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The September 11th Victims Compensation Fund can only hesitatingly find its place within a comprehensive study of reparation programs. While the origin of the Fund lies in the political exigencies surrounding a perceived threat to the security of the United States, it more accurately reflects the desire by the U.S. Congress to ensure the viability of its nation’s air carriers. Unlike traditional reparations which are closely related to a process of social reintegration of the victim, fostering civic trust and social solidarity, the Fund was not established to bring justice to the victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Also, unlike traditional reparations, the Fund did not seek to serve as a mechanism of corrective or distributive justice as a result of an authoritarian domestic regime or internal conflict. It was initially created out of fear that recourse to the U.S. courts would threaten the precarious financial health of the airline industry. Implicitly, however, such pragmatism reflected a desire by lawmakers that the government be seen as doing all it could to ease the pain of those who suffered so greatly on September 11, 2001. Initial motivations for the program aside, there is no question that the compensation scheme has since taken on a life of its own. Ultimately, the Fund’s contribution to any reparations case-study lies in its cautionary tale about the creation of elaborate administrative schemes that try to individualize recoveries as the mechanisms through which to compensate victims.

Many of the key actors in the 9/11 drama articulated their grievances using archaic religious language. But the very fact that the code involved is ancient while the behaviour that needs to be explained is recent suggests the inadequacy of causal theories that overemphasize the religious element. This chapter examines whether non-religious motives may well have been predominant in the 9/11 mission. To pursue this suggestion, the inquiry is divided into two parts, discussing first the perpetrators and then the instigators and supervisors of the plot.

In times of crisis, the press acts in a patriotic role, fostering national unity and defending American institutions. After George W. Bush was inaugurated, the press ignored evidence that Al Gore had as much of a claim to be the victor in Florida as Bush, shaping stories about postelection analyses of the Florida vote to make only a Bush victory seem legitimate. On September 11, journalists filled in rhetorical gaps in Bush's performance, then changed the criteria by which the president was judged.

This chapter charts the contours of the cultural environment inhabited by civil society organizations in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. While the majority of these organizations continued to produce positive or neutral messages about Islam, journalists were heavily influenced by the emotional appeals of a small group of anti-Muslim organizations—despite their meager social and financial resources. More than a decade after the September 11 attacks, anti-Muslim organizations enjoy considerable influence upon media, government, and public opinion. Meanwhile, the influence of mainstream Muslim organizations has substantially decreased. How did mainstream Muslim organizations lose so much of their influence within the American public sphere? How did anti-Muslim fringe organizations captivate the American media, government, and broader public?

This concluding chapter assesses the debate over humanitarian intervention in the light of the events of September 11, 2001. On the one hand, it can be argued that 9/11 has reversed the momentum behind the norm of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’. In the course of waging the war on terrorism, the powers of sovereign states have been increased and the willingness of Western states to criticize the treatment of civilians within other sovereign jurisdictions appears to have weakened. On the other, there are three reasons why humanitarian intervention – and the issues associated with it – will continue to preoccupy scholars and statesmen in a post-September 11th world. First, the terrorist attacks of 2001 have reinforced the view that instability within or collapse of a state anywhere in the world can have implications that reach far wider than that particular region. Second, the debate about what constraints should be placed on the use of force – particularly those related to proper authority – are as relevant for the ‘war on terror’ as they are for humanitarian intervention. Finally, as the missions in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 have shown, humanitarian rationale are all-important in justifying the use of force in international society, even when other motives are at work.

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 chapter begins with presenting some background on the painting September 11 used on the cover of this book, which is by Russian artist Akmal Mizshakarol. It then presents the question posed by the book: how do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them? The chapter suggests that transcending violence is forged by the capacity to generate, mobilize, and build the moral imagination.

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.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to answer the question of how a small group of anti-Muslim organizations commandeered the collective identity of Islam across so much of the American public sphere. It examines how collective actors compete to shape shared understandings of Islam within the American media, the policy process, and everyday life. In so doing, the book provides a new theory of how collective actors create cultural change after major historical ruptures such as the September 11 attacks. The chapter then discusses the study of cultural change with Big Data, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter explains why the impassioned warnings of anti-Muslim fringe organizations overshadowed the dispassionate condemnations of terrorism produced by mainstream organizations with superior financial and social resources after the September 11 attacks. Moreover, it explains how the rise of anti-Muslim fringe organizations within the mass media provoked angry responses from mainstream organizations that only called further attention to these once-obscure actors within the American public sphere. Finally, the chapter explains how consternation about whether and how to respond to the continued rise of the fringe created tension and splintering within the mainstream, and thus further opportunity for fringe organizations to advance their peripheral cultural messages within the media.

