Review of "The Real Price of War: How You Pay for the War on Terror," by Joshua S. Goldstein (original) (raw)
Ch11[2].pdf Kellner.pdf Globalization and Terrorism
Globalization has been one of the most hotly contested phenomena of the past two decades. It has been a primary attractor of books, articles, and heated debate, just as postmodernism was the most fashionable and debated topic of the 1980s. A wide and diverse range of social theorists has argued that today's world is organized by forms of globalization, which are strengthening the dominance of the world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and organizations, and eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture. Contemporary theorists from a wide range of political and theoretical positions are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment, but there are fierce debates concerning its nature, effects, and future. 1 For its defenders, globalization marks the triumph of capitalism and its market economy (see apologists such as Fukuyama, 1993; Friedman, 1999 & 2005 who perceive this process as positive), whereas its critics portray globalization as negative (see Mander & Goldsmith, 1996; Eisenstein, 2004; Robins & Webster, 1999). Some theorists highlight the emergence of a new transnational ruling elite 1 Attempts to chart the globalization of capital, decline of the nation-state, and rise of a new global culture include the essays in
Globalization's Shadow: An introduction to the globalization of political violence
September 11 revealed most dramatically that globalization has a shadow. While some of the world's citizens enjoy the benefits globalization brings, others seek to put globalization to their own politically violent purposes. If the terrible events of September 11 demonstrated anything, it is that globalization can as readily facilitate violence as it can produce peace, prosperity and political order. The precise nature of the relationship between globalization and political violence, however, remains largely unstudied. Most studies of globalization, understandably perhaps, focus on the rise of new information and communication technologies and their transformative effects on societies. In general, it is the economic dimensions of globalization that have been widely discussed and analysed, particularly the globalization of production and finance, and the relationship between states and markets. This book was prompted by a sense that globalization is intimately connected with the changing sources of insecurity and changing intensities of violence in the contemporary world, despite the relatively scant attention paid to it. It seeks to subject the relationship between globalization and political violence to closer scrutiny. The questions behind this book are: Has globalization given rise to new forms of violence? And how, if at all, does globalization affect the character and intensity of violence? This chapter presents a broad overview of the nexus between globalization and political violence. First, it will present a working definition of globalization. Second, it will rehearse arguments about the economic dimension of globalization, arguably the most visible side of globalization. Third, it will explain how violence has been understood in the study of politics and international relations. Fourth, it will examine how globalizing forces of political economy interact with localized violent conflicts in the so-called 'new wars'. Fifth, the chapter analyses the changing character of security. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the contributing chapters to this volume. Its primary aim is to elaborate the context in which questions about the globalization of political violence have been or might be raised in the study of international relations, and to draw some connections among the various chapters included here.
Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of the Global Order
International Journal, 2002
110-story, stainless steel towers (which tourists simply call "The Twin Towers") are flanked by a plaza larger than Piazza San Marco in Venice. When completed, these solid, banal monoliths came to overshadow Lower Manhattan's cluster of filigreed towers, which had previously been the romantic evocation that symbolized the very concept of "skyline". Ten million square feet of office space are offered here: 7 times the area of the Empire State Building, 4 times that of the Pan Am. The public agency that built them (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) ran amok with both money and aesthetics…(1) I. Introduction [1] This unexceptional description from a guide book sparks our memory as keenly as endless reruns of planes, fireballs and apocalyptic dust clouds chasing office workers. The references to icons of Renaissance Europe and American modernity remind us of the magnitude, the ambition, of what once was. After the fact, the scale of the structures is fathomable only in statistical form. Likewise the human suffering inflicted. Just as '1 and 2 World Trade Center' provided visual orientation points for New Yorkers, the date of their demise gives us a temporal point of reference we could all have done well without. Standing a mere twelve months from those events, the sense of uncertainty and incomprehension remains great. Questions abound. Were the attacks the first in a series marking the commencement of a 'clash of civilisations'? What is the substance of this conflict and its resolution? What are the implications of American hegemony? Most pertinently for present purposes, what is the role of law in this conflict? [2] In the pages of this highly readable volume, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne of the University of Wales Aberystwyth, have assembled a first class collection of responses to such questions. With remarkable speed (the book was published in June 2002), the editors have managed to garner contributions from a genuinely stellar group of scholars of whom Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Byers and Robert Keohane are merely the best known. The differences in understanding the post-9/11 world are often sharp. These cleavages sometimes arise from geographical viewpoints. Occasionally divergences appear to originate in disciplinary concerns (international relations scholars feature most prominently, although political economists, international lawyers, political and social theorists are also present). They are sometimes straightforwardly located in political differences. Had this book arisen from an academic conference the personal and intellectual clashes would have been absorbing. What price Fukuyama and Chomsky in the same room, or An-Na'im and Waltz? Precisely because of these internal frictions, the reader is presented with a variety of accounts, analyses and conclusions that cover a broad spectrum of positions in an engaging manner. [3] No short review can do full justice to a collection with thirty-one chapters. Instead, I focus on a small number of themes that feature prominently and are of particular relevance to lawyers. Given the diversity of materials, this means that much fascinating material goes unsurveyed. Nonetheless, by training our attention on two sets of oppositions (cultural convergence versus divergence, and new realism in international relations theory versus the idealism on public international and human rights lawyers), I seek to demonstrate that this intelligently heterogeneous collection makes a significant, timeous, contribution to our comprehension of the 'new' global order. II. The Convergence Thesis v. Divergence [4] Practically everyone who makes their living by writing has dashed off a piece on 9/11. For many this has necessitated the eating of humble pie and the reworking of previous frameworks. For others, such as Sam Huntington, there has been a gleeful dusting down of previously embattled theses.(2) Francis Fukuyama and his 'End of History' thesis, intuitively belong to the first group but, he argues here, better fits with the latter.(3) Fukuyama's (in)famous claim of now a decade's vintage is that the evolution of societal governance has reached its apotheosis in the form of modern liberal democracy combined with market capitalism, and that this will henceforth be the dominant form of government. Written in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's implosion, the triumph of such values seemed plausible, if not mildly bleak. But post-9/11 (and the prior sustained backlash against 'globalisation'), Fukuyama seems less controversial than irrelevant. Not so, says he. He puts his core beliefs as proudly as before: Democracy, individual rights, the rule of law, and prosperity based on economic freedom represent universal aspirations that will ultimately be shared by people all over the world, if given the opportunity. (p. 28) [5] Thus, our current conflict is not a Huntingtonian 'clash of civilisations', for that rubric is both over-and under-inclusive. There is a clash not between 'Islamic culture' and 'Western culture', but rather of 'Islamo-Fascism' with 'Modernity'. The nub of the conflict is modernity's key project of separating church/religion and state. Fukuyama argues that this separation is a necessary feature of a peaceful community of societies ("if politics is based on something like religion, there will never be any civil peace because people cannot agree on fundamental religious values" (p. 30)), a desirable one, and an inevitable one. Such optimism is based on his view that, There is an underlying historical mechanism that encourages a long-term convergence across cultural boundaries, first and most powerfully in economics, then in the realm of politics and finally (and most distinctly) in culture. (p.
