Allegories of a Never-Ending War

The attacks to the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001 brought serious consequences for the daily lives of Americans even to date. Although the literature on 9/11 and the resulted War on Terror abounds, less attention was paid to the daily effects of 9/11 in Western culture. To fill this gap, the present book, which is formed by different authored chapters, not only focuses on deciphering the nature and historical evolution of terrorism but also its consequences on the capitalist system. Starting from the premise that 9/11 is destroying the Western democracies from the inside, authors who have contributed to this editorial project shed light on the inconsistencies and ideological limitations of terrorism-research today. In this respect, the book infers the thesis that terrorism has affected one of the cultural touchstones of Western civilization: the sacred law of hospitality. The Islamophobia, the recent white supremacist manifestations, and the adoption of high technology to surveillance (or spy) the private life of citizens, without mentioning the tightening of border checks are clear signs that terrorism is gradually and partly isolating the US from the rest of the world. This book intends to discuss to what extent terrorism is mining democracy internally. We have invited authors from different countries and cultures to participate, some of them even non-English native speakers. This would be very well a limitation since speaking in a foreign language is almost difficult, but to my end, this is the tug of war of the book. Still further, an edited book contains interesting debates, which need to be properly organized by the editor, given the discrepancies among the authors' ideologies. For that, we have disposed from an introductory and concluding chapter to review the common-thread argumentation -- chapter by chapter. Last but not least, each author not only gave a multicultural perspective on the problem but a particular diagnosis of how terrorism is discussed, imagined and internalised in different countries. These chapters interrogate further on the dominant discourse revolving around terrorism, Jihadism and 9/11. We hope this book helps to clearly expand the current understanding of terrorism and its effects in the Western culture.