An Interim Assessment of September 11: What Has Changed and What Has Not?

thought and discussion. Emotions also remain raw, and we have little general knowledge to draw on because our grasp of terrorism is even less secure than it is of other important social phenomena such as poverty, ethnic conflict, and wars. Terrorism grounded in religion poses special problems for modern social science, which has paid little attention to religion, perhaps because most social scientists find this subject uninteresting if not embarrassing. These obstacles help explain if not excuse why most of my arguments will be negative ones. It is easier to dispute some commonly held views than to say what is right. I will argue that the threat of terrorism is not as new as is often claimed, that terrorism reinforces state power more than it undermines it or exemplifies the decreasing importance of states, that the claims for reducing terrorism by getting at its root causes are largely tendentious, that viewing the struggle against terrorism as a war is problematic, and that the attacks of September 11 are not likely to greatly change world politics.