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“Civilization” is back at the forefront of global policy debates. The leaders of rising powers such as China, India, Turkey, and Russia have stressed their civilizational identity in framing their domestic and foreign policy platforms. An emphasis on civilizational identity is also evident in U.S. president Donald Trump's domestic and foreign policy. Some analysts argue that the twenty-first century might belong to the civilization state, just as the past few centuries were dominated by the nation-state. But is the rise of civilization state inevitable? Will it further undermine the liberal international order and fuel a clash of civilizations, as predicted by the late Samuel Huntington? Or might ideas from East Asian and other non-Western civilizations contribute to greater pluralism in our thinking about world order and the study of international relations?

The Khabib Nurmagomedov versus Conor McGregor Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 229 battle was among the most controversial mixed martial art fights of the past decade. In this study, the author examines how the various popular media outlets from the Eastern and Western world portrayed Khabib Nurmagomedov after UFC 229. The author used Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis by grounding it in the Orientalism and Occidentalism paradigms to examine the phenomenon. Fairclough’s model for critical discourse analysis was employed to investigate the various Western and Eastern popular press and digital media platforms (i.e., newspapers, blogs, and sporting news websites). The author analyzed 57 (Western n = 38, Eastern n = 19) media reports per the inclusion criteria. The study results unveiled conflicting predispositions present in the Western and Eastern media for Khabib Nurmagomedov. This study contributes to the limited knowledge of how a Muslim man athlete with diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds is portrayed contrarily by some Western and Eastern media outlets. Finally, the author discusses the theoretical implications of the study.

Imaginaries of 'terrorism' and 'Arab mind' backwardness can be seen as closely connected: the latter explains the former as irrational--violence thus becomes the product of backward cultures. I regard this way of representing the violence of peripheralised peoples as a specific expression of symbolic violence: new barbarism. The 'new barbarism' thesis implies explanations of political violence that omit political and economic interests and contexts when describing violence, and presents violence as a result of traits embedded in local cultures. New barbarism and neo-Orientalist imaginaries may serve as hegemonic strategies when the production of enemy imaginaries contributes to legitimise continuous colonial economic or political projects, as can be witnessed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This article offers an empirical test of Huntington's thesis in \"The Clash of Civilizations.\" Huntington argues that states belonging to different civilizations will have a higher propensity to be involved in international conflict. This effect should be more prominent in the post-Cold War period. The civilization factor should also interact with membership in different Cold War blocs, border contiguity, regime type, and levels of modernization, magnifying or depressing the basic effects of these variables. To test these hypotheses, a logit specification with King & Zeng's solution for rareness of events is used on the Kosimo data. The Kosimo data allow for an extension of the empirical analysis from both a temporal and a substantive point of view. This study shows that state interactions across the civilizational divide are not more conflict prone. The first eight years of the post-Cold War era also fail to give support to Huntington's thesis. Moreover, while the civilization factor modifies the effects of border contiguity and regime type, this is not sufficient to generate conditions under which differences in civilizational heritage are associated with greater risks of conflict.

As constructivists and other advocates of constitutive theories have often noted, the natural world is very different from the social one. Our ideas about the social world not only reflect that world, but help shape and create it; we are part of the reality we try to describe and explain, and we therefore have the potential to alter the reality a theory is merely intended to describe or explain. Our theories about the social world may thus become self-fulfilling prophecies or autogenetic in character, or they may self-negate. And yet while social constructivists often make this point in epistemological debates, there have been relatively few attempts so far to address its empirical implications. With that objective in mind, this paper examines two prominent IR theories—the democratic peace and the commercial peace—arguing that each has a self-fulfilling character rather than being true or false in any objective or timeless sense, as well as the potential of a currently self-negating thesis—the clash of civilizations—to become self-fulfilling; each theory is, to paraphrase the now time-honored expression, what the relevant actors make of it. The article also probes the processes by which theories become self-generating or self-negating. It is suggested that a number of frameworks developed outside political science—especially diffusion theory, memetics, social contagion theories, George LakofFs metaphor-based model, Malcolm Gladwell's \"Tipping Point\" approach and social network analysis—may in combination help us understand both how political ideas spread through academic and policy communities and why particular ideas \"win out\" over others.

Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis has sparked considerable debate. Huntington argues that post-Cold War conflicts will revolve primarily around civilizations. This article uses the Minorities at Risk dataset to provide a quantitative element to the civilizations debate, which, thus far, has been based mostly on anecdotal arguments. The article focuses on whether there has been a rise in both the quantity and intensity of ethnic conflicts between groups belonging to different civilizations since the end of the Cold War. Overall, the analysis reveals several problems with Huntington's argument. First, Huntington's classification of civilizations is difficult to operationalize. Secondly, civilizational conflicts constitute a minority of ethnic conflicts. Thirdly, conflicts between the West and both the Sinic/Confucian and Islamic civilizations, which Huntington predicts will be the major conflicts in the post-Cold War era, constitute a small minority of civilizational conflicts. Finally, there is no statistically significant evidence that the intensity of civilizational ethnic conflicts have risen relative to other types of ethnic conflicts since the end of the Cold War.

Cultural identity has become prominent in studies of world politics in the post-Cold War era. First, a growing literature in world politics has emerged that focuses on the impact of social culture, broadly conceived as the shared religious, racial or ethnolinguistic characteristics of a society. The significance of this aspect of culture is epitomized in studies focusing on ‘ethnic conflicts’, ‘ethnic security dilemmas’, and most prominently in Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, which suggests, among other things, that shared civilization membership is the fulcrum upon which post-Cold War era world politics rests. Secondly, the impact of political culture, broadly conceived as the shared norms and institutions guiding political behaviour in a society, has become increasingly salient, as evidenced by the bourgeoning literature on the democratic peace thesis, which posits that the extent to which a state (or pair of states) is democratic is a major determinant of its war-proneness. Adherents of this view argue either that although democracies are just as war-prone as non-democracies they rarely fight other democracies, or that democracies are more peaceful than non-democracies, in general.

The clash of ignorance thesis presents a critique of the clash of civilizations theory. It challenges the assumptions that civilizations are monolithic entities that do not interact and that the Self and the Other are always opposed to each other. Despite some significantly different values and clashes between Western and Muslim civilizations, they overlap with each other in many ways and have historically demonstrated the capacity for fruitful engagement. The clash of ignorance thesis makes a significant contribution to the understanding of intercultural and international communication as well as to the study of inter-group relations in various other areas of scholarship. It does this by bringing forward for examination the key impediments to mutually beneficial interaction between groups. The thesis directly addresses the particular problem of ignorance that other epistemological approaches have not raised in a substantial manner. Whereas the critique of Orientalism deals with the hegemonic construction of knowledge, the clash of ignorance paradigm broadens the inquiry to include various actors whose respective distortions of knowledge symbiotically promote conflict with each other. It also augments the power-knowledge model to provide conceptual and analytical tools for understanding the exploitation of ignorance for the purposes of enhancing particular groups' or individuals' power. Whereas academics, policymakers, think tanks, and religious leaders have referred to the clash of ignorance concept, this essay contributes to its development as a theory that is able to provide a valid basis to explain the empirical evidence drawn from relevant cases.

Samuel Huntington's article and book on the clash of civilizations has created a great deal of controversy and interest. The focus of this is his assertion that in the post-Cold War era, there will be significant conflict between states from Western civilization and states from Islamic civilization. This assertion has been the subject of a number of systematic empirical studies (Henderson, 1997, 1998; Henderson and Tucker, 2001; Russett, Oneal and Cox, 2000; Chiozza, 2002). These studies share two things in common. First, they all use the dyad year as the case and predict to the onset of conflict. Second, none found any support for Huntington's thesis. In our paper, we ask a different question: Given the engagement of a dyad in a militarized interstate dispute (MIDs), is there a relationship between the civilizational status of the dyad and the chances of the dispute escalating to war? Using the MID data, we conduct a two-stage estimation to identify the mixed civilization effect on the probability of dispute and then on the probability of the escalation to war. In the pre-Cold war era, there is a greater probability for mixed civilization dyads and for Islamic-Western dyads to engage in disputes and for these disputes to escalate to war. These findings contradict Huntington's argument that the clash of civilization thesis applies only to the post-Cold War era. The post-Cold War era does not offer complete empirical support for Huntington's expectations either. Mixed civilization dyads do not appear to be as likely to engage in dispute or escalate to war. Islamic-Western dyads do appear to be more apt to engage in dispute during this period, but not to escalate.

In this research note I examine Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' thesis in the light of his arguments to his detractors to apply his thesis to post-Cold War armed conflicts within states. Drawing on more recent data on intrastate armed conflict to 1999, I demonstrate that Huntington's thesis is not substantiated. What we observe is that many of the interethnic and inter-religious conflicts that occur in the post-Cold War era are clashes within rather than between civilizations, just as Huntington's critics have noted previously. In fact, in the post-Cold War era, where there have been changes in the incidence of 'clashes of civilizations' we find that their number has actually declined, if only marginally. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]