It is a rare opportunity to be asked to reflect on an essay written a decade ago, now with the benefit of hindsight—of knowing what has happened, rather than anticipating what might happen—and with the tempting prospect of saying “I told you so.” But the truth is that the meaning of September 11 continues to recede just as the tenth anniversary arrives, or remains as difficult to fathom now as it was then. [...]
In the days immediately following September 11, 2001, the Council invited a wide range of leading social scientists from around the world to write short essays for an online forum, After September 11. Written against two-week deadlines when it was difficult to come by sure knowledge in a time of quickly changing circumstances, the forum’s essays would be downloaded millions of times and used extensively by teachers and journalists.
A decade later, contributors to the original forum were asked to reflect on what they wrote and to explore what has changed and what remains the same since those harrowing times. The result is this extraordinary digital collection of new essays, 10 Years after September 11. Short and written in a style that is accessible to both academic and non-academic readers, the essays offer deep, expert analysis of developments since 9/11 from the perspectives of the social sciences.
10 Years After September 11
Planes, Trains, and Chemical Plants: China in 2001 and 2011
by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
What kind of year was 2001? American government figures and candidates for office can only answer this in one way—if, that is, they want to be seen as mainstream representatives of either of the main political parties. They have to begin by referring to the tragedies and traumas of 9/11 and move on to the challenges the country faced a decade ago in the aftermath of that horrific day. Leading members of a very different political organization, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), might be strongly tempted to respond to the query in a radically contrasting way, at least when talking among themselves. [...]
10 Years After September 11
September 11, Ten Years On
by Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira
Ten years ago I argued in this space that under global capitalism, wars among major nations no longer made sense and that the turning point from a world where the great countries were permanently threatening each other with war to a world of international economic competition had been the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. War made sense while there were real winners and losers—while the winner could reduce the loser to a condition of slavery, or impose taxes on its new colony, or incorporate its territory. [...]
10 Years After September 11
What We Have Learned from 9/11
by Haideh Moghissi
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is upon us. The tragedy surely changed the global political landscape forever. The shockwaves it sent throughout the world, most notably through the United States, raised hopes that the tragedy would encourage probing of the causes of the event and help change Western governments’ foreign and military policies and adventures in the interest of reducing global tensions. That has hardly happened. [...]
10 Years After September 11
9/11: Landmark or Watershed?
by Richard W. Bulliet
Was 9/11 a landmark event or a watershed event? I started posing this question to friends and students soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and urged them to keep it in mind as they watched the fallout over the passing years. [...]
10 Years After September 11
Prediction Is Hazardous—Reflections on 9/11, Global Terror, and Global Democracy
by Jack A. Goldstone
Ten years ago, just days after the World Trade Center attack, Charles Tilly courageously put forth for the SSRC thirteen predictions about the attackers, their operations, and the consequences of their actions. Let me address his two last predictions: [...]
10 Years After September 11
Whither Cyber Terror?
by Dorothy E. Denning
Ten years have passed since G-Force Pakistan, a group of Pakistani hackers with a history of defacing websites, announced the formation of the Al-Qaeda Alliance on one of their hacked sites. Declaring that they stood by Al-Qaeda, the defacement said they would be attacking major US and British websites and giving confidential data to Al-Qaeda authorities. [...]
10 Years After September 11
9/11, Global Emergency, and the Crisis of Multilateralism
by Kanishka Jayasuriya
The response I made some weeks after the attack on the twin towers by and large has been reinforced over the years. The core of my argument was the idea that the practices and language of security that were so pivotal to the response to the events of 9/11 risked marginalizing the broader context of power and interest that shapes these transnational issues. [...]
10 Years After September 11
Ten Years after 9/11: Controversy over the Meaning of Jihad Remains, As It Always Will
by Farish A. Noor
A decade ago, I wrote about the evolution of the concept of jihad and how a plastic signifier grew harder over time and assumed a status that became almost canonical. Ten years on, it seems that the contestation over the meaning of that signifier remains with us, and my suspicion is that it always will. […]
10 Years After September 11
Retribution and Its Consequences
by Luis Rubio
One of my teachers, Roy Macridis, was fond of saying that public policy, in particular that which is relative to foreign policy, should be evaluated not for its objectives but for its consequences. The theme that especially grieved him was the Vietnam War, concerning which his pithy affirmation was that the United States had achieved exactly the opposite of what it had set out to accomplish. Ten years ago, my concern was that the American response to the brutal attacks of 9/11 would bring about precisely the opposite of what was intended. [...]