What is a strength and weakness of Jihad vs. McWorld?

One strength in Barber's work would be the way he helps to identify new realities in the globalized world.  A weakness would be that his binary distinction could blur all the complexities within it.

Barber was ahead of his time in defining a new reality of a post-Cold War world in Jihad vs. McWorld.  He was able to envision how globalization would expand all over the world and be so easily embraced. He also was able to forecast how fundamentalism would rise as its countervailing force.  In a world devoid of the traditional superpowers, one of the strengths of Barber's work is that he was able to identity two trends of socio-political mobilization that would come to play critical roles in defining the new era.

Along these lines, I would say that a weakness of the work is that it strives to reduce the complexities of the modern setting to a binary distinction.  If Barber is right in that we have entered a world where the Cold War superpowers no longer exist, then we should probably move away from strict binary divisions.  Barber's work fails to account for the multiplicity of voices that have emerged through social media and information technology.  In carving out the new world, it might be somewhat myopic to suggest that there are, again, only two dominant paths to social and self- definition. While "Jihad" and "McWorld" are powerful realities of the globalized age, there are more forces at play in this new setting.  It is one where individual identity, social media identification, and articulation of new and varied voice have become vital.  In this light, stressing a binary approach to the world might be perceived as a potential weakness in the work.