Clash of Civilizations and Escalation of Domestic Ethnopolitical Conflicts

Abstract

The clash-of-civilizations thesis asserts that differences between civilizations increase the likelihood of escalation of conflicts and that since the end of the cold war, fault lines between civilizations are becoming the sites of the most intense conflicts. The author tests the tenability of this claim concerning domestic ethnopolitical conflicts. Statistical tests employ logit analysis to analyze 1,036 ethnopolitical dyads (linking 130 governments and 631 ethnic groups) from 1980 to 1999. The results strongly support the claim of the clash-of-civilizations thesis that in the first post-cold war decade (1990 to 1999), contacts between civilizations within states were more likely than were contacts that do not cross linguistic or religious lines to escalate to more intense conflicts. Yet, the apparent increase in conflict between civilizations in the 1990s was part of an escalation in all types of cross-cultural conflict that does not in itself portend continued escalation in the clash of civilizations.

The rise of religion and the fall of the civilization paradigm as explanations for intra-state conflict

“…Thus, the bar for success of the studies focusing on religion is much lower than the one set by the CoC paradigm. In fact, several of the studies that focus on CoC find that civilization has an impact, but less of an impact than other factors (Fox 2004;Henderson 2004;Henderson and Singer 2000;Roeder 2003). This means that most of the studies that find that civilizational conflicts are a minority of all conflicts are consistent with the studies of religious conflicts that similarly find religious conflicts to be in the minority, though representing a substantial minority.…”

“…Andrej Tusicisny (2004) found that the majority of international and domestic conflicts between 1945 and 2001 involving Muslims were with other Muslims. Philip Roeder (2003) shows that sectarian differences contributed to domestic ethnic conflict between 1980 and 1999. Brian Lai (2006) shows that differences between the religious identities of state leaders-but not differences in the religious identities of state populationscontributed to international conflict in the Middle East between 1950 and 1992.…”

“…A series of studies on terrorism in the past few decades found that the majority of terrorist acts and new terrorist groups have been religious ones (Weinberg and Eubank 1998;Weinberg et al 2002), but others argue that, even so, this terrorism is primarily motivated by nationalism (Pape 2003). Similarly, when examining Civilization has no significant impact Henderson and Singer (2000) Civil war Political factors are more important than cultural ones Henderson and Tucker (2001) International conflict Civilizational differences make states less likely to go to war Leng and Regan (2002) Inter-state mediation Mediation is more successful in inter-civilizational disputes Roeder (2003) Ethnic conflict 1980-1999 Civilization has less of an impact than religion and ethno-linguistic differences; no change in conflict dynamics after end of Cold War Russett et al (2000) International militarized disputes Intra-civilizational conflicts are most common; intercivilizational conflicts waned after Cold War ended Tusicisny (2004) International and domestic conflict…”

The future of civilization and state religion policy

“…Most quantitative studies on the topic have consistently found that Huntington's vision for the future turned out to be inaccurate with regard to both domestic and international conflict [11,14,17,30,31,32,33,34,35,52,54,61]. To be fair, quantitative studies of this nature can only assess what has occurred through the present and cannot rule out Huntington's predictions becoming true in the future.…”

“…Inter-civilizational conflicts do occur and are a large proportion of conflict, though a minority of it [14,17,54,61]. Also, civilizational and cultural factors do impact on conflict, though less so than other factors [17,32,34,52]. In some cases this means civilizational and cultural differences resulting in less conflict [35,45].…”