Abstract

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the largest terrorist attack in human memory triggered a periodising caesura, determining a radical restructuring of the dialectic between national socio-political practices and the international order that had emerged at the end of the Cold War. Unexpectedly struck on its own soil, as it had not been even during the World Wars, the United States reacted in a furious and absolutist manner, seeking both exemplary revenge and the reassertion of its own planetary hegemony, often by suppressing (and sometimes violating) internal constitutional principles and norms of international law. This issue aims to provide a historical reflection on the evolution of geopolitical spaces at the beginning of the XXI century, by bringing together international relations scholars, political scientists, historians of institutions and specialists in the phenomenology of terrorism, to examine the dialectic between the eruption of globalised jihadism and the spread of a «culture of fear» in Euro- Atlantic societies.