The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington is an extremely well written and insightful book. Samuel P. Huntington is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University, director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, the chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the president of the American Political Science Association. During the Carter administration, Huntington was the director of security planning for the National Security Council. He is also the founder and coeditor of the highly regarded international affairs publication, Foreign Policy.
In 1993 Samuel P. Huntington wrote an article for the respected journal Foreign Affairs titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”. This article was very controversial and stirred up much debate among scholars, politicians, and anyone interested in the future of international affairs. His book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, is a more detailed exploration of the ideas and predictions put forth in his article.
Huntington believes that with the end of the Cold War, the world is divided along the borders of civilizations and religion rather than the boundaries of countries. He identifies eight clearly distinct civilizations: Western (the United States and western Europe), Islamic, Sinic (primarily China), Orthodox (primarily Russia), Japanese, Hindu, Latin American, and African. A pervasive presumption in the Western world is that with the fall of communism, the West has “won” and that the rest of the world will now embrace democracy and Western culture. Huntington disagrees with this presumption. In his book, Huntington shows us how civilizations and cultural identities are shaping the post-Cold War world.
In the first part of the book, Huntington describes how the world has gone from being bipolar during the Cold War, to being multipolar in the post-Cold War era. During the Cold War the world was basically divided along the lines of the “democracy vs. communism” conflict. Now that the Cold War is over, lines are being drawn along various ethnic and religious lines. Huntington uses many diverse examples such as the fighting between tribes and clans in Rwanda and Somalia, the clash of ethnic groups in Bosnia, and the conflicts in Sri Lanka, India, and Sudan. Throughout his book, for each ...
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... also build on the cultural commonality between European countries and the United States. Huntington also suggests that Western countries must develop economic and political ties to match their collaborated dedication to security issues. He states that an increased political and economic unity among Western nations will offset the relative decline in their share of the world’s population and economic influence.
In summary, Huntington believes that the future of the world depends on understanding and cooperation between the leaders of the world’s civilizations. He is a realist and believes that clashes between civilizations will be the greatest threat to world peace and stability. Throughout “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” Huntington gives numerous persuasive arguments to convince his audience that he is correct. Huntington has a writing style that is precise and direct. His mastery of the subject is obvious and his use of facts and examples to prove his point is very convincing. This book is a very important text and is recommended to anyone who is involved in the study of international relations or is interested in the current state of world politics.
Frieden, Jeffry A., David A. Lake, and Kenneth A. Schultz. World Politics. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2013. Print.
...taken the form of universalization of those same structures across the world through reforming measures or through discourses in the Muslim world, thus creating conflicts as noted by Majid. The main weapon of this power relationship is observing and differentiating between good and bad, thus ingraining binary oppositions with the western values at the superior end. Thus, the western hegemony is like a beauty myth which is an unattainable western standard which is not only undesirable but harmful for the non-west. Still, they are coerced to adopt this standard due to a constant gaze and pressure from the West. Therefore, there is a need to revert this gaze and dismantle the western hegemony and power structures through the proliferation of ideas; ideas that take root not merely from the power elite or existing structures but stem from individual and provincial needs.
Samuel Huntington was one of the America’s greatest political scientist, back in 1993 Huntington published an essay, which later became a book, called The Clash of Civilizations, in his analysist he argued that the future conflict will be marked by civilizations conflict. He believes that in this new world the sources of conflict will not be primarily ideological nor economical, but rather the great division of humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. In short, Huntington’s predicts that the clash of civilizations will dominate global politics in the future (Huntington, 1993).
The first is a rejection of the Clash thesis as fabricated myth for perpetuating Western dominance and justifying its aggrandizing policies. The other is of the Clash being inevitable due to the essentially and radically different ethos of Islam that makes it impossible to reconcile with the West. Sajjad (2013) thus added that Muslims needed to prepare for the approaching Clash. In his article, Sajjad (2013) interestingly shared some analysis from the non-Western world point of view on the flaw of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations as
Mingst, Karen A., and Jack L. Snyder. Essential Readings in World Politics. N.p.: W.W. Norton, 2013. Print.
Advances in technology and the expansion of trade have, without a doubt, improved the standard of living dramatically for peoples around the world. Globalization brings respect for law and human rights and the democratization of politics, education, and finance to developing societies, but is usually slow in doing so. It is no easy transition or permanent solution to conflict, as some overly zealous proponents would argue. In The Great Illusion, Norman Angell sees globalization as a force which results from and feeds back into the progressive change of human behavior from using physical force toward using rational, peaceful methods in order to achieve economic security and prosperity. He believes that nations will no longer wage war against one another because trade, not force, yields profit in the new global economy, and he argues that “military power is socially and economically futile” because “political and military power can in reality do nothing for trade.” While the economic interdependence of nations should prove to be a deterrent from warfare, globalization is not now, and was not a century ago, a prescription for world peace. At the turn of the twentieth century, formal colonialism was still profitable in some regions, universal free trade was not a reality, nationalism was not completely defunct, military force was necessary to protect economic investments in developing locations, and the arms race of the previous century had created the potential for an explosive war if any small spark should set the major powers off against one another. The major flaw in Angell’s argument is his refusal to acknowledge the economic advantages that colonizing powers, even after globalization has started to take shape, can actuall...
