Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and Terrorism (2005) (original) (raw)

We face a globalizing world beset by raging violence and deep national, religious and individual insecurities. ‘Globalization’ may be the catch-cry of our times, but the ‘War on Terror’ has given it a harder and more tragic resonance. In order to confront this development critically the book turns upon a matrix of contradictory phenomena—globalism, nationalism, and state-terror. These are phenomena that seem to defy understanding, at least in their strange intersections. Too many commentators still maintain the mythologies that globalization is predominantly a neo-liberal economic phenomenon; that nation-states are on the way out, and that terror is something that primarily comes from below. Global Matrix exposes those half-truths, though without simply turning them on their head. Half-truths have a habit of being just that—half true. The book sets out to confront the problems of understanding with a dual emphasis on critically mapping the cultural politics of the present, and setting these phenomena in the context of deep continuities from the past. The two authors write independently but in continual dialogue as they attempt to answer four main questions. What is the cultural-political nature of contemporary globalization? How adequate, particularly in the context of globalizing nation-states, is a politics of nationalism? How are we to understand new and old nations in the context of changes across the late twentieth century and into the present? Where does national violence come from and what does it mean for a globalizing war on terror? Global Matrix confronts mythologies and opens debate.