Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations?
1) Huntington predicts that civilizational fault lines will be the next major
cause of conflict in the world. What were the previous fault lines that war
or conflict were fought along? What is the one major difference between
these previous types of conflict and the coming clash of civilizations?
2) How does he define ‘civilization’? How does ‘nation’ (or ‘nation-state’)
relate to ‘civilization’?
3) What reasons does Huntington provide to explain why wars will be
fought on civilizational/cultural fault lines?
4) What is different about how civilizational conflict occurs at both the
micro- and macro- level?
5) What has caused Islam to have ‘bloody borders’ (page 35)?
6) What is ‘kin-country’ syndrome, and what role did it play in the breakup
of the former Yugoslavia, according to Huntington?
7) “The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be… conflict
between "the West and the Rest" (page 41). Why?
8) Huntington states that countries like Turkey, Mexico and Russia are facing
a civilizational identity crisis. Unlike Mexico, why have Turkey and Russia
been unable to reinvent its civilization identity?
9) “The most prominent form of this cooperation is the Confucian-Islamic
connection that has emerged to challenge Western interests, values and
power” (page 45). What exactly are the countries that comprise the
Islamic and Confucian civilizations doing that has given rise to this
cooperation against the West?
Interview with Huntington, Q&A: A Head-On Collision of Alien Cultures?
1) Based on this interview, how has the US seemingly provoked a ‘clash of
civilizations’?
2) Why are young, well-educated, and middle-class men more likely to
become radicalized terrorists? How do increasing birth rates increase the
rate of radicalization in Muslim countries?
3) In ‘Clash of Civilizations’ Huntington argued that future global conflict will
pit ‘the West against the Rest’. Why has it now become ‘Islam against the
Rest’?
4) As mentioned in the interview, the most frequent criticism against the
‘Clash of Civilizations’ is that he seems to treat entire civilizations as
unified blocs. Is his response to this critique convincing?