Clash of Civilizations

Clash of Civilizations

Theory presented by American political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, in 1992. Huntington argued that in the post-Cold War era, conflicts will arise on the basis of conflicting cultural and religious identities among the world’s population. He thus identified eight “major civilizations” namely: the Western, the Latin American, the Orthodox, the Muslim or Great Middle East, the Sub-Saharan Africa, The Buddhist, the Chinese, the Hindu, and the Japanese. This theory, later expanded in the book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), was conceived in response to Fukuyama’s work, The End of History (1992), in which the western liberal values were celebrated as absolute, providing an unchallenged hegemonic ideology in the upcoming twenty- first century.