The twenty-first century opened with the world’s sole superpower fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq and threatening war against several other states in a new unilaterally aggressive and militarist mode. Only a decade before, having triumphed over communism, the United States had attempted a combination of multilateralism and commercialism, festooned with themes of human rights and democracy, in the discourse and practices of globalization. Although many had legitimately criticized globalization and its military interventions in the name of human rights and democracy as imperial, the brazen swagger of the new imperialism of the twenty-first century seemed a dramatic reversal. The tide of literature on globalization, which had risen so high so fast during the 1990s, now ebbed just as rapidly, and the waters of a new wave of writing on imperialism rushed in.
