Kojo Koram – författare

WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2023Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political WritingShortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical PublishingLonglisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural UnderstandingA Guardian Book of the Year'Brilliantly arranged and rich with fresh insights' Akala'A radical, beautifully written understanding of our history' Owen Jones'You can't understand how Britain works today without reading it' Frankie Boyle'A challenge to a nation living in the shadow of empire: reckon with your imperial past, or it will come back to bite you' Grace Blakeley'This book should be part of the national curriculum' Ellie Mae O'HaganBritain didn't just put the empire back the way it had found it.In Uncommon Wealth, Kojo Koram traces the tale of how after the end of the British empire an interconnected group of well-heeled British intellectuals, politicians, accountants and lawyers offshored their capital, seized assets and saddled debt in former 'dependencies'. This enabled horrific inequality across the globe as ruthless capitalists profited and ordinary people across Britain's former territories in colonial Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were trapped in poverty. However, the reinforcement of capitalist power across the world also ricocheted back home. Now it has left many Britons wondering where their own sovereignty and prosperity has gone...Decolonisation was not just a trendy buzzword. It was one of the great global changes of the past hundred years, yet Britain - the protagonist in the whole, messy drama - has forgotten it was ever even there. A blistering uncovering of the scandal of Britain's disastrous treatment of independent countries after empire, Uncommon Wealth shows the decisions of decades past are contributing to the forces that are breaking Britain today.

The War on Drugs has led to millions of people dead, displaced and incarcerated. Disproportionately enforced on oppressed races, international drug prohibition has reinforced the colour line across the globe.While laws prohibiting the production, sale and use of particular drugs are presented as politically neutral and objective, this collection reveals the racist impact of the War on Drugs across multiple continents and in numerous situations. From racialised drugs policing at festivals in the UK to the necropolitical wars in Juarez, Mexico and from the exchange of drug policing programs between the United States and Israel to the management of black bodies in Brazil, this collection proves that the regulation of drugs and race is an international, and intentional, disaster.Pushing forward the debate and activism led by groups such as Black Lives Matter and calling for radical changes in drug policy legislation and prison reform, both nationally and internationally, this collection cuts deep and rings true for all people fighting racism today.

The War on Drugs has led to millions of people dead, displaced and incarcerated. Disproportionately enforced on oppressed races, international drug prohibition has reinforced the colour line across the globe.While laws prohibiting the production, sale and use of particular drugs are presented as politically neutral and objective, this collection reveals the racist impact of the War on Drugs across multiple continents and in numerous situations. From racialised drugs policing at festivals in the UK to the necropolitical wars in Juarez, Mexico and from the exchange of drug policing programs between the United States and Israel to the management of black bodies in Brazil, this collection proves that the regulation of drugs and race is an international, and intentional, disaster.Pushing forward the debate and activism led by groups such as Black Lives Matter and calling for radical changes in drug policy legislation and prison reform, both nationally and internationally, this collection cuts deep and rings true for all people fighting racism today.

'Rigorous, impassioned and urgent' - Ash SarkarWe are in a moment of profound overlapping crises. The landscape of politics and entitlement is being rapidly remade. As movements against colonial legacies and state violence coincide with the rise of authoritarian regimes, it is the lens of racism, and the politics of race, that offers the sharpest focus. In Empire's Endgame, eight leading scholars make a powerful intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in Britain. While the 'hostile environment' policy and Brexit referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual behaviours. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state. Engaging with movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, Empire's Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a political vision that includes rather than expels in the face of crisis.

'Fantastic . . . Kojo's case is clear and to my mind irrefutable' AKALA'Essential reading' CAROLINE LUCASThe future of drugs is here, and it's dangerously unequal.Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed. Drugs once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while substances criminalised for generations are being reborn as breakthrough mental health treatments, wellness supplements, Silicon Valley productivity tools and billion-dollar investment opportunities. How did this reversal happen - and who stands to benefit?In The Next Fix, award-winning author and academic Kojo Koram travels from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana to the United States, to uncover the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to grassroots activist campaigns and the question of reparations, he traces the growing tension between movements fighting for justice after decades of prohibition and the finance-world race to profit from a newly legal frontier. Will drug reform finally undo the racial violence, environmental destruction and public health failures of the War on Drugs? Or will it simply open a new chapter in global capitalism, creating a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies?Urgent, moving and deeply reported, The Next Fix asks whether the War on Drugs is really over - or merely changing its chemical formula.

