisation and corporations.

Naomi Klein writes an internationally syndicated column for the Guardian and her articles appear in The Nation, The New Statesman, Newsweek International, the New York Times and the Village Voice. Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalisation Debate was published in October 2002. For the past six years, Klein has travelled throughout North America, Asia, Latin America and Europe, tracking the rise of anticorporate activism. She is a frequent media commentator and university guest lecturer and was a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics.