With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union ended, and ushered in a new era that came to be known as globalization. The world began to deepen its interdependence and appeared as one village. Thomas Friedman’s book ‘The World is Flat’ aptly described how every country was now connected with the other in multiple ways that were mutually beneficial. The United Nations began to weave together a global normative framework by organizing mega conferences on important subjects from rights of children and women to environmental protection and human settlements, followed by five-yearly and ten-yearly reviews.
Come 9/11, the day transnational terrorism struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the world woke up to a perverted side of globalization. The inter-connectedness had made it easy for the violent, extremist non-state actors to advance their destructive agenda across nations. As the world struggled to fight terrorism, the US first invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and then Iraq in 2003 – the two wars that consumed the US firepower for nearly two decades. A process of regime changes in the Middle East, dubbed as the ‘Arab Spring’, was launched around 2011, which soon turned disastrous, often described as the ‘Arab Winter’.