This chapter gives brief descriptions of Post-WWII interstate conflicts linked to the main phases in great power tensions: the bipolar Cold War, with Korean war 1950, the Viet Nam war 1965, Interventions, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, the Détente and unipolar conflict resolving world that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the multipolar world that is emerging thereafter with terrorism, Russian intervention in Georgia and war in Ukraine and sharp tensions between the Koreas and in the East and South China Seas.

Wartime leaders need to carry their armies and sometimes their nations through trying ordeals. Accordingly, there are occasions that call for effective rhetoric. This section consists of fourteen speeches during wartime or in the face of impending war. The speakers include Shakespeares Henry V, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Duff Cooper, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush.

This chapter compares the values, beliefs, and policy actions of the Clinton administration after the end of the Cold War and those of the George W. Bush administration after the events of September 11, 2001.

This chapter explores terrorism, terrorist groups, and potential solutions to terrorism. It discusses conceptual and legal definitions of terrorism. It then provides historical context, describing terrorist waves driven by ideologies such as anarchism, anti-colonialism, New Left perspectives, and various religions. The chapter looks at who becomes a terrorist, taking account of theories of grievance, radicalization, recruitment by terrorist groups, lone wolf terrorism, and foreign fighter recruitment. It considers relationships between regime type and terrorism, examining why democracies, anocracies, and autocracies respectively might be more or less likely to attract terrorist violence, and exploring issues such as media coverage, grievance, and repression. Terrorist tactics and how these might diffuse across groups are discussed, as are terrorist group cooperation and state sponsorship of terrorism. The chapter also looks at the challenges of crafting effective counterterrorism policy, with a focus on deradicalization. It then applies many of these concepts to a quantitative study on whether targeting terrorist group leaders helps stop terrorism, and a case study of al-Qaeda.

This chapter delves into one of DeLillo's frequently recurring themes, terrorism, yet develops the ways in which different novels' approaches to understanding terrorism significantly differ despite their surface similarities.

Hamilton Carroll considers shifting trends across nearly two decades of post-9/11 novels from early works grappling with the unrepresentability of terror to recent narratives by Susan Choi, Mohsin Hamid, Joseph O’Neill, and Jess Walter that depict the everyday experiences of racialized precarity in a period of perpetual warfare, nuclear proliferation, migration catastrophes, and neo-ethnonationalisms. Political turmoil and violence by state and non-state entities remain central to twenty-first century life, even as the events of September 11, 2001, have shifted from recent trauma to historical retrospection.

Rosenthal provides a critical history and analysis of the connections between mainstream and experimental theatre in New York, from the 1960s to 2020, with a focus on Broadway. She argues that Broadway and mainstream theatre underwent multiple and significant transformations during the 1960s and in the decades that followed. Rosenthal analyzes the work of playwrights, directors, composers, choreographers, and designers who made art both downtown in experimental theatres and uptown on Broadway. The concept of the “mainstream experimental” is used as a descriptor for Broadway throughout the following half century, as commercial theatre continued to push and shape US society and culture at large. Alongside artists, pathbreaking producers off and on Broadway are the focus of this chapter, along with the prominence of ensemble-based musicals and dramatic works and the success of solo performances on Broadway. The contributions and legacies of LGBTQ artists such as Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, and Lisa Kron, and Black artists including August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, and Jeremy O. Harris, are central to Rosenthal’s argument and critique.

The entire outlook of the Middle East changed following the 9/11 attacks, and US–Iran relations were no different. Iran condemned the attacks, citing its own experiences with terrorism, and the first year of the war in Afghanistan surfaced surprising opportunities for cooperation. But in a pivotal State of the Union address, George W. Bush referred to Iran, along with North Korea and Iraq, as part of an Axis of Evil, supporting terrorism and disrupting the global order. The Iranians were incensed and called off the talks on Afghanistan’s new government. The next few years would see heightened rhetoric from both sides and the election of hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Despite his inflammatory policies, he apparently was still open to engagement with the US, if Washington would make the first move. Bush showed no signs of doing so, but with the decline in influence of neoconservative advisers Rumsfeld and Cheney, and the rise to Secretary of State of Condoleezza Rice, the administration made a surprising switch. Again, little of actual substance would develop, but it showed that even as fierce public jabs were exchanged, secret channels still survived.

This chapter will situate Roth’s work within the post-9/11 climate defined by a shift in national attitudes as a result of an increased fear of terrorism, and among other literary figures struggling to represent American and, in some cases, the subject of terror, in their fiction.

Analysis of terrorism in Pakistan has often suffered from simplifications, generalisations and stereotyping. Seen either as an extension of global Islamic extremism or worse a nursery that breeds this transnational threat, the country has regularly been ostracised and chastised by the international community. Since Islamic extremism has widely been regarded as a malevolent force that can only be perceived in apocalyptic terms, Pakistan therefore has attracted the attention of a number of alarmists and doomsday prophets. This negative attention has subsequently produced a discourse on one of the most dangerous countries in world that narrowly focuses on the security threat posed by Pakistan. Such superficial and shallow engagement with the problem is deeply unfair, as it selfishly presents terrorism in the country as a danger to the rest of the world and cruelly ignores its primary affectees – the people of Pakistan.

