Pervasive economic and even physical insecurity are daily conditions of life for many in the world's failed and failing states and offer compelling reasons to leave. Such reasons do not ensure a welcome elsewhere, least of all in affluent Western countries, nor are they, in the main, qualifying conditions under the 1951 Refugee Convention. For the West, the press of potential migrants and asylum claimants seems a looming threat, roiling its politics. In Europe, the response has combined measures to curtail human trafficking across the Mediterranean with efforts to encourage (more bluntly, bribe) the governments of sending and transit countries to stem the flow. In the United States, massed groups fleeing violence in Central America face a cumbersome judicial process that will eventually deny most of them refugee status and demand their return. The regions of insecurity, especially in North and West Africa, the Horn of Africa, and western Asia, are the no-go world of Ruben Andersson's book. Uncontrolled migration is an immediately tangible concern motivating the West's interest in these regions, along with the post-9/11 “war on terror,” with its self-proclaimed mandate to intervene wherever anarchy and the threat of terrorism are found. Western interference, of course, has long come in the form of development aid, including support for birth control, and in the residual habits of metropolitan powers still seeking to shape the societies and economies of former colonies. Mixed in too, despite its record of failure, is the neoconservative mission to spread the values of democracy and free markets across benighted areas. These varied interests, in different proportions, underlie Western approaches to the no-go world. The resulting combination of militarized and humanitarian interventions, at once serious in intent and ineffective (often comically clumsy) in execution, is the grist for Andersson's account. Andersson is an LSE-trained anthropologist based at Oxford's Department of International Development. He has a particular interest in migration and security issues in southern Europe and the Sahel: an earlier work was Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (2014). He has the anthropologist's penchant for fieldwork on foot and one-on-one interactions, though often foiled in this project by the travel constraints imposed by risk-averse security officials and by the fine-print of insurance plans. In lieu of his own direct exposure to no-go areas, he prowls the edges, interviewing an array of civilian and military operatives of relevant international “missions,” intrepid aid workers, assorted oddball expats, and skeptical local observers—in his words, an ethnography of interveners. His broader interest is in “systems of intervention, from peacekeeping and aid to border security and counterterror, and their interlinkages” (261–262). A recurrent focus of the present study is the conflict in northern Mali that began in 2012 in the aftermath of the ill-fated NATO incursion into Libya. French special forces, followed by UN peacekeepers, sought to quell a rag-tag Tuareg insurgency. What had been intended as a simple counterterrorism operation, to deal with “jihadi fighters with Mad Max weaponry” (61), metastasized into a diffuse campaign against a complex array of armed groups of varying ideologies and overlapping territories. (See Lebovich (2019) for a description of the current situation on the ground.) The activities of the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), mostly Western-led but with peacekeeping soldiers from a range of African countries like Chad and Guinea, are recounted by Andersson with detached bemusement. Some other interventions he discusses have done more to create a refugee exodus than to contain one. In Somalia, the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) backed the 2006 Ethiopian invasion, leading to the emergence of the Islamist terrorist group al Shabaab. In Afghanistan, the end-game of the US and NATO presence has the remaining forces confined mostly to a fortified Kabul green zone, called by some the Kabubble. Transit countries were quick to see the opportunities for leverage presented by migrant traffic. Turkey's role in governing the Aegean crossing to Greece is the best-known instance. Quantitatively larger challenges for Europe are the migration routes through the Sahel and Libya. A “prize asset” for Niger, Andersson remarks, is “the central desert route to Libya,” for both migrants and smugglers (189). He quotes the country's foreign minister in 2016: “Niger needs a billion euros to fight against clandestine migration” and the EU's announcement, 18 months later, of just that amount of unspecified economic assistance to Niger. Libya's Gaddafi had earlier demanded €5 billion a year for his government to halt the migrant flow, against the threat that Europe would “turn black”(162–163). In post-Gaddafi Libya the EU has preferred direct involvement. The European Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM) to Libya was an EU training effort in “integrated border management.” Equipped with little more than rubber stamps amid the