Unholy Wars Seyla Benhabib I It has become clear since September 11 that we are faced with a new form of strug- gle that threatens to dissolve the boundaries of the political in liberal demo-cracies. The terror network of Osama bin Laden, and its various branches in Egypt, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Algeria, and among Islamist groups in western Europe, is wider, more entrenched, and more sophisticated than it was believed to be. The attacks unleashed by these groups (and their potential sympa- thizers in the US and Europe among neo-Nazis and white supremacists), especially the use of the biological weapon anthrax to contaminate the civilian population via the mail, indicate a new political and military phenomenon which challenges the framework of state-centric politics. Historians always warn us that the unprecedented will turn out to have some forerunners somewhere and that what seems new today will appear old when considered against the background of some longer time span. Nevertheless to “think the new” in politics is the vocation of the intellectual. This is a task at which Susan Sontag, Fred Jameson, and Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek have failed us by interpreting these events along the tired paradigm of an anti-imperialist struggle by the “wretched of the earth.” 1 Neglecting the internal dynamics and struggles within the Islamic world and the history of regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Kashmir, these analyses assure us that we can continue to grasp the world through our usual categories, and that by blaming the policies and actions of western governments one can purge oneself of the enmity and hatred which is directed toward one as a member of such western societies. These analyses help us neither to grasp the unprecedented nature of the events unfolding since September 11, 2001 nor to appreciate the internal dynamics within the Arab-Muslim world which have given rise to them. The line between military and civilian targets, between military and civilian populations, had already been erased during the aerial bombings of World War II. This is not what is new since September 11. Faced with the total mobilization of society, initiated by fascism and National Socialism, it was the democracies of the world, and not some marginal terrorist group hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan, that first crossed that line and initiated “total war.” The civilian popu- lation at large became the hostage of the enemy, as during the bombing of London by the Nazis and then of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki by the Allies. In the 1950s, the Algerian War marked a new variation in this process of the Constellations Volume 9, No 1, 2002. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.