Nafeez Ahmed

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is the founding editor of the 100% reader-funded investigative journalism project INSURGE intelligence. His latest book is Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer, 2017). He is an 18-year investigative journalist, formerly of The Guardian where he reported on the geopolitics of social, economic and environmental crises. He now reports on ‘global system change’ for VICE’s Motherboard. He has bylines in The Times, Sunday Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer, The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, among other places. He has twice won the Project Censored Award for his investigative reporting; twice been featured in the Evening Standard’s top 1,000 list of most influential Londoners; and won the Naples Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award created by the President of the Republic. Nafeez is also a widely-published and cited interdisciplinary academic applying complex systems analysis to ecological and political violence. He is a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute.

Society To Collapse By 2040 Due To Catastrophic Food Shortages, Environmental Disaster

New scientific models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilization will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability that are fueled by war.

Nafeez Ahmed
By Nafeez Ahmed
APTOPIX Mideast Iraq

Before you panic, the good news is that the scientists behind the model don’t believe it’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and policies. But even so, it’s a sobering wake-up call, which shows that business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it:

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New Age Of Water Wars Portends ‘Bleak Future’ For The Middle East

New research shows that water scarcity linked to climate change is now a global problem playing a direct role in aggravating major conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.

Nafeez Ahmed
By Nafeez Ahmed

Cracks in the dry bed of the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino, Calif. (Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP) Behind the escalating violence in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, as well as the epidemic of civil unrest across the wider region, is a growing shortage of water. New peer-reviewed research published by the American Water Works Association

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MI5’s Jihadi John: How British Intelligence Primed Both Sides Of The Terror War

‘Jihadi John’ was able to join IS for one simple reason: from Quilliam to al-Muhajiroun, Britain’s loudest extremists have been groomed by the security services.

Nafeez Ahmed
By Nafeez Ahmed
A caricature by Syrian artist Yousef Abdeleki on ISIS' filmed executions.

A caricature by Syrian artist Yousef Abdeleki on ISIS' filmed executions. Every time there’s a terrorist attack that makes national headlines, the same talking heads seem to pop up like an obscene game of “whack-a-mole”. Often they appear one after the other across the media circuit, bobbing from celebrity television pundit to erudite

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How The CIA Made Google

Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet.

Nafeez Ahmed
By Nafeez Ahmed
Google's campus-network room at their data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Photo: Connie Zhou/AP)

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, western governments are moving fast to legitimize expanded powers of mass surveillance and controls on the internet, all in the name of fighting terrorism. US and European politicians have called to protect NSA-style snooping, and to advance the capacity to intrude on internet privacy by

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How I Was Censored By The Guardian For Writing About Israel’s War For Gaza’s Gas

The Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper, The Guardian, which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.

Nafeez Ahmed
By Nafeez Ahmed
Mideast Israel Palestinians

After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer

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Carbon Colonialism: How The Fight Against Climate Change Is Displacing Africans

Carbon trading—one of the biggest weapons touted by governments and business in the global fight against climate change—could end up killing the planet. In Africa, human rights campaigners say, it is already killing people.

Nafeez Ahmed
By Nafeez Ahmed
3burninghouses

Since the launch of a World Bank sponsored conservation programme in west Kenya eights years ago, the Bank-funded Kenya Forest Service (FKS) has conducted a relentless scorched earth campaign to evict the 15,000 strong indigenous Sengwer community from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills. The pretext? The Sengwer

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How the Pentagon’s Skynet Would Automate War

Due to technological revolutions outside its control, the Department of Defense (DoD) anticipates the dawn of a bold new era of automated war within just 15 years. By then, they believe, wars could be fought entirely using intelligent robotic systems armed with advanced weapons.

Nafeez Ahmed
By Nafeez Ahmed
KaklM

Pentagon officials are worried that the US military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China, and are willing to explore almost anything to stay on top—including creating watered-down versions of the Terminator. Due to technological revolutions outside its control, the Department of Defense (DoD) anticipates the dawn of

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