What special vulnerabilities does the world of the 21st century have to terrorist attacks? What kind of role does the United States see itself playing as the world's only superpower in the coming decades? How should we now characterize the conduct of the US foreign policy? Answers to such questions are perhaps not much clearer now than they were immediately after the attacks, but one of the more positive effects of these attacks has been to stimulate much serious discussion about them, and thus about the place of violence about changing forms of warfare, about different forms of terror, and about challenges to prevailing accounts of the legitimacy of violence in contemporary political life in the context of emerging and in many respects dangerously unstable structures of power and authority on a global scale.
These essays do not constitute a unified perspective on what happened on 11 September 2001, and the US response to it. They are perhaps most usefully read as an experiment in writing contemporary history as it evolves. Some essays contradict others, some are quite specific, and others generalize very broadly. They all affirm, however, that there is no simple answer to difficult questions around the recent events, only a complex braid of explanatory factors that have yet to be fully evaluated.

1. Introduction 2. Reflections on 11 September 3. Invisible Cities 4. The Politics of Terrorism and Civilization: How to respond as a human being 5. Identifying Limits on a Borderless Map in the First Post-Modern War 6. War, Terror, Judgement 7. Afghanistan and the Global Environment: Turning local language into global grammar 8. The United States Against the World: Oil, hegemony and the militarization of globalization 9. The Response of the British Government to the Attack on America 10. The European Union and 11 September 11. Terrorism and New Wars 12. On Pharmacological War 13. Immigration, Asylum, Borders and Terrorism: The unexpected victims 14. Barbarians