The Political Economy of Jihad and the War on Terror

This paper treats the “war on terror†as a battle to engage the hopes of a target population. bounded by shared “conspiracist†beliefs. These are seen as countering the cognitive dissonance arising from a history of perceived humiliation. A small militant minority within this target population will have a tendency to perpetrate acts of terror both as an expression of their “apocalyptic hopes†and to evoke such hopes among their potential or latent members within the target population. In reacting to these acts through a preventive “war on terror†that is unrestricted in time and space, the superpower is setting itself the ambitious goal of extinguishing these hopes. Questions must therefore arise as to whether the pursuit of this option rather than “a more focused, restrained international response†can be explained in terms of a dispassionate assessment of the public interest being over-ridden by the passions provoked by a sense of superpower humiliation or by private considerations of political interest.