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Naomi Klein — news, coverage & facts — IJR

The Shock Doctrine

Klein's third book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was published in 2007. The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics have risen to prominence in countries such as Chile under Pinochet, Poland, and Russia under Yeltsin. The book also argues that policy initiatives (for instance, the privatization of Iraq's economy under the Coalition Provisional Authority) were rushed through while the citizens of these countries were in shock from disasters, upheavals, or invasion. The book became an international and New York Times bestseller and was translated into 28 languages.

Central to the book's thesis is the contention that those who wish to implement unpopular free market policies now routinely do so by taking advantage of certain features of the aftermath of major disasters, be they economic, political, military or natural. The suggestion is that when a society experiences a major 'shock' there is a widespread desire for a rapid and decisive response to correct the situation; this desire for bold and immediate action provides an opportunity for unscrupulous actors to implement policies which go far beyond a legitimate response to disaster. The book suggests that when the rush to act means the specifics of a response will go unscrutinized, that is the moment when unpopular and unrelated policies will intentionally be rushed into effect. The book appears to claim that these shocks are in some cases intentionally encouraged or even manufactured. Klein identifies the "shock doctrine", elaborating on Joseph Schumpeter, as the latest in capitalism's phases of "creative destruction".

The Shock Doctrine was adapted into a short film of the same name, released onto YouTube. The original is no longer available on the site; however, a duplicate was published in 2008. The film was directed by Jonás Cuarón, produced and co-written by his father Alfonso Cuarón. The original video was viewed over one million times. The director Michael Winterbottom, alongside Mat Whitecross, also produced a documentary on the book which premiered in 2009.

The publication of The Shock Doctrine increased Klein's prominence, with The New Yorker judging her "the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago." On February 24, 2009, the book was awarded the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing from the University of Warwick in England. The prize carried a cash award of £50,000.

Criticism of Israel

In 2008, Klein was the keynote speaker at the first national conference of the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians (now Independent Jewish Voices). In January 2009, during the Gaza War, Klein supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, arguing that "the best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa."

In 2009, on the occasion of the publication of the Hebrew translation of her book The Shock Doctrine, Klein visited Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, combining the promotion of her book and the BDS campaign. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, she emphasized that it was important "not to boycott Israelis but rather to boycott the normalization of Israel and the conflict." In a speech in Ramallah on June 27, she apologized to Palestinians for not joining the BDS campaign earlier. Her remarks, particularly that "[some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card", were characterized by Noam Schimmel, an op-ed columnist for The Jerusalem Post, as "violent" and "unethical", and as the "most perverse of aspersions on Jews, an age-old stereotype of Jews as intrinsically evil and malicious."

Klein was a spokesperson for the protest against the spotlight on Tel Aviv at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, which Klein said was a very selective and misleading portrait of Israel. She has also served on the advisory board of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2023, in the context of the Gaza war, she wrote:

For Zionist believers (I'm not one of them), Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress. Within this worldview, antisemitism is cast as a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us, just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats. The Israeli state's current murderous leveling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology, and there will be more in the coming days.

At a "Seder in the Streets" event in 2024, held near Senator Chuck Schumer's residence, Klein spoke about the contemporary meaning of Passover and its relation to the war. Using the Exodus story of Israelites worshipping the golden calf as an idol, she drew parallels to what she called "the false idol of Zionism." She said: "It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery, the story of Passover itself, and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide."

Environmentalism

By 2009, Klein's attention had turned to environmentalism, with particular focus on climate change, the subject of her book This Changes Everything (2014). According to her website in 2016, the book and its accompanying film (released in 2015) would be about "how the climate crisis can spur economic and political transformation." She served on the board of directors of the non-profit group 350.org from 2011, through the fiscal year ending September 2018, and took part in their "Do the Math" tour in 2013, encouraging a divestment movement.

