Clash Of Civilizations Thesis Research Articles

Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 229: Orientalism vs. Occidentalism in the Media

The Khabib Nurmagomedov versus Conor McGregor Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 229 battle was among the most controversial mixed martial art fights of the past decade. In this study, the author examines how the various popular media outlets from the Eastern and Western world portrayed Khabib Nurmagomedov after UFC 229. The author used Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis by grounding it in the Orientalism and Occidentalism paradigms to examine the phenomenon. Fairclough’s model for critical discourse analysis was employed to investigate the various Western and Eastern popular press and digital media platforms (i.e., newspapers, blogs, and sporting news websites). The author analyzed 57 (Western n = 38, Eastern n = 19) media reports per the inclusion criteria. The study results unveiled conflicting predispositions present in the Western and Eastern media for Khabib Nurmagomedov. This study contributes to the limited knowledge of how a Muslim man athlete with diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds is portrayed contrarily by some Western and Eastern media outlets. Finally, the author discusses the theoretical implications of the study.

Retraction: A Scalpel for Islam and Western Relations: The Path to the Clash of Civilization with Islamophobia

Sovyetler Birliği’nin çöküşünün ardından Batı’nın bizatihi kendisine yeni bir “öteki” yaratma çabası İslam ve Batı dünyasını yeniden karşı karşıya getirmiştir. Buna katkıda bulunan en önemli gelişmelerden biri ise ‘Medeniyetler Çatışması’ tezi olmuştur. Harvard Üniversitesi’nden Profesör Samuel Huntigton’un kaleme almış olduğu bu tez İslam ile Batı arasındaki çatışmayı meşru gören en temel araçlardan biri olarak kullanılmıştır. Bu kurama göre Soğuk Savaş’tan sonra artık uluslararası arenada veya yeni dünya sisteminde cereyan edecek olan çatışma ve mücadeleler ideolojik, ekonomik değil kültürel nedenlerden doğacaktır. Çatışmanın merkezinde ise İslam ve Batı medeniyeti olacaktır. Ortaya atılan bu tez dünya genelinde büyük ses getirmiş ve yoğun tartışmalara sebebiyet vermiştir. Öyle ki, kuram tartışılırken araştırmalar, özellikle ABD ve Avrupa ülkelerinde, ayrımcılık ve hoşgörüsüzlük ekseninde şekillenen; Müslümanlara karşı İslamofobi olarak adlandırılan olgunun yükselişe geçtiğini ortaya koymaktadır. Bu bağlamda çalışmamızda AB ülkelerinde yükselmekte olan İslamofobi ve Medeniyetler Çatışması tezi arasındaki ilişki irdelenecektir.Bu makale 28-06-2021 tarihinde geri çekildi. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/anemon/issue/62926/955693

Journalists’ views on the British coverage of Turkey’s EU bid and the clash of civilizations thesis

Abstract Turkey’s bid to join the European Union (EU) and the surrounding discussions in European countries’ national media have been receiving increasing interest since Turkey became an official EU membership candidate in 1999. However, almost all academic work concerning the topic examines only the media coverage. In contrast, this article looks at journalists’ views on the media content about Turkey, and also discusses the clash of civilizations thesis as a frame to understand the media discourse. Twenty-one journalists who work or had worked in various British media outlets participated in semi-structured interview sessions. The data was conceptualized and categorized with the help of qualitative analysis software NVivo. Findings are presented through two main sections: Journalists’ views on the decrease in Turkey–EU relations’ popularity in the British media and the changes in the content; and the clash of civilizations thesis in the context of Turkey’s EU bid. Journalists’ views on the coverage reveal that their approach to Turkey’s EU bid is in line with the general view of the British media. In addition, the findings show that the clash of civilizations paradigm is used as a tool for British politicians and the British media to expose their support for Turkey’s EU bid.

Transcending Dualism in Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations Thesis

Glorification of ‘self’ (Western civilisation) at the expense of the ‘other’ (eight civilisations) was inherent in Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. The ‘other’ civilisations identified—as the non-self and situated mostly in the Global South—were clubbed together as the Rest, irrespective of their pluralism. Building on Huntington’s binaries—the West and the Rest—this article makes an attempt to reflect on similarities within the perceived differences. Even though his civilisations appear different, they are in many ways similar due to interactions, colonisation and globalisation. Their relationship has become complicated; Western civilisation cannot do without civilisations from the Global South. Hence, there can be no perpetual or fixed enemy nor can all relationships be suspended with the ‘other’ in a globalising world.

Islam, Domestic Politics and International Relations

Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation. By Michaelle L. Browers Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 210 pp. $26.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-74934-3). Islam and Peacemaking in the Middle East. By Nathan C. Funk, Abdul Aziz Said, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009. 303 pp. $65.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-588-26569-2). Political Islam in Southeast Asia. By Gordon P. Means,. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009. 444 pp. $32.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58826-678-1). Al-Qaeda's terrorist activities, sectarian conflict in Iraq, and the electoral successes of Islamists in many parts of the Arab world have drawn great attention once again to the role of Islam in international affairs. In fact, since the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s, and especially the Iranian revolution of 1979, Islam has played an increasingly greater role in the domestic and international politics of the Muslim world. In the 1990s, violent and nonviolent Islamist challenges to Arab regimes sparked fears about the “Islamic threat.” Thus, given the context of the events of the last decade, the dearth of literature on the role of Islam in international relations, a discipline that seeks to make sense of global issues, is striking. To be fair, there have been some waves of related research. In the 1990s, Samuel Huntington's controversial Clash of Civilizations thesis stirred debate, but it became less about cultural–religious factors as a source of conflict and more about perceptions of Islam's role in international politics. While some of the literature after 9/11 that has probed the robustness of Islam as an explanatory variable for political violence, civil war, and terrorism may be considered part of a burgeoning literature on religion and politics, there is still a great amount of work to be done on Islam and international relations. The purpose of this essay is to do more than just review three books that deal with Islam and politics. Rather, I shall make the case that these books, which differ greatly in methodology, substance, and target audience, have something important to say about contemporary debates in international relations. Rather, I shall make the case that these books, which differ greatly in methodology, substance, and target audience, have something important to say about contemporary debates in international relations; they highlight the ways in …

A (short) history of the clash of civilizations

Where does the clash of civilizations thesis and its underlying us-versus-them mentality come from? How has the idea been engineered historically and ideologically in the ‘east’ and ‘west’? What were the functions of Christianity and Islam to these ends? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in this article that engages both the clash of civilizations thesis and the discourse of ‘Orientalism’ more generally. Dissecting the many manifestations of mutual retributions, the article establishes the nuances of the ‘clash’ mentality within the constructs we commonly refer to as ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’, showing how it is based on a questionable ontology, how it has served particular political interests and how it is not inevitable. What is presented, rather, is a short genealogy of this idea, dispelling some of its underlying myths and inventions along the way.

Identity and Conflict: Ties that Bind and Differences that Divide

Conventional wisdom suggests that cultural differences make conflict more likely. Culture can unite and divide, but there exists little agreement among scholars over how identity forms among states, what distinctions are most salient, and when conflict is more likely. Researchers have tended to ‘confirm’ the role of identity in an ex post facto fashion, looking only at actual conflicts with cultural differences, without considering the opportunities for conflict among groups. We address a series of problems with existing conceptions of identity and ethnicity. We distinguish between shared and different culture by religion, language, and ethnicity. Rather than equating states with just the dominant groups, we also consider how relations involving secondary groups present in other states can give rise to conflict. We examine empirically the relationship between cultural similarities and differences and international dispute behavior in the post-World War II era. Our results suggest that culture and identity influence dispute patterns, but in ways that run counter to conventional beliefs. We find little evidence that conflict is more common between states where the dominant groups come from different cultural affiliations. If anything, our results suggest that violence is more likely among states with similar cultural ties, even when controlling for other determinants of conflict. Moreover, dyads where a group is politically privileged in one state but a minority in another tend to be particularly conflict prone. We conclude with suggestions for reorienting the study of identity and conflict in more constructive ways than the clash of civilization thesis.

Globalization and Diversification of Islamic Movements: Three Turkish Cases

In the aftermath of the September 11 events, debates raged about the tension between the West and the Muslim world, and between globalization and Islamic movements. Some authors were reminded of the clash of civiliza tion thesis arguing an essential cultural incompatibility between the West and the Muslim world.1 Others pointed to an antagonistic relationship between globalization, originating from and arguably controlled by the West, and Is lamic movements, which resist this process. The World Trade Center was tar geted because it symbolized globalization.2 According to this perspective, what we are seeing is a tension between Jihad and McWorld.3 Although these arguments are exaggerations, they are not baseless specula tion.4 There are Islamic movements that oppose globalization in order to pre serve their identities and ways of life. These movements see globalization as a new phase of Western colonialism. Therefore, their resistance to globalization

Sovereignty Relinquished? Explaining Commitment to the International Human Rights Covenants, 1966-1999

