Back to basics with Prof Bobbitt, then. To understand the wars on terror (he prefers the plural), we must first explore their constitutional context, ‘the underlying constitutional order’. Caribbean pirates, he contends, were the ‘terrorists of the kingly state’. In the 20th century, we fought ‘the industrial wars of the nation state’. But we now live in the era of what Bobbitt calls the ‘market state’ — globalised, networked, part-privatised, porous to capital, culture and people.

And herein lies the core of his argument: today’s strains of terrorism are only intelligible in terms of the vulnerabilities of the ‘market state’. We must stop thinking in terms of Islamic civil war, cultural clashes and democratisation in the Middle East — important as those debates are — and ask how contemporary forms of terror arose now in particular, and why they are so potent.

‘Like new antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis,’ Bobbitt writes, ‘market state terrorism is a function of what we have done to eradicate old threats. That is, its principal causes are the liberalisation of the global economy, the internationalisation of the electronic media, and the military- technological revolution — all ardently sought innovations that won the Long War of the 20th century.’ Within this setting, the battle ahead is not between Islam and the West, or the might of a hyperpower and the cunning of bearded men in mountain hideaways, but between terror and consent.

The corollary is that we shift our collective focus from the terrorists and what motivates them — as important as that is — to our own vulnerabilities: what Bobbitt calls ‘a supply side analysis that focuses on our own exposure’. And in a world of bio-terror (not to mention mutating diseases, independent of terror) ‘our own security is only as strong as the weakest of the public health systems worldwide’.

Though this is a deeply scholarly book and one studded with literary references (Shakespeare, John Gay, Hardy, Eliot, Joseph Heller), it is not short on specifics. On the US domestic front, he recommends, inter alia, a federal isolation and quarantine statute and regulations, national identification cards, legislation to permit the president to federalise National Guard troops in a natural disaster, new rules for preventive detention, and a better system for the analysis of personal data.

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