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War On Terror (war + on_terror)
Selected AbstractsFrom September 11th, 2001 to 9-11: From Void to Crisis,INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2009Jack Holland This paper draws on interviews conducted in the days and weeks after the events of September 11th, 2001, analyzing the transition from "September 11th, 2001" to "9-11." That is, from the discursive void that immediately followed the acts of terrorism in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania to the apparently self-evident crisis that the events came to represent in the following days and weeks. First, the paper redresses persistent oversights of discourse-oriented work by recognizing and investigating both the agency of the US general public and the context that official responses were articulated in. Second, the paper serves to denaturalize the construction of 9-11 as crisis, questioning the first and pre-requisite stage of the emerging discourse of the "War on Terror." Theorizing void, crisis and their relationship enables an understanding of how the War on Terror was possible and opens a critical space for its contestation. [source] Institutional Vulnerablity and Opportunity: Immigration and America's "War on Terror"LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 4 2006Elizabeth Heger Boyle New legal realism focuses on the complexity of individual action and the view of law from the "bottom-up." Neoinstitutionalism also suggests that rational-actor models are too simplistic, but spotlights enduring historical effects on individual action and thus tends to view the world from the "top-down." In this article, we seek to marry the two disparate approaches by centering on moments of institutional vulnerability and opportunity when a system can change or be redefined. The terrorist attacks on September 11 provided a unique opportunity for institutional change. Policymakers seized this opportunity to introduce reforms into American immigration law that fundamentally altered how that law is administered. The implications of these legal reforms were to group many migrants into the category of potential "terrorist" and to make it increasingly difficult for any migrant to claim "victim" status. Immigrants responded to these reforms by refraining from public criticism of the United States and by becoming American citizens. We discuss the potential implications of those actions on the institution of citizenship. [source] Legitimizing the "War on Terror": Political Myth in Official-Level RhetoricPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2010Joanne Esch This paper argues that mythical discourse affects political practice by imbuing language with power, shaping what people consider to be legitimate, and driving the determination to act. Drawing on Bottici's (2007) philosophical understanding of political myth as a process of work on a common narrative that answers the human need to ground events in significance, it contributes to the study of legitimization in political discourse by examining the role of political myth in official-level U.S. war rhetoric. It explores how two ubiquitous yet largely invisible political myths, American Exceptionalism and Civilization vs. Barbarism, which have long defined America's ideal image of itself and its place in the world, have become staples in the language of the "War on Terror." Through a qualitative analysis of the content of over 50 official texts containing lexical triggers of the two myths, this paper shows that senior officials of the Bush Administration have rhetorically accessed these mythical representations of the world in ways that legitimize and normalize the practices of the "War on Terror." [source] Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2004Anna M. Agathangelou America's "war on terror" and Al Qaeda's "jihad" reflect mirror strategies of imperial politics. Each camp transnationalizes violence and insecurity in the name of national or communal security. Neoliberal globalization underpins this militarization of daily life. Its desire industries motivate and legitimate elite arguments (whether from "infidels" or "terrorists") that society must sacrifice for its hypermasculine leaders. Such violence and desire draw on colonial identities of Self vs. Other, patriotism vs. treason, hunter vs. prey, and masculinity vs. femininity that are played out on the bodies of ordinary men and women. We conclude with suggestions of a human security to displace the elite privilege that currently besets world politics. [source] Barack and Slumdog MillionaireNEW PERSPECTIVES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2009NATHAN GARDELS President Barack Obama pledged in his first TV interview,with the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya,that America under his watch would "listen with respect and not dictate" to the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has further announced that this country will no longer just throw around its military might but will pursue a "smart power" approach by tempering the use of hard weaponry with the "soft power" of persuasion and cultural attraction. Or, as Madame Secretary's husband Bill has put it, America will now lead through the power of example instead of the example of power. The first exceedingly complex test of Obama's smart power strategy will be how to end George W. Bush's misguided "war on terror" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, keeping al-Qaida at bay without being swallowed by the quagmire of tribal politics. An array of experts from New Delhi to Paris offers their views in this section. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||