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Chapter 2 presents a revisionist account of Osama Bin Laden’s personal experience of the West and his attachments to Britain. Bin Laden was born in 1957 in Riyadh, the only child of Muhammed Bin Laden’s tenth wife, A’alia Ghanem. After his parents’ divorce, Bin Laden spent his childhood years in the mother’s household. His father, a rich entrepreneur, died in an airplane accident when Osama was ten. The young Bin Laden had a cosmopolitan and in some ways rather secular upbringing. The turning point in his life came in 1976, when as a student he was exposed to Egyptian Islamist radicals in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda was founded in August 1988 in Bin Laden’s house in Peshawar, Pakistan. It was, from the start, dedicated to a global jihad. The chapter uses Bin Laden’s personal journal and files taken from his house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and recently published books written by his close associates, to correct simplistic views of Bin Laden as a “man in a cave.”

In a globalizing world, members of the same religious community, anchored in different parts of the world, have greater capacity to increase their cultural, social, and economic links with one another. Ironically, this chapter points out how the rise of religious pluralism amid globalization has also strengthened the hand of Muslim leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, intent on destroying pluralism altogether. Al-Qaeda preaches peace but glorifies violence. Bin Laden’s view that violent jihad is an obligation on individual believers isolates him from leading Muslim scholars and jurists. Still, he has been able to gather and hold a sizable following, through dramatic actions, but also through the very same communications technologies that drive religious pluralism and create soft power in world affairs.

Chapter 8 is woven around the author's trip to Saudi Arabia six months prior to 9/11. There are two faces of Saudi Arabia: Mecca, the birthplace of Islam and the prophet Mohammed, and Riyadh in the Nadj region, the home of Mohammed bin Abd al-Wahhab and the birthplace of Osama Bin Laden. The chapter explores the tensions between the two kingdoms, and the connections between Islam and Islamist extremism, especially as manifested in Saudi understandings of jihad and tawhid. It traces the pernicious Wahhabi public theology from its origins in the 13th century to its ideological covenant with the House of Saud. The author's experiences with Saudi officials, religious minorities in the kingdom, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and the State Department lead him to conclude that Wahhabism will remain a source of terrorism, and a threat to U.S. national security, until the Saudis contain or destroy it via political reform grounded in religious freedom.

This chapter describes the relationship between Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with a focus on the development of a post-9/11 strategy, by examining al-Zawahiri's brief strategic template, which he offers in his post-9/11 book Knights Under the Prophet's Banner. Osama Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda, the first organization dedicated to global jihad, in 1988, with the help of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Together they began a series of bombings in U.S. embassies, which eventually culminated in the 9/11 attack. The success of al-Qaeda efforts can be attributed to the organization's ideology and strategy. They believe they could defeat the U.S. using the same strategy they have used in defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The first task in their strategy was to convince their own members and allies that the United States was not all-powerful and impossible to defeat.

George W. Bush regarded economic globalization and democratic enlargement as insufficient to contain Iraq, Iran, and other “rogue states.” As a result, he stocked his administration with hard-line Cold Warriors whose strategy for handling regional troublemakers like Saddam Hussein came straight out of Eisenhower’s America—rollback. When Al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. homeland on 11 September 2001, the Bush administration unleashed a “global war on terror,” expanding the Cold War national security state and embracing preventive war as the surest guarantees against a second 9/11. In the process, the new “green threat” of radical Islam replaced the old “red threat” of international communism. The initial testing ground for the Bush Doctrine was Iraq, where an American blitzkrieg rapidly morphed into a brutal low-intensity war against insurgents which blackened America’s reputation and strengthened the hand of Muslim extremists. Although Bush #43 made exporting “freedom” a key goal during his second term, by early 2009 rogue state rollback had backfired in the Middle East.

This Introduction explains how the book addresses issues around the Western wing of the global jihadist movement. It is based on an extensive data collection relating to about 6,400 Western residents and citizens from twenty countries who committed terrorism-related crimes or died fighting with Al Qaeda or an aligned foreign terrorist group since the early 1990s. The Introduction argues that the diffusion of jihadist extremism in Western democracies was driven by the strategic objectives of Osama Bin Laden and the global movement he spearheaded rather than, as is often said, by local grievances of Western Muslims. Bin Laden was a political entrepreneur. His singular accomplishment was to give extremist Islamism a new strategic direction by focusing on a war against the “far enemy,” the United States and its Western allies, on the assumption that relentless terrorism against American and Western targets would compel the United States to withdraw support from the Muslim world and leave Muslim governments vulnerable to the jihadist insurgents. The chapter reviews a range of ideas about the causes of terrorism and outlines a theory of networked social contagion that explains how jihadism has made inroads in Western democracies.

