Promoting a Singular Global Threat -- Terrorism: Strategy of choice for world governance

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The manner in which the 'war on terrorism' has been justified and developed calls for reflection on the use of singular threats as a preferred strategy in response to the many dilemmas of world governance.

The past decade has seen much focused concern on the challenge of world governance in the light of the multiplicity of interdependent problems faced by society and the planet. This has been associated with the articulation of a multitude of strategies to deal with them. Some efforts have been made to articulate these strategies within global plans, such as Agenda 21, but with relatively little success.

It is recognized that the need for new approaches to world governance are urgent if the crises are not to interact to engender a chaotic uncontrollable situation. At the same time the democratic governance processes in many industrialized countries are themselves becoming problematic in unforeseen ways -- to a degree that causes many to suspect that key services are becoming unmanageable. Coping has become problematic, notable in the case of utilities (railways and health service in the UK; energy and health services in the USA). Not only is it now a real question as to whether individual countries are governable in any meaningful sense, but the reflection of this challenge on a global scale has become daunting.

In this context the 'war on terrorism' has come as a real relief to many in that it provides a way of simplifying the complexity through radical deprioritization of many of the factors that have proven to be an impossible strain to manage. The wide variety of 'health' and 'poverty' issues, for example, are easily framed as of secondary consideration in the face of the dramatic issues of 'terrorism'. The question is whether this approach should be understood as the key to future world governance.

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