This is a book about shock. About how countries are shocked - by wars, terror attacks, coup d'etats, economic crisis, natural disasters. And about how these countries are then shocked again - by those who exploit that shock to push through economic reforms that, rather than help a country rebuild itself, serve only to further break it down. The Shock Doctrine is the true history of the past three decades, revealing that our world is increasingly ruled by those in thrall to an ideology: an ideology that has managed to erase its own violent beginnings and has convinced us that 'free markets' and 'free people' are one and the same. Based on breakthrough reporting, Naomi Klein traces the rise of disaster capitalism from its birth in the 1970s' dictatorships of South America, through its growth during the collapse of communism, to its present-day incarnation in New Orleans, Iraq and South-East Asia.