Theoretical analysis reveals cultural divisions as primary drivers of post-Cold War geopolitical tension, suggesting global conflicts align along civilizational boundaries rather than ideology.
Samuel Huntington was a Harvard professor and political scientist. His article, published in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, was developed on the basis of a lecture written in 1992, and he later expanded his ideas into the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996. This article was a direct response to his former student Francis Fukuyama, whose book The End of History and the Last Man argued that liberal democracy represented the final form of human government and that major ideological conflicts had come to an end. Huntington viewed the situation differently. His central argument was simple but powerful. As he wrote, in the new era, the most important differences among people would no longer be ideological, political, or economic, but cultural. He believed that the era of ideology had come to an end and that the world was returning to an older form of conflict based primarily on cultural divisions. According to his thesis, new conflicts would emerge along the boundaries between different civilizations, while cooperation would primarily take place within those civilizational boundaries.
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Shohruh Raxmonov (2026) studied this question.
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