The author of this small yet closely argued book, the distinguished academic Arjun Appadurai, states in the preface that Fear of Small Numbers is at least in part a response to the criticism made against a previous book of his that overlooks the ill-effects of globalization. That work, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), characterized globalization as a positive development, or at least a preferable world situation to that created by the senescent system of the nation-state. Appadurai remains unrepentant in his support for globalization, promising to continue his project with the as yet unpublished, tentatively titled The Capacity to Aspire, where he will conclude his long-term project “to seek ways to make globalization work for those who need it most and enjoy it least, the poor, the dispossessed, the weak, the marginal populations of our world.”(Preface, p. xi).

Here, however, Appadurai looks squarely at the most horrendous effects of globalization: “Why should a decade dominated by a global endorsement of open markets, free flow of finance capital, and liberal ideas of constitutional rule, good governance, and active expansion of human rights have produced a plethora of examples of ethnic cleansing on one hand and extreme forms of political violence against civilian populations (a fair definition of terrorism as a tactic) on the other?” (p.3). Why Rwanda and Kosovo, in other words, why 9/11, and why a war on terror.

Using categories of his own, such as “social uncertainty” and “the anxiety of incompleteness”, both referring to perceived threats to the nation-state and its defining ethnos, the author attempts to show that globalization heightens these threats in various ways to the point of generating large-scale violence. For example, “the multiple, rapid, and largely invisible ways” in which globalized capital moves across national boundaries “are seen as creating the means for today’s minority to become tomorrow’s majority”. (p. 84). It is this possible “morphing” of a minority into a majority, a direct effect of globalization and an upheaval of sufficient magnitude to propagate “the fear of small numbers,” which in its turn generates large-scale violence of the type the world has been witnessing since the 1990s.

Interestingly, Appadurai only very briefly mentions the familiar entities popularly associated with the evils of globalization: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the multi-national corporations, U.S. hegemony, and such. His approach is intently focused on violence on the large scale, and on the immediate perpetrators of this violence. He has an illuminating chapter on terror and terrorists, and concludes with another on “Grassroots Globalization” where he sees a way, “however incipient, obscure, and tentative” to avert a cataclysmic end to “civilians and civility”.