This essay will critically assess whether 9/11 represented a paradigm shift in international politics. A ‘paradigm shift’ can be defined as a change in the dominant worldview of an era.This would henceforth outline that it carries a strong connotation of a change in the times.
The 9/11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks carried by 19 suicide hijackers who were later identified as being in association with the Islamist terrorist organisation, Al-Qaeda. “Within hours of the September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington D.C, American commentators were already comparing the event to a “new Pearl Harbor.” (Philip Gordon, 2001)
As the aftermath of these four catastrophic attacks led to over 2,996 casualties and over 6.000 people injured.
9/11 represented a paradigm shift in international politics as it firstly led to the start of the global
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In the aftermath of 9/11, countries have now elevated domestic threats as being an equal consideration to the engagements of other countries, supporting international diplomacy.
However, it could as be argued that 9/11 had not represented a paradigm shift in international politics due to the fact that a lot of the pre-existing debates within IR were hardly affected by the September 11th attacks. Most certainly, the 9/11 terrorist attacks had shocked the entire world and triggered a paradigm shift in every country. However, it did not represent a paradigm shift in international politics as that of the Cold War era in which the United States’s paradigm was the model on which other states were patterned, which could then be argued as not representing a paradigm shift in international