Today marks exactly twenty-five years since 9/11. It remains, quite rightly, a day of mourning for the nearly 3,000 people killed in those attacks, and for the families and communities whose lives were altered forever. Any serious reflection on the last quarter of a century must begin there: with grief, with loss, and with the recognition that those deaths mattered profoundly.
But remembrance cannot stop at that point. If we are to be honest about what followed, we must also acknowledge the millions of lives lost across the Middle East and South Asia in the wars, occupations, displacements, sanctions, drone campaigns, detention regimes, and security policies that gathered under the banner of the War on Terror. The Costs of War project at Brown University estimates that at least 4.5 to 4.7 million people have died in the post-9/11 war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, the great majority of them indirectly, as war destroyed economies, health systems, and infrastructure. Whatever figure one uses, the scale of suffering is almost impossible to comprehend, and it remains unevenly recognised in public debate.
Much of my work over the last two decades has tried to make sense of these consequences at global, national, and local levels. The War on Terror was never only a matter of foreign policy. It reshaped domestic politics, policing, citizenship, migration, public discourse, and the everyday lives of Muslim communities in Britain, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. It also normalised a way of thinking in which whole populations could be treated as suspect, certain regions could be rendered permanently governable through violence, and state power could present itself as defensive even when it produced deep injustice.
This is why the language of Western freedoms, liberties, and values needs to be approached with care. These principles matter, but they were too often invoked selectively, as though they belonged only to some people and could be defended by denying them to others. In practice, the pursuit of those accused of violating Western norms frequently relied on indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, torture, surveillance, racial profiling, and wars whose human costs were borne overwhelmingly by people far from the centres of Western power.
The result was not security in any meaningful sense. It was blowback on a vast scale. Western interventions generated new grievances, fractured already fragile societies, strengthened authoritarian tendencies, and created the conditions in which further violence could emerge. Each new crisis was then used to justify another layer of intervention, another expansion of state power, and another narrowing of civil liberties. This circular logic has continued for a generation: violence produces intervention; intervention produces resentment and instability; instability produces more violence; and the cycle begins again.
Language was central to how all of this became possible. It was profoundly important in establishing the basis for what came to be seen as the “coalition of the willing”, linked to what began as the War on Terror and later became known as the “Long War”. Not all of this discourse flowed from a single dominant frame, but language clearly carried a significance that went beyond the narrative itself.
It legitimised certain actions while dispensing with any meaningful transparency or openness, so that ideas of national and international security could be invoked without question. Militaristic language also conveyed a sense of urgency and importance that placed decision-making firmly within particular formations of state power.
This was deliberate. The responses that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 were driven by a combative energy that sought to justify the actions that followed. George W. Bush’s references to “evildoers” reflected a Manichaean view of the world. Within days of the attacks, he also described the campaign ahead as a “crusade”, before his advisers quickly steered him away from the term.
This rhetoric pushed national populations to accept a security-led paradigm as the only legitimate approach, with dissent increasingly penalised. It did not, however, stop protest or resistance. Civil society organisations continued to challenge unfair imprisonment, the erosion of civil liberties through counter-terrorism strategies and policies, incarceration without fair trial, and the wider consequences of the War on Terror.
Indeed, this kind of rhetoric enabled international powers to coalesce around what was presented as essential to global security. In reality, the interventions it licensed destabilised entire countries and created long-term consequences, particularly in Iraq, where the invasion and occupation created the conditions that ultimately contributed to the rise of ISIS and its later expansion into Syria.
The War on Terror also produced a boomerang effect, visible in practices such as citizenship stripping, securitisation, and surveillance, which became part of everyday life for many European Muslims. All of this reflects a wider global framing of Othering, Orientalism, and the subjugation of minorities in pursuit of an ethnocentric self, seemingly at almost any cost.
This rhetoric also desensitised ordinary members of the public, leaving them increasingly numb to the dehumanising and depersonalised ways in which death and destruction, including the deaths of innocent civilians, were discussed.
British officials quietly stopped using the phrase “War on Terror” in late 2006, when the Foreign Office reportedly advised ministers to drop it. Hilary Benn confirmed the shift publicly in April 2007, and in January 2009 the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, went further, describing the whole notion as “misleading and mistaken”. By then, however, Iraq was already in disarray, years on from the devastating assaults on Fallujah in 2004.
Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002, remains in operation almost twenty-five years later. Its military commissions have secured only a handful of convictions, most through plea deals and several since overturned on appeal, and the five men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks have still not been brought to trial. The whole idea behind Guantanamo seemed to be that people would eventually forget about it, and I think too many have. Yet the tragedy of what happened there is written into the lives, and in some cases the memoirs, of those who were eventually released.
Alongside extraordinary rendition, these incarcerations reveal how a global security apparatus effectively abandoned basic principles of humanity and justice in pursuit of what was presented as the only solution to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Arguably, this approach also fuelled further attacks and deeper problems. As ISIS lost territory in its later stages, it increasingly urged supporters in the West to carry out attacks in their home countries rather than travel to Syria and Iraq. This is what we saw in numerous cases in 2016 and 2017, including in Berlin, Manchester, and London. In several of these cases, the perpetrators were already known to the authorities; the public inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing concluded that MI5 had missed a significant opportunity to take action that might have prevented the attack.
Twenty-five years on, the question is not only how we remember 9/11, but how we account for everything done in its name. To mourn those who died that day should not require silence about those who died afterwards. A more honest memory must hold both truths together: the horror of the attacks, and the devastation caused by the policies that followed. Only then can we begin to imagine a politics beyond endless war, racialised suspicion, and the repeated claim that injustice is the necessary price of security.