Abstract

The 11 September 2001 terrorist action organized on US soil by the transnational jihadist group al-Qaeda represented a phenomenological novelty with epochal implications: The ability to simultaneously hijack four airliners and crash them, with hundreds of passengers forced to die along with the suicide bombers, against the capital symbols of American «hegemonic power» (the capitalist economy projected by the Twin Towers, the military organisation centred on the Pentagon, the democratic liberalism recognised in the Capitol), causing almost 3,000 casualties, over 6,000 injured, and 25 billion dollars in material damage, effectively revolutionised the offensive and communicative modus operandi of politically motivated violence as it had been expressed in the modern Western sphere. At the same time, this huge and traumatic event decreed a securitarian reaction throughout the Euro-Atlantic system, driven by the winds of the «global war on terror» launched by the G. W. Bush administration. With the unprecedented terrorist rupture of the USA’s inviolability and the consequent American attempt to unilaterally reestablish its own planetary hegemony through pre-emptive strikes, the marginalisation of international humanitarian law and the forced export of the Western model of democracy, a new historical era was thus inaugurated, coinciding with the beginning of the third millennium, under the sign of existential fear.