Excerpt from: "Culture Change, Symbolic Object Loss, and Restitutional Process," by Howard F. Stein, Ph.D. To read the complete paper please click here.

“The principal function of human psychology is to come to terms with human biology. We begin our careers in the uterine environment. Initially, the mother’s body, the social topography of kin and neighbors, the animate and inanimate physical environment, are not experienced as distinct objects with a life and needs of their own: they are the world. One experiences them as though they were an intrinsic, if distal, part of the self; just as if limbs. Sometimes insidiously, sometimes abruptly, one dimly begins to perceive that the world is distinct from the self. One suffers the blessing and curse of self-awareness. One becomes self-exiled. The world is forever after beyond the self.”

Excerpt from: "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," by Lee Harris.
To read the complete paper please click here.

“But what happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group? That such a thing can happen is obvious from a glance at history. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century, after all, spread like a virus. Their propagation was not that suggested by John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas — fantasy ideologies were not debated and examined, weighed and measured, evaluated and compared. They grew and spread like a cancer in the body politic. For the people who accepted them did not accept them as tentative or provisional. They were unalterable and absolute. And finally, after driving out all other competing ideas and ideologies, they literally turned their host organism into the instrument of their own poisonous and deadly will.”

Excerpt from: Terror and Liberalsim (2003) by Paul Berman. New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton. To read additional excerpts from the book, please click here.

“For it is very odd to think that tens of millions of people, relying on their own best judgments, might end up joining a pathological political movement. Individual madmen might step forward – yes, that is unquestionable. But, surely, millions of people are not going to choose death, and the Jonestowns of this world are not going to take over entire societies. The very idea of a pathological mass movement seems too far-fetched to be believable. Is the world truly a place where mass movements bedeck themselves in shrouds and march to the cemetery? This seemed unthinkable. And, all over the world, the temptation became irresistible to conclude that, no, the world remains a rational place, and pathological movements do not exist, and slanderers are weaving lies on behalf of narrow material interests. No, suicide terror must be – it has to be, perhaps in ways invisible to the naked eye – a rational response to real-life conditions.”

Excerpt from Chapter in: Sacred Violence, Torture, Terror and Sovereignty (2008) by Paul Kahn. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. To read the complete chapter, please click here.

“Viewing the battlefield from a certain distance, it is not even clear who is the object of sacrifice: the enemy and the conscript suffer the same threat and burden of physical destruction for the sake of making present sovereign power. Killing and being killed are bound together just as the sacral-monarch’s power to take a life was always linked to his own sacrificial character. Coronation was a ceremony of rebirth, of life through death. The emergence of the royal “we” follows upon the death of the personal “I.” The power to take a life is always linked to the willingness to give up one’s own life, for self-sacrifice marks the presence of the sovereign.”

Excerpt from: “Re-thinking (in)security discourses from a critical perspective” by Josefina Echavarría Alvarez. To read the complete article, please click here.

“Security discourses (are) an integral part of the state’s construction of its own identity. Security discourses may be understood as the state’s constant reproduction of danger rather than as the state’s response to danger. Security discourses provide a significant input to construct the nation.  Security discourses  portray certain dangers as threatening the We inside the state borders, telling Us what we are not, what we have to fear, and what the state should defend us from. Thus, the process of constitution of both identities, of state and people, the inner and outer, or Us and Them emerge at the same time.”

Excerpt from: "Reflections on Communism Twenty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall" by Paul Hollander. To read the complete article, please click here.

“Only the idealistic or utopian component of both communism and Nazism could justify the scale of political violence undertaken. Communist campaigns of extermination and political violence had a cleansing, purifying goal. Those persecuted and killed were defined as socially, culturally, and morally harmful, as well as inferior and obstructive to the accomplishment of laudable objectives such as the creation of a better society or better world. The removal of such groups was often conceptualized as a surgical procedure. Only the idealistic or utopian component of both communism and Nazism could justify the scale of political violence undertaken.”