Global Responses to the 'War on Terror'

The present collection seizes upon the momentum built by an emerging body of work that responds not only to the decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also to the multiple transnational reverberations of these conflicts: the realignment of geopolitical power relations; the formation of new terrorist networks (ISIS) and regional alliances (Iraq/Syria); the growing number of terrorist incidents in the West; the changing discourses on security and technologies of warfare; the leveraging of fundamental constitutional principles;and the ethical anxieties surrounding the lack of accountability for the violence carried out in the name of countering terrorism. The essays in this collection selectively reflect on these trajectories, which we have termed ‘global responses’ as they neither privilege one regional perspective over the other, nor define one discursive frame (‘War on Terror’) against another (‘9/11’). Instead, they concern themselves with the myriad representations of the political and cultural vicissitudes triggered by the responsive violence to 9/11 in select novels, poems, memoirs and films set in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Afghan–Pak border region, South Waziristan, Al-Andalus, Kenya, Canada, the US and the UK – works in which both the plots and the characters frequently pass through, at times surreptitiously, the Netherlands, Jordan, Senegal, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Mauritania