I’d like to look at the problem of terrorism from a rarely examined angle: the spread of globalization.

Up until very recently I regarded anti-globalism and its adherents as behind-the-curve luddites, idealistic kids with fancy but unemployable degrees and too much spare time on their hands.

This article, not the first one on anti-globalism that I read, but well-argued and profound given its context, nudges me even further into an anti-globalism camp.

I find this idea, that the globalism is in fact a precursor of terror, interesting and worthy of examining. In sum, we blame tradition and ‘ancient hatreds’ when it is in fact modernity and race for growth-at-all-costs that may be at the root of current spike in conflicts all over the world.

The author argues that the new global economy, brought to Global South by the developed nations, breaks down human-scale structures, destroys bonds of reciprocity and mutual dependence and forces the young to reject one’s own identity and one’s own self.

The standard thinking goes that globalization erases the self-identity of a Muslim or a Buddist or a Catholic and turns them all into one nation, one ethnicity – that of a global consumer. But, as the author shows, the opposite has occurred. As the fruits of globalization are dangled in front of everybody, only a minority, usually politically connected, is a beneficiary of those fruits. The rest see what they can be or rather what they should be and then are denied the path to that new identity. Thus tensions begin to appear where there were none before.

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