This is a major new collection of essays on literary and cultural representations of migration and terrorism, the cultural impact of 9/11, and the subsequent ‘war on terror’. The collection commences with analyses of the relationship between migration and terrorism, which has been the focus of much mainstream political and media debate since the attacks on America in 2001 and the London bombings in 2005, not least because liberal democratic governments in Europe and North America have invoked such attacks to justify the regulation of migration and the criminalisation of ‘minority’ groups. Responding to the consequent erosion of the liberal democratic rights of the individual, leading scholars assess the various ways in which literary texts support and/or interrogate the conflation of narratives of transnational migration and perceived terrorist threats to national security. This crucial debate is furthered by contrasting analyses of the manner in which novelists from the UK, North Africa, the US and Palestine have represented 9/11, exploring the event’s contexts and ramifications. This path-breaking study complicates the simplistic narratives of revenge and wronged innocence commonly used to make sense of the attacks and to justify the US response. Each novel discussed seeks to interrogate and analyse a discourse typically dominated by consent, belligerence and paranoia. Together, the collected essays suggest the value of literature as an effective critical intervention in the very fraught political aftermath of the ‘war on terror’. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

This paper reviews the growing global popularity of the notion of, “War on Terror,” and explores how the immigrant is implicated in the complex web of connections between terrorism and transnational crime, and how a rethinking of open borders policies may serve to limit the incessant occurrence of transborder terrorism. This paper posits that the success of unilateral actions against global terrorism will remain an illusion unless measures are initiated to build multilateral and institutional capacities to combat this global menace. The paper is a contribution to the discourse on how non-military policies and responses to terrorism can be employed to deal with actors who are influenced to use extreme violence against civilians in bid to achieve their selfish goals. The author's analysis moves beyond use of military might and strategy to winning the war on terror to exploring possible options of constructive engagement with the enemy including tight border controls. Of key importance in winning the war on terror is addressing conditions that terrorists exploit with a view to providing alternative options to mass struggles by transforming violent confrontations to non-violent interventions through peace education. In this regard, making conflict transformation a global strategy under the auspices of the UN, instead of the usual military actions by a collection of allies whose agenda are often suspect will address moral questions associated with such military engagement and also map the root causes of conflicts as the beginning of a transformation process to global peace.

After the September 11th attacks the United States government sought a response to terrorism. The ensuing "war on terror" brought sweeping new federal regulations and changes in immigration policy. Consequent changes in society's reaction to immigration and the degree to which immigrants have become criminalized are apparent. Hauptman reveals the effects of a moral panic toward immigration after 9/11, explaining social control initiatives like the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, as a direct result of the concern over immigrants in the United States. Hauptman concludes that the response to the attacks resulted in the criminalization of immigrants in post-September 11th society.

War, migration, and refugeehood are inextricably linked and the complex nature of all three phenomena offers profound opportunities for representation and misrepresentation. This volume brings together international contributors and practitioners from a wide range of fields, practices, and backgrounds to explore and problematize textual and visual inscriptions of war and migration in the arts, the media, and in academic, public, and political discourses. The essays in this collection address the academic and political interest in representations of the migrant and the refugee, and examine the constructed nature of categories and concepts such as ‘war,’ ‘refuge(e),’ ‘victim,’ ‘border,’ ‘home,’ ‘non-place,’ and ‘dis/location.’ Contributing authors engage with some of the most pressing questions surrounding war, migration, and refugeehood as well as with the ways in which war and its multifarious effects and repercussions in society are being framed, propagated, glorified, or contested. This volume initiates an interdisciplinary debate which re-evaluates the relationship between war, migration, and refugeehood and their representations.

Drawing on critical geopolitics and related strands of social theory, this book combines new case studies with theoretical and methodological reflections on the geographical analysis of security and insecurity. It brings together a mixture of early career and more established scholars and interprets security and the war on terror across a number of domains, including: international law, religion, migration, development, diaspora, art, nature and social movements. At a time when powerful projects of globalization and security continue to extend their reach over an increasingly wide circle of people and places, the book demonstrates the relevance of critical geographical imaginations to an interrogation of the present.

Courageously stepping into charged terrain, this book casts a clear light on globalization and terrorism for what they are, not what some may wish them to be. Jamal R. Nassar carefully defines these twin concepts, placing them in historical as well as political context. Woven throughout the book is his central theme of the migration of dreams and nightmares. As some are able to take advantage of the opportunities of globalization, leaving others behind, they leave behind a legacy of unrealistic dreams. These unfulfilled hopes of the poor and oppressed often transform themselves into nightmares for the wealthy and powerful. This vicious cycle, the author argues, is often enhanced by globalization and effected by terrorism. Focusing on the key case studies of Palestine and Northern Ireland, Nassar applies their lessons to other examples of conflict including Iraq, Afghanistan, the Congo, Chechnya, and Colombia in order to internationalize our understanding of how globalization and terrorism operate in a range of situations. He also devotes a chapter to Islamist terrorism in a tour de force of incisiveness and balance. This book considers globalization and terrorism not only from the perspective of the major powers, but also introduces the views of those dominated by forces beyond their control. Yet even as the author offers a profound critique of Western hegemony, he conveys respect and hope for an enlightened global interdependence—embracing the power of the dream over the nightmare.

This book examines cultural imaginations post 9/11. It explores the idea of a religious community and its multifaceted representations in literature and popular culture. The essays in the volume focus on the role of literature, film, music, television shows and other cultural forms in opening up spaces for complex reflections on identities and cultures, and how they enable us to rethink the ‘trauma of familiarity’, post-traumatic heterotopias, religious extremism and the idea of the ‘neighbour’ in post-9/11 literary and cultural imagination. The volume also probes the intersections of religion, popular media, televised simulacrum and digital martyrdom in the wake of 9/11. It also probes the simulation of new- age media images with reference to the creation and dissemination of ‘martyrs’, the languages of grief, religionisation of terrorism, islamophobia, religious stereotypes and the reading of comics in writing the terror. An essential read, the book reclaims and reinterprets the alternative to a Eurocentric/Americentric understanding of cultural and geopolitical structures of global designs. It will be of great interest to researchers of literature and cultural studies, media studies, politics, film studies and South Asian studies.