Regions, Strategies and Empire in the Global War on Terror.

The often overlooked economic dimensions of the current American national security strategy bridge the military policies of the neo-conservative Bush doctrine with the neo-liberal tendencies of economic globalisation. They do so by explicitly extending control into the "dangerous periphery" of the global economy by strategies that attempt to integrate these regions into the global economy. Reading recent official American defence documents in parallel with commentaries on the war on terror by popular authors Thomas Barnett and Robert Kaplan suggests a broad complementarity of geopolitical categories that link imperial military action directly with neo-liberal globalisation. Both rely on a dichotomous mapping of the world into civilised core and dangerous periphery, categories that reprise earlier imperial mappings of the world and replicate the violent practices of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]