Clash of Civilizations
- According to the Clash of Civilizations theory, people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.
- Future conflicts, according to American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, would be waged between cultures rather than countries.
- In reaction to Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man, it was initially given in a 1992 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, and subsequently expanded upon in a 1993 Foreign Affairs piece titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” Huntington expanded on his ideas in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996.
- The expression was popularised by Albert Camus in 1946,[9] Girilal Jain in his study of the Ayodhya controversy in 1988, Bernard Lewis in his article “The Roots of Muslim Rage” in The Atlantic Monthly’s September 1990 issue, and Mahdi El Mandjra in his book “La première combat civilisationnelle” in 1992.
- The phrase “Young Islam on Trek: A Study in Civilizational Conflict” first appears in a book about the Middle East written by Basil Mathews in 1926.
- Huntington started his inquiry by looking at various viewpoints on the nature of world politics in the post-Cold War era. Human rights, liberal democracy, and the capitalist free market economy, according to certain philosophers and authors, have become the only remaining ideological alternatives for states in the post–Cold War world. In a Hegelian sense, Francis Fukuyama claimed that the world had reached the “end of history.”
- While the age of ideology was passed, Huntington maintained that the world had simply returned to a natural condition of affairs marked by cultural struggle.
- In his thesis, he projected that in the future, the dominant axis of conflict will be cultural.
- Huntington too sees the clash of civilizations as a historical process.
- World history used to be dominated by conflicts between rulers, governments, and ideals, such as those found in Western civilisation.
- With the end of the Cold War, however, world politics entered a new era in which non-Western civilizations were no longer exploited beneficiaries of Western civilisation, but were instead integral players in shaping and progressing world history alongside the West.
