num_pages: 117
description: President Bush was roundly criticized for likening America’s antiterrorism measures to a “crusade” in 2001. Far from just a gaffe, however, such 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 non-governmental organizations, transnational corporate militias, and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda. Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror addresses the role of neomedievalism in contemporary politics. While international-relations theorists promote neomedievalism as a model for understanding emergent modes of global sovereignty, neoconservatives exploit its conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends. Holsinger concludes with a careful parsing of the Bush administration’s torture memos, which enlist neomedievalism’s model of feudal sovereignty on behalf of the abrogation of human rights.
language: English
title: Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror
titlecomplete: Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror
genres: Nonfiction, Politics
ratings_count: 24
publisher: Prickly Paradigm Press