Globalization and Terrorism: The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares (review)

It was not long ago that the terms globalization and terrorism referred to unrelated aspects of global politics. Globalization was associated with deterritorialization and the expanding interconnectedness of political, economic, and cultural relations across the globe. In contrast, terrorism referred to forms of political violence, usually wielded by nonstate actors, directed at noncombatants. Even if used in reference to forms of state violence or struggles for national liberation, terrorism was generally associated with territorial conflict and political instability. As such terrorism was associated with phenomena at odds with, or at least occupying different spaces from, those of the networks and agents of the global economy that sought to expand market access (and peaceful relations) across the liberal economic order.

Since 11 September 2001, however, these terms have formed a dangerous synergy within the American geopolitical imagination. In the immediate wake of the attacks many openly questioned the fate of globalization, as the very flows that drove economic interconnectedness were now also feared as potential vectors of deterritorialized threats. For many American commentators, international terrorism came to be viewed as the “dark underbelly of globalization” traveling the same routes across national boundaries and evading state regulation. This insecurity helped provoke a vast projection of American power through its “Global War on Terror,” which some have come to view as a new form of “empire.” Michael Ignatieff, for example, claimed that “terror has collapsed distance, and with this collapse has come a sharpened American focus on the necessity of bringing order to the frontier zones,”¹ which were once viewed as outside the scope of globalization.

In Globalization and Terrorism, Jamal Nassar suggests that the Bush administration’s global war is not a product of the post-9/11 collapse of the gap between globalization and terrorism but rather is a militarized acceleration of processes of domination by the powerful over the weak, which will breed only more violence and insecurity for both Americans and populations affected by U.S. policies. Nassar seeks to expose how both pre- and post-9/11 discourses about globalization and terrorism represent the “perspective of the dominant powers” (1), which he seeks to contrast with his own rewriting of the connection between “globalization” and “terrorism” from “the perspective of those dominated” (103).

In launching his counternarrative, Nassar allows the terms globalization and terrorism to encompass a wide range of global and historical processes. Nassar briefly surveys various writings on globalization to suggest that “power, wealth, and greed play a major role as root causes of” (3) the process that, citing Martin Khor, is what much of the third world has long experienced as colonization (7). While many readers will either nod in recognition of this indictment of “corporate globalization” or find the sweeping survey an unconvincing caricature, Nassar’s goal is not to offer a detailed analysis of complex global processes. Instead, in order to contextualize this thing called “terrorism,” he sketches out a broad, abstract framework in which globalization represents various forms of exploitation. Nassar defines terrorism as a political label used to decontextualize acts of political violence thereby masking or obscuring the underlying political struggles and oppression that, in his words, serve as the root causes of violence. Thus Nassar argues that “terrorism is a symptom rather than a disease” (17) and sets his task to explore its root causes and their connections to globalization.

In short, he argues that “globalization continues to create new breeding grounds for terrorism by leaving people behind” (104). He elaborates this claim with an image that explains the book’s subtitle. Globalization, Nassar notes, is not only responsible for creating a new class of poor and disinherited people, but it also...