Terror in the Western Mind: Cultural Responses to 9/11
David Martin Jones is Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and taught there and at the National University of Singapore, the University of Tasmania, and the University of Queensland. His most recent book is History’s Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics. Previously, he wrote Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia, Political Development in Pacific Asia, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England, and The Image of China in Western Social and Political Thought. With M. L. R. Smith, he has co-authored Reinventing Realism: Australian Foreign and Defence Policy at the Millennium, ASEAN and East Asian International Relations, Asian Security and the Rise of China, Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age, and The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency.
M. L. R. Smith is Professor of Strategic Theory at King’s College London and a former Head of its Department of War Studies. He received his Ph.D. from King’s and began his academic career at the National University of Singapore. Subsequently, he has been a UK Ministry of Defence civil servant, working with the Royal Naval College, and later with the Joint Services Staff and Command College, and was Principal Lecturer at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is author/co-author of numerous books, including: Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement, Dilemmas of Decommissioning, Reinventing Realism: Australian Foreign and Defence Policy at the Millennium, ASEAN and East Asian International Relations, The Strategy of Terrorism: How It Works and Why It Fails, Asian Security and the Rise of China, Sacred Violence: Political Religion in a Secular Age, and The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency: Strategic Puzzles, Problems and Paradoxes. His most recent book is Year of the Bat: Britain, China and the Coronavirus.
Twenty years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we can now see that the War on Terror profoundly affected Western self-understanding and the secular liberal image it sought to project onto a global canvas at what was widely assumed to be the end of history. The dramatic change in awareness that 9/11 brought about was particularly vivid, this book maintains, in the media that sustained and displayed the West’s self-image. In particular, fiction, film, drama, the visual arts, and popular music have all struggled to come to grips with the phenomena of terror, asymmetrical warfare, home grown jihadist activism, and the moral and political dilemmas they evoke.
The book further argues that the evolving progressive response to 9/11 assumed an increasingly ideological character via the critical and normative international relations theories that came to dominate Western campuses after 2001. These perspectives gave substance to an increasingly critical depiction of the West’s War on Terror and its popular promotion through works of literature, film, music, and the visual arts. Promoted through these popular genres, it combined the ingredients that formed “woke” ideology in an accessible formula that subsequently dominated both the mainstream media, academia, and, in time, government agencies.
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