The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder

The London bombings of 7 July 2005 revived the debates that raged after 11 September, 2001. What relation did they bear to the foreign and war policies of the UK and the US? Were they symptoms of a ‘cultural clash’ between deep-seated ‘values’ or signs of a social crisis at the root of the ongoing conflict? How should we analyse the present-day emergence of fanatical forms of Islamic fundamentalism?The title of the book refers to the famous thesis on the ‘Clash of Civilizations’. Achcar develops a counter-thesis, namely that the clashes we are witnessing do not oppose civilizations, but their dark sides. Each civilization produces a specific form of barbarism which tends to take over in periods of crisis. Accordingly, the Bush administration...