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What it argues
Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996, is an expansion of a 1993 Foreign Affairs essay that generated more response than almost any article in that journal's history. Huntington's core argument is that after the Cold War, the primary conflicts in world politics would no longer be ideological or economic but cultural — that the fault lines between civilizations would be the main battleground of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Huntington identifies seven or eight major civilizations: Western, Confucian (Chinese), Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. He argues that these are not simply geographic groupings but coherent cultural identities defined by language, religion, history, and shared values. In the post-Cold War world, he contends, people define themselves primarily by these civilizational identities rather than by nation, ideology, or class. The major conflicts of the future would occur along civilizational fault lines — particularly between the West and Islam, and between the West and China.
What it gets right
- 1.
The primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world is not ideological or economic but cultural — identity defined by civilization, language, history, and religion.
- 2.
Huntington identifies seven or eight major civilizations as the principal units of global political analysis, arguing these have more explanatory power than nation-states for predicting conflicts.
- 3.
The most dangerous fault lines run between Western Christianity, Islam, and China — not because conflict is inevitable but because these civilizations have the most incompatible core values and the most direct strategic competition.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) was an American political scientist who taught at Harvard University for more than fifty years. He was a founder of the journal Foreign Policy and served on the National Security Council staff under President Carter. His other major works include Political Order in Changing Societies and Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. He is remembered as one of the most influential and controversial political scientists of the twentieth century, whose frameworks shaped policy debates across party lines.
