<p>In 1993, political scientist Samuel Huntington published his seminal article in Foreign Affairs, later expanded into a 1996 book titled <em>The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order</em>. He argued that post-Cold War conflicts would pivot from economic ideological battles to cultural and religious fault lines, defining civilisations as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity.” This thesis challenged his student Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” optimism, positing instead that liberal democracy’s triumph would not usher in universal harmony but instead ignite primordial rivalries. Crucially, Huntington’s framework was predictive, not merely descriptive, a distinction his critics too often collapse. Initially dismissed as reductionist, his ideas now demand re-evaluation in a world where civilisational narratives are no longer fringe rhetoric but statecraft.</p>.<p>Recent geopolitical tensions vividly illustrate this resurgence. The joint United States-Israeli strikes on Iran exemplify how rhetoric frames disputes as existential civilisational struggles. US officials have portrayed Iran not merely as an enemy state but as a theocratic antithesis to Western secularism. President Donald Trump has invoked Christian values to underscore this divide, declaring in speeches that “no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration”, pledging to defend “Judeo-Christian principles” against perceived threats, and most visibly, in a March 2026 Oval Office scene where evangelical pastors prayed that “wisdom from heaven to flood his heart” and “continued blessing and favour” upon him amid global challenges, fusing religious authority with executive power.</p>.<p>For Huntington, this would not be incidental symbolism but a deliberate civilisational signalling, transforming foreign policy into a form of eschatology. This framing elevates policy disagreements into struggles between Christian enlightenment and Islamic authoritarianism. Along with Israel, this would be the bulwark of Judeo-Christian heritage as in Eretz Yisrael, the biblical Promised Land where God’s covenant with Abraham is held to anchor Jewish historical and spiritual claim to the territory. Huntington would reinforce this alliance as a civilisational front. As Edward Said warned presciently in 2001, such framing “misleads and confuses the mind” by collapsing diverse realities into monolithic blocs, manufacturing the very confrontations it claims to describe.</p>.Beyond the rhetoric of war.<p>Iran’s former President Mohammad Khatami offered the sharpest counter-vision. His 1998 Dialogue Among Civilisations, adopted by the United Nations as the theme for 2001, argued that “believing in dialogue paves the way for vivacious hope.” In retrospect, Khatami’s initiative was not mere idealism; it rested on the philosophical premise that civilisations are internally plural, historically porous, and incapable of monolithic agency. What Huntington treated as fixed identities, Khatami exposed as dynamic negotiations. Yet in 2026, with US-Iran hostilities intensifying, this vision appears not just marginalised but structurally suppressed, crowded out by leaders like Marco Rubio, who at the Munich Security Conference decried migration as a “crisis destabilising societies all across the West,” recasting economic anxieties as civilisational siege.</p>.<p>Critics expose deeper flaws in Huntington’s architecture. Noam Chomsky argued it served as a post-Cold War “paradigm to control people,” substituting Islam for communism as the organising enemy. Tomorrow, Hinduism could equally furnish the pretext for an external anti-India rhetoric, erasing the subcontinent’s centuries of layered pluralism. Jonathan Fox’s 2002 empirical analysis found civilisational conflicts constitute only a fraction of ethnic disputes, with intra-civilisational violence far more prevalent – this is a statistical rebuke to the thesis’s predictive claims. Most incisively, Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence (2006) demonstrated that Huntington’s singular civilisational categorisation is not merely oversimplified but dangerous: by reducing persons to one dominant identity, it actively generates the violence it purports to explain.</p>.<p>“The denial of an important liberty,” Sen wrote, occurs whenever external frameworks override an individual’s own negotiation of plural loyalties. This insight reframes the problem entirely; civilisational conflict is less an inevitable structural feature than a political choice, amplified by those who profit from polarisation.</p>.<p><strong>Resisting the rhetoric</strong></p>.<p>Deeper analysis reveals Huntington’s prescience in the rhetoric’s rise, yet his determinism falters against globalisation’s counterforces. Transnational movements, climate activism, feminist solidarity, and digital subcultures routinely cut across his civilisational boundaries. Conflicts in Sudan or Myanmar, among 2026’s gravest crises, are driven predominantly by resource competition and authoritarian consolidation, not theological difference. Even the Russia-Ukraine war, often mapped onto Orthodox versus Western fault lines, is better explained by Russia’s centuries-old compulsion to secure its vast borders, a strategic anxiety exacerbated by NATO’s eastward expansion. The civilisational label, applied post-hoc, obscures more than it illuminates, which may precisely be its political utility.</p>.<p>At the time of this article’s submission, only 36% of Americans supported the war in Iran, and fewer still would likely accept that what is unfolding constitutes a civilisational struggle rather than a failure of diplomacy. Solutions lie in Khatami’s dialogue, amplified through institutional architecture. Education must embed cultural literacy as a civic priority, dismantling the stereotypes that make civilisational rhetoric legible to mass audiences. International bodies must actively monitor and counter divisive narratives, channelling competition into shared frameworks, climate, pandemic response, and nuclear non-proliferation, where cooperation is structurally incentivised. As Khatami argued, “the information age is the age of dialogue,” but dialogue requires institutional scaffolding, not merely goodwill.</p>.<p>Huntington’s thesis illuminates identity’s role in conflict while erring fatally on inevitability. The real danger is not that civilisations must clash; it is that enough powerful actors can make it appear they do. Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s warning remains the sharper guide: the most dangerous condition for the common masses is one “where the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” In that epistemic collapse, civilisational myths thrive. Resisting them demands not just dialogue, but the intellectual clarity to see past the narratives that powerful interests construct and dismantle them before they become self-fulfilling prophecies.</p>.<p><em>(The writer is a social scientist based in Australia)</em></p>.<p>(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)</p>
