SumBlog 12: Samuel Huntington and The Clash of Civilizations

  This week in class we talked about Samuel Huntington and the article he published about the clash of civilizations. In addition to this we talked about the critics of Huntington's proposal, mainly Edward Said's criticism because he was the most vocal about his opinions. According to Huntington, the clash of civilizations happens when groups of countries with similar cultural values have conflicts. Rather than thinking of these conflicts as happening because of nation-state divisions, Huntington says that the differences in cultures are to blame. He brings religion into the mix by saying that it is the most prominent factor in these conflicts between civilizations, and it is mainly between the Western civilization and the Islamic civilization. In class we talked about some reasons for this, and we discovered the conflicts are primarily between these two civilizations because the religions of these areas (Christianity and Islam) are just so similar in their core attributes that they will undoubtedly clash. Basically when people identify themselves based on their religion and their culture, they are bound to clash with other groups of people who have a different religion or culture. There are a few civilizations in this world that can in no way be grouped together because they are so vastly different, so they end up almost competing with each other and are often involved in conflicts.
  On the opposing side there is Edward Said who published an article directly negating what Huntington was saying. Said explained that Huntington was completely overgeneralizing the different groups of people and also conveying himself as a racist by giving certain groups these attributes that they are constantly in conflict because of their religion. I can see how the clash of civilizations would make sense in extreme and radical situations, but I agree with Said that it is a major overgeneralization. We even discussed the proof available for this in class by looking at how Catholicism is vastly different in France and Ireland, two countries included in Huntington's "Western Civilization."
  For me, I agree with Said's criticism of the clash of civilizations over Huntington's support of it. There are so many examples today even that don't uphold what Huntington was saying because there are a large number of conflicts that aren't between different civilizations, or there are conflicts within what is deemed a civilization. If these areas are grouped together because of common culture and practices, I think Africa needs to be looked at again. When we looked at the world map that showed where the different civilizations are, Africa was only two colors, and that's mostly due to the fact that the Sahara desert covered the area that was a different color from the rest. I would say that Africa needs to have more than just one generalized civilization because the people that live there are so vastly different and are constantly in conflict with each other. We learned about why Africa is split up in this way in a geography class I took two semesters ago, so when we discussed the civilizations Huntington proposed, I couldn't help but think of the conflicts in Africa. When the Europeans discovered that there were valuable resources in Africa's interior, they were quick to raid those resources and then colonize the continent. When they did this, however, there were obviously already people living there who belonged to varying ethnic groups, and when the borders between countries were drawn by the Europeans they split up ethnic groups between countries and then also put different ethnic groups together into one country and expected them to be able to cooperate with each other. This led to many conflicts between groups because each group wanted to have control over the other, leading to the creation of minority and majority groups which continue to fight with each other to this day. That is why I don't agree with Huntington's model; Africa is not just one civilization.
  The map on the top shows the Ethnolinguistic Groups within Africa with the country borders superimposed over these group boundaries. As you can see, the country borders intersect between many of the groups and then countries are formed that contain many different groups. The bottom picture shows where various conflicts occur, and if you compare the two maps, you can see that the areas where conflicts occur are areas with many different Ethnolinguistic groups within one country.