Hacking Networks of Terror

That we in North America face a new kind of threat is beyond question. The attacks against the heartland of the United States, its corporate and military icons, and the killing of over 3,000 civilians, mark a watershed in thinking about security. It is almost two hundred years since civilians in North America have been the object of systematic attack, and even longer since the core of the hegemonic power was struck from the periphery. The important analytical and political questions are What kind of threat do we face? What is the appropriate response to that threat? In other words, what are the appropriate ways to think about dealing with a threat from a nonstate actor with no fixed location or permanently defined territorial assets?

September 11 in Comparative Perspective: The Antiterrorism Campaigns of Germany and Japan

For the United States, September 11 is a turning point.; For Japan and Germany it brought a sense of déjà vu. The United States’ experience with terrorism is not unique, but it is distinctive. How other states, here Japan and Germany, have dealt with terrorism may help put the events of September 11 and their aftermath into perspective. Japan and Germany were not as successful in stemming terrorism as their governments and people would have liked. An analysis of their policies sheds new light on this turn in world politics.

Rational Extremism: Understanding Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century

In the last decade, the field of international relations has undergone a revolution in conflict studies. Where earlier approaches attempted to identify the attributes of individuals, states, and systems that produced conflict, the “rationalist approach to war” now explains violence as the product of private information with incentives to misrepresent, problems of credible commitment, and issue indivisibilities. In this new approach, war is understood as a bargaining failure that leaves both sides worse off than had they been able to negotiate an efficient solution. This rationalist framework has proven remarkably general—being applied to civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and interstate wars—and fruitful in understanding not only the causes of war but also war termination and conflict management. Interstate war is no longer seen as sui generis, but as a particular form within a single, integrated theory of conflict.

The Globalization of Informal Violence, Theories of World Politics, and the “Liberalism of Fear”

The attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 have incalculable consequences for domestic politics and world affairs. Reliable predictions about these consequences are impossible. However, it may be worthwhile, even at this early point, to reflect on what these acts of violence reveal about the adequacy of our theories of world politics. In what respects have our assumptions and our analytical models helped us to understand these events and responses to them? And in what ways have we been misled by our theories?

Interacting Variables: September 11 and the Role of Ideas and Domestic Politics

The events of September 11 can be taken as a good place to explore the interaction of variables in explaining events. We know that many variables are at play in most complex situations. Taking account of them all is impossible, and even investigating several is messy. One way to tackle this problem is to pay closer attention to the interaction of variables--not to look at all of them but to explore carefully where they intersect and to detect the mechanisms of their relationships.Many of the quarrels in our field arise out of a desire to assert aggressively the predominance of a particular, favored variable. Wearying of this sort of combat, some analysts have become more interested in examining the connections among variables, the ways in which one parameter acquires strength or signals causality because of its interaction with another. The events of September 11 show the values of this approach. It will surely involve some loss of parsimony, but it may lead to important insights and research programs. To pursue it, we need models of causality that work with interactions.

Symbols, Strategies, and Choices for International Relations Scholarship After September 11

Pundits and officials have been remarkably united in their assertions that the “war on terrorism” is fundamentally a new kind of war. This is troubling, because it suggests that the world has stepped into terra incognita. No one—to draw a recent comparison—has suggested that this past winter's standoff between India and Pakistan is fundamentally new, even though both nations are now nuclear powers. Indeed, in spite of the high stakes in Kashmir, the conflict feels familiar, partly because the two countries have long been mutually suspicious and often hostile, and because they are two states; we know how to think and to talk about them. And, one hopes, policymakers know how to reduce these tensions. In contrast, the war on terrorism has an almost surreal quality because of the utter novelty of the idea of a superpower fighting against a transnational, clandestine network or against the even more nebulous phenomenon of terrorism itself. Like the U.S. government, international relations scholars were caught largely unaware and were initially unprepared to offer much guidance on how the new crisis might develop.