During the post-cold war world, the world's only superpower has encountered an unprecedented challenge: a non-state enemy that is challenging its hegemony and is using violence as a strategic means. Given the international nature of this phenomenon, a structured explanation such as this is given added necessity and urgency. Cornelia Beyer provides a structured explanation for terrorism and its links with the 'Global War on Terror' as it relates to the latter's broader context, causes and implications. She offers a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of international terrorism and proposes effective policies to counter it. She also remedies the current undertheorized nature of the subject area, and in doing so opens up new modes of thinking about and struggling against global terrorism.

This book explores modern Islamic terrorism in the context of globalization and cultural evolution. 21st century terrorism is different and new, first because it relies heavily on electronic communication systems and other aspects of modern technologies, and second, because it is in large part a product of fractured globalization, with its associated threats to the collective identity of Muslims. Part one of this work contrasts globalization as an ideal with globalization as it is actually taking place, with its enormous contradictions and threats. Moghaddam, a longtime and highly respected terrorism and conflict researcher, argues that globalization is resulting in serious threats to the basic psychological needs of some, particularly in connection with collective identity. Part two explores how globalization has brought sudden contact between different groups with no previous history of large-scale contact, resulting in a rapid decline in diversity. Terrorism is one of the dysfunctional defense mechanisms of people in such conditions, facing external threats. Part three describes long-term solutions, focusing particularly on the role of women and the nature of the family in traditional Islamic societies. Moghaddam shows us why globalization is resulting in what he calls catastrophic evolution, the rapid decline and disappearance of minority cultures and languages, and why that brings a clash of ideologies and the rise of extremism. There are also other dangerous trends, and those call for inspired solutions, springing from an understanding that traditional conflict-resolution, evolved in the shadow of the Cold War, is no longer effective and needs to change.

Acts of violence assume many forms: they may travel by the arc of a guided missile or in the language of an economic policy, and they may leave behind a smoldering village or a starved child. The all-pervasiveness of violence makes it seem like an unavoidable, and ultimately incomprehensible, aspect of the modern world. But, in this detailed and expansive book, Marc Pilisuk and Jen Rountree demonstrate otherwise. Widespread violence, they argue, is in fact an expression of the underlying social order, and whether it is carried out by military forces or by patterns of investment, the aim is to strengthen that order for the benefit of the powerful. The Hidden Structure of Violence marshals vast amounts of evidence to examine the costs of direct violence, including military preparedness and the social reverberations of war, alongside the costs of structural violence, expressed as poverty and chronic illness. It also documents the relatively small number of people and corporations responsible for facilitating the violent status quo, whether by setting the range of permissible discussion or benefiting directly as financiers and manufacturers. The result is a stunning indictment of our violent world and a powerful critique of the ways through which violence is reproduced on a daily basis, whether at the highest levels of the state or in the deepest recesses of the mind.

Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence: Beyond Savage Globalization? is a collection of essays by scholars intent on rethinking the mainstream security paradigms. Overall, this collection is intended to provide a broad and systematic analysis of the long-term sources of political, military and cultural insecurity from the local to the global. The book provides a stronger basis for understanding the causes of conflict and violence in the world today, one that adds a different dimension to the dominant focus on finding proximate causes and making quick responses Too often the arenas of violence have been represented as if they have been triggered by reassertions of traditional and tribal forms of identity, primordial and irrational assertions of politics. Such ideas about the sources of insecurity have become entrenched in a wide variety of media sources, and have framed both government policies and academic arguments. Rather than treating the sources of insecurity as a retreat from modernity, this book complicates the patterns of global insecurity to a degree that takes the debates simply beyond assumptions that we are witnessing a savage return to a bloody and tribalized world. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of international relations, security studies, gender studies and globalization studies.

As global challengers moved from peaceful protest to more violent confrontation, the market ideology of the dominant Western perspective transformed into what Steger terms an 'imperial globalism' led by the United States. This text explores this transformation and its impacts around the world.

With Theory of International Politics Kenneth Waltz established Neo-realism as a major school of thought in IR, which still remains a dominant approach within the discipline in the Anglo-American world and beyond. Man, the State and War - his first contribution to the debate in IR and the predecessor to Theory of International Politics - received praise for its presentation of a discussion on the causes of international warfare as well as the possibilities of its prevention on three different levels of analysis: the individual, the state and the international system. This book reflects on the arguments presented in Man, the State and War from a contemporary perspective. Do Waltz's ideas still hold firm ground in the discipline? The book alerts to the perceived necessity of combining conceptions of governance and authority with considerations on the reduction of inequality at the individual, state and international level. Inequality in particular has received increased attention as a cause for violence at all three levels since Waltz published Man, the State and War. The book also addresses Waltz's rejection of supranationalism as the remedy for war - a view that has been challenged since he wrote the book. One theme stands out: from today's perspective, the establishment and maintenance of 'good global governance' can be considered the most important aspect for the prevention of war.