More From Our Geographers

Read more from Alec Murphy's comments on relations in a post-September 11th world.

I think that we run the risk of, in some senses, losing the positive momentum that came from exposing the relative weakness, if you will, of Islamic fundamentalism, in terms of its real sort of political and military roots in Afghanistan by this unilateralist impulse…. Which of course was an impulse that seemed to work well in the early going after September 11 because that was what, arguably, helped to allow for a relatively efficient military response. But I think that the key now is to start thinking about what we can do that will pull back from the unilateralist view and in fact put us in a position of continuing the early efforts of building a global coalition, which I worry now is beginning to unravel, because I think the future of the view that the average Muslim will have in that part of the world and beyond is going to be impacted a great deal by how our particular objectives are seen, and if our objectives are seen as, 'we're going to go in and control what's going on,' I think that's going to lead to a great deal of negative reaction.

On the one hand, the September 11 situation and its aftermath are not simply reflective of a problem that is socioeconomic. It doesn't mean that socioeconomic issues aren't relevant but it's not specifically a socioeconomic problem. I mean, after all, one could argue that even those who were apparently most responsible for what happened, that their real cause was not to uplift the downtrodden masses. We don't see a correlation in any way between those areas that have been most actively engaged in the cause and those areas that are suffering in the worst ways from socioeconomic differences and so forth.

But at the same time, the socioeconomic position of Southwest Asia, Middle East, North Africa, the Islamic world in general, I think would clearly be understood by those who were part of the September 11 initiative as a larger indicator of fundamental unequalness of the world today, of a kind of hegemonic position that the West has had in the world today. So, in a more abstract way, I think that is relevant to what has happened. But then what is the role of the state in all of this? Part of the problem here is the very diversity of even the types of regimes in the Islamic world…there are a variety of different types of regimes there. And so the extent to which the state is seen as implicated in the problem is partly a question of what type of regime or what you're referring to when you think about whether the state is implicated as part of the problem.