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Discusses the transatlantic drift (or split) that has occurred between the US and Western Europe since the election of George W. Bush in December 2000, and the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 Sept 2001. The further tensions that have arisen since then over the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are discussed, as is the crisis over North Korea and the huge expansion in NATO and in the EU through the entry of Eastern European countries. The author presents speculations on the future of the American–Western European relationship, and forecasts an even further drift apart. This he bases on eight primary reasons, which he discusses in detail. These are: the Cold War is over; unilateralism is growing stronger in the US; the EU is slowly but steadily taking on an ever stronger role; out‐of‐area disputes are becoming increasingly frequent and they have been notoriously difficult to handle for the two sides of the Atlantic; redefinitions of leadership and burdens are always difficult to do; economic disputes are proliferating; even cultural disputes are becoming increasingly numerous; and finally, demographic changes are taking place, particularly on the American side of the Atlantic, that in the long run are likely to challenge the existing relationship.

This short introductory chapter provides a brief analysis of the high‐yield (junk bond) market in the USA in 2001 and 2002, discussing the multitude of influences upon it, including the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It notes that any attempt to compare the impact of these attacks with previous historical events will be flawed because the combination of an act of war committed in the USA at the time of a recession has never before occurred. A table is presented that attempts to sort out the positive and negative effects of individual events and circumstances on the market for high‐yield securities, and a summary is given of the immediate damage to the credit markets in September 2001. It is suggested that there is at least anecdotal evidence of large cash positions sitting on the sidelines globally, so that any recovery could be significant.

The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of the science that has been disseminated over the past decade on the psychological impact of terrorism. Both short- and longer-term research on the psychiatric and medical effects of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is first presented, and then compared to other studies within the United States (e.g., following the Oklahoma City bombing) and internationally (e.g., in Israel, England, Spain, France, etc.). Data are presented on both the general population as well as specific sub-groups that may be vulnerable to negative outcomes (e.g., those directly exposed, children, service professionals, etc.). Overall, this research suggests that while spikes in psychopathology occur immediately following an act of terrorism, these rates decline over time and return to baseline rates 6 to 12 months following the attack. However, specific populations exhibit more chronic rates of psychopathology over time (e.g., populations directly exposed, those with prior psychiatric history, etc.).

Examines the range of responses to the September 11, 2001 (9/11) act of terrorism on the World Trade Center, such as calls for revenge, justice, self‐criticism, repentance, and forgiveness. This is followed by a comparison of Jewish and Christian responses to requests for forgiveness made by perpetrators of atrocities in Nazi Germany and in South Africa. Concludes with the hope that the book will help bring us closer to the biblical vision of love founded on justice, compassion, and self‐transformation.

Following the 9/11 attacks, al‐Qaeda and other terrorist groups pose a threat, operating with global networks and potentially armed with weapons of mass destruction. To counter these threats, US policy‐makers argued that extreme times justify extreme measures. These include pre‐emptive military action to forestall terrorist attacks and new methods of interrogation to uncover them. Just‐war thinking would license neither the new US doctrine of pre‐emption nor the new interrogation techniques. For an absolutist torture is always wrong, but a consequentialist, such as Dershowitz, justifies torture if it could save lives. To understand why torture is wrong we need to deploy all the resources of virtuous consequentialism, attending not just to the consequences but the internal states and character of the torturer and his victim. We want our public servants to be virtuous. Yet we need our special interrogators to be men or women of vice.

Moving to an application of the worldviews of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, this chapter examines the decisions to go to war with Iraq. Beginning with George H.W. Bush, the chapter examines the administration’s policy toward Iraq prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It then analyzes how George H.W. Bush and his administration responded to the invasion. Turning to George W. Bush, the chapter explores the pre-September 11th administration policy toward Iraq and the impact of the September 11th attacks on the United States on that policy. Returning to George H.W. Bush, the chapter explains how the president and his advisors pursued a policy of multilateralism, building a coalition to defend Saudi Arabia and, if necessary, evict Iraq from Kuwait. Finally, the chapter concludes by focusing on George W. Bush’s argument for regime change in Iraq, focusing on how the president and his advisors made that case. Throughout, the chapter demonstrates how the “enlightened” realist and “cowboy” liberal worldviews played a role in each administration’s decisions and policies.

Changes in the nature of warfare are traced from the 1945–89 era of strategic stability through the Balkans imbroglio of the 1990s to the advent of the new threat of global terrorism marked by 9/11. The current fashion, inaugurated by Kaldor and Smith, to talk of ‘new wars’ that have replaced industrial inter‐state war, is criticized. War is a protean monster that regularly changes its nature. It is mistaken to suppose that the latest protean mutation is the form war will henceforth take. Recent trends, including the shift from wars of necessity to wars of choice, have underlined the importance of both moral clarity on why war is being undertaken and of virtuous behaviour by all involved in its conduct. Morality not just provides a necessary external constraint on war but may also furnish both the ground for undertaking military operations and a vital internal tool for their successful conduct.

