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.

This article analyzes political and social values held by people in security communities (regions in which large-scale use of violence is very unlikely). Inhabitants of four security communities (in Europe, North America, South America, and South-East Asia) are generally more tolerant to out-groups than the rest of the world's population. In addition, comprehensive security communities (that is zones where not only interstate war, but also civil war, has become unthinkable) are characterized by higher interpersonal trust. The hypothesized effect of democracy, economic liberalism, and social participation was not confi rmed. Going back to Deutsch's conceptualization of the security community, the article challenges assumptions frequent in the constructivist literature.

This article shows that indirect positive reciprocity triggered by experiencing short and superficial cooperation with outgroups' individual members reduces discrimination of other members of the same group. The field research combined a lab-in-the-field experiment and a survey conducted in the slums of Mumbai, an Indian city notorious for Hindu-Muslim violence. After the treatment manipulated expectations of cooperative behavior, ethnically heterogeneous groups produced as much public goods in a public goods game as homogeneous groups. This positive experience radically reduced Hindu subjects' discriminatory attitudes towards the Muslim minority after the experiment. The effect was equally strong among voters of two extremist parties implicated in ethnic riots. The survey compared reciprocity with alternative explanations of why people discriminate against some, but not other ethnic groups. Indirect positive reciprocity and intergroup contact are associated with less, and relative size of the outgroup with more discriminatory attitudes.

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