Constructing Global Enemies: Hegemony and Identity in International Discourses on Terrorism and Drug Prohibition

Constructing Global Enemies asks how and why specific interpretations of international terrorism and drug abuse have become hegemonic at the global level. The book analyses the international discourses on terrorism and drug prohibition and compares efforts to counter both, not only from a contemporary but also from a historical perspective.
Utilising poststructuralist theory of the relationship between hegemony and identity, Herschinger argues that hegemony is much more than just the dominance of a single country in international life; rather it is the emergence of a hegemonic order that can best be understood as the production of a new collective identity. Offering an in-depth discussion of the methodology of discourse analysis, the book explores how such hegemonies emerge and persist in the field of security. This serves to explain the widespread disagreement regarding the fight against international terrorism as well as the successful suppression of counter-hegemonic projects in the field of international drug prohibition.
Constructing Global Enemies will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations and security studies.

Eva Herschinger is a research associate and lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the Universität der Bunderswehr, München, Germany.

1. Introduction 2. On Hegemony and Identity in International Security Discourses 3. Opening the ‘Black Box’: The Construction of International Hegemonies 4. International Drug Prohibition: Constructing the ‘Drug-Free World’ 5. Writing the ‘War on Terror’: The Struggle of Hegemonic Projects 6. Comparing the ‘War on Drugs’ and the ‘War on Terror’ 7. Conclusion. Appendix