Civilizational kin allegiances drive fault-line conflicts to escalate far beyond their origins

Evidence

A civilizational paradigm thus sets forth a relatively simple but not too simple map for understanding what is going on in the world as the twentieth century ends. No paradigm, however, is good forever. The Cold War model of world politics was useful and relevant for forty years but became obsolete in the late 1980s, and at some point the civilizational paradigm will suffer a similar fate. For the contemporary period, however, it provides a useful guide for distinguishing what is more important from what is less important. Slightly less than half of the forty-eight ethnic conflicts in the world in early 1993, for example, were between groups from different civilizations. The civilizational perspective would lead the U.N. Secretary-General and the U.S. Secretary of State to concentrate their peacemaking efforts on these conflicts which have much greater potential than others to escalate into broader wars. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 78 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Both sides in fault line wars benefit from redefining local conflict as civilizational — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 750; Inter-civilizational conflicts escalate while intra-civilizational ones stay contained — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 43; Three-tier kin structures escalate then constrain ethnic conflicts — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 776 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Cross-civilizational conflicts have greater escalation potential than intra-civilizational ones #expands (0.92) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 78