Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

New World, New War: Understanding Global Jihad, Kabir Sethi

Political Science Honors Projects

Scholars tend to explain contemporary conflicts by referring to ambiguously defined processes of globalization. Given this conceptual vacuum, I build a theoretical model that explains the transformation of war through a rigorous analysis of globalization from multiple temporal perspectives. This Braudelian model, which examines the warfighting paradigm, the social mode of warfare, and the historical structure of war, is then used to explain globalist radical Islam. My findings indicate that the emergence of global network societies has had a profound, transformative effect on jihadist violence and, more broadly, on the global mode of warfare.