With the demise of the red threat, Bill Clinton expected globalization to trump militarism and “enlarge” the area of freedom. America’s technological prowess and financial power would contain rogue states, combat international outlaws, and curb ethnic violence. Determined to broker peace between Israelis and Arabs and reorient relations with the Muslim world, Clinton developed a policy of “dual containment” directed against Iraq and Iran, two regional troublemakers who threatened Israel’s security and America’s access to Persian Gulf oil. Nevertheless, Clinton’s approach failed to bring peace to the Middle East and did nothing to stem the tide of anti-Americanism unleashed by Islamic extremists like Osama Bin Laden, who were angered by Westernization, U.S. support for Israel, and the growing American military presence in the region. As the 1990s drew to a close, radical Islam seemed destined to become what Bolshevism had been eighty years earlier—an existential threat which must be destroyed if it could not be contained.

This chapter highlights transnational interactions that are exemplified by accounts of the interactions between Osama Bin Laden and Pakistani Sunni militant groups. It acknowledges the role of the army, specifically the military intelligence known as the Pakistani secret services (ISI), an institution which decided to use jihadi groups against India in a more systematic manner in the 1990s. Networks of personal relationships often played a substantial role, especially among the former Islamic volunteers who fought in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1992. The chapter also highlights the Uzbeks and Tajiks that fought shoulder to shoulder between 1992 and 1997. It discusses the consequence that members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan were able to find in the refuge and protection of the upper Gharm valley in Tajikistan between 1998 and 2000.

Part Three of the book turns to the question of international society and international relations after September 11, starting with a chapter by Richard Falk, who argues that international society remains a useful starting point for studying today's globalized world because it is predicated on the dual assertions of international anarchy and a (potentially) global normative order – a duality that provides a fertile breeding ground for different accounts of what the world should look like. The author discusses the changing geopolitical context of globalization and global governance, suggesting that if globalization is to be retained as a label for the current phase of international relations, its net must be cast far more broadly than it has been – since the events of 2001 it needs to be interpreted far less economistically, and more comprehensively. The last part of the chapter considers approaches to global governance, international society, and world society given this altered understanding of ‘globalization’. The author identifies five overlapping accounts of globalization that provide alternative and competing pictures of the future of global governance and international society: corporate globalization, which refers to the growth of transnational business and the forging of common interests and values based on neoliberal economics; civic globalization, which in many ways is a civil society response to the corporate variety and has manifested itself in a number of transnational anti‐globalization movements, but has now moved beyond straightforward opposition towards the articulation of new global political agendas; imperial globalization, which is a US‐led form of globalization that seeks not the creation of a genuinely multinational neoliberal global economy but rather the extension of American power and the satisfaction of US interests narrowly conceived; apocalyptic globalization, the variant promoted by Osama Bin Laden and his followers and aims to overthrow the society of states and replace it with an Islamic world state; and regional globalization, in which a number of regions around the world are developing their own subsystems as a way of moderating pressures created by the global flow of capital. The author argues that none of these forms of globalization is likely to predominate completely, but that the relationship between them is likely to shape the nature of global governance for the foreseeable future.

This chapter studies the process that led to the Saudi decision to reestablish a U.S. military basing presence in 1990. Though Saudi Arabia maintained its partnership with the U.S. military throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. was not given control of local bases after 1962 until the First Gulf War. The external threat posed by Iraq was the main driver behind convincing the Saud monarchy to allow a U.S. military basing presence. From 1990 to 2003, the kingdom confronted major domestic security challenges, including several terrorist attacks motivated by the U.S. military basing presence, but it was not until Saddam Hussein was finally removed in 2003 that the U.S. military was asked to terminate its basing presence. Iran also posed less of a threat to the kingdom since U.S. military bases surrounded Iran on both its eastern and western borders, including in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

This chapter begins by describing how US drones eliminated many of China’s most wanted Muslim separatists in Pakistan beginning in 2009. The chapter describes how China’s general strategy has been not to engage with extremists, but to ensure that it doesn’t get on the wrong side of them, which has often put China at odds with the United States. This chapter expands on the recent history of how China has shifted its position on extremism in South Asia and become more comfortable with the idea of the United States continuing to provide security in Afghanistan. It explores the limits of Sino–US cooperation, including a hypothetical seizure of Pakistani nuclear weapons in the case of the state destabilizing. In the wake of the killing of Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan leaned on China as relations with Washington plummeted. However at the same time Chinese officials were assuring their US counterparts that they shared concerns about Pakistan’s extremist problem and would not “backfill for the Americans.” Furthermore, in recent years China has been more cooperative with the US in its work to leave behind a stable and secure Afghanistan.