Revolt: The Worldwide Uprising Against Globalization

Written by Nadav Eyal

Narrated by Kaleo Griffith

""A well-written and thought-provoking account of the current crisis of globalization. Not everyone will agree with Eyal's interpretation, but few will remain indifferent."" —Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens    

An eye-opening examination of nationalism’s spread around the world as the promise of globalism wanes

Revolt is an eloquent and provocative challenge to the prevailing wisdom about the rise of nationalism and populism. With a vibrant and informed voice, Nadav Eyal illustrates how modern globalization is not sustainable. He contends that the collapse of the current world order is not so much about the imbalance between technological achievement and social progress or the breakdown of liberal democracy as it is about a passion to upend and destroy power structures that have become hollow, corrupt. or simply unresponsive to urgent needs. Eyal illuminates the benign and malignant forces that have so rapidly transformed our economic, political, and cultural realities, shedding light not only on the economic and cultural revolution that has come to define our time but also on the counterrevolution waged by those it has marginalized and exploited.

With a mixture of journalistic narrative, penetrating vignettes, and original analysis, Revolt shows that the left and right have much in common. Eyal tells stories of distressed Pennsylvania coal miners, anarchist communes on the outskirts of Athens, a Japanese town with collapsing fertility rates, neo-Nazis in Germany, and Syrian refugee families whom he accompanied from the shores of Greece to their destination in Germany. Into these reports from the present Eyal weaves lessons from the past, from the opium wars in China to colonialist Haiti to the Marshall Plan. With these historical ties, he shows that the revolts’ roots have always been deep and strong, and that rather than seeing current uprisings as part of a passing phenomenon, we should recognize that revolt is the new status quo. 

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780062999689

Nadav Eyal

Nadav Eyal is one of Israel’s most well-known journalists and a winner of the Sokolov Prize, often regarded as Israel’s Pulitzer. Eyal is also a senior research scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Foreign Affairs (SIPA) and an adjunct professor, contributing to discussions on global and Middle Eastern politics.  Eyal is a front-page columnist for Yediot Aharonot and Ynet, Israel’s most widely circulated newspaper and popular news site. In 2016, several months before the U.S. presidential elections, Eyal aired Trumpland, a series of short documentaries on Israeli television that explored the grievances affecting America, particularly in the Rust Belt. These received considerable attention for highlighting the forces that would later lead to a Trump victory. He holds an LLB from the Hebrew University Law Faculty in Jerusalem and a master’s degree in global politics from the London School of Economics.

Reviews for Revolt

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is probably best regarded as a memoir of the author's career as a journalist to date, which I mostly read to get some sense of how an informed foreigner regards the United States; though Eyal is concerned about much more than that. While much of this work deals with "globalism" as unfettered international business practice, where profits are made and the side affects of those practices are "externalized" (i.e. dumped on population being exploited), Eyal has bigger issues he wants to deal with. In the main, Eyal sees the current dysfunction as a result of he era of responsible leadership that followed World War II having passed away, and the successors not appreciating that the system is not a machine that will run on its own without attentive maintenance. Yes, the Cold War was afflicted with a string of lethal proxy wars, but, without getting too nostalgic, matters were kept in bound. What's clear now is that no bounds are really being recognized, and most of the world leadership is playing with fire. Though this book is not that concerned with COVID (the original edition having a publication date of 2018), that might wind up being the real wake-up call about the limits of identity politics and of unfettered nationalism.

Going forward, what Eyal hopes for is a new commitment to a politics appreciating that collective problems do not take care of themselves, and a stronger sense of common decency in terms of handling communities that have been crushed in the gears of the increasing unsustainable world economic system; he realizes he's asking a lot.