ABSTRACT

Samuel P. Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996, towards the end of an academic career that began in 1952. It shares a theme with all his writing—concerning the power of identity to shape history and political decision-making. His 1969 book Political Order in Changing Societies argued that rapid modernization in developing countries produces political instability by raising political awareness. In 1991, Huntington published The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, which seems at odds with Political Order and the argument he would develop in Clash. In The Third Wave, when considering the major limiting factors in the democratization of a state, Huntington included the role of culture and came to a subtly different conclusion from his later one in Clash. The Third Wave went on to help define the field of democratization studies. It set the groundwork for a theory now referred to as the transition paradigm.