Crisis by Design

Reviews / Votes

"Crisis by Design is as much about Puerto Rico as it is about our global colonial neoliberalism condition. It is about being done and undone by old and new structural forces, which form a relentless crisis-driven multilayered system."
-Luis Eslava, La Trobe University and Kent Law School "This book makes a ground breaking contribution to our knowledge of what has come to be known "disaster capitalism" by elucidating how, in the colonial context, disaster is capitalism. The social devastation caused by financial hurricanes, just like their extreme weather equivalents and earthquakes, and just like the social debris that is created in the aftermath by the PROMESA and the FOMB have become the routine and certain by-products of colonial capitalism. As Jose Atiles teaches us, it is not just that the 'state of emergency' has become the rule; in colonial context it was always so. Emergency law is a constant, a cast iron rule of law, forged in the furnaces of capital accumulation. As Puerto Rico lurches from multi-layered crisis to multi-layered crisis, we realise that the unbroken succession of deeply interwoven crises appear as a constant underpinned by new layers of 'exceptional' law. As he walks through the ashes of the crisi/es, Jose Atiles finds both newly imposed forms of value extraction (through corruption and anti-corruption initiatives alike) and new forms of resistance to those (#Wandalismo and #NiCorruptosNiCobardes). And it is in the latter that we find the embers of something new to come. A popular movement on the streets, rising up against corruption to create temporary ruptures and challenges to colonial legality; an enduring, slow-burning fuse that is kept smoldering in what is an almost impossibly uplifting and beautiful conclusion to Crisis by Design."
-David Whyte, Queen Mary University of London