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"Globalization and the Growth of Global Terrorism"
Peter Bergen

Peter Bergen, CNN terrorism correspondent, author of Holy War Inc., and producer and host of Al Qaeda 2.0

The talk will reflect my recent travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan researching the threat posed by al Qaeda since 9/11. And the talk will try to answer some of the following questions: How has al Qaeda reinvented itself since 9/11? How effective has the US campaign been against the new al Qaeda? How did al Qaeda's top leadership give the slip to the most powerful army in history following 9/11? Is al Qaeda an organization, or an ideology? Or both? A central theme running through the talk will be the answer to the seemingly simple question: What is al Qaeda? Al Qaeda is now one of the best-known organizations in the world, with brand recognition seemingly only eclipsed by another successful franchise operation:  McDonalds. Yet there is a great deal of ambiguity about what exactly constitutes al Qaeda. Is it a terrorist organization run in a regimented top-down fashion by its CEO, Osama bin Laden? Or is it a loose knit group of tens of thousands of Islamist radicals around the world whose only common link is that they trained in Afghanistan? Or has al Qaeda evolved into an intensely anti-Western ideology that has now been adopted by millions? Or is it all of the above? Additionally I'll discuss my meeting with bin Laden in 1997.

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• Peter Bergen