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This chapter discusses the second phase of UN involvement in Iraq, which seemed to herald the emergence of the Security Council as a New World Order Policeman. The Security Council’s capacity to legitimize the use of force provided a legal basis for international action to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. The chapter recounts the diplomatic and military success of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm — mandated to compel the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait and conducted by a coalition of states — drawing legitimacy from Security Council decisions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Chapter VII also provided a newly assertive basis for traditional activities, such as ceasefire implementation and border-monitoring tasks, the Council gave to a new mission, UNIKOM, deployed along the border between Iraq and Kuwait. This new police role for UN peace operations was part of a larger ‘New World Order’ heralded by President George H. W. Bush, which seemed to hold the promise of an international rule of law, enforced by a united P-5 operating through the Security Council.

Despite the unprecedented millenarian pluralism in contemporary America, the varieties—religious, secular, and improvisational—have been integrated by the wide acceptance of a unifying conspiracy theory commonly denoted by the phrase New World Order. This chapter examines its disparate origins, for it appears to have developed separately out of religious and secular ideas that subsequently converged. New World Order theories claim that both past and present events must be understood as the outcome of efforts by an immensely powerful but secret group to seize control of the world. The idea of the New World Order as a sinister development draws on two distinct streams of ideas that evolved separately but eventually converged: millenarian Christianity and political pseudoscholarship. Its speculations about the end-times led to scenarios in which a diabolical figure—the Antichrist—would fasten its grip upon the world.

New World Order theory claimed to provide an overarching explanation for contemporary politics by fitting all events into a single scenario: a diabolically clever and unscrupulous secret organization was in the process of seizing control of the world. The New World Order came to include highly specific claims about both the identities of the conspirators and the means they would employ to seize power and defeat their opponents. Among the latter techniques, three allegations were particularly significant: that black helicopters are tangible evidence of the conspiracy's existence, that a network of concentration camps is being readied to incarcerate dissenters, and that a technology of mind control has been developed in order to make the rest of the population docile and malleable. New World Order beliefs had the special advantage of speaking with equal force to both the religiously and the secularly inclined.

Since its inception in the mid-1970s, Islamic finance was been firmly embedded within the US-centred international economic order under the tutelage of Saudi-supported pan-Islamism. With the end of the Cold War and the increased globalisation of the economy, new sets of rules, norms and institutions began to emerge. The position of Islamic finance is paradoxical. On one hand, Islamic finance thrived. But political Islam grew more diverse and complicated, and was designated in many influential circles as the successor of Communism as the main enemy of the post-Cold War period. Adding to this is the events of September 11th, which bolstered the view of Islam as the new enemy in the West. As the war against terrorism came to be the staple of world politics, many Islamic institutions came under attack and their integration in the global economy suffered a severe blow. This chapter discusses the evolution of global politics, Islamic finance and Islamist politics over three periods, beginning its discussion with the later stages of the Cold War (1917 to 89), during which the first aggiornamento of Islamic finance took place. It then discusses the ‘New World Order’ that followed the end of the Cold War (1990 to 2001) and ends by examining the ‘New New World Order’ which was ushered in by the events of September 11, 2001. Each of the periods in the chapter was characterised by different political alignments and priorities, different forms of Islamic finance and different types of Islamist movements.

The Oklahoma City bombing brought New World Order ideas to the public attention. A segment of American culture straddles the divide between mainstream and deviant and encompasses millions of people: the UFO community. Those who are interested in UFOs, believe in them, or claim to have been contacted or abducted by them form a subculture knitted together by lecture circuits, Web sites, magazines, and conventions. Attitudes about UFOs contain the seeds of conspiracist thinking, for public attitudes are clearly at variance with the official position that there is no credible evidence that UFOs exist. Receptivity to New World Order ideas in some UFO circles was facilitated by two legends peculiar to the ufology milieu: the “men in black” story and the tale of underground bases. Gradually, the New World Order had found its way into UFO literature. The advantage for New World Order ideas of being placed in a UFO context has been a reduction in stigma.