The struggle to balance our many diversities with unity and, at least some tolerance and cooperation, has been one long battle between mankind and itself. Often, it seems almost eternal, a flame that cannot be extinguished unless all its kindling is dunked in some eye-opening truth and acceptance. Today, as much as any other day in history we experience these acts against each other: as impactful as Russia and Ukraine or the conflicts between Israeli and Palestinian people or as silly as Brazil and Argentina’s famous football rivalry. More industrialized countries/societies, particularly western societies, can obtain a certain superiority complex. Ethnocentrism plays a role in this; in a large amount of cases the “inferior cultures” lacked something like stronger military forces and technological advances, or even a disadvantage caused by the local geography that was dubbed weaker than their opponents.
One of the most vigorous debates focuses on the current status of the United States hegemony and whether or not it is in decline. This begs the question, if the United States is indeed declining in status, will it still be an influential player or not? I argue that the United States is losing its prominent position as the hegemonic leader of the world, but will still remain an influential player in global politics in the following decades to come. Its decline is an imminent result of their domestic issues, the violation of international laws and economic deficit, which have posed a grave and serious challenge for the United States. On the other hand, I propose that the United States will remain a dominant force due to its innovation, cultural influences around the world, and military prowess. In their articles, “How Americans Can Survive the rise of the Rest”, by Fareed Zakaria and “America and Europe in the Asian Century”, by Kishore Mahbubani, provides two distinctive and thought provoking arguments from a declinist perspective. However, both articles are susceptible to criticism and will be further examined in order to understand the United States prominent role.
“Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.” Machiavelli’s quote from Discourses of Livy manages to succinctly describe our current social and political world. Founded on colonialization and violence, the term ‘the west’ promotes the idea of certain values and concepts which make it superior to ‘the east’. I argue that the concept us ‘us versus them’, particularly when linked with the Western Ideology, justifies violence in social, economic and physical terms. This ideology perpetuates the idea that there are inherent, distinct characteristics which separate members of each race, known as race thinking. Further, it allows powerful nation-states to
As we entered the new millennium, Edward Said’s article, “The Clash of Ignorance”, appeared in the October 22 edition of The Nation, in 2001. His paper was a critical response to my thesis which first appeared in 1993, “The Clash of Civilizations?”. The following years saw many adopting his argument as a valid counter to my thesis. However, I believe that his argument builds more to the notion of the clash of civilizations stated in my paper, strengthening it, rather than weakening it. In this paper, I will discuss and address the arguments that he had put forward.
Throughout history, Western civilization has been an emerging force behind change in foreign societies. This is the concept that is discussed in the article the West Unique, Not Universal, written by Samuel Huntington. The author makes a very clear thesis sentence and uses a variety of evidence to support it. This article has a strong very convincing point. The thoughts expressed in this article can be related to a lot of events throughout history.
One of the biggest questions plaguing most political theorist is what will be the source for future conflict in this increasingly globalized world. Samuel Huntington a prominent political scientist in the U.S tried to answer this question in 1996 when he published the “Clash of Civilizations” which discusses the primary source of future global conflicts. In it he mentions religion and cultural differences as being the main source of conflict in the post cold war world. In evaluating Huntington’s theory you must evaluate modern conflicts and global issues of the present and compare them to the ideas held in his theory to see if his beliefs hold up to the substantial weight of the evidence. In critiquing Huntington’s argument you must also be
Theoretical perspectives help us study the underlying questions we have about society. Each perspective concentrates on diverse characteristics of society. These aspects are analyzed on different levels to develop theories. When it comes to comparative criminal justice, the focus perspective is the comparability and connectivity of criminal justice systems. The world’s criminal justice system contains four theoretical perspectives: modernization, civilization, world-system, and globalization theory. Although there are four perspectives that signify the world’s system, I will only be comparing the theories of modernization and civilizational clash and their nature.
...arly lead to the rivalry of superpowers being replaced by the clash of civilizations. Conversely it then makes it evident that in this particular new world global politics then become the politics of civilizations whereas local politics become the politics of ethnicity (Huntington, 1996).
The Soviet Union’s collapse at the end of the Cold War left the United States without its major global rival. Now alone at the top, the United States’ strategic imperatives have shifted remarkably. The shift has been significant enough to prompt fundamental questions about the international order and whether this new “unipolar moment” will last. Indeed, since 1989, political scientists have clamored to define the United States’ status relative to the rest of the world. Indispensable nation? Sole super...