ABSTRACT
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington the ensuing political crisis was resolved by invoking categories of warfare. Many commentators discussed matters in terms of “global” wars. Numerous discussions of this supposedly new “global” politics invoked geographical language. The apparent violation of the sanctity of the metropolitan center by terrorists, who had penetrated from peripheral places, reprised the long pattern of dividing the world into wild zones and tame zones, areas of civilization in comparison to residual places of barbarism, somewhere vaguely “out there.” These colonial geographies of empire were quickly reworked into the new language of the “global war on terror.”