Chapter 3 uses the case of racial targeting of South Asians—Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs—in the post-9/11 period and their reactions to the targeting to illustrate the importance of religion in shaping the fractured political response to intensified discrimination. The religious identity not only shaped and calibrated the racial targeting but also framed the responses of the South Asian groups and worked against broader panethnic solidarity in opposition to racial hostility.

Chapter 8 examines the increasingly gay-friendly era since the 1990s, during the peak of America’s neoliberal economic order. Queer flight attendants in this era have won more benefits, including flight privileges and health benefits for their domestic partners. Yet just as they have attained parity with their straight peers, all of them have endured unprecedented pay cuts and the loss of collective bargaining power. Along these lines, I consider the plight of disgruntled Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater, who in 2010 walked off his job by deploying the plane’s emergency slide. Slater embodies how male flight attendants, even if they are no longer discriminated against, experience their work as undignified and underpaid in the era of airline deregulation and bankruptcies.

This chapter describes the analytical mechanism of political semiosis, introducing and specifying the representational, demonstrative (or indexical), and performative features. These features are illustrated via descriptions of the experiences and conundrums associated with event characterization, inclusion, and involvement on the morning of September 11, 2001. The coordination of the features of political semiosis can lead to a turning point that is generally recognized and thus lead to an incorporation of eventful ruptures into individual, social and political timelines.

In order to examine the larger theme of religion and violence, this essay describes a course its author regularly teaches on the theme of contested space that is constructed as “sacred” by practitioners of different religious traditions. It focuses on Jerusalem, claimed by rival groups who identify with either Islam or Judaism, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The course objective is threefold: (1) to get students to think about critical theory and method in religion by using concrete examples; (2) to prod them to think about religion as a humanly constructed phenomenon as opposed to a divinely given one; and (3) to get them to reflect critically on how the “religious” intersects with phenomena from which it is customarily differentiated: the political, the ideological, the economic, etc. The present chapter explores these theoretical issues and their practical consequences as they revolve around this specific course, followed by a discussion of the author’s reasons for teaching it.

This chapter situates Concerned Women for America’s focus on sex, gender, and reproductive issues as just one recent manifestation of a longstanding American trend to connect sexual and gendered practices with national strength. Starting with the late nineteenth century and spanning through the twenty-first, the chapter shows how everything from immigration and civil rights to war and Communism have been read as explicitly sexual events. In particular, the chapter gives attention to the rise of the Christian Right and Concerned Women for America. It also considers how President Obama and the attacks of September 11, 2001, have been used as symbols generating new sexualized rhetoric. The chapter concludes that whenever gender, race, and sexual norms have changed, chaos rhetoric from many fronts has emerged to warn of America’s demise, something resolved through conformity with conservative political ideologies.

Through the writings of US poet Charles Bernstein, this chapter examines the tension between affective immediacy and distancing artifice in attempts to read and write our era of globalization. From his late–Cold War essays on Ezra Pound and his post–Cold War writing on the “Poetics of the Americas” to his post-9/11 response to the invasion of Iraq in Girly Man and World on Fire, Bernstein highlights the dichotomy between aesthetic and ideological approaches to contemporary literature and culture, inviting both ideologically suspicious and defen¬sively theological readings of his work. He also exemplifies the related problem of the loss of affect in the distant reading prac¬tices that a global perspective seems to entail. In the tension between ideology and theology, artifice and affect, the chapter locates the implicated position of poem, writer, and critic within the global circulation of capital and the uneven structures of modernity.

Based upon an extended case study of developments in counter-terrorism policy and practice in the UK, this chapter argues that signal crimes frequently play an important role in triggering the reform and development of social institutions. Casting the events of 9/11 as the archetypal signal crime, that has been reinforced by subsequent incidents such as the bombings in London in 2005, it is shown how these signal events have induced profound changes in the ways that nation states think, feel, and act in relation to the risks of terrorism. A particular focus of the analysis is upon tracing the emergence of an innovative, more overt and co-productive approach to counter-terrorist policing.

The conclusion considers the importance of acts of piracy, terrorism, and narcotrafficking in helping to consolidate and expand the reach of U.S. state power in a post 9/11 world. The U.S. state has grown and been strengthened by framing certain behaviors as requiring extralegal measures to suppress acts of “inexplicable villainy.” Indeed, perhaps this is why piracy continues to matter. Debates around the existence of Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes point to the capaciousness of the language of terrorism, which has been borrowed from the language of piracy in legitimizing extrajudicial expressions of state power. Indeed, the existence of extrajudicial spaces and expressions of state power, which run counter to the protections guaranteed by the state, have made apparent the need to sustain and perpetuate the language of piracy. It would seem that piracy’s significance has not diminished in the years since the Civil War’s conclusion.