Christian Parenti

Christian Parenti is an investigative journalist, academic and author. His books include Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, a survey of the rise of the prison-industrial complex from the Nixon through the Reagan Era and into the present and The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror, a study of surveillance and control in modern society. The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq, is an account of the US occupation of Iraq. In Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, Christian links the implications of climate change with social and political unrest in mid-latitude regions of the world. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ivory Coast and China.

Christian’s reporting in Afghanistan was the subject of an award-winning HBO documentary, Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi. Directed and edited by Ian Olds, the film follows the working relationship between Christian and his Afghan colleague Ajmal Naqshbandi, and after Naqshbandi’s capture and murder by the Taliban, Christian’s investigation of that crime.

Christian’s writing is regularly published in The Nation, and he frequently appears on Doug Henwood’s radio show, Behind The News, on KPFA in Berkeley, California. His book Tropic of Chaos was influential in producing the recent PBS documentary Extreme Realities. He has also written for the London Review of Books, Mother Jones, Jacobin and Condé Nast Traveler.

He was a visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and was a Soros Senior Justice Fellow. Parenti has taught at the New College of California and at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. He is Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College. He has also served as a professor of sustainable development at the SIT Graduate Institute. In 2016, Christian published an essay in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? concerning the political and economic foundations of climate change.