ABSTRACT
The “War on Terror” was declared by the USA in response to a new kind of war, “global terrorism.” The development of counter-terrorism at home and pre-emptive war abroad signified a major change in how the USA, the only global superpower, was going to meet the new political and military challenges in the post-Cold War era. Yet while we are told “the world changed forever” by the events of September 11, this ignores the way earlier postCold War challenges of civil war, genocide, and terrorism in the 1990s had already begun to shape Western military and security policies about intervention and conflict prevention. Global terrorism and the War on Terror are only one action-reaction pair in the West’s security responses to the new forms of political violence since the end of the Cold War. A new lexicon of political violence has been coined to describe new forms of intra-state or non-state violence and warfare-”ethnic cleansing,” “urbicide,” “genocide,” “terrorism,” and “new wars”—and Western responses to this violence including humanitarian intervention,” “human rights war,” “perpetual war,” “pre-emptive war,” and “war against terror.” Alongside these forms of war, I will argue, we have also seen the emergence of a new “therapeutic security paradigm” in which external intervention is justified on the grounds that either trauma in war-affected populations or irrational conflict in putatively “failed states” is the basic source of terror. Meanwhile, under changing legitimating regimes, the project of “global liberal peace” remains an extension of military power.
