Clash of Civilizations

The clash of civilizations thesis is one of the most visible and debated international relations concepts developed since the end of the Cold War. It holds that the world’s major cultural zones are likely to form large alliance blocs and that the borders between these blocs are likely to experience heightened conflict and war. Samuel Huntington (1927–2008), a political scientist, first developed and expounded this thesis in the 1990s. As the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, policy makers and scholars began to seek alternate models to understand global political organization and anticipate future wars. Huntington argued that globalization would reinforce bonds between culturally similar societies, but these developments would also highlight differences between civilizations. This thesis provided a simple explanation for violence ...