The Clash of Civilisations
…has returned to the Global conversation, but not in the way Samuel Huntington imagined. What appears as cultural conflict, may in fact, reflect deeper fractures within the global political economy.
A Return of Civilisational Language
In the years following the end of the Cold War, the world appeared to move – almost with relief – towards a shared horizon. Markets expanded, borders softened, and a certain confidence took hold: that economic integration might succeed where ideology had failed, weaving together a more stable and cooperative global order.
Yet even in that moment of optimism, a different reading was offered. In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington warned that the fault lines of future conflict would not be drawn by ideology or economics alone, but by culture, religion, and civilisational identity. He closed with a stark proposition:
“In the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.”
For many at the time, this was an argument out of step with the spirit of the age – overly deterministic, even pessimistic. And yet, three decades on, as one watches the language of global conflict increasingly framed in civilisational terms, his words return with an unsettling familiarity.
Leaders speak of “civilisational defence.” Conflicts are narrated not merely as disputes over territory or resources, but as struggles over identity and historical belonging. The world, it seems, has rediscovered the grammar Huntington described.
And yet, to accept this at face value is to risk misunderstanding the deeper currents at work.
Interdependence and Its Discontents
From the perspective of international political economy, what we are witnessing is not a simple clash between self-contained civilisations, but a far more intricate condition: a world profoundly interconnected in its material structures, yet increasingly fragmented in its narratives of meaning. Trade, finance, and technology bind societies together in ways unprecedented in history, even as political discourse seeks to differentiate, and at times divide, them.
This produces a paradox. Civilisational rhetoric has intensified at precisely the moment when material interdependence has reached its greatest depth.
The United States and China, often cast as representatives of distinct civilisational models, remain deeply entangled through supply chains, capital flows, and technological systems. Similarly, relations between what is often termed “the West” and “the Islamic world” are not defined by separation, but by layered interactions – economic, political, and intellectual – within a shared global framework. Civilisations, in practice, do not act; rather, states, institutions, and networks do, often across the very boundaries they are said to defend.
Why, then, has civilisational language returned with such force?
Part of the answer lies in the growing strain within the global economic order itself. Decades of integration have generated extraordinary wealth, but also deep and visible inequalities – within societies as much as between them. For many, the promise of globalisation has become uneven, uncertain, and at times exclusionary. In such a context, identity offers not merely a cultural anchor, but a language through which discontent can be expressed and mobilised.
Civilisation, in this sense, becomes less a cause of conflict than a vessel – carrying grievances whose origins lie in material conditions.
The Generational Fault Line
Yet even this analysis remains incomplete without attention to a quieter, but no less significant, transformation: the generational reconfiguration of these very societies.
Recent reflections have pointed to a dimension largely absent from Huntington’s original framework – the internal fractures within civilisations themselves, particularly along generational lines. While political elites continue to invoke civilisational narratives to consolidate authority and frame external competition, younger generations are increasingly shaped by shared experiences that transcend these boundaries.
Across diverse contexts – from South Asia to Western democracies – young people encounter similar realities: precarious employment, rising living costs, constrained opportunity, and the looming horizon of ecological uncertainty. These conditions give rise to a form of consciousness that is at once local and global – rooted in immediate circumstances, yet resonant across borders.
In this light, what emerges is not a uniform civilisational alignment, but a more complex layering of identities and solidarities. Younger cohorts do not simply inherit the civilisational divisions of their predecessors; they navigate, reinterpret, and at times quietly dissolve them, even as they remain embedded within their cultural worlds.
From an international political economy perspective, this introduces a profound tension. The narratives of global politics. – articulated from above – continue to organise the world into civilisational blocs. Yet the lived realities from below reveal patterns of connection and contestation that do not neatly correspond to those divisions.
If Huntington mapped the external edges of civilisations, these generational dynamics illuminate the fault lines running through them.
Beyond the Clash
The implication is not that civilisational identity has receded, but that it now coexists with, and is often unsettled by, shared material experiences that cut across its boundaries. Movements led by younger generations – whether in protest, reform, or political transformation – frequently articulate demands not in the language of civilisational opposition, but in terms of justice, dignity, and future possibility.
This suggests that the tensions of the present moment cannot be reduced to a clash between cultures alone. Rather, they reflect a more intricate condition: a global political economy in which identity, inequality, and legitimacy are increasingly intertwined.
At a deeper level, this points to a more fundamental question – one that lies beneath both civilisational rhetoric and generational unrest. Modern economic systems have achieved remarkable success in organising production and expanding wealth. Yet they have struggled to articulate a coherent sense of purpose beyond growth, efficiency, and competition. In the absence of such a grounding, both identity and resistance emerge as responses to a shared unease.
What, then, is truly in contention is not merely the relationship between civilisations, but the frameworks through which human societies understand their place within an interconnected world.
Huntington was right to recognise that culture and identity would remain central to global politics. Where his thesis proves less sufficient is in its assumption of stable and coherent civilisational blocs. The reality that has unfolded is more fluid, more entangled, and perhaps more revealing of the human condition itself.
We are not witnessing a definitive clash of civilisations.
We are witnessing a world searching – sometimes anxiously, sometimes creatively – for a way to reconcile its material interdependence with a deeper sense of meaning.
If you’d like to explore this idea further,
👉 you can learn more about the clash of civilisations in this article.
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