Muslim states resorted to violence in international crises far more than Western powers

Evidence

Muslim states also have had a high propensity to resort to violence in international crises, employing it to resolve 76 crises out of a total of 142 in which they were involved between 1928 and 1979. In 25 cases violence was the primary means of dealing with the crisis; in 51 crises Muslim states used violence in addition to other means. When they did use violence, Muslim states used high-intensity violence, resorting to full-scale war in 41 percent of the cases where violence was used and engaging in major clashes in another 38 percent of the cases. While Muslim states resorted to violence in 53.5 percent of their crises, violence was used by the United Kingdom in only 11.5 percent, by the United States in 17.9 percent, and by the Soviet Union in 28.5 percent of the crises in which they were involved. Among the major powers only China’s violence propensity exceeded that of the Muslim states: it employed violence in 76.9 percent of its crises. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 718

Categorization

• QUESTION: Huntington’s crisis dataset (1928-1979) predates the chapter’s focus on late-20th-century fault line wars; worth checking where these figures come from and whether the coding of ‘Muslim’ is by majority population or regime.