Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror

by Stuart Croft

Since the infamous events of 9/11, the fear of terrorism and the determination to strike back against it has become a topic of enormous public debate. The 'war on terror' discourse has developed not only through American politics but via other channels including the media, the church, music, novels, films and television, and therefore permeates many aspects of American life. Stuart Croft suggests that the process of this production of knowledge has created a very particular form of common sense which shapes relationships, jokes and even forms of tattoos. Understanding how a social process of crisis can be mapped out and how that process creates assumptions allows policy-making in America's war on terror to be examined from new perspectives. Using IR approaches together with insights from cultural studies, this book develops a dynamic model of crisis which seeks to understand the war on terror as a cultural phenomenon.

310 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2006

Reviews

[Peter Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book examines how what it describes as the “discourse” of 9/11 was constructed and sustained, and in doing so the authour tries to build a flow chart through the course of the book to explain how generally such crisis underpin and drive, or perhaps sometimes can even undermine, that discourse. The flow chart does begin to creak a little towards the end but the journey to that point throws out an abundance of ideas. To pick just one of those concepts, I was quite taken with the notion of the date based description 9/11 being the US’s “second” 9/11. The first 9/11 being described as the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 9/11th (11th September) 1857. The book also opens on what was, for me as a reader, a totally unexpected third 9/11 event.
The book dates from 2006 but the authour has since written more on the topic at: http://bit.ly/rsfLhT