In the shadows of globalization: civilizational crisis, the 'global modern' and 'Islamic nihilism'

This article explores points of contact between neojihadist violence and
globalization as part of a strategy to provincialize the inherently presentist character of extant discussions of the current financial crisis. It seeks a broadening of the cultural field in which neojihadist projects, specifically of destruction or self-annihilation, become intelligible. Implicit in this exercise is the nagging suspicion that a focus on civilizational aspects of the general crisis offers greater access to differential registers within globalization. The violence
of globalization is captured in the emergence of restrictive cultural horizons preventing authentication of different forms of life. Islamic nihilism is a constitute aspect of modernity, and under globalizing conditions, an integral part of cultural and religious erasure. The exhaustion of a west-centered global modern as the only legitimate imagined world is the principal feature of this crisis. Nihilistic violence merely uncovers the recognition of the necropolitical conditioned by the global modern.