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Big events in world politics provide students of international relations and comparative politics with the closest thing to a natural experiment. September 11th is no exception. For a political analysis of terrorism material capabilities and objective factors are typically besides the point. What matters are the political importance of processes that shape how groups and governments conceive of the use of violence, how publics perceive and interpret insecurity, and how threats are constructed politically. Such conceptions, interpretations and processes of threat construction occur largely within polities rather than between them. And domestic politics differ across countries in ways that deserve careful analysis by those interested in the international politics of counter-terrorism. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is like a strong beam of light which gets filtered by distinct national lenses that create different political responses even in democratic, capitalist states closely allied with the United States such as Germany and Japan. September 11 supports the view of both proponents and critics of globalization. Operating within, across and alongside states, the AlQaeda network is a close approximation of the novel condition of world politics that globalization theory, with its insistence on converging practices, has illuminated. Sharp differences in counter-terrorism policies, the focus of this paper, underlines the importance of states whose policies are retaining striking differences. And distinctive national responses are embedded in different regional contexts, illustrated here by Europe and Southeast Asia. This diversity in national approaches in a plural world underlines the difficulty that U.S. diplomacy is likely to face in a prolonged war on terrorism conceived of as a clash between good and evil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]