This article examines whether the content of the International Human Rights Covenants and the costs associated with their ratification influence the decision of countries to join. The author evaluates three theoretical perspectives-rationalism, world polity institutionalism, and the clash of civilizations-with data for more than 130 countries between 1966 and 1999. Rationalists contend that treaty ratification is tightly coupled with internal sovereignty arrangements, human rights practices, and ideological commitments, all of which become more important as treaty enforcement strengthens. World polity institutionalists expect ratification to be loosely coupled with a country's conduct or its political, ideological, or cultural commitments, although this gap narrows as compliance is more effectively enforced. A civilizations approach predicts tight coupling between ratification and cultural values, regardless of the mechanisms in place for enforcing compliance. Results lend partial support to rationalism and world polity theory, whereas the clash of civilizations thesis is much less successful in accounting for patterns of ratification. Furthermore, the costs of ratifying a treaty, considered in terms of its surveillance and enforcement provisions, influence rates of accession more than the specific rights a treaty protects.

Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (review)

Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman (eds.) Sites of Violence: and Conflict Zones. University of California Press, 2004. 373 pp. This edited book arose out of an international research association developed among scholars drawn from sociology, geography, studies, law, anthropology and advocacy: Women in Conflict Zones Network (WICZNET), founded in 1996. I am an original member, but played no role in this volume. As its name suggests, members came together in response to what they felt to be an urgent need to further develop interdisciplinary analysis of interplay of and violence in zones. This felt need was very direct for some, as they were then living or doing research in active conflict such as former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, and Guatemala; most of rest had previous research experience in similar situations. For this review and as reflected in this volume, conflict may be taken as social contexts of high relative levels of violence: immediate militarized violence seen in war, insurgency, and government repression, and more indirectly, in displacement, forced migration, and local level social disruption. Sites of contains fourteen chapters, a merged bibliography, and an index. first two chapters are agenda setting, while all rest save last have topical foci. Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman introduce volume with an overview that is global in several senses. They provide a wide range of domains and key connections between gender, violence, and conflict zones, with an emphasis on (chiefly destabilizing) international forces that affect them. They hope volume's contributions extend feminist methodology of transverse politics by focusing on their practice in conflict zones (8). They also outline process through which participants' research agendas evolved and briefly introduce chapters that follow under themes recurring in this volume: Nationalisms, Ethnic Nationalisms and Relations, Violence and Women's Rights, Gender and Citizenship, Feminist Empowerment Across a Continuum of Violence, and The Global Political Economy of Culture. In this chapter, I see two stances maintained through most substantive chapters which pose significant explanatory challenges. One concerns role of in explanation. While Giles and Hyndman do identify as a linking force between social levels and situations in conflict zones, they clearly wish to underplay it as a causal force. They and others in volume often take a partially reductionist stance in which cultures are infinitely malleable maps of meaning within a material economy of nationality, sexuality, class, caste, religion, and gender (17). This appears in part reactive to those who still essentialize gendered violence as inherent in the culture of peoples or as natural product of ancient hatreds; it is perhaps also a reflection of priority given by volume participants to keeping globalization and large scale political and economic forces in forefront of analysis. These are valuable cautions and goals to highlight for policy makers and lay readers, especially in light of popularity of variants of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis, which as Giles and Hyndman point out, frame many world conflicts in popular media today. However, social scientists (well, at least ? anthropologists) for a generation have largely avoided dead end analysis of as an autonomous whole, and it is unarguable that some of most powerful explanations of on-the-ground, microlevel gendered conflict come exactly from sensibly contextualized cultural analysis. As a linked position, Giles and Hyndman do not want to assign explanatory priority to any particular scale of social phenomena. Considering diverse disciplinary interests of participating WICZNET members this seems appropriate. However, one consequence is that many of substantive chapters produce explanations that float between levels, sometimes leaving me uncertain as to what is explicandum and what is explicans. …

The Rift in the Subject: A Late Global Modernist Dilemma

The article looks at what the author describes as the ‘rift in the subject’. It explains a phenomenon stationed between tradition and modernity, as experienced by young Muslims living in the USA. This experiential standpoint explains their capacities as social actors to engage in forms of collective action that have taken on conflicting global dimensions. The author argues that the experience of living between several geographies of selfhood, (1) defies causal models of cultural continuity and rupture; (2) conflates eastern and western modernities; (3) poses challenges to the western notion of recognition as the most appropriate model for explaining lives claiming radically different forms of cultural difference. In this regard, the young Muslim subject, rather than being a cultural exception, as implied in the ‘clash of civilization thesis’, is a harbinger of how profoundly engrained the problem of difference has become within the western paradigm itself.

Civilizational Conflicts: More Frequent, Longer, and Bloodier?

