WikipediaExtracts:Clash of Civilizations
Extracted from Wikipedia --
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is a 1996 book by American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, in which he developed the clash of civilizations thesis that argues that cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world.
After the end of the Cold War, some thinkers argued that capitalism, liberal democracy, human rights and a market economy had become the only remaining ideological possibilities. In particular, Huntington's former student Francis Fukuyama proposed in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man that liberal democracy may represent the end of history in a Hegelian sense. Huntington responded to Fukuyama in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, and later expanded his ideas in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled The Clash of Civilizations? and his subsequent 1996 book.
Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. He posited that the concept of civilizations, as the highest category of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict. Toward the end of his 1993 article, Huntington stated that this theory was not an argument for the desirability of such conflicts, but that it was necessary to consider its "implications for Western policy".
For Huntington, the clash of civilizations represents a development of history. In the past, world history was mainly about the struggles between monarchs, nations and ideologies, such as that seen within the Western civilization. However, after the end of the Cold War, he believed that world politics moved into a new phase in which non-Western civilizations are no longer the exploited recipients of Western civilization but have become additional important actors joining the West to shape and move world history.
Huntington's thesis was influential in academia and politics. It is argued to have motivated both the strategies of Islamic extremism and the war on terror, and has been identified as an ideological influence on nationalist politicians such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The thesis has been criticized for exaggerating cultural differences, for failing to accurately predict where conflicts would occur, and for misidentifying the sources of conflict. Critics argue that conflicts such as the Syrian civil war, the Yemeni civil war and the Russo-Ukrainian war (a possibility that Huntington explicitly rejected) demonstrate that the most significant conflicts have occurred within and not between Huntington's civilizational groupings.
