Far from an unfortunate cliché, medievalism has become a dominant paradigm for comprehending the identity and motivations of America’s perceived enemy in the War on Terror. Yet as Bruce Holsinger argues here, this cloying post-9/11 rhetoric has served to obscure the more intricate ideological machinations of neomedievalism, the global idiom of the non-state actor: NGOs, transnational corporate militias, and terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and al Qaeda. While International Relations theorists promote neomedievalism as a model for understanding emergent modes of global sovereignty, neoconservatives exploit its conceptual slipperiness for tactical ends. Holsinger concludes with a careful parsing of the Bush administration’s Torture Memos, which enlist neomedievalism’s model of feudal sovereignty toward the abrogation of human rights.As mentioned on ITM last year.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror
My copy of Bruce's book arrived today (thanks, Bruce!) and I am truly looking forward to reading it. Has anyone else picked it up yet? Here is the description from the Prickly Paradigm website:
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