This essay expresses ambivalence about the use of the term "evil" in analyses of terrorism in light of the association of the two in speeches intended to justify the United States' "war on terrorism." At the same time, the essay suggests that terrorism can be regarded as "evil" but only when considered among a multiplicity of "evils" comparable to it, for example: rape, war crimes, and repression.

The neo‐Gramscian framework offers one of the more innovative contributions to a discipline long embedded in the self‐same verities of behaviouralism, positivism and neo‐Realism. As with conventional wisdom, however, neo‐Gramscians reproduce either assumptions of liberal neutrality or cultural thickness in relation to the ‘peripheral zones’ of the global political economy. These tendencies produce a variant that can be likened to ‘soft Orientalism’. In the first instance, cultural difference is not much of an impediment to the establishment of (West‐centred) global hegemony. (...) In the second instance, otherness becomes the principal source of counter‐hegemonic movements or resistance. This article provides a Gramscian rereading of these antinomies in relation to the apparent consolidation of a natural attitude towards Islam in the wake of recent dramatic events. (shrink)

: The key concept is "vertigo of secularization." It relates to the fears that societies experience when understanding the need to ground their political orders as separated from religion. The erosion of values produces vertigos around the world. We need to understand better these kinds of processes because only by doing so can we keep that fear and violence from taking precedence over the hard working tasks of building up a global political community.

I begin by examining the logic of autoimmunity as characterized by Jacques Derrida, ‘that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘‘itself’’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’ (Borradori, 2003: 94). According to Derrida, religion, democracy, terrorism and recent responses to the trauma of terrorism can be understood in terms of this logic. Responses to terrorism are ‘autoimmune’ and increase the trauma of terrorism as well as risking democratic values. I argue (...) that the risks of autoimmunity can be negotiated in better ways if we see how autoimmunity relates to another important Derridean concept, hospitality. (shrink)

: This essay expresses ambivalence about the use of the term "evil" in analyses of terrorism in light of the association of the two in speeches intended to justify the United States' "war on terrorism." At the same time, the essay suggests that terrorism can be regarded as "evil" but only when considered among a multiplicity of "evils" comparable to it, for example: rape, war crimes, and repression.

My essay begins by analyzing how Hegel and Honneth’stheory of recognition would seem to lend support to insurgentterrorists’ struggle for the right to self-determination. Insurgentterrorism often looks like a concretization of what Honneth calls themoral protest of the oppressed launched against the dominatingpowers. Insurgent terrorism also bears affinity to the politics ofrecognition in the sense that it challenges the legitimacy and authorityof the forces owned by the state, and seeks to gain public recognitioninstead for the legitimacy of their own cause. (...) Precisely because whatmatters uppermost to terrorists is the gaining of recognition for theircause as just, terrorists are eager to seize the mass media as a meansof spreading their ideas. My essay will end, however, by pointing outmajor differences between insurgent terrorism on the one hand, andHegel and Honneth on the other. (shrink)