Critical Review: The Clash of Civilizations (Samuel P. Huntington)

Michael Kennedy

Jan 2014 · GRIN Verlag

About this ebook

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Politics - General and Theories of International Politics, grade: A, Webster University, language: English, abstract: This critical review examines Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 article titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”. In this article, Huntington (1993a) argues that in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, international relations would no longer be dominated by an ideological conflict as was witnessed during the Cold War years, between capitalism and communism. Nor would the next pattern of conflict be dominated by state-to-state tensions. Instead, as Huntington argues, the world would witness a clash of civilizations between a Western civilization and other major civilizations – in particular an Islamic civilization and a Confusion civilization. Huntington makes valid arguments in terms of what international relations would not be dominated by, however; the argument that a clash of civilizations based on cultural differences between the West and other civilizations is a simplistic hypothesis born out of a realist Cold War paradigm.