The Challenge of Anarchy: Introduction.

Title:The Challenge of Anarchy: Introduction

Text:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. William Butler Yeats published his poem "The Second Coming" in 1920 in the aftermath of the first world war and the devastation of Europe. Today, 100 years later, the spectre of anarchy is haunting the world once again. Not the anarchy of political philosophy but the anarchy of chaos, a state of lawlessness when governments and societies deteriorate and collapse. Central, Sahelian and East Africa; the Arabian Peninsula; the Levant; Iraq; Afghanistan; Myanmar; Central and South America, are all increasingly suffering from chaos and violence, as war lords, drug lords, and corruption rise and established governments decline.

The West has not seen such a widespread run of this sort of anarchy since the Thirty Years War in Europe half a...