Abstract:

Relative to their perceived importance in international and domestic politics, civilizations are radically understudied by social scientists. One possible cause is that existing research on civilizations is too often based on outmoded primordialist assumptions about the nature of identity that at least partly trace back to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” paradigm. A new theoretical framework is proposed for understanding civilizations based on important postprimordialist research, including in human psychology. This approach not only helps us understand the appeal and spread of Huntingtonian ideas, but generates fresh predictions that can be tested and developed as part of a new research program. Civilizations are widely portrayed as the grandest of all world actors, the largest human groupings short of humanity itself and the source of people’s most fundamental identities and behaviors. World leaders and terrorists alike describe them as the prime movers in global politics, and media often resort to them when interpreting everything from the September 11 attacks to China’s economic ascendance to popular prejudices against migrants. Yet despite its prominence in public discourse, the study of “civilizations” has remained largely peripheral to social science. The debate on Samuel Huntington’s seminal “clash of civilizations” thesis is an exception that proves the rule. Sparking a firestorm of public discussion across the globe, this argument was pilloried by many of the world’s leading scholars, for whom the whole concept of civilization became tainted with all the problems they found in Huntington’s work. Some initially sought to test his thesis, but the most prominent systematic attempts came up negative and such efforts have since petered out. One can still find it in some leading journals as a spicy “straw man” argument that is debunked to the benefit of the preferred argument, and in a few countries that Huntington characterized as “torn” between two civilizations the notion has framed much scholarship on their own identities and foreign policy orientations.  But for the most part, the notion of civilizations remains prominent mainly in politics and mass media rather than scholarship. This article suggests that this relative stagnation of the civilizations paradigm may result from the fact that it is widely interpreted as a last bastion of primordialism. Tests have focused primarily on the primordialist parts of Huntington’s theory, and debates on civilizations’ role in world politics have been divorced from remarkable advances in research on identity over the last two decades. Negative findings from such research have tended to lead scholars to ignore the paradigm rather than attempt to rethink it. And those who continue to embrace it--typically politicians and policy analysts rather than scholars--are also those to whom primordialism tends to appeal, so they also see no need to reconsider it. Accordingly, little effort has been applied to considering whether post-primordialist understandings of identity  might lead not to the outright rejection of the concept but instead to revision and new insights. This article argues that post-primordialist findings about the nature of identity would lead us to rethink the notion of civilizations and that we should go ahead and update it in order to frame a research agenda for gaining a better understanding of the role of civilizational identity in domestic and international politics. The concept is surely worthy of such an effort. For one thing, in order to produce a holistic understanding of human identity, it would seem selfevident that we must study the most macro-level identifications as well as local and mesolevel ones. Even beyond this, civilizational identity is very widely believed to be important, including by world leaders who actually make policy and practice international relations and domestic politics.5 Moreover, media in different countries often frame major events in civilizational terms, with the most prominent recent example perhaps being American media coverage of the September 11 attacks.6 Indeed, given how significant civilizations are in  international political discourse and understandings, the concept would seem radically understudied by social scientists. The following pages thus examine the development of civilizations theory, focusing in particular on the Huntingtonian work that has come to shape current debates, and then show how up-to-date post-primordialist research on identity politics recasts the notion of civilization, lending it new scholarly and practical capacities for understanding  domestic and international politics.

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