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Top1. Introduction
Without any doubt, terrorism is today one of the major threats Western nations face. Some political authorities referred to the scourge of terrorism to denote the urgency of governments to thwart some active radicalized groups which today operate in the core of western democracies (Harmon & Feldman, 2007; Hoffman, 2003). Terrorism not only has mutated in the threshold of time but changed its tactics and strategies. Since 2001, terrorism has targeted laypeople, civilians, global travelers and tourists worldwide. Whether classic terrorism historically planned their attacks against celebrities, Chief Police Officers or even authorities, now the targets include luxury tourist destinations and leisure hot-spots (Korstanje 2017; 2019). As Lisa Stampnitsky (2013) puts it, terrorism research has evolved to become a maturated sub-discipline of political science, but paradoxically, terrorist cells have embraced a more radicalized cosmology of the world. At the same time, we have abundant information on their psychological motivations. It is difficult to resist the impression that the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September of 2001 inaugurated a new epoch of fear where the check and balance institutions gradually deteriorated, if not undermined (Altheide 2019; Skoll 2016; Howie 2012). Terror was commoditized, packaged and exchanged as a new media product that is globally consumed by a vast audience (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2015). Through the stimulation of a culture of terror, liberal policies that otherwise would be rejected were unilaterally accepted by citizens. Terrorism, since 9/11, forged a serious moral crisis openly crystallized in the fear for the “Other” an aspect vivid in the post COVID19 context. The rise of a new outbreak known as COVID19 opened the doors to similar answers and counter-strategies adopted by the government just after 9/11. In this vein, some studies focused on the interconnection of the enemy living within and the outbreaks of the COVID19 virus originally reported in China (Korstanje & George 2021). Cohen-Louck and Levy (2021) coin the term viruism to denote the multifaceted consequences of COVID19 in the citizens´ life. These include not only a sentiment of victimization compared to 9/11 and global terrorism, as well as many narratives originated in a manifest fear to the “Other”. This moot point suggests there are many similarities between COVID19 and the climate of fear ignited by terrorism. Viruism, comparable to terrorism, rests on the belief the “Other” is seen as a perfect killer. In this direction, Desai & Amarasingam use the term Corojihadism to explain how radicalized groups are catalogued as a potential virus by local authorities. There is a biological metaphor of terrorism widely employed to discipline the “Other”. Authors eloquently note that terrorism, like COVID19, emulates the logic of living with the enemy inside. Our current manuscript focuses on the interconnection between terrorism and COVID19 but not for their similarities but rather by the long-lasting effects of terrorism in the Western social imaginary and the ways of perceiving the “Other”. What is original in our thesis is that it goes on the fact that 9/11 and the War on Terror mined the cultural matrix of West affecting not only how the “Non-Western Other” is seen and ultimately treated but also the “law of hospitality” which is the ideological core of Western democracies. Far from being a foundational event or an opportunity towards a more sustainable society, the COVID19 pandemic affirms a tendency that originated in 2001 which leads Occident to close its borders to the “Other”. The so-called War on Terror sets the pace for a new War against a virus.