The Strategic Irrelevance of 9/11

Professor Roland Dannreuther, Head of Department of Politics and International Relations

The French scholar, Raymond Aron, observed that ‘an act of violence is labelled “terrorist” when its psychological effects are out of proportion to its purely physical results’. This understanding of the internal meaning of terrorism reveals both the strategic significance of the terrorist acts of 9/11 and their ultimate strategic irrelevance.

9/11 and the Reconstitution of Order and Meaning

David Chandler, Security and IR Programme

Jean Baudrillard – The Spirit of Terrorism

At a pinch, we can say that they did it, but we wished for it. If this is not taken into account, the event loses any symbolic dimension. It becomes a pure accident, a purely arbitrary act, the murderous phantasmagoria of a few fanatics, and all that would then remain would be to eliminate them…

9/11 was not 9/11: Facilitating ‘Democracy Limited Inc’ in the West

Dr Dibyesh Anand, Security and IR Programme.

For those searching for conspiracy theories about the spectacular attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2011, I’ll disappoint you. Please go and listen to the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad or search on google to satisfy your appetite. I have no interest in that.

Can We Trust Democracies?: September 11th, the War on Terror and “Humanitarian Intervention”

Dr Aidan Hehir, Security and International Relations Programme

‘It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is of course untrue.

The facts speak only when the historian calls on them; it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context’. [1]

E.H. Carr

‘Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth’.[2]

Jean Baudrillard

“September 11^th 2001” or “9/11”?

The magnitude of current events are rarely as obvious as was the case on September 11^th 2001. Millions around the world watching as the World Trade Center collapsed immediately sensed that this was the terrible dawn of a new era. September 11^th 2001, like all seminal dates in history, has come to denote far more than the terrorist attacks. The date itself has become popularly represented as “9/11”; this may seem like an innocuous abbreviation but while “September 11^th 2001” is a date, “9/11” is arguably a symbol, and symbols are by definition designed to convey a message. As Richard Jackson

Public Debate: "Assessing the Impact of 9/11 Ten Years On".

The Security and International Relations Programme is launching is seminar series this year with a roundtable discussion on the impact of September 11th 2001. The roundtable will involve a number of members from the Department of Politics and International Relations and all are welcome to come along and take part in the questions and answers. Details below.
Hope to see you there,
Aidan

6th October, 18:00, Fyvie Hall, Regent Street

"Assessing the Impact of 9/11 Ten Years On".

Roundtable Participants:

·         Dr Dibyesh Anand

·         Dr Ricardo Blaug

·         Professor David Chandler

·         Professor Roland Dannreuther

·         Dr Aidan Hehir

·         Dr Patricia Hogwood

·         Dr Thomas Moore

Kosovo - The Hazards of Intervention and Statebuilding

Click this link to view a seminar on the record of the international community's engagement with Kosovo since NATO's intervention in 1999.

'Where is the Human in Human-Centred approaches to Development?: A Foucauldian Critique of Amartya Sen’s ‘Development as Freedom’

Draft paper for 'Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present: A Symposium', University of Bologna, Italy, March 3-4, 2011,

Professor David Chandler

This paper engages with Foucault’s critical exploration of shifts and transformations in liberal frameworks of governmental rationality to consider how our understanding of the human subject has been transformed within development discourses. here.