Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror

This book examines the development of the 'war on terror' discourse and its evidence in American life.

Stuart Croft (Author)

9780521867993, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 September 2006

310 pages, 13 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.63 kg

'… Stuart Croft has done nothing less than produce the definitive cultural history of America's response to 9/11. … It is a big, bold, brassy take on post 9/11 America. Croft looks beyond policy debate and elite opinion to understand how American civil society and ordinary Americans felt and reacted to the worst attack against the homeland since Pearl Harbour. … Croft's book is the essential guide to how this happened.' http://wimw-theo.blogspot.com

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.

Introduction
1. Disrupting meaning
2. Deconstructing the second American 9/11
3. The decisive intervention
4. The institutionalisation and stabilisation of the policy programme
5. Acts of resistance to the 'war on terror'
6. The discourse strikes back
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], Politics & government [JP], Media studies [JFD], Cultural studies [JFC], Regional studies [GTB]