International Relations Theory and the Terrorists Attacks of September 11

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Recommended: 9/11's effect on the US and the world essay

An event as epochal as September 11 is bound to provoke theorists of international relations. Over the past decade or so, there has been a race in academia to claim the prize for the best theory to explain the events before and after September 11. The consensus is that the dominant discourse of realism has won, because it conceives of conflict and destruction as natural in an anarchical world (from Thomas Hobbes' "anarchical state of nature"). It also justifies America's threatening military actions after the terror strikes as a natural form of behavior of strong states, which always bully the weak into compliance to serve the former's selfish interests.

The more interesting contest is among the alternative theories to realism. It is a race for second prize, and the main competitors are feminism, globalism/neo-Marxism and pluralism.

Feminism

The fundamental premise of feminism is that international politics is a "man's world" and a "gendered activity". Gender is a social construction based on ideas of "autonomy", "objectivity", "sovereignty" and "virtu" (Niccolo Machiavelli), of which only men and masculine states are allegedly capable. Writing after September 11, feminist novelist Arundhati Roy encapsulated this critique, saying, "Women of the world stand between two extremes, both represented by androcentrism, Rambo culture and patriarchy - Osama bin Laden and George Bush." Bin Laden reportedly has 42 wives and is a defender and instigator of Taliban-style hardline Islamic "structural violence" against women. Bush heads the most conservative American administration since Ronald Reagan, pursuing vested interests of the military-industrial complex and giant oil multinationals that extort women in the Third World (a line favored by Marxist feminism).

Realist dogmas and metaphors of "war of every man against every man" and "stag hunt" (Jean Jacques Rousseau) have been pursued vigorously by the US government since September 11, accompanied by a culture of "manliness" and glorification of soldiers and ultra-patriotic themes in the media. "Imperial brotherhoods" (Robert Dean) among mujahideen and the Bush cabinet are waging destructive wars to quench their fanaticism and male egotism. Some feminists see the World Trade Center itself as a symbol of male capitalist egotism which ran into another kind of Arabic male chauvinism on September 11.

Feminists also like to point out that the majority of women in the world, including Palestinians, mourned the deaths of innocents in the terror attacks, and called for a foreign policy of reconciliation instead of revenge.

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