Clash of Civilizations Thesis

The essay outlining the thesis about whether global politics was entering a stage characterized by a “clash of civilizations” (originally posed with a question mark at the end of the title phrase) was first published in 1993 in the journal Foreign Affairs and later expanded into a book titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which has since been translated into 39 languages. The controversial thesis was the contribution of Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008), whom Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek magazine, eulogized as “the greatest political scientist of the last [Page 234]half-century” (Newsweek, January 3, 2009). Many scholars have suggested that the clash of civilizations thesis (although seen as polemical and ferociously criticized) has a significant ...