The world has been changed by the securitisation of everyday life and the Islamisation of security. The accompanying threat-complex has shifted American sensibilities, says Cas Mudde.
The tragedy of 11 September 2001 was used by authoritarian forces in the United States as a political opportunity. The ensuing damage to liberty, legality and democracy has been deep, says Mariano Aguirre
A flawed response to terrorism on its soil brought the United States low. The lessons are also for the rest of the world to learn, says Rein Müllerson.
What are the principal lessons of the ten years of war since the 11 September 2001 attacks? Paul Rogers, whose first openDemocracy column was published a few days after 9/11, responds to three questions.
The intense Polish empathy with America of the days after 11 September 2001 drew on an enduring connection. But there are signs of change, says Adam Szostkiewicz.
The reaction to the attacks of 11 September 2001 included an instinctive veneration of their chief architect. Its deeper foundation is a regressive and widespread ethno-religious view of the world, says Sami Zubaida.
A terror-filled day of mass murder in the eastern United States imprinted itself on the world's consciousness - and became the prelude to a decade of further violence. openDemocracy writers reflect on the impact and legacy of the events of 11 September 2001.
The inspiring Arab protesters of 2011 bring hope that the tragic cycle of animosity opened by 9/11 can end, says Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi.
The postmodern terror of 11 September 2001 unleashed a decade of catastrophic war. A decade's accounting includes both numberless victims and some unlikely beneficiaries, says Arshin Adib-Moghaddam.
The atrocity of 11 September 2001 entrenched an imaginary polarisation between “the west and the rest” - and buried a deeper reality that is only now emerging to light, says Madawi al-Rasheed.
A half-decade after 9/11, the United States appeared to Andrew Stroehlein to be locked in a “conflict mentality”. Now, he says, a new set of economic concerns - and even the rise of carnivalesque politics - signal the return of a kind of normality.
Pakistan is too often portrayed in flawed and reductive ways that flatten its complexity and offer misleading guidance to policy-makers. This makes it all the more important to acknowledge some difficult truths about the country, says Anatol Lieven.