wiscnetwork.org
Ten years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, to which the United States reacted by promoting a global campaign against international terrorism, the so-called War on Terror remains at the center of attention within academic and policy-makers circles, especially after the U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. A massive academic literature dedicates itself to the understanding of its multiple dimensions: military, economic, legal, strategic, diplomatic, and cultural, among others. However, there is a considerable lack of attention to the discursive dimension of the War on Terror, most notably in relation to the role of foreign policy in discursively (re)affirming a specific national identity for a political social body. Inspired by a growing albeit still marginal body of work on how language and meaning socially construct and shape foreign policies and national identities, this paper attempts to shed light on the processes through which dominant discourses attempt to create order, write identity, reflexively construct external threats and enemies, produce consent, discipline behavior and legitimate the State as a privileged loci of security. I will argue that U.S. foreign policy discursive practices reproduces a system of meanings which tries to stabilize the very notion of "Americanness" according to a very specific ideology: Puritanism. As a result, Puritanism becomes embedded with Americanismand vice versaand thus imposing an American national identity based on a Puritan ideological matrix which has very important implications for U.S. foreign relations.
Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 2004
Rarely does a reviewer have the chance to read a book so intimately related to unfolding events that one's interpretation of news stories becomes more deeply informed by it, and vice versa. Harvey's latest work is one such example, examining America's current`war on terror', and arguing that the world since the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks in America in September 2001 has become defined by an American imperialist agenda. To assess the nature and effects of US imperialism, Harvey constructs a double dialectic between America's internal dynamics and external relationships on the one hand, and between territorial and economic political imperatives on the other. These logics drive contentious foreign policies, based on a selective remembering of history, and often provoke great international objection, whilst demanding instability and fear at home to provide their popular justification. The problems are compounded when the territorial and economic imperatives compete, forcing America's hand further. This occurs, Harvey says, because US imperialism is founded on the exploitation of a global geography of uneven development, and the need (inexplicitly) to maintain this inequality whilst overcoming the crises of capitalist overaccumulation of the kind Harvey has discussed before. It is the need for more extensive`fixes' to the crisis which both necessitates and justifies US expansionism, and which may result in America overreaching itself, as it finds it can no longer maintain the internal and external dimensions to its power. The need to maintain a strategic control in the Middle East lies behind recent military action: partly because of oil, but also because of a longer term imperative to have this region within its sphere of influence, in order to open up new areas for spatial fixes, and to resist potential rivals like the EU and China. Harvey places this in a clear historical context, arguing that, although differences exist, there are also similarities with previous imperialist periods, which were also driven by the demands of Harvey's double dialectic. Harvey's clarity in this respect is one of the book's strongest points, as it sets out his often complex ideas on Marxist economics in a particularly clear way, in a context students may find more readily understandable than his other works. Resisting US imperialism is a massive task for locally based and sometimes conflicting groups, often demonised as rejecting progress and denying the benefits of US hegemony. However, these benefits result from`accumulation by dispossession', as the world's poorest are reduced to the status of a (particularly devalued) commodity, as forced indebtedness and dependency grow, and as assets become privatised. Harvey shows how the class struggle of previous centuries has become translated onto a global scale: a reflection of the ever-increasing scale of the capitalist spatial fix. The final chapter offers the starkest warning: Harvey argues that the USA in the last decade has shifted the basis of its power from consent to coercion. Examples range from military threats to other interventions (such as attaching conditions to international aid to ensure`right' kind of developmental strategies). There is also a third weapon: the USA dominates various international organizations (such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank) to such an extent that the global political economy remains structured towards extending America's influence and maintaining its global agenda. Returning to his initial dialectic, Harvey shows how this is impossible without a similar coercive politics within the USA, led by a Christian right which condemns dissent as unpatriotic, and which sees resistance to US imperialism as evidence of the need for more intervention and coercion. It is not hard to believe Harvey's claim that America could develop into a`permanent war economy', using`invisible' enemies such as Al-Qaeda to maintain homeland support. It is hard to escape the thought that, as the scale at which capitalist crises have become displaced Reviews