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Eurasian security governance has received increasing attention since 1989. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the institution that best served the security interests of the West in its competition with the Soviet Union, is now relatively ill-equipped resolve the threats emanating from Eurasia to the Atlantic system of security governance. This book investigates the important role played by identity politics in the shaping of the Eurasian security environment. It investigates both the state in post-Soviet Eurasia as the primary site of institutionalisation and the state's concerted international action in the sphere of security. This investigation requires a major caveat: state-centric approaches to security impose analytical costs by obscuring substate and transnational actors and processes. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon marked the maturation of what had been described as the 'new terrorism'. Jervis has argued that the western system of security governance produced a security community that was contingent upon five necessary and sufficient conditions. The United States has made an effort to integrate China, Russia into the Atlantic security system via the Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. The Black Sea Economic Cooperation has become engaged in disseminating security concerns in fields such as environment, energy and economy. If the end of the Cold War left America triumphant, Russia's new geopolitical hand seemed a terrible demotion. Successfully rebalancing the West and building a collaborative system with Russia, China, Europe and America probably requires more wisdom and skill from the world's leaders.
alone its later manifestation suggested by the ‘War on Terror’. Stone’s early life and career were dominated by the effects of Vietnam. Much later with Nixon (1995), Stone was still piecing together his personal and cinematic treatise on what the country and the conflict meant to himself and his fellow Americans –and his work has returned to that territory and its wider Cold War ramifications time and again. However, there has been a shift too. His post-9/11 films, Alexander (2004), World Trade Center (2006), W. (2008) and Savages (2012) also had plenty to say about
2 ‘9/11’ and the noise of contemporary fiction In November 2013, Manhattan resident Kenny Cummings sent an email of inquiry to his local newspaper. ‘Have you ever heard from neighbors about the wailing World Trade Center?’, he wrote, claiming that an ‘eerie sound’ could be heard a couple of blocks away from the newly constructed building of One World Trade Center.1 When the email was published, many Tribeca residents confirmed that the sound was real by posting comments and uploading videos of the tower’s ‘wailing’ to YouTube. ‘It’s all the screams of those
understanding of relations between liberal modernity and the forces that we are told seek its destruction. Even within many of the critical responses to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center which formally inaugurated the War on Terror we find the attack itself portrayed as an act of violence visited upon liberal modernity from ‘the outside’ of liberal modernity as, for example, Mary Kaldor has described it (Kaldor 2003: 142–60). The alternative account of the war that we have advanced so far is based on an understanding of it as an attempt of life to escape its
brought to a close by the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 (2005: 95–107). The cold war that was defined by the nuclear stand-off between the US and USSR after world war two began to unwind with the USSR’s debilitating war in Afghanistan in which the US-funded Mujahideen insurgents exposed the weakness of the Soviet military outside their spectacular Kremlin displays. The war crippled an already weak Soviet economy, forcing President Gorbachev to withdraw his troops in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. Ironically, a civil
moment. In many ways, New York City is a fitting location in which to end this study. In Chapter 2, I argued that narrative depictions of ‘9/11’ fixate on three forms of noise: the literal noise of the World Trade Center collapse, the global resonance of American exceptionalism and the symbolic noise of the event as a temporal structure. My fifth and final chapter returned to the streets of New York in Open City (2011), a novel published a decade after the attacks, to examine how urban noise can coexist with a quiet aesthetic when a novel does not privilege the event
health specialists to the World Trade Center site on 9/11; Fassin and Rechtman 2009 : 1), security policies also remain concerned about traumatic symptoms that become evident later. Disaster recovery policy in the UK, for example, recommends the application of psychological tests upon victims and witnesses months after the event (Cabinet Office 2011 ). This demonstrates an attitude of prolonged
2504Chap4 7/4/03 12:39 pm Page 69 4 Eurasia and the transnational terrorist threats to Atlantic security Phil Williams The terrorist attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not only the most audacious and successful terrorist attacks the world has yet seen, but also marked the maturation of what had been described as the ‘new terrorism’. It was a maturation in several senses. In the first place it revealed that trends identified by astute specialists such as Walter Laqueur, Bruce Hoffman and Ian Lesser were, in fact, well
Death is simultaneously silent, and very loud, in political life. Politicians and media scream about potential threats lurking behind every corner, but academic discourse often neglects mortality. Life is everywhere in theorisation of security, but death is nowhere.
Making a bold intervention into the Critical Security Studies literature, this book explores the ontological relationship between mortality and security after the Death of God – arguing that security emerged in response to the removal of promises to immortal salvation. Combining the mortality theories of Heidegger and Bauman with literature from the sociology of death, Heath-Kelly shows how security is a response to the death anxiety implicit within the human condition.
The book explores the theoretical literature on mortality before undertaking a comparative exploration of the memorialisation of four prominent post-terrorist sites: the World Trade Center in New York, the Bali bombsite, the London bombings and the Norwegian sites attacked by Anders Breivik. By interviewing the architects and designers of these reconstruction projects, Heath-Kelly shows that practices of memorialization are a retrospective security endeavour – they conceal and re-narrate the traumatic incursion of death. Disaster recovery is replete with security practices that return mortality to its sublimated position and remove the disruption posed by mortality to political authority.
The book will be of significant interest to academics and postgraduates working in the fields of Critical Security Studies, Memory Studies and International Politics.
The introduction offers a sketch of the current conjuncture, while also providing an outline of the book’s argument. It begins with the contrast between the capitalist triumphalism that accompanied the end of the Cold War and the setbacks that capitalism has faced at the beginning of this century. The capitalist world’s main superpower, the United States, has faced a number of challenges, from the World Trade Center attacks to the military fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed it; but also economic challenges, as manifested by the rise of China and the global financial crisis of 2008. This latter crisis and the global coronavirus pandemic have also adversely impacted the rest of the capitalist world, notably Europe. At the same time, a deepening ecological crisis and a crisis of political democracy are also manifestations of capitalism’s increasingly destructive implications. After the brief overview of the current conjuncture, the introduction outlines how each of the book’s chapters adds to the analysis of capitalist destruction, to the cost–benefit contradiction that capitalism generates, and to the political implications of this contradiction and of its experience by diverse segments of the population for the formation of an anti-capitalist coalition fighting for a more humane, less destructive society.