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Palgrave Macmillan

Truth Wars

The Politics of Climate Change, Military Intervention and Financial Crisis

  • Book
  • © 2015

Overview

  • Highly topical in light of the ongoing financial, military, economic and resource crises
  • Battles about truth and politics are relevant to everyone – NGOs, UN, national governments, activists, academics, citizens
  • Looks at 'truth' not in an isolated case scenario, but through analyzing military interventions, environmental disasters and the financial crisis
  • Brings concepts from the natural sciences (climate change, geology, biology) together with the social sciences (politics, truth, philosophy)

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

  1. Introduction

  2. Politics, Truth and Climate Change

  3. Politics, Truth and Military Intervention

  4. Politics, Truth and the Global Financial Crisis

Keywords

About this book

We live in an age of crises that are global in scale and potentially apocalyptic in severity, affecting the lives of millions billions of people. Peter Lee examines the struggle for truth at the heart of these crises to show how political leaders attempt to shape individual behavior, attitudes and identity.

Reviews

“He explores the political manipulation of truth discourses to explain how individuals come to identify with particular truth claims. Lee divides his exploration into three sections with three chapters in each. … Lee’s ability to write in an engaging and responsible style that assists the reader in serious ethical introspection of these and other political crises is remarkable. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels.” (J. R. Pottenger, Choice, Vol. 53 (7), March, 2016)

'Focusing upon the three great global political crises of our time military intervention, the financial meltdown, and the actual 'meltdown' threatened by climate change the author provides a probing and deeply unsettling assessment of the manner in which competing and often illusory truth-claims are fashioned by political leaders, governments, international institutions and demagogues solely in order to re-shape the world in their image, and to gain control over the lives of others. Our fundamental assumptions about what Truth is, or what it means, are put to test in this eloquent, articulate, and provocative work.' - George R. Lucas Jr., U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, USA

'Truth Wars makes a unique and important contribution to the literature on some of the most pertinent questions in global politics today. Peter Lee's new book really challenged my own thinking on what I thought was 'true' in the debates about climate change, drone warfare and the global financial crisis. I cannot wait to see my IR students engage with this thought-provoking analysis, which is guaranteed to lead to some heated discussions! Moreover, Truth Wars not only stands out for its innovative approach to global crises and controversies. It is written with such a sense of fun that I could not put it down once I started reading.' - Bettina Renz, University of Nottingham, UK

'Peter Lee provides the reader with a stimulating, non-judgmental foundation for what can only be classified as the attempt to understand how political truths become political truths and their impact on the political process of establishing policy, making decisions that will affect how policy is implemented, and how it ultimately affects each of us.At least after reading Politics in Crises: Truth Wars, each of us will have a better understanding of the way these truth wars are conducted and be better able to form our own truths.' Bill Powers, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Portsmouth, UK

    Peter Lee

About the author

Peter Lee is Lecturer in Air Power Studies at King's College London, based at RAF College Cranwell in Lincolnshire, UK. During the build-up to the 2003 invasion and for most of the period of the UK's involvement in Iraq, he served as a RAF chaplain. He is regularly invited as a public speaker to give seminars on this subject to military, academic and wider audiences.

Bibliographic Information

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