Gilbert Achcar’s book The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder came out recently in a third French edition. On this occasion, the author wrote and translated a new foreword.

After the annus horribilis that France experienced in 2015, marked by the January and November terror attacks, 2016 seemed to spread this bitter feeling across the globe. The European xenophobic right’s post-Brexit jubilation, the bloody Bastille Day in Nice, which came with a new surge of Islamophobia, the election of the ultra-reactionary demagogue Donald Trump, Aleppo’s martyrdom, Vladimir Putin’s triumph: enough to make you wretch with the nightmarish feeling of living through a new version of last century’s interwar years.

At the very outset of the present century, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, I wrote the first edition of this book. The diagnosis-prognosis that its title revealed can be summarized as follows: the conjunction of neoliberalism’s devastating social effects and the United States’ imperialist greed following its Cold War victory created a fertile ground for a new release of the barbaric tendencies inherent to each cultural area, which were countered and repressed by the civilizational process during the first post-1945 decades. Instead of this progressive dialectic, a reactionary one was set in motion, in which opposing barbarisms reinforce each other and the violence of the strong stirs up the asymmetric violence of the weak.