Making a Killing: How and Why Corporations Use Armed Force to Do Business »

Madelaine Drohan is an award-winning journalist who has covered business and politics in Canada, Europe and Africa during a twenty-five-year career. She was awarded a Reuters Fellowship at Oxford University in 1998 and the Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism in 2001. She has worked for Maclean’s, the Financial Post, and The Globe and Mail. Drohan lives in Ottawa.

A dramatic and compelling journey into the dark heart of globalization.

Publishers Weekly

Former foreign correspondent for Toronto's Globe and Mail, Drohan concentrates on Africa for this indictment of multinational corporations that forge ties with armies, warlords, militias and mercenaries. She traces the roots of corporate armed force to Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company, describing even greater atrocities perpetrated in the Congo and in Sierra Leone during the 1950s. The efforts of Belgian company Union Mini re to secure an independent Katanga demonstrates the limits of corporations' ability to employ armed force in competition with effective governments and international organizations. The second half of the book shows what can happen given the absence of those countervailing forces. A single man, Roland Walter Rowland, shaped the history of newly independent Mozambique via politicized investment policies; in the early 1990s, Shell Oil worked hand-in-glove with the Nigerian government and ignored the consequences for human rights. In the Sudan, Talisman Energy, a Canadian oil firm, became embroiled in the north-south conflict that continues to wrack that country when Sudanese troops ostensibly guarding the oil fields practiced a scorched-earth policy in the surrounding communities. Though a comparative dimension incorporating South Asia and Latin America would have been valuable, Drohan's African case studies (and there are more here) are well researched, clearly presented and deeply troubling. Agent, David Johnston for Sideshow Media. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.