Huntington attributes complex world conflicts to unchanging civilizational essences

Evidence

We have only to examine the premises of Samuel P. Huntington’s widely cited book Clash of Civilizations to see the importance of the notion of culture clash to the contemporary making of empire. Huntington argued that the primary source of conflict in the world today is the cultural difference between the West and non-West, a culture clash in which Islam figures prominently as the antithesis of Western civilization. People who are alike culturally cooperate with each other; dislike or fear of the foreigner and accompanying feelings of superiority are present in all cultures. From such simple premises, Huntington explains a wide range of complex phenomena such as the Rwandan genocide, the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia, and the triumph of political Islam. Islam has been at war with the West for fourteen hundred years, a conflict that flows from the two civilizations’ differences, he declares. For Huntington, cultures are distinct entities with values and practices that form an unchanging essence. Indeed, he explicitly rejects historicizing. ‘The causes of this ongoing pattern of conflict lie not in transitory phenomena such as twelfth-century Christian passion or twentieth-century Muslim fundamentalism. They flow from the nature of the two religions and the civilizations based on them.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Huntington’s ahistorical essentialism parallels the Milgrom chapters on how institutions—not essence—shape trade cooperation; both undercut cultural essentialism. — connects to: Post-Cold War conflict was framed by Huntington as civilizational cultural clash — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”: The…, 174; Huntington deemed Islam itself, not fundamentalism, the underlying problem
• QUESTION: Worth digging into whether Huntington’s Islam-at-war-1400-years framework is actually consistent with known history of Christian-Muslim alliances and coexistence.