Why do civilizations following comparable institutional reforms, possessing similar natural resources, or operating within equivalent technological environments often experience profoundly different historical trajectories? This question has long occupied scholars across history, sociology, economics, political science, and comparative civilizational studies. Although environmental conditions, institutional quality, cultural values, and technological innovation have each provided influential explanations for long-term development, these approaches generally treat human agency as a dependent or implicit variable rather than as the principal object of civilizational reproduction. This article argues that civilizations should be understood not merely as systems that organize resources, institutions, or symbolic cultures, but as long-term historical systems dedicated to cultivating, reproducing, and transforming the human capacities upon which these structures ultimately depend. From this perspective, the enduring success of civilizations is determined less by the quantity of resources they possess than by their ability to educate, socialize, organize, and continuously reproduce individuals capable of discovering, mobilizing, preserving, and renewing those resources across successive generations. Building upon a geo-civilizational perspective, the article proposes that geographical environments influence historical development indirectly by shaping adaptive contexts within which societies gradually construct distinctive normative orientations, educational traditions, institutional arrangements, and collective patterns of socialization. These historically accumulated processes contribute to the formation of characteristic forms of human agency that subsequently influence institutional resilience, innovation, and long-term developmental trajectories. Geography therefore functions not as a deterministic force but as one component within a broader historical process of civilizational formation. The article critically reviews four major explanatory traditions in comparative civilizational research—environmental, institutional, cultural, and civilizational approaches—and argues that each illuminates important dimensions of historical development while leaving insufficiently theorized the mechanisms through which civilizations reproduce the human capacities necessary for institutional continuity and historical adaptation. To address this analytical gap, the article introduces human formation as an intermediate level of analysis linking environmental conditions, historical adaptation, institutional organization, and long-term civilizational development. Rather than proposing an alternative to existing theories, the geo-civilizational perspective seeks to integrate their principal insights within a broader explanatory framework centered on the historical cultivation of human agency. By relocating analytical attention from the products of civilizations to the processes through which civilizations reproduce the people capable of creating and sustaining those products, the article offers a new conceptual foundation for comparative civilizational studies and outlines a research agenda for future empirical investigation. Keywords Geo-Civilization; Civilizational Development; Human Formation; Human Agency; Comparative Civilizations; Comparative Historical Sociology; Institutions; Culture; Long-Term Development; Historical Adaptation.
Ahmed Sarirete (Mon,) studied this question.