The Civilization Of Perpetual Movement: Nomads in the Modern World - Hardcover

Nick McDonell was born in New York City in 1984. He is the author of the novels Twelve, The Third Brother, and An Expensive Education, and a book of reportage, The End of Major Combat Operations. McDonell is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford universities and has reported from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for TIME, Harper's, and others.

"Nick McDonell tackles one of the great blind spots of political science: the persistence of nomadism in the contemporary world. Nomads are not, McDonell shows, a relict of an earlier era of societal development, but a thoroughly modern challenge to contemporary governance." -- Alex de Waal, Research Professor and Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, Tufts University

"In this intriguing, unusual and well-written little book, McDonell shares his frustrations with the political difficulties faced by nomadic peoples in the twenty-first century and the failure of international relations theory to comprehend nomads lived realities. He describes in detail several instances of the unequal and often tragic clash between the 'civilisation of perpetual movement' and that of tax-gathering, boundary-jealous, rule-bound, development-oriented states." -- Richard Tapper, Emeritus Professor at SOAS, University of London, and author of many books and articles on nomadism including Frontier Nomads of Iran

"Since he was a graduate student at Oxford, Nick McDonell has studied the question of how important nomadism has been to world history for the past 500 years. Very, is the answer. This well-written and extremely accessible book is an account of that journey." -- Dawn Chatty, Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration and formerly Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford