Clash of Civilizations and Escalation of Domestic Ethnopolitical Conflicts

Abstract

The clash-of-civilizations thesis asserts that differences between civilizations increase the likelihood of escalation of conflicts and that since the end of the cold war, fault lines between civilizations are becoming the sites of the most intense conflicts. The author tests the tenability of this claim concerning domestic ethnopolitical conflicts. Statistical tests employ logit analysis to analyze 1,036 ethnopolitical dyads (linking 130 governments and 631 ethnic groups) from 1980 to 1999. The results strongly support the claim of the clash-of-civilizations thesis that in the first post-cold war decade (1990 to 1999), contacts between civilizations within states were more likely than were contacts that do not cross linguistic or religious lines to escalate to more intense conflicts. Yet, the apparent increase in conflict between civilizations in the 1990s was part of an escalation in all types of cross-cultural conflict that does not in itself portend continued escalation in the clash of civilizations.