In an interview by Graeme Greene in New Internationalist, Klein rejected criticism that This Changes Everything politicized the climate issue and that the issue should be apolitical, asserting that such criticism reflected "how blind so many within the mainstream climate discussion are to the fact that they themselves are fully immersed within the confines of neoliberalism; ... It's a fantasy that you could fundamentally shift the building blocks of your economy without engaging with politics."

She encouraged the Occupy movement to join forces with the environmental movement, saying the financial crisis and the climate crisis are similarly rooted in unrestrained corporate greed. She gave a speech at Occupy Wall Street where she described the world as "upside down", where people act as if "there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions", and as if there are "limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need."

She has been a particularly vocal critic of the Athabasca oil sands development in Alberta, describing it in a TED Talk as a form of "terrestrial skinning." On September 2, 2011, she attended the demonstration against the Keystone Pipeline outside the White House and was arrested. Klein celebrated Obama's decision to postpone a decision on the Keystone pipeline until 2013 pending an environmental review as a victory for the environmental movement.

She attended the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. She put the blame for the failure of Copenhagen on President Barack Obama, and described her own country, Canada, as a "climate criminal". She presented the Angry Mermaid Award (a satirical award designed to recognize the corporations who have best sabotaged the climate negotiations) to Monsanto. Writing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, she warned that the climate crisis constitutes a massive opportunity for disaster capitalists and corporations seeking to profit from crisis. But equally, the climate crisis "can be a historic moment to usher in the next great wave of progressive change", or a "People's Shock".

In 2016, following the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, Klein called for an international campaign to impose economic sanctions on the United States if his administration refused to abide by the terms of the Paris Agreement. In October 2022, Klein published an article on The Intercept that addressed the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference and the repression of the Egyptian government; the conference took place in Egypt, a country widely seen as repressive and autocratic. She goes on to state "Sisi's Egypt is making a big show of solar panels and biodegradable straws ... but in reality, the regime imprisons activists and bans research. The climate movement should not play along", calling it greenwashing. In an interview with Democracy Now!, she says "what is not welcome would be pointing out this enormous lucrative network of deals that the military itself is engaged in that are linked to fossil fuels, that are linked to destroying remaining green space in cities like Cairo". Klein also stressed the release of prominent political prisoner and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, and wrote a foreword to You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (2021), his collected writings translated by an anonymous collective.

Other activities

Klein contributes to The Nation, In These Times, The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The Guardian, and is a senior contributor for The Intercept. She is a former Miliband Fellow and lectured at the London School of Economics on the anti-globalization movement. Her appointment as the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick began in October 2018 and ran for 3 years.

Klein ranked 11th in an internet poll of the top global intellectuals of 2005, a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals compiled by the Prospect magazine in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine. On Google Scholar which tracks academic articles, Klein has an overall h-index of 53 and her publications have been cited in the scholarly literature over 49,000 times as of May 2023. She was involved in 2010 G-20 Toronto summit protests, condemning police force and brutality. She spoke to a rally seeking the release of protesters in front of police headquarters on June 28, 2010.

In October 2011, she visited Occupy Wall Street and gave a speech declaring the protest movement "the most important thing in the world". On November 10, 2011, she participated in a panel discussion about the future of Occupy Wall Street with four other panelists, including Michael Moore, William Greider, and Rinku Sen, in which she stressed the crucial nature of the evolving movement.

Klein also made an appearance in the British radio show Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 in 2017.

Klein was a key instigator of the Leap Manifesto, a political manifesto issued in the context of the 2015 Canadian federal election focused on addressing the climate crisis through restructuring the Canadian economy and dealing with issues of income and wealth inequality, racism, and colonialism. The manifesto has been noted as an influence in the development of the Green New Deal and eventually led to the establishment of The Leap, an organization that works to promote the realization of the principles behind the original manifesto.

In 2019, along with other public figures, Klein signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election. In 2025, Klein actively participated in New York canvassing for Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. She also supported her husband Avi Lewis's campaign for leader of the New Democratic Party in 2026.