Civilizational Conflicts: More Frequent, Longer, and Bloodier?

Abstract

Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis considers interstate and intrastate conflicts between groups of different civilizations to be more frequent, longer, and more violent than conflicts within civilizations. The clash of civilizations should be the principal issue in world politics after the end of the Cold War, and it should especially shape the relationship between the West and Islam. This article examines Huntington’s hypotheses on the basis of a dataset derived from the Uppsala Conflict Data Project. A new research design uses conflict-years in order to deal with conflicts both between and within states. It also tries to find the ‘core’ intercivilizational conflicts. The analyses distinguish three periods after World War II, and each of them is characterized by a higher number of intercivilizational conflict-years than the previous one. There are two points of transition, in the 1960s and 1980s, but the trends in the clash of civilizations seem to be unaffected by the end of the Cold War. The relationship between civilizational difference and duration of conflict is not statistically significant. Conflicts within civilizations are less likely to escalate into war during the post-Cold War period than during the Cold War period, while the intensity of conflicts between civilizations remains as high as in the Cold War. The majority of intercivilizational conflict-years during the post-Cold War period have involved Islamic groups. Nevertheless, the frequency of conflict between the Islamic and Sinic (Confucian) civilizations and the West remains marginal.