Cross-civilizational conflicts have greater escalation potential than intra-civilizational ones

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

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that cross-civilizational conflicts escalate more is asserted here — worth checking whether subsequent evidence actually supported this in the 1990s and 2000s (e.g. Rwanda, internal civil wars proved more deadly).
• XREF: Relates to the author’s own ‘map not good forever’ caveat — paradigms as instruments rather than truths, echoing Thomas Kuhn’s framework-obsolescence view.