These developments pose intellectual
challenges to those working in cultural and
critical geopolitics. First, there is a need to
grasp the contours and contradictions of the
postmodern geopolitical condition, a condition
characterized by ‘deterritorialized threats’
embedded within a ‘world risk society’ (Beck,
1999; Ó Tuathail, 2000). Contemporary life in
advanced technoscientific states is dependent
upon deep and pervasive technological
systems – financial flows, energy grids, nuclear
power stations, transportation networks,
water and sewer treatment complexes, com-
modity markets, medical centers, information
technology routers and webs – that are often
unstable and vulnerable to predictable yet
potentially catastrophic accidents. As is now
evident, they are also exceedingly vulnerable
to the malign intent of determined non-state
actors who can, in utilizing the airline trans-
portation system or the postal service as
weapons, pose a general threat to the state
and society they target. Powerful states are
now justifiably concerned about ‘asymmetrical
threats’ from weapons of mass destruction.
Not only can the few threaten the many but
relatively marginal groups can inflict cata-
strophic harm upon the populations of the
mightiest and most affluent states. Protecting
against such asymmetrical threats is virtually
impossible, for technoscientific systems are
pervasive and integral to the routine function-
ing of everyday life in advanced industrial
states. Nevertheless, the public effort to secu-
ritize these infrastructures is likely to be a
permanent feature of life in advanced indus-
trial states.
Second, there is the need to understand
how the new hegemonic global discourse of
‘counter-terrorism’ will work itself out in
regional geopolitical contexts where state
territorial conflicts persist. How are ‘terror-
ism’ and ‘counter-terrorism’ to be defined in
specific geopolitical circumstances? Will the
discourse of ‘counter-terrorism’ function in
the same way as anti-communism and con-
tainment did during the Cold War, allowing
authoritarian leaders and pivotal states to
proclaim their enemies ‘terrorists’ and justify
wars as necessary ‘counter-terrorism’? The
US–Russian alliance against ‘Islamic terrorism’
is intriguing in this respect, for the Putin
administration has represented its war againstthe breakaway republic of Chechnya as its
own national variation on a global theme.
Counter-terrorism becomes an alibi for
human rights abuses. Conflicts in the Balkans,
Israel–Palestine, Sri Lanka and India–Pakistan
have also been characterized by tactical local-
izations of the global discourse of counter-
terrorism. Whether the United States will
gradually lose enthusiasm for its global cru-
sade against terrorism as the costs mount is
also an open question.
Finally, there is the question of identity and
otherness. Identities, as the chapters in this
section underscore, are performative cultural
understandings about self and other, friends
and enemies. One of the consequences of
11 September and the subsequent war against
al-Qa’ida and the Taliban in Afghanistan is that
it has renewed civilizational and religious
storylines about identity and difference
(Huntington, 1997). Radical Islam is the outside
by which a new community of ‘civilized states’
is being reimagined and reconstituted. In
Europe this storyline has resulted in a diminu-
tion of the discourse of Europe versus Russia
and a revitalization of the discourse of Europe
versus Islam. Russia, the United States and
Europe are now ostensibly part of the inter-
national coalition of ‘civilized states’ against
radicalized Islam. It is even proposed that
Russia might at some future date join NATO,
an alliance established to contain its power. In
the months following 11 September Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suggested
that the west was inherently superior to the
Islamic world and ‘bound to conquer and occi-
dentalize new peoples. It has done it with the
Communist world and part of the Islamic
world, but unfortunately a part of the Islamic
world is 1,400 years behind’ (quoted in Ash,
2001).While he subsequently distanced himself
from these remarks, Berlusconi nevertheless
owes part of his electoral success to his deft
use of widespread fears of a ‘secret invasion’ of
Italy by immigrants, particularly Muslims. Other
politicians are sounding similar themes, shifting
the emphasis of Europe’s civilizational border
from the east to the south.
These are still early tendencies and only a
few of the issues thrown up by the cultural
geopolitics of 11 September. Dramatic strug-
gles against spectacular acts of terrorism are
always likely to dominate the media, but it is460 GEOPOLITICAL CULTURESSection-8.qxd 03-10-02 10:43 AM Page 460