In several respects, history is at the forefront of terrorism scholarship through challenging the domination of the social sciences and conventional wisdoms of the present that do not hold up to scrutiny once historicised. Moreover, historical research frequently accomplishes this by accessing a rich supply of primary source material that is more readily available than contemporary records because the passage of time has rendered it less sensitive. Despite these factors, there remains a broader impression, especially among governments, that terrorism’s past has little relevance to its present, hence the placing of resources into contemporary social science research instead of into the historicising of terrorism. As with terrorism, counterterrorism is not solely a phenomenon of the present day. It has a history as long as that of terrorism. Whether it is in the form of counterterrorism methods, such as the reliance on human intelligence, the difficulty in striking a balance between civil liberties, human rights and security or how to define the threat needing to be countered, the issues of the twenty-first century are, to varying extents, re-emergent, not nascent. As scholars make increasing inroads into excavating the difficult and convoluted history of terrorism, the need to exhume another inherent element of the complex equation, counterterrorism responses in both the micro and macro, grows ever greater.

Chapter 5 presents the results from a national survey experiment in which we manipulated racial/ethnic cues in an ambiguous news vignette depicting a potentially threatening situation at an airport. Compared to whites, African Americans and Latinos exhibited substantially higher levels of outgroup empathy and more favorable attitudes toward Arabs. In reaction to the experimental vignette, African Americans and Latinos were more likely to side with the Arab passenger and find the additional search and questioning by the airport security officer unreasonable than were white respondents. They were also more likely to support civil rights policies and commit to political action to protect the rights of targeted groups in this threat context. These reactions occurred even though African Americans and Latinos perceived themselves to be at greater personal risk from terrorism. Group empathy helps explain the racial/ethnic differences in attitudes and reactions we observed here.

American military policy during the current century has been an abject, and highly destructive, failure. Misguided and failed wars instituted in the aftermath of the spectacular terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, have cost trillions of dollars and killed well over 200.000 people, including more than twice as many Americans as perished on 9/11. Much-exaggerated alarm after 9/11 made politically possible an armed invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, spilling over into Pakistan, to depose an unpleasant regime that, despite some appearances, had essentially nothing to do with 9/11. And in 2003, the American military was sent to Iraq to remove the fully-containable and fully-deterrable regime of Saddam Hussein. Initially successful at first, the two ventures ultimately inspired lengthy insurgencies against the occupiers. In Iraq, Iran and Syria, concerned they might be next, worked successfully with friendly Iraqis to make the American tenure in Iraq as miserable as possible. Insofar as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were motivated by a romantic notion that the forceful intervention would instil blissful democracy on grateful peoples, impelling other countries to follow suit and in time to love the United States and Israel, the ventures have been a fiasco of monumental proportions.

The American response to 9/11 sharpened the hostility between the two main antagonistic regional blocs and all but eliminated the possibility that either Iran or Syria might retreat from the hegemonic strategy of maintaining an ‘Axis of Resistance’ in favour of pursuing rapprochement with the West. The George W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror (GWoT), launched in the wake of the attacks, promised assistance to authoritarian regimes that would join the United States in confronting an amorphously defined ‘terrorism’ in the Middle East and beyond. Three central dynamics underpinned regional order in the Middle East during the first decade of the new millennium. The first was the contestation between Iran and Saudi Arabia for Western favour. The second was the Arab–Israeli conflict, in which non-Arab Iran had become a central protagonist. The third was a competitive dynamic for Western support between between Turkey and Egypt. The chapter considers each of these dynamics in turn.

This chapter looks at the Brotherhood’s evolution in the decade after 9/11, and how debates about principles gradually morphed into an identity crisis concerning the organization as a whole. Against the setting of an unstable global security environment, marked first by a US-led ‘global war on terror’ and then by US-sponsored projects for the ‘democratization’ of the Middle East, the chapter highlights the debates between the followers of the Tilmisani school on the one hand, and the vanguardist faction on the other. The chapter also introduces the youth members of the Muslim Brotherhood who, in the context of an increasingly potent social protest movement, found themselves increasingly at odds with their leadership. The chapter ends with the contentious Guidance Office elections of the winter of 2009, when the vanguard leaders asserted total control of the Brotherhood’s executive office. Based on Oral History interviews with key Brotherhood members from across all organizational ranks, memoires and available online material, original texts published by the Brotherhood, an analysis of the Brotherhood-related diplomatic correspondence of the US Embassy in Cairo as published by Wikileaks, and a reading of the available scholarly literature, the chapter recounts how the Muslim Brotherhood, while meandering through an unstable global security environment, became further entrenched within its own internal bickering and squabbles to yield a weakened organization unready to meet the challenges of the Egyptian uprising of 2011.