As countries around the world turn away from a century-long War on Drugs, we are seeing the slow decline of a system of drug control which resulted in the futile brutalisation of poor people across the world, especially poor people of colour, all while issues of addiction, impoverishment and dangerous drug deaths continued to sky-rocket. But, as The Next Fix will show, what is being established in the aftermath of the drug war is actually threatening to reinforce many of the same inequalities that were intensified by prohibition. About 1% of the current legal cannabis dispensary store owners in the US are Black. Across many of the states that have legalised cannabis, people with drug convictions are denied a business licence or working in the industry.This means that the racial minorities who were disproportionately arrested and imprisoned during the drug war are now in danger of being punished twice: once by prohibition and again by exclusion from the emerging multibillion dollar market in legal drugs. Instead of advancing the course of social justice, drug law reform is helping the hedge funds, tech companies, oil companies and tobacco companies investing in drugs to get even richer, encouraging a commercialised legal drug industry that is likely to only accelerate the social problems associated with substance abuse.Going beyond the legal cannabis market to look at everything from the growing pharmaceutical/therapeutic use of psychedelics to the interconnected worlds of high finance and the cocaine trade, from the association of khat with narco-terrorism to the tobacco companies trying to use legal drugs to rebrand themselves as wellness companies, this book will be taking the readers behind the scenes of this new frontier of global capitalism. Entering the world of drug policy reform, which brings together contrasting characters from yoga instructors to traditional Rastafarian leaders, investment bankers to policing reform activists, over the chapters Kojo Koram will show that although we might be living through the end of the War on Drugs, the brave new world emerging out of it may, in practice, still look a lot like the old one.

'Fantastic . . . Kojo's case is clear and to my mind irrefutable' AKALA'Essential reading' CAROLINE LUCASThe future of drugs is here, and it's dangerously unequal.Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed. Drugs once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while substances criminalised for generations are being reborn as breakthrough mental health treatments, wellness supplements, Silicon Valley productivity tools and billion-dollar investment opportunities. How did this reversal happen - and who stands to benefit? In The Next Fix, award-winning author and academic Kojo Koram travels from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana to the United States, to uncover the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to grassroots activist campaigns and the question of reparations, he traces the growing tension between movements fighting for justice after decades of prohibition and the finance-world race to profit from a newly legal frontier. Will drug reform finally undo the racial violence, environmental destruction and public health failures of the War on Drugs? Or will it simply open a new chapter in global capitalism, creating a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies?Urgent, moving and deeply reported, The Next Fix asks whether the War on Drugs is really over - or merely changing its chemical formula.

WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2023Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political WritingShortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical PublishingLonglisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural UnderstandingA Guardian Book of the Year'Brilliantly arranged and rich with fresh insights' Akala'A radical, beautifully written understanding of our history' Owen Jones'You can't understand how Britain works today without reading it' Frankie Boyle'A challenge to a nation living in the shadow of empire: reckon with your imperial past, or it will come back to bite you' Grace Blakeley'This book should be part of the national curriculum' Ellie Mae O'HaganBritain didn't just put the empire back the way it had found it.Uncommon Wealth is the little known and shocking history of how Britain treated its former non-white colonies after the end of empire. It is the story of how an interconnected group of British capitalists enabled horrific inequality across the globe, profiting in colonial Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. However, the greed unleashed in this era would boomerang, now leaving many ordinary Britons wondering where their own prosperity has gone. Ranging from Jamaica to Singapore, Ghana to Britain, this is a blistering account of how buried decisions of decades past are ravaging Britain today.

The War on Drugs has led to millions of people dead, displaced and incarcerated. Disproportionately enforced on oppressed races, international drug prohibition has reinforced the colour line across the globe.While laws prohibiting the production, sale and use of particular drugs are presented as politically neutral and objective, this collection reveals the racist impact of the War on Drugs across multiple continents and in numerous situations. From racialised drugs policing at festivals in the UK to the necropolitical wars in Juarez, Mexico and from the exchange of drug policing programs between the United States and Israel to the management of black bodies in Brazil, this collection proves that the regulation of drugs and race is an international, and intentional, disaster.Pushing forward the debate and activism led by groups such as Black Lives Matter and calling for radical changes in drug policy legislation and prison reform, both nationally and internationally, this collection cuts deep and rings true for all people fighting racism today.