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.

Huntington’s Shift to the Declinist Camp: Conservative Declinism and the ‘Historical Function’ of the Clash of Civilizations

Samuel Huntington, a severe critic of decline theory and an adamant revivalist, shifted radically to the declinist camp with the end of the Cold War, his penultimate declinist vision being found in The Clash of Civilizations. A chronological analysis of his work (intellectual biography), though, shows continuity in his analysis of what is ‘wrong’ with America. His true focus is not relative, but absolute decline, or normative (moral) decline, a concern he shares with the new declinists, that is, right-wing realists who were also revivalists. For them decline is a code word for what is wrong with America, normatively, and an instrument of mobilization to return America to a state they consider ideal. The clash of civilizations thesis is part of this project. Unlike these new declinists, Huntington is a Democrat who grounds his appreciation of the new declinists’ ‘conservatism’ in his analysis of America’s ‘liberal’ exceptionalism, which makes it difficult for the country to adopt a realist foreign policy.

Samuel Huntington and the Geopolitics of American Identity: The Function of Foreign Policy in America's Domestic Clash of Civilizations

The clash of civilizations thesis's true origins lie partly in problems Samuel Huntington sees brewing in his own country. His thesis is to a considerable extent an externalization of these troubles––an attempt to solve them through international means, while serving U.S. national interests in tandem. As a scholar of American exceptionalism Huntington is––explicitly and openly––concerned about the political unity and cultural homogeneity of his country in the absence of the existential threat of world Communism. He sees “multiculturalism” and excessive immigration threatening America's dominant Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, English culture and its libertarian political values. Right-wing “anti-federalism” is threatening the authority and very existence of the federal government, while “commercialism,” the elevation of commercial interests above all else among economic and political elites, intensifies the class conflict roots of much anti-federalism. The solution to these myriad problems is a foreign threat, whether real or perceived; hence, the clash of civilizations.

Internationalism and Divine Law: A Baha'i Perspective

This article introduces the internationalism motif in Baha’i political and legal thought and Baha’i; arguments concerning the place of divine legal claims in contemporary debates about models of world order. In contrast to theories such as the clash of civilizations thesis of world politics—which view divine legal and political claims as a likely source of conflict and violence—the relative and progressive concept of revelation in the Baha’i Faith argues for religion as a potentially unifying and foundational force in the evolution of a universal civilization. Baha’i perspectives on internationalism also illustrate a distinct concept of divine law articulated within the Persianate and Muslim traditions of nineteenth century political and legal thought.

Try Again: A Reply to Russett, Oneal & Cox

Russett, Oneal & Cox (2000) (henceforth RO&C) claim that their analysis of militarized interstate disputes between 1950 and 1992 provides a test of my hypotheses concerning clashes of civilizations. It does nothing of the kind, and their claim that it does is simply untrue. As they note, the Cold War ended in 1989. Hence, the Cold War constitutes well over 90% of the period they analyze. My clash of civilizations thesis, however, deals with the post-Cold War period. It is an effort, as I write in the book's opening pages, to shed some light on 'how global politics after the Cold War will differ from global politics during and before the Cold War' (Huntington, 1996: 34). The book is 'meant to be an interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the Cold War' (p. 13). 'The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilizational identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world' (p. 20). I contrast the bipolarity and importance of ideology in the Cold War with the multipolar, multicivilizational character of the post-Cold War world, a contrast dramatized by the maps on pp. 24-27. Sentence after sentence in the book begins with phrases such as 'In the post-Cold War world' and 'In the emerging world'. That is what the book is about. It is not about the Cold War, and an analysis of conflicts during the Cold War can neither prove nor disprove its central argument. Second, the RO&C dataset is not only temporally irrelevant, but also extremely limited. It includes only interstate conflicts, which are a small, and possibly quite unrepresentative, sample of the violent conflicts in the world. They also appear to be decreasing in frequency compared with intrastate conflicts. (According to Wallensteen & Sollenberg, 2000: 638, out of 110 armed conflicts in 94 countries during the period 1989-99, only 7 were interstate, and a further 9 were intrastate conflicts with foreign intervention.) If RO&C had looked at the postCold War period, they would have found very few interstate wars, even though, as the data they cite from Gurr show, many ethnopolitical conflicts have been occurring. Third, while they make a passing reference to the central concern of the book with the dangers of escalation in intercivilizational conflicts, they nonetheless focus their analysis on the relative frequency of intercivilizational and intracivilizational wars in the Cold War. As they show, the frequency of intracivilizational conflicts varied among civilizations during the Cold War. As I point out,