Read Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists for Free Online

resurgence.
Many made giddy by globalization—the ever faster and deeper integration of individuals, corporations, markets, nations, technologies, and knowledge—believe that a connected world inexorably shrinks differences and divisions, making everyone safer and more secure in one great big happy family. If only it were not for people’s premodern parochial biases: religions, ethnicities, native languages, nations, borders, trade barriers, historical chips on the shoulder. This sentiment is especially common among scientists and the deacons of Davos, wealthy and powerful globetrotters who schmooze one another in airport VIP clubs, three-star restaurants, and five-star hotels and feel that pleasant buzz of camaraderie over wine or martinis at the end of the day. I don’t reject this world; I sometimes embrace it. But my field experience and experiments in a variety of cultural settings lead me to believe that an awful lot of people on this planet respond to global connectivity very differently than does the power elite. While economic globalization has steamrolled or left aside large chunks of humankind, political globalization actively engages people of all societies and walks of life—even the global economy’s driftwood: refugees, migrants, marginals, and those most frustrated in their aspirations.
For there is, together with a flat and fluid world, a more tribal, fragmented, and divisive world, as people unmoored from millennial traditions and cultures flail about in search of a social identity that is at once individual and intimate but with a greater sense of purpose and possibility of survival than the sorrow of here today, gone tomorrow. For the first time in history, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union shattered the brief illusion of a stable, bipolar world, most of humanity is politically engaged. Many, especially the young, are increasingly independent yet interactive, in the search for respect and meaning in life, in their visions of economic advancement and environmental awareness. These youth form their identities in terms of global political cultures through exposure to the media. Even the injustices of the blistered legacies of imperialism and colonialism are now more about how the media paints the past to construct contemporary cultural identity than about the material and mental effects of things that happened.
Global political cultures arise horizontally among peers with different histories, rather than vertically as before, in traditions tried and passed in place from generation to generation. Human rights constitute one global political culture, originally centered upon the Americas and Europe, and the quest for rights is a growing part of what former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski called “the global political awakening.” 20 The decidedly nonsecular jihad is another political culture in this massive, media-driven transnational awakening: thoroughly modern and innovative despite its atavistic roots in the harsh purity of the Prophet’s original community in the Arabian Desert. Jihad offers the group pride of great achievements for the underachieving: an englobing web of brave new hearts for an outworn world tearing at the seams. Its attraction, to youth especially, lies in its promise of moral simplicity and of a harmonious and egalitarian community whose extent is limitless, and in its call to passion and action on humanity’s behalf. It is a twisting of the tenets of human rights, according to which each individual has the “natural right” of sovereignty. It claims a moral duty to annihilate any opposition to the coming of true justice and gives the righteous the prerogative to kill. The end justifies the means, and no sacrifice of individuals is too costly for progress toward the final good.
I don’t know how this crisis of territorial cultures and the ensuing conflict of global political cultures will play out in the end. But my purpose here is to help find a