Under the presidency of George W. Bush, this chapter argues, religious identities and ethical commitments had a significant impact on U.S. foreign policy—and an even greater impact on perceptions of that policy abroad. The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 and the attacks of September 11, 2001, were critical junctures. The end of the cold war and religious mobilization in U.S. politics coincided with heightened awareness of religious persecution across many countries, culminating in the 1998 legislation. And in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the U.S., the struggle against Islamic radicalism became both a foreign policy priority and a rallying cry in U.S. domestic politics. The worldwide perception of a religious impetus in U.S. foreign policy has had a negative impact on America's standing in the world.

The final two chapters in Part One investigate the evolving research agenda of the English School of International Relations and its contribution to contemporary international relations. In this chapter, the author investigates the emerging dialogue between English School and constructivist approaches in order to explore how they help to understand the post‐September 11 world, arguing, in particular, that, taken together, both English School and constructivist scholarship can add much to the understanding of contemporary international society. The chapter undertakes two tasks, first, it revisits an argument made elsewhere by the author: that although constructivism and the English School share much in common, and there is considerable scope for productive engagement, scholars on both sides are currently mired in an unproductive dialogue of stereotypes. In this dialogue, constructivists draw little more from the English School than the well‐rehearsed proposition that states can form international societies not just systems, and English School scholars focus too heavily on the statist, positivistic form of constructivism associated with the writings of Alexander Wendt – although it is likely to be far more fruitful to see both perspectives as bounded realms of debate, each characterized by significant internal debates over ontology, methods, and ethics. The chapter's second task is to suggest how an enriched dialogue between constructivism and the English School could be productively deployed to grapple with some of the central research questions of the post‐September 11 world: namely, the relationship between power and institutions, international society and world society, and order and justice.

Using beliefs and rumors that emerged during the first days after September 11, this chapter discusses how a culture in crisis uses these tools to make sense out of a disorienting event such as this. Rumor is a truth claim not backed by authoritative information. Whether true or false, it is an expression of a community's collective beliefs. These are especially illustrated in rumors about religious miracles and signs that occurred in the attacks, about groups of Arab Americans who publicly celebrated the event, and about a terrorist who warned his girlfriend about the attack in advance. The chapter analyzes these in terms of the politics of plausibility (the sort of thing Americans are predisposed to believe) and of credibility (the sources that Americans normally trust for reliable information). To flourish in public discourse, a rumor should be both credible and plausible.

This chapter begins with a brief history of the dozens of civil society organizations that worked to shape the representation of Muslims within the American public sphere before the September 11 attacks. These include a diverse array of African American and immigrant Muslim organizations, as well as Jewish, Christian, and nonreligious civil society organizations that became involved in public discussions about Islam during the Arab–Israeli War, the Iranian hostage crisis, and other high-profile events involving Muslims. This broad historical perspective highlights the emergence of mainstream civil society organizations that produced positive or neutral messages about Muslims in the decade before the September 11th attacks, alongside a small group of fringe organizations with predominantly anti-Muslim messages.

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.

The conclusion notes that, while several of the contributors to this book suggest that the United States and Europe may well return to the cooperation of the past, most factors would seem to indicate that the two have entered a new period compared to the cold war years. While the Soviet threat was almost ideally handled by NATO, terrorism is not similarly unifying; America has changed compared to the cold war years, especially because of demographic developments and because of September 11; while in the foreseeable future the EU cannot challenge the US militarily or politically, slowly the EU is defining its own identity and increasing its international influence. On the other hand, a divorce between the two sides of the Atlantic appears unlikely. The two sides may not be as close as during the cold war, but, to the extent that they still need friends and allies, and they do, they will still be forced to look to each other.

Many rumors concerning the September 11 terrorist attacks claimed that the event was in fact caused by a plot secretly planned by a secret group of evil elites. This chapter proposes a methodology of understanding conspiracy theories as an integrated body of beliefs that make sense of a confusing event by connecting it with deeply ingrained cultural values. Conspiracy has the benefit of seeing order in a disorderly event, and giving people a plausible villain to blame. Initially, many Americans assumed that Arab Americans or Muslims were generally aware of the plot and complicit in it; later, more hardy beliefs held that Israelis or Zionists were actually responsible, or that the Bush administration had cynically orchestrated the attacks to shore up its own credibility at home. Increasingly, these conspiracy beliefs express profound distrust of governments and elite groups of intellectuals.