Afflicted Powers is an account of world politics since September 11, 2001. It aims to confront the perplexing doubleness of the present - its lethal mixture of atavism and new-fangledness. A brute return of the past, calling to mind now the Scramble for Africa, now the Wars of Religion, is accompanied by an equally monstrous political deployment of (and entrapment in) the apparatus of a hyper-modern production of appearances."--BOOK JACKET.