Critical Views of September 11


Book Description

An international collection of scholars turn their attention to September 11, offering fresh insights from Africa, Eurasia, Surope, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Original.




Understanding September 11


Book Description

Some of the nation's most respected thinkers share their insights into the attacks of September 11, including Robert O. Keohane, David Heid, Saskia Sassen, Olivier Roy, and many others. Original.




The Long Shadow of 9/11


Book Description

This book provides a multifaceted array of answers to the question, In the ten years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, how has America responded? In a series of essays, RAND authors lend a farsighted perspective to the national dialogue on 9/11's legacy. The essays assess the military, political, fiscal, social, cultural, psychological, and even moral implications of U.S. policymaking since 9/11. Part One of the book addresses the lessons learned from America's accomplishments and mistakes in its responses to the 9/11 attacks and the ongoing terrorist threat. Part Two explores reactions to the extreme ideologies of the terrorists and to the fears they have generated. Part Three presents the dilemmas of asymmetrical warfare and suggests ways to resolve them. Part Four cautions against sacrificing a long-term strategy by imposing short-term solutions, particularly with respect to air passenger security and counterterrorism intelligence. Finally, Part Five looks at the effects of the terrorist attacks on the U.S. public health system, at the potential role of compensation policy for losses incurred by terrorism, and at the possible long-term effects of terrorism and counterterrorism on American values, laws, and society.--Publisher description.




America and Its Critics


Book Description

No other country in the world evokes such contrasting sentiments as the United States of America. This is not new, but it has become particularly virulent in recent years. The reason is simple: after the end of the cold war America has remained the only super power in the world. Or rather, it has become a veritable hyper-power without apparent limits to the exercise of its power. The fate of the world lies in large part in its hands. This book analyses the most widespread criticisms of American democracy – namely , that it is plebiscitary, devoid of voters, unduly favours the rich, and imperial. It shows that these criticisms fail to hit the mark. Yet even if its vices are fewer and different from what its critics often claim, American democracy cannot be read as an exemplary catalogue of virtues, as its apologists would have it. Resting on contradictions rather than coherence, American democracy cannot be seen as a model and even less as an ideology. Rather it should be understood as a method. Clearing away the misunderstandings and prejudices that cloud contemporary debates about America, this book brings out with exceptional clarity the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the American democratic experience. In a century when no country can hope to escape from the influence of American power, it is vital to understand both.




September 11 in History


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Table of contents




Understanding Post-9/11 Afghanistan


Book Description

9/11 and the subsequent war on terror have misleadingly reinforced the idea of a world politics based on a 'civilizational' clash. While post-9/11 Afghan society appears to be troubled with a conflict between so-called Islamic-terrorist and secular-democratic forces, the need for an alternative understanding to pave the way for peace has become paramount. This book uses a critical theoretical perspective to highlight the hidden political and economic factors underlying the so-called civilizational conflict in post-9/11 Afghanistan. It further demonstrates how a post-Islamic humanist discourse has the potential to not only carve the way for peace amidst dangerous entanglement between politics and religion in post-9/11 Afghanistan, but also vindicate Islam of its unjustified denigration in the contemporary world.




The Selling of 9/11


Book Description

The Selling of 9/11 argues that the marketing and commodification of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reveal the contradictory processes by which consumers in the United States (and around the world) use, communicate, and construct national identity and their sense of national belonging through cultural and symbolic goods. Contributors illuminate these processes and make important connections between myths of nation, practices of mourning, theories of trauma, and the politics of post-9/11 consumer culture. Their essays take critical stock of the role that consumer goods, media and press outlets, commercial advertising, marketers and corporate public relations have played in shaping cultural memory of a national tragedy.




Recovering 9/11 in New York


Book Description

This collection of essays offers a rich variety of approaches to how people and institutions in greater New York have sought to find meaning in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, now a decade on. The views and practices documented here join memory, recovery, and rebuilding together to form a vital new chapter in New York’s metropolitan history. Contributors contest the dominant nationalist narrative about 9/11 to generate a more local and socially-engaged form of scholarship that connects directly with the experiences of people who lived or came to work in New York that fateful day and the years that followed. In doing so, these essays give academics and clinical professionals an opportunity to reflect upon and work with the people of a community – in this case, metropolitan New York – as essential partners, and even the main protagonists, in creating new paradigms to capture the significance of these events and their aftermath. The collection is comprised of sixteen essays by experts drawn from a wide range of scholarly and professional fields. They investigate how people across the New York metropolitan region initially responded to and have since remembered the events of September 11th as they rippled out into the city, the surrounding metropolitan region, and the nation at large. They engage directly with the emotional and psychological aftermath of the attacks, approaching the questions of healing and teaching from a variety of institutional, professional, and non-professional perspectives. The volume concludes with a selection of essays that grapple with the challenge of “Representing 9/11.” Contributors to this section evaluate contemporary novels and films that have risked engagement with deep narrative traditions to translate the recent memory of public events into resonant stories and imaginative language. Readers are invited to consider how all these responses – in literature, memorials, media representations, and the words and actions of diverse individuals – still contribute to the complex, yet inescapable challenge of making meaning of 9/11.




The 9/11 Generation


Book Description

Explores how young people from communities targeted in the War on Terror engage with the “political,” even while they are under constant scrutiny and surveillance Since the attacks of 9/11, the banner of national security has led to intense monitoring of the politics of Muslim and Arab Americans. Young people from these communities have come of age in a time when the question of political engagement is both urgent and fraught. In The 9/11 Generation, Sunaina Marr Maira uses extensive ethnography to understand the meaning of political subjecthood and mobilization for Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American youth. Maira explores how young people from communities targeted in the War on Terror engage with the “political,” forging coalitions based on new racial and ethnic categories, even while they are under constant scrutiny and surveillance, and organizing around notions of civil rights and human rights. The 9/11 Generation explores the possibilities and pitfalls of rights-based organizing at a moment when the vocabulary of rights and democracy has been used to justify imperial interventions, such as the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maira further reconsiders political solidarity in cross-racial and interfaith alliances at a time when U.S. nationalism is understood as not just multicultural but also post-racial. Throughout, she weaves stories of post-9/11 youth activism through key debates about neoliberal democracy, the “radicalization” of Muslim youth, gender, and humanitarianism.




Reign of Terror


Book Description

A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 "An impressive combination of diligence and verve, deploying Ackerman’s deep stores of knowledge as a national security journalist to full effect. The result is a narrative of the last 20 years that is upsetting, discerning and brilliantly argued." —The New York Times "One of the most illuminating books to come out of the Trump era." —New York Magazine An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian direction For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, the era pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance; weakened the rule of law through indefinite detentions; sanctioned torture; and manipulated the truth about it all. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized feature of American politics and national security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home, as the summer of 2020 showed. A politically divided and economically destabilized country turned the War on Terror into a cultural—and then a tribal—struggle. It began on the ideological frontiers of the Republican Party before expanding to conquer the GOP, often with the acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Today’s nativist resurgence walked through a door opened by the 9/11 era. And that door remains open. Reign of Terror shows how these developments created an opportunity for American authoritarianism and gave rise to Donald Trump. It shows that Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to dismantle the War on Terror after killing Osama bin Laden. By the end of his tenure, the war had metastasized into a bitter, broader cultural struggle in search of a demagogue like Trump to lead it. Reign of Terror is a pathbreaking and definitive union of journalism and intellectual history with the power to transform how America understands its national security policies and their catastrophic impact on civic life.