Huntington, Samuel P. "Try Again: A Reply to Russett, Oneal & Cox." Journal of Peace Research v. 37, n. 5 (2000): 609-610.

Russett, Oneal & Cox (2000) (henceforth RO&C) claim that their analysis of militarized interstate disputes between 1950 and 1992 provides a test of my hypotheses concerning clashes of civilizations. It does nothing of the kind, and their claim that it does is simply untrue. As they note, the Cold War ended in 1989. Hence, the Cold War constitutes well over 90% of the period they analyze. My clash of civilizations thesis, however, deals with the post-Cold War period. It is an effort, as I write in the book’s opening pages, to shed some light on ‘how global politics after the Cold War will differ from global politics during and before the Cold War’ (Huntington, 1996: 34). The book is ‘meant to be an interpretation of the evolution of global politics after the Cold War’ (p. 13). ‘The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilizational identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world’ (p. 20). I contrast the bipolarity and importance of ideology in the Cold War with the multipolar, multicivilizational character of the post-Cold War world, a contrast dramatized by the maps on pp. 24–27. Sentence after sentence in the book begins with phrases such as ‘In the post-Cold War world’ and ‘In the emerging world’. That is what the book is about. It is not about the Cold War, and an analysis of conflicts during the Cold War can neither prove nor disprove its central argument.

 

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