HENT DE VRIESment of markets and the fortune or failure of nation-states, have contributed to the deter-
ritorialization, delocalization, mediatization, and even virtualization of religion, together
with the invention of new forms of agency and community. No unified theory is currently
available to hold these trends together in a compelling explanatory account or historical
narrative. No political theology, in the singular, ever will. But several building blocks can
be discerned along the road leading up to the post-secular condition, as the contributions
to this volume testify.
The geographical and demographic-sociological base of physical struggle inspired or at
least verbally legitimated by religion—no religion without (at least some) violence, no vio-
lence without (at least some) religion^12 —is characterized by an increasingly delocalized,
deterritorialized, and volatile mobility. The beliefs and theological rationalizations that
motivate spectacular forms of violence against states and civilians need no longer take
hold in the minds and hearts of whole groups and generations—and general stoicism, if
not resignation, may well be the dominant public response. Yet the elusive effects of such
militant religious manifestations and the terror associated with them have come to perme-
ate the life of all institutions and to affect the substance of legal systems, political hopes,
and cultural sensibilities, well beyond the borders in which they are committed and out
of all proportion. How should we explain this discrepancy? And how can citizens, non-
governmental organizations, and nations respond to it in a responsible and effective way?
Is there a policy of and for the unpredictable and the disproportional?
Clearly, the ‘‘war on terror’’—or any other version of military preemption and judi-
ciary, let alone para- or extra-legal, repression—cannot be it. Sweeping gestures invoking
labels such as ‘‘global terrorism’’ (or ‘‘terrorists of global reach’’) and a ‘‘global war on
terror’’ are no more helpful, since they cling to an outdated concept, ‘‘war,’’ and fail to
specify the—often ‘‘local’’—conditions and special effects to which the adjectiveglobal
refers.^13 Other approaches are required, ones that can engage local issues of legal, political,
economic, and cultural integration or dialogue, thoughwithout any certainty, whatever
other ills they may undo, that they can identify a single, now moving, now immobile—in
any case, invisible, inaudible, ungraspable, and often unintelligible—target. Can such ap-
proaches be learned and taught, let alone be planned or institutionalized? Where the
proclaimed ‘‘enemy’’ has no clear strategy other than inflicting terror and provoking
wrath, can one develop strategies? And without them, what would the political be? Where
the perceived threat turns out to elude the state apparatus’s horizon of expectation, is
there anything leftto do? Or is acting and reacting no longer the proper modality of
response? Where diplomacy is not an option, is one condemned to respond either too
little, too late, or in a disproportionate way? A whole new art of conducting war and
establishing peace—something other than war and warfare, peace and peacefulness in
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