Risking Human Security

• Introduction -- The Basic Principles of Attachment Theory -- The social construction of the human brain -- The Connections between Public Life and Personal Attachment -- Attachment and loss of community -- Labour to love -- Unsettling policies: unanticipated consequences for migrant Afro-Caribbean families -- Seeking asylum: the struggle for a new secure base -- Compassion deficit disorder? The impact of consuming culture on children’s relationships -- Primitive justice: who pays the price? -- Strategies for Enabling Change -- Human security and conflict -- Enabling change

'Risking Human Security is an important book. Written for both a professional and wide lay audience, this volume seeks to bring the issues of attachment into the public domain. What makes it unique, is its exploration of how policy decisions, culture and politics can undermine - or support - the conditions on which human survival and security depend. Using case studies written by scholars and by activists with anthropological and psychological insights, Green demonstrates that our abilities to bond with others can be weakened or shattered by more than what is popularly understood as "trauma". Contributors demonstrate that like all structural violence, consumer and industrial cultures can be as destructive of attachments as are wars and forced migration. Embracing,and going beyond, traditional academic analysis, "Risking Human Security" provides corrective and necessarily subversive lenses to make the human condition more visible. Green's book makes a valuable contribution to all who are working to alleviate human suffering and to create a more life-affirming world.'- Joseph Gerson, PhD, Director of Programs, Director of Peace and Economic Security Program, American Friends Service Committee, New England'This is a book we have been waiting for. Within a framework of proposing that threats to attachment are threats to human security, Marci Green has assembled a team of contributors analysing the risks to secure attachments that arise from both the extraordinary and routine conditions of everyday life. Contributions from clinicians, researchers, political activists and educators enable Green's book to explore the direct effects of political conflict, forced migration, and the aftermath of environmental disaster. In addition the book makes valuable contributions to our understanding of the indirect damage done to attachments by our social arrangements, by considering the organisation of our workplaces, the effects of aggressive marketing practice on children's capacity to empathise with others, and the disastrous undermining of communities caused by the U.S. 'War on Drugs' and imprisonment practices. This is a fine book and essential reading.'- Joseph Schwartz, Training Therapist and Director of research at the Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, London; Editor of "Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis"'Timely, interesting and valuable, the book has a wide appeal.'- Andrew Barley, Therapy Today