World on Fire: How Exporting Free-Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred & Global Instability - Softcover

For over a decade now, the reigning consensus has held that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this astute, original, and surprising investigation of the true impact of globalization, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua explains why many developing countries are in fact consumed by ethnic violence after adopting free market democracy.
Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These "market-dominant minorities" - Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia - become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the United States has become the world's most visible market-dominant minority, a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. Chua is a friend of globalization, but she urges us to find ways to spread its benefits and curb its most destructive aspects.

"A brilliant, groundbreaking assault on the prevailing wisdom that the American political and economic model is a one-stop solution to the world's woes."
-Will Blythe, Elle Magazine

"Chua frequently fuses expert analysis with personal recollections to assert that globalization has created a volatile concoction of free markets and democracy that has incited economic devastation, ethnic hatred and genocidal violence throughout the developing world.
-Publishers Weekly

"A nuanced contribution to the debate over whether free markets spread democracy or merely advance the McDonaldsization of the globe. Chua defends her case well (and adds a damning footnote to the history of Enron along the way). Globalism is a fact of modern life, she concludes, but one destined to yield much bloodshed in the years to come."
-Kirkus Reviews

"This hard-hitting book should be read by everyone who still imagines that free markets can solve all the world's ills."
-Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America