International Relations and Terrorism - Essay Example

The US bombing on September 11th is one case where terror was unleashed upon a mixed combination of individuals from countries across the world. International relations experts have made attempts to explain the impacts of this attack on the US and in the world. The events of September 11 are clearly etched in the minds of individuals across the world. The terrorist attack targeted and hit the World trade centre, a building that was central to the activities of many countries, not only the United States of America (Saurette, 2006).

The terrorist attack in effect caused what political scientists would call a domino effect. Soon after the bombing, Afghanistan was invaded closely followed by the invasion of Iraq. The aftermath of America's retaliatory actions were only seen later, at a time when no remedial action could be taken - several lives were (and are still being) lost, and billions worth of property destroyed. The American dollar gradually devalued while the Euro has achieved tremendous gains, rich oil companies departed from the United States for Dubai and much more effects have been witnessed across the world.

In Afghanistan, America's actions resulted in a gender revolution. Generally, the reputation of the US as a superpower has also been negatively affected by the attack as well as by its wars against the countries it engaged in war (Saurette, 2006). ThThe terror attack on the world's superpower on a global scale raised eyebrows. The reality of terrorism has much more been accepted, and nations across the world have continued ever since to make provisions for counter-terrorism. Extremist movements have since received international attention and nations are taking pro-active measures in preventing small and big flare-ups as opposed to waiting for an attack to apply reactive measures.

The events as they occurred, together with the retaliatory actions of the United States of America have provoked a lot of International Relations theorists to jump into action in an attempt to analyze the impacts of the event on international relations. The following sections attempt to critically relate international relations theories with the events that followed the September 11th US attack.INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORYInternational relations theory is geared towards providing a conceptual model that can be used as a basis for analyzing international relations.

Every theory takes a reductive and essentialist form to different degrees by taking different assumptions in each case. In international relations theory, the analysis only focuses on salient events that are prove to be relevant to the theory. This can better be stated considering a case where a realist completely disregards an event that may be crucial to the constructivist and vice versa.The character and number of assumptions that are made by an IR theory practically determines how usefulness it will be.

Again, several ways of thinking come to play when dealing with International relations theory. The different schools of thought which are usually conflicting include Neo-Gramscianism, Marxism, Constructivism, Institutionalism and others. Two positivist schools of thinking however have become most popular: Liberalism and Realism. Constructivism is continuously becoming a mainstream theory and particularly outside the USA, post-positivist theories are increasing in popularity (Mann,