The Clash of Civilizations

The Clash of Civilizations is a theory, proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, stating that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.

This theory was originally formulated in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", in response to Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

The phrase itself was earlier used by Bernard Lewis in an article in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled "The Roots of Muslim Rage". Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews: Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations (p. 196).

This expression derives from clash of cultures, already used during the colonial period and the Belle Époque.

Read more about The Clash Of CivilizationsOverview, Major Civilizations According To Huntington, Huntington's Thesis of Civilizational Clash, Modernization, Westernization, and "torn Countries", Criticism

Famous quotes containing the word clash:

    When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand—as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it is bad art.
    Marc Chagall (1889–1985)