Always on the lookout for opportunities to press their case, anti-immigration advocates lost no time after the attacks of September 11. As one of them pointed out in testimony before the Senate, It seems clear that the 19 terrorists of September 11 were all foreign citizens and entered the United States legally, as tourists, business […]
Terrorist attacks on and since September 11th have stimulated public soul-searching, military and diplomatic responses, and efforts to reform public policy. Both the attacks and responses to them have raised a host of questions about social organization, basic social institutions, how people mobilize amid crises, and how differences of culture and politics shape conflict and cooperation.
This website features an extraordinary and still-expanding collection of essays by leading social scientists from around the country and the world. These are efforts by social scientists to bring theoretical and empirical knowledge to bear on the events of Sept. 11, their precursors, and what comes after.
We have asked the authors of these essays to write against two-week deadlines. Much to their credit they have obliged, even when it is difficult to come by sure knowledge in a time of quickly changing circumstances.
These essays are intended as resources for teachers—especially college and university instructors—who want to address the unfolding events in their courses from the perspectives of the social sciences. We hope they may also serve journalists and others who seek a guide to academic knowledge related to these events. Not least they are for all of us who seek deeper understanding in troubling times.
Ten years after these essays were published, contributors to After September 11 were asked to reflect on what they wrote and to explore what had changed and what remained the same since those harrowing times, resulting in the essay collection 10 Years after September 11.
After September 11
One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Addressing Diversity in the Needs and Development Capacities of Afghan Women, Short and Long-Term
by Margaret Mills
As Barnett Rubin has persuasively argued elsewhere on this website, human security is the key issue linking Afghanistan’s ongoing institutional melt-down, amidst the entanglements of exploitative geopolitics, with Americans’ and Europeans’ own intensified focus on safety and economic security in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Also on this site, Saba Gul Khattak has represented how […]
After September 11
U.S. Foreign Economic Policy After September 11th
by Barry Eichengreen
Unquestionably, the events of September 11th have reshaped the debate over globalization. A trend that many economists characterized as irresistible suddenly appears less so. Foreign assembly operations have become less attractive to U.S. corporations now that there is the fact, or even the danger, that their trucks will be stuck in mile-long queues at the […]
After September 11
The Predicament of Diaspora and Millennial Islam: Reflections in the Aftermath of September 11
by Pnina Werbner
Introduction One intellectual response to September 11 has been an outpouring of scholarly commentaries, each in turn suggesting an interpretation of September 11 from a particular personal and disciplinary angle. In the present paper I reflect, like these other commentaries, on the impact of September 11 from my own scholarly perspective, that of an anthropologist […]
After September 11
The Globalization of Informal Violence, Theories of World Politics, and “The Liberalism of Fear”
by Robert O. Keohane
The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, have incalculable consequences for domestic politics and world affairs. Reliable predictions about these consequences are impossible. However, it may be worthwhile, even at this early point, to reflect on what these acts of violence reveal about the adequacy of our theories of world politics. In […]
After September 11
The Shifting Grounds for Transnational Civic Activity
by Jeffrey Ayres and Sidney Tarrow
Since the terrorist attacks rocked the United States on September 11th, for most Americans the state has become a welcome buffer against the anxiety and uncertainties of a new age of biological attacks. This has had a profoundly negative effect on the transnational activists who challenged neoliberal globalization in the late 1990s. As the “rally […]
After September 11
Theorizing Islam
by Richard W. Bulliet
In January, 1981, the Islamic Republic of Iran released 52 Americans whom the revolutionary students occupying the Tehran embassy had held for 444 days. This ended a traumatic intrusion of Middle Eastern politics upon the American psyche. Unimaginable only two years before, the trauma has clouded our dreams and our memories ever since. Twenty years […]
After September 11
Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism
by Daniele Archibugi
The fall of the Berlin Wall was a symbolic event that raised hopes for a more united world, founded on the values of international legality and democracy. The idea was put forward that, at last, human rights would be respected planet-wide and that violent conflict would gradually disappear. In just over a decade, many such […]
After September 11
Networks of Dissent: Islamism and Reform in Saudi Arabia
by Gwenn Okruhlik
The following essay will be forthcoming in Current History. Our thanks to the editors for allowing the essay to appear here. The politics of Islamist dissent in Saudi Arabia have come under intense scrutiny since September 11. This is hardly surprising. Osama bin Laden is Saudi Arabian by birth and upbringing. Suspicion existed for some […]
After September 11
Violence, Law and Justice in a Global Age
by David Held
On Sunday, 23rd September 2001, the novelist, Barbara Kingsolver wrote in The Los Angeles Times: ‘It’s the worst thing that’s happened, but only this week. Two years ago, an earthquake in Turkey killed 17,000 people in a day, babies and mothers and businessmen…. The November before that, a hurricane hit Honduras and Nicaragua and killed […]