Networks of Terror: Globalization, Fundamentalism and Political Violence

Abstract

A defining feature of political modernity was the centralization of legitimate violence within the unitary and sovereign form of the modern nation state. The sociological analysis of violence and terror was conducted in terms of an ‘episodic’ conceptualization of power and tended to focus on how violence underpinned the structural capacities of economic and political elites. In an era marked by warfare, revolution and violent social upheaval the ‘objective’ characteristics of military and physical violence were accentuated and the important role of violence in the constitution of social meaning and identity tended to be marginalized or ignored. The events of 9/11 2001 in New York highlighted the extent to which violence always has a context that shapes both the protagonists and victims of violence and those that represent them (Lawrence & Karim, 2007). The political memory is never simply a neutral lens of human history and experience: the context of violence determines and defines the range of public memory and the political uses of the past. Hence, the contrast between the moral and media panic generated by the attack on the World Trade Center, New York and that generated by the political violence and genocide committed in the African nations of Rwanda and the Sudan. In the contemporary age, the media does not simply report violence but both creates and responds to public expectations and concerns about violence and terror.