The Redefinition of the Political Enemy after 9/11/2001: an Analysis from the War and its Discourses

Abstract

The new wars and the clash of civilizations are two theoretical approaches to the current international order. This article attempts to contrast these two proposals: on the one hand, terrorism, which reappears in the international scene after 9/11/2001, and on the other hand, the language of the war depicted in the discourses of President George Bush. The conclusions arrived at are, first, that the tactics used to fight terrorism denote wars for territory aimed at identifying the enemy in States or blocks of States as “axis of evil” and spread the violence indistinctively within these territories, and second, that the identification of terrorism from an opposition of concepts, differentiating the existence of a certain “us” represented by the West from “them” opposing it, produces and reproduces the confrontation.