country's spreading chaos, EUBAM's operatives are players in a “tragedy and farce” (160–166), monitoring the situation from afar. (In North America, the US has chosen threats and aid cut-offs along with border hardening as migration deterrents—with similarly scant success.) Standing back, Andersson discerns a new pattern of response to the emerging transnational threats of “migration, drugs, and terror” that is reproduced in successive theaters. In each case, Western actors are perforce drawn in, but pull back from actual engagement on the ground. They “circle the danger zone while obsessively peering into the darkness.” In effect, “they foist remoteness on insecure regions” (52). This mode of intervention by “ambivalent deployment” warrants a distinctive term: he calls it the Timbuktu syndrome. He sees in it echoes of colonial-era policies that supported indirect rule in buffer states as shields against the truly wild regions, but now combined with the “hard” border security of blast walls and bollards. True to his discipline's belief in ground-truthing, Andersson has little time for higher-level theorizing. He disdains both Panglossians like Thomas Friedman and Parag Khanna and doom-mongers like Robert Kaplan and Robert Kagan. Particularly reviled are the “quack theories” of Thomas Barnett, whose line of separation between the core globalized areas of the world and the unstable, disconnected “gap” areas supposedly provided the US defense establishment with its rationale for sustained high levels of post-Cold War spending. No Go World, as its author acknowledges, is an essay rather than a monograph. It has digressions, interludes, and extended analogies in which Andersson reflects on colonial history, maps and mapping, classic children's tales, Conrad, Kipling, and Eliot (The Waste Land). The terms he introduces are often striking (“architecture of risk”), if a bit blurry (“psychogeography of danger,” “geopathology of intervention”). A few are merely regrettable: “dangerization.” Andersson favors a mannered prose, wearing to this reader though praised in the cover blurbs: “We will soon delve further into the wider historical mapping of danger, yet for us now let us note how, in Western capitals, the Sahara and its ancient outpost of Timbuktu have long served as repositories of murky fears and desires” (50–51). Made complicit in his travels, we accompany the author as he roams “from Bamako to Kabul and back again.” An appendix in the book offers an anthropologist's defense of narrative and storytelling as against “the harder social sciences, enamored with lining up fact against affect” (258). Economics and demography, rather than the political futurism of Khanna or Kagan, are the “hard” social sciences in this context. What do these disciplines have to offer in the non-narrative realm? Sticking with Africa, much of the continent is finally showing promise by the standard indices of economic development as governments across the region—with well-known exceptions—shape up. But as incomes rise, so do rates of outmigration, essentially unaffected, perhaps even increased, by foreign aid. (The evidence was reviewed in this journal by Clemens and Postel (2018).) Urbanization proceeds apace; the growth poles in both east and west of the continent draw in workers. Foreign investment in extractive industries and physical infrastructure (much of it from China) is flowing in. With good management, the resulting economic thrust will be equaled or surpassed by the growth of manufacturing and services, already foreshadowed by the spread of smart-phone-based financial services. Enough, it can be hoped, to meet the forbidding challenges of population growth and climate change. But what is the future of, say, Mali or Niger? The UN's demographic predictions here are ominous: Mali increasing from 20 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2050, Niger from 24 million to 66—already factoring in a substantial fall in their current fertility of six to seven lifetime births per woman. And these are fragile, predominantly rural economies, with tiny formal sectors, and subject to the vagaries of a drying climate and encroaching desert. It is a stretch to imagine them being gradually drawn into the orbit of a dynamic West Africa, centered on southern Nigeria or Ghana. (The projections, of course, may mislead. Yemen with a population today of close to 30 million provides a cautionary tale: seen from 2000, the UN projected population for Yemen in 2050 was 102 million; seen from 2019, with a bloody civil war still raging, the 2050 projected total is 48 million.) Continued migrant pressure on Europe from the South is not in question. Andersson's mild injunction for Western leaders is to “shift attention from [border] reinforcement toward positive cooperation on mobility with poorer countries” (p.239). He concedes, in an understatement, that this is likely to be “unpalatably cosmopolitan” in present circumstances. Borders will surely be reinforced, literally so at the geographic boundaries but also internally, at significant cost to liberal society, by a more stringent and pervasive monitoring of legal status.