For the last two decades nearly all analysis of insecurity, conflict or development has stressed the need to "empower" or "capacity-build" local individuals or communities. This ground-breaking book presents a radical challenge to such approaches, arguing that solutions to the world's problems are not understood within external structures of economic, political and social relations, but instead with individuals and groups - often the most marginal and powerless. This has gone hand-in-hand with a shift from state-based to society-based understandings of the world. Chandler provocatively argues that this has limited available transformative possibilities, and to achieve real change - both at a local and a global level - requires a radical re-think in Western thought.