ABSTRACT
In 1993 the journal Foreign Affairs (vol. 72, no. 3) published an article entitled “Clash of Civilizations” by Samuel Huntington, Harvard Professor, former Director of Security Planning for the National Security Council, and President of the American Political Science Association. By 1996 Huntington had developed his article into a book, and it was published under the title The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. The argument was that in a post-Cold War world, the crucial distinctions between people were not primarily ideological or economic, but cultural. World politics was being reconfigured along cultural lines, with new patterns of conflict and cooperation replacing those of the Cold War. The hot spots in world politics were on the fault-lines between civilisations: Bosnia, Chechnya, West Asia, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and others. The civilisation with a particularly large number of hot spots was Islam. It had bloody borders and represented the greatest danger to world peace.
