Post-Cold-War conflict is claimed to run along cultural and religious rather than ideological or economic lines.
Huntington's 1993 article was enormously influential and is heavily criticised — both on the record of the prediction and on whether the civilisational blocs cohere at all.
In practice
- A foreign ministry reorganises its analysts by religion and region rather than by trade bloc, and its briefings anticipate some conflicts closely and miss the civil wars entirely.
- Two neighbouring states sharing a faith and a language fight over a river, and the framework that grouped them together has nothing to say about it.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation Huntington offered is that ideology lost its organising power after 1989, leaving older identities to structure conflict. Another is domestic: cultural identity is often the cheapest available basis on which leaders can assemble a coalition.
- In its favour
- It anticipated the salience of religious and cultural identity in post-Cold-War politics, and identity mobilisation is a documented driver of conflict.
- Against it
- Quantitative studies of post-1989 conflicts find most fighting within civilisations rather than between them, and the blocs themselves are internally divided, which is the standard objection to the categories.
- Standing
- Enormously influential and widely criticised, both for its empirical record and for the coherence of its civilisational categories.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works