Introduction:

The terrorist attack of September 2001 and its aftermath has not only changed our world, it has also changed our perception of the world we live in. The seemingly peaceful two preceding decennia, which had been seen as a period of a world wide economic boom, were now scrutinized in order to find the deeper reasons behind the terrorist attack. Next to the fact that this boom was already passing its peripathy it was realised that those years had seen many comparable, however not as horrible, events. Putting those twenty years in perspective it became obvious that they had seen a gradual build up of terrorist attacks of an international kind besides those carried out in generally terrorist stricken areas. Terror had become a global issue, an unwanted companion as it were of economic globalisation so eagerly sought by international firms, national governments and other institutions, national or international. The reaction of the US administration - the war on terrorism, the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and later against the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq - and the manner in which they put their politics into practice immediately led to criticism not only from the political field but also from within academia.