<p>In 1993, political scientist Samuel Huntington published his seminal article in Foreign Affairs, later expanded into a 1996 book titled <em>The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order</em>. He argued that post-Cold War conflicts would pivot from economic ideological battles to cultural and religious fault lines, defining civilisations as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity.” This thesis challenged his student Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” optimism, positing instead that liberal democracy’s triumph would not usher in universal harmony but instead ignite primordial rivalries. Crucially, Huntington’s framework was predictive, not merely descriptive, a distinction his critics too often collapse. Initially dismissed as reductionist, his ideas now demand re-evaluation in a world where civilisational narratives are no longer fringe rhetoric but statecraft.</p>.<p>Recent geopolitical tensions vividly illustrate this resurgence. The joint United States-Israeli strikes on Iran exemplify how rhetoric frames disputes as existential civilisational struggles. US officials have portrayed Iran not merely as an enemy state but as a theocratic antithesis to Western secularism. President Donald Trump has invoked Christian values to underscore this divide, declaring in speeches that “no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration”, pledging to defend “Judeo-Christian principles” against perceived threats, and most visibly, in a March 2026 Oval Office scene where evangelical pastors prayed that “wisdom from heaven to flood his heart” and “continued blessing and favour” upon him amid global challenges, fusing religious authority with executive power.</p>.<p>For Huntington, this would not be incidental symbolism but a deliberate civilisational signalling, transforming foreign policy into a form of eschatology. This framing elevates policy disagreements into struggles between Christian enlightenment and Islamic authoritarianism. Along with Israel, this would be the bulwark of Judeo-Christian heritage as in Eretz Yisrael, the biblical Promised Land where God’s covenant with Abraham is held to anchor Jewish historical and spiritual claim to the territory. Huntington would reinforce this alliance as a civilisational front. As Edward Said warned presciently in 2001, such framing “misleads and confuses the mind” by collapsing diverse realities into monolithic blocs, manufacturing the very confrontations it claims to describe.</p>.Beyond the rhetoric of war.<p>Iran’s former President Mohammad Khatami offered the sharpest counter-vision. His 1998 Dialogue Among Civilisations, adopted by the United Nations as the theme for 2001, argued that “believing in dialogue paves the way for vivacious hope.” In retrospect, Khatami’s initiative was not mere idealism; it rested on the philosophical premise that civilisations are internally plural, historically porous, and incapable of monolithic agency. What Huntington treated as fixed identities, Khatami exposed as dynamic negotiations. Yet in 2026, with US-Iran hostilities intensifying, this vision appears not just marginalised but structurally suppressed, crowded out by leaders like Marco Rubio, who at the Munich Security Conference decried migration as a “crisis destabilising societies all across the West,” recasting economic anxieties as civilisational siege.</p>.<p>Critics expose deeper flaws in Huntington’s architecture. Noam Chomsky argued it served as a post-Cold War “paradigm to control people,” substituting Islam for communism as the organising enemy. Tomorrow, Hinduism could equally furnish the pretext for an external anti-India rhetoric, erasing the subcontinent’s centuries of layered pluralism. Jonathan Fox’s 2002 empirical analysis found civilisational conflicts constitute only a fraction of ethnic disputes, with intra-civilisational violence far more prevalent – this is a statistical rebuke to the thesis’s predictive claims. Most incisively, Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence (2006) demonstrated that Huntington’s singular civilisational categorisation is not merely oversimplified but dangerous: by reducing persons to one dominant identity, it actively generates the violence it purports to explain.</p>.<p>“The denial of an important liberty,” Sen wrote, occurs whenever external frameworks override an individual’s own negotiation of plural loyalties. This insight reframes the problem entirely; civilisational conflict is less an inevitable structural feature than a political choice, amplified by those who profit from polarisation.</p>.<p><strong>Resisting the rhetoric</strong></p>.<p>Deeper analysis reveals Huntington’s prescience in the rhetoric’s rise, yet his determinism falters against globalisation’s counterforces. Transnational movements, climate activism, feminist solidarity, and digital subcultures routinely cut across his civilisational boundaries. Conflicts in Sudan or Myanmar, among 2026’s gravest crises, are driven predominantly by resource competition and authoritarian consolidation, not theological difference. Even the Russia-Ukraine war, often mapped onto Orthodox versus Western fault lines, is better explained by Russia’s centuries-old compulsion to secure its vast borders, a strategic anxiety exacerbated by NATO’s eastward expansion. The civilisational label, applied post-hoc, obscures more than it illuminates, which may precisely be its political utility.</p>.<p>At the time of this article’s submission, only 36% of Americans supported the war in Iran, and fewer still would likely accept that what is unfolding constitutes a civilisational struggle rather than a failure of diplomacy. Solutions lie in Khatami’s dialogue, amplified through institutional architecture. Education must embed cultural literacy as a civic priority, dismantling the stereotypes that make civilisational rhetoric legible to mass audiences. International bodies must actively monitor and counter divisive narratives, channelling competition into shared frameworks, climate, pandemic response, and nuclear non-proliferation, where cooperation is structurally incentivised. As Khatami argued, “the information age is the age of dialogue,” but dialogue requires institutional scaffolding, not merely goodwill.</p>.<p>Huntington’s thesis illuminates identity’s role in conflict while erring fatally on inevitability. The real danger is not that civilisations must clash; it is that enough powerful actors can make it appear they do. Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s warning remains the sharper guide: the most dangerous condition for the common masses is one “where the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” In that epistemic collapse, civilisational myths thrive. Resisting them demands not just dialogue, but the intellectual clarity to see past the narratives that powerful interests construct and dismantle them before they become self-fulfilling prophecies.</p>.<p><em>(The writer is a social scientist based in Australia)</em></p>.<p>(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)</p>
