Lexicon of Conflict: How the Post-9/11 'War on Terror' Redefined Global Politics and Language

Former US President George W Bush speaks about his administration's so-called global war on terror at a high school in Tipp City, Ohio in 2007. Torture became “enhanced interrogation”, while suspects were seized and removed across borders through “extraordinary rendition”. Detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were designated “enemy combatants”, and deadly attacks were described as “surgical” or “targeted” strikes. In the years following the September 11 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center, a distinct vocabulary of war, heavily laced with the language of bureaucracy and precision, entered the political mainstream in the United States. At its centre was a phrase broad enough to encompass almost everything that followed: the “war on terror”.

That phrase came to define an era in which the US illegally invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, established the notorious Guantanamo Bay holding centre for “terrorists”, and dramatically expanded its surveillance and national security powers at home. Experts note this was all facilitated by a new lexicon that sanitised violence and erased the humanity of its targets. Twenty-five years later, the phrase “war on terror” is heard far less frequently from the White House, but many of the themes and ideas it helped to embed remain deeply rooted in US politics. “I think we can see the legacy of the war on terror everywhere in US politics today,” Leonie Jackson, a senior international relations lecturer at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, told Al Jazeera. “In fact, I would argue that we are still very much inside the logic of this ‘war’.”

Nine days after the attacks on New York and Washington, DC in 2001, then-US President George W Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there… It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” he declared. Congress had already passed the Authorisation for Use of Military Force, signed by Bush on September 18, giving the president broad authority to use force against those he determined had planned, authorised, committed, or aided the September 11 attacks, or anyone who had harboured those responsible.

Unlike a conventional war, however, this was not a conflict against a specific group or country. “Terrorism is not a state, a territory or even a specific organisation. It is a tactic,” Christopher Baker-Beall of Bournemouth University told Al Jazeera. “Declaring a ‘war on terror’, therefore, created a conflict without an obvious geographical boundary or clearly defined enemy and therefore, importantly, no natural endpoint.” Later that year, Bush laid down a stark challenge for the international community: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Bush also frequently used the term “evil”. Harmonie Toros, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Reading in the UK, told Al Jazeera that this “language is used to sanitise actions taken by the US – actions that could be seen as not okay for a normal, functioning democracy to undertake”. At the same time, she said, it represented “a strong discursive effort to demonise” the enemy. Fear, anger, and the desire to respond, Toros noted, combined to create the narrative of the “war on terror”, dividing the world not only between allies and enemies, but between notions of “good” and “evil”. In his paper, 9/11, the Crisis of Meaning, and Disinformation in the 21st Century, Jason Thomas wrote that this stems from colonial ideas of civilisation and barbarism, with the US constructing a narrative that asserted the “civilised/barbarian” axis as fundamental in world politics.

The US invaded Afghanistan less than a month after the events of September 11, 2001. In March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq based on repeated claims by the Bush administration that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Those stockpiles were never found, but by then, the “war on terror” had rapidly expanded into a sprawling network of global military and covert operations. Nearly 780 people would eventually pass through the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, with all but a handful eventually freed without ever being charged with a crime, though some languished in detention for two decades.

When the British-American human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith first arrived at Guantanamo to render legal aid to detainees, he reported seeing boys as young as 14 being held. “The Guantanamo detention camp was born a sorry lie and it remains one,” Stafford Smith wrote for Al Jazeera in 2022. Alongside Guantanamo, the CIA operated secret detention facilities, or “black sites”, overseas, while the abuse and torture of prisoners by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became one of the defining scandals of the war.

Oiling the wheels for those practices was a language that often appeared deliberately clinical. Torture and abusive interrogation methods, including waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, and stress positions, were described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, while the covert transfer of detainees outside ordinary judicial processes became “extraordinary rendition”. Baker-Beall noted that the striking bureaucratic character of these terms created a “moral and political distance” that sanitised acts of extraordinary violence. In legal memoranda known as the “Torture Memos”, lawyers in the Bush administration constructed a narrow interpretation of torture to authorize brutal techniques. Jackson noted that this euphemistic language helped cloak practices in “a veneer of legality”, while Tahir Abbas, professor of criminology and global justice at Aston University in the UK, told Al Jazeera that it desensitised ordinary members of the public.

Forty-five days after September 11, Bush signed the Patriot Act, vastly expanding the surveillance apparatus of the US government. The post-9/11 security architecture also transformed immigration, borders, and domestic policing, leading to the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. Security policy shifted from responding to actual threats to governing possible future threats. Governments across Europe also introduced sweeping counterterrorism laws, while Muslim communities increasingly found themselves subjected to a “boomerang effect” of securitisation, surveillance, and a politics of “othering”.

By the time Barack Obama became US president in 2009, the terminology began to shift, and on May 23, 2013, Obama announced that the “war on terrorism” was over. However, the institutions built in its wake did not disappear. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, created as part of the Department of Homeland Security, continued its operations. Guantanamo Bay has also seen use by the Trump administration to detain migrants. Toros noted that the war on terror left behind a legacy of villainising specific groups, a practice that has expanded into wider political discourses.

The legacy also extends into US foreign policy, with Donald Trump ordering the executive branch in 2025 to use the name “Department of War” as a secondary title for the Department of Defense. The US has engaged in further military action in the Middle East, with Trump claiming action against Iran was necessary to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon, drawing comparisons to the 2003 Iraq war justifications. While the current circumstances differ, Jackson observed that the same pre-emptive security logic and political arguments remain deeply ingrained in US society today.