The War on Terror

Paper Summary:

This paper explores the different ways in which al Queda terrorism shatters the key presuppositions of liberal democratic societies. It looks at how societies marked by the war on terror are likely to redefine citizenship and political community in ways antithetical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.

From the Paper:

"The perpetual fear of arbitrary terrorist violence can only amplify these morbid sentiments and the disintegration of civic life which occurs in crime ridden areas offers an instructive example of the effects which free floating fear and anxiety can produce. Fear has an unmistakeably atomising logic, in such climates freedom, frequently conceptualised as a risk in itself, invariably loses ground to the imperative of security; Bigos description of the war on terror as a state of mind captures a very real dimension of it. Equally certain, however, are the profound institutional changes that accompany this change; the war on terrors implications for civil-military relations point towards a radical departure from the structure normally associated with constitutional states. US military planners have been somewhat more prescient than their civilian counterparts in drawing out the logic of this development, and the effects of the blurring boundaries between war-peace civilian-combatants were cogently laid out in the doctrine of Fourth Generation Warfare."

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