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Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency

Author(s): Charles Hirschkind and

Saba Mahmood

Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), pp. 339-354

Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3318265

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SOCIAL THOUGHT AND COMMENTARY

Feminism, the Taliban, and
Politics of Counter-Insurgency
Charles Hirschkind

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Saba Mahmood

The University of Chicago

O0n a cool breezy evening in March 1999, Hollywood celebrities turned out
in large numbers to show their support for the Feminist Majority’s cam-

paign against the Taliban’s brutal treatment of Afghan women. Jay and Mavis

Leno hosted the event, and the audience included celebrities like Kathy Bates,

Geena Davis, Sidney Potier, and Lily Tomlin. Jay Leno had tears in his eyes as he

spoke to an audience that filled the cavernous Directors Guild of American

Theater to capacity. It is doubtful that most people in this crowd had heard of

the suffering of Afghan women before. But by the time Mellissa Etheridge,

Wynonna Judd, and Sarah McLachlan took to the stage, following the Afghan

chant meaning “We are with you,” tears were streaming down many cheeks.2

The person spearheading this campaign was Mavis Leno, Jay Leno’s wife, who

had been catapulted into political activism upon hearing about the plight of

Afghan women living under the brutal regime of the Taliban. This form of

Third World solidarity was new for Mavis Leno. Prior to embarking on this proj-

ect, reports George magazine, “Leno restricted her activism to the Freddy the Pig

Club, the not-so radical group devoted to a rare series of out-of-print children’s

books.”3 She was recruited by her Beverly Hills neighbor to join the Feminist

Majority, an organization formed by Eleanor Smeal, a former president of NOW.

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FEMINISM, THE TALIBAN, AND POLITICS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY

Little did members of the Feminist Majority know that Leno would make the

plight of Afghan women living under the Taliban rule a cause celebre: not on-

ly did the Hollywood celebrities join the ranks of what came to be called the

“Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan” campaign, but a large number of pop-

ular women’s magazines (like Glamour, Jane, Teen, etc.), in addition to feminist

journals like