New World Order ideas about a coming global tyranny coalesced with UFO conspiracist theories in the 1990s. Their union was exemplified in the works of two conspiracists, Jim Keith and David Icke. Comparison of Keith and Icke is instructive not simply to demonstrate their similarities but also to illuminate their differences. Keith, a professional conspiracy theorist, unraveled the plots that allegedly drove history. Icke, by contrast, began his journey to conspiracism in environmental politics and the New Age. Keith drew on the entire paraphernalia of New World Order conspiracy theories and published three lists of federal emergency management agency concentration-camp locations, together with a map. Icke integrates the concept of a malevolent serpent race with the more conventional conspiracism. Keith's final speculations and Icke's recent work, however, fall clearly into the category of improvisational millennialism. Both lay out end-of-history scenarios in which good and evil must fight a final battle.

Millennialism and New World Order conspiracy theories have been closely intertwined. They seemed to provide a way of predicting the emergence of the Antichrist. Among the conspiracy-minded, millennialism has included a generalized belief in the end of history, attempts to fuse alien arrival with Christian millennialism, the addition of non-Western millenarian ideas, and even the belief that millennialism itself is part of the conspirators' plot. UFO writers have been able to link ideas about extraterrestrials with more traditional apocalyptic expectations. The millennium is incrementally achieved through a gradualism that makes apocalyptic disasters unnecessary. Bridging mechanisms are organizational devices that link the domain of stigmatized knowledge to accepted forms of political expression. Three bridging mechanisms of particular significance are: the cultivation of crossover audiences, the development of alternative communications systems, and the indivisibility of the stigmatized knowledge domain.

New World Order adherents can either ignore or adopt racist and anti-Semitic ideas, but their constructs have spread rapidly. Some New World Order ideas in ufology have been free of any overt racial or religious bias. UFO conspiracists often reproduce the biases of nineteenth-century American nativism, concentrating on the malevolence of the three groups that obsessed nativists in that century: Catholics, Freemasons, and Jews. This chapter discusses the place Catholics, Freemasons, and Jews occupied in nativist thought, and the role they play in contemporary ufology. As conspiracy theories have become increasingly broad and multilayered, they have identified an ever-wider array of conspiratorial agents. Jesuits figure prominently in contemporary UFO conspiracy theories because, as a tightly structured order, they can be accommodated among the secret societies that obsess conspiracists.

This chapter looks to the real “New World Order.” Conventionally, international relations as well as international law concentrated on the interactions of nation-states. On this model, the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Kenya, Mexico, and the Bahamas, for example, are principally the irreducible units. Recent thinking emphasizes that instead, international relations more and more consists of executive, legislative, and judicial officials directly reaching out to their foreign counterparts to share information, forge ongoing networks, coordinate cooperation, and construct new frameworks. The traditional nation-state has today become “disaggregated,” dealing with its peers less as monolithic sovereign states than through these more specialized “global networks.” Notably, the counterparts that officials of one state seek out in others tracks the divisions of separation of powers: executives to executives, judges to judges, legislators to legislators. How such transnational, interdepartmental networking affects each branch of government within a given state is another matter.

This chapter focuses on the evolution of civil society participation in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process and the rise of “multistakeholderism” as a new principle with the potential to inform more of information and communications technology (ICT) global governance. After discussing the role of the WSIS in fostering a new trilateral relationship among governments, private industry, and civil society and in promoting international diplomacy, the chapter looks at the Carlsbad Treaty of 1819, the debate over the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), the Global Information Infrastructure Initiative, and the Working Group on Internet Governance.

The two unrelated events of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the allied victory in the Persian Gulf War made the year 1991 a significant turning point for both Moscow and Washington. A full fifteen nations emerged from the shell of the former Soviet Union, while revolutions in the formerly communist managed states of East Europe led to the emergence of democratic forms in all of them. The resulting Russian state was much smaller and weaker than the Soviet state that it supplanted. In contrast, American power surged forth with the coordinated victory in the Persian Gulf War over Iraq, after its invasion of Kuwait, that restored U.S. military credibility after the quagmire of the War in Southeast Asia. New doctrinal formulations emerged on both sides with the new Russian Constitution of 1993 that paralled the rise of the Yeltsin government, and with the New World Order as articulated for a time by the George H.W. Bush administration. The resulting imbalance of power was a major change from the dynamics of the Cold War but also a prod to the ambitions of Russian leaders like Vladimir Putin. However, balance remained with the mutual negotiations that characterized START diplomacy.

Critics of Islamic finance focus on the political mischief of Islamic banks on domestic and international terrain. The suspicion surrounding Islamic banks rests on the syllogism: political Islam at the domestic and international level requires financial resources, Islamic banks are committed to Islam and have vast financial resources; therefore, Islamic banks are likely to advance the political goals of potentially subversive Islamic groups. Do Islamic banks have a domestic or international political agenda? Do they play a role in promoting radical Islam and international terrorism? The answer is that they usually do not. Banks, by virtue of being part of the existing power structure, have a strong status quo orientation. However, there are exceptions to that general rule. As will become evident in the succeeding discussions, the benign view is not widely shared among authoritarian leaders, who often see financial Islam as a destabilising force. This chapter discusses the connection between Islamic finance and politics in domestic and international contexts, comparing the evolution of financial Islam in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Sudan and Indonesia. It also discusses the role of Islamic finance in the New World Order and in the post-September 11 world, where Islamic financial institutions have often been considered ‘guilty by association’.

This chapter focuses on two events that preceded the IWY intergovernmental conference and NGO tribune: a “journalists’ encounter” and a seminar on women in development. The journalists’ encounter was organized by the UN’s information agency, which sponsored Third World media fellows and invited scores of other journalists to discuss media coverage of women, an issue of considerable interest among feminist activists and IWY planners. The development seminar was sponsored by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) via the American Association for the Advancement of Science and focused on crafting development strategies that would improve rather than diminish women’s status. Discussions included women’s access to credit, recognition of women’s uncommodified subsistence labors, and greater attention to local priorities and solutions. The chapter explores how these two issues intersected as Third World intellectuals protested against Western domination of media representations, echoing feminist concerns about male-dominated mass communications media.

This chapter develops an eleventh “plague” onto Jacques Derrida's list of ten plagues of the New World Order in his Specters of Marx: the growing global climate crisis. Forging an amalgam from Derrida and Heidegger, it shows that the eleventh plague was not just “one more plague” but was at the heart of the first ten, or at least was intimately implied or caught up in them. In the most summary form, this would be to show that questions of violence, law, and social justice are inseparable from ecological sustainability. A similar move would demonstrate that another candidate for the eleventh plague—the animal holocaust—is closely connected both with the first ten plagues and ecological sustainability, perhaps serving as a bridge of sorts. Derrida's remarks about the animal holocaust, and about human suffering and misery, are set in the context of people's denial, blindness, and refusal to acknowledge these phenomena, and the way that human suffering especially represents the contradiction, the hidden waste, produced by an ever more efficiently functioning system.

Throughout the post-Soviet period various conspiracy theories, most of which have been anti-Western, have moved from the margins of intellectual life to the mainstream of Russian politics. The trauma of the Soviet collapse enabled political elites to offer a conspiratorial reading of the event, and use this both for the purpose of nation-building and for suppressing democratic opposition by accusing its proponents of having destroyed the Soviet Union from within. Russian political elites use conspiracy theories to tackle emerging challenges by dividing Russian society into a majority loyal to the Kremlin, and a minority which is supposedly out to destroy Russia. The state authorities, including top-ranking politicians, seem to be the main producers of this conspiracy discourse; however, they use it with great care, with much reliance on the support of intellectuals who take part both in the production and dissemination of these theories to the general public. Studying conspiracy theories in Russia provides us with a means to comprehend domestic politics and to explain the strategies of the Russian political elite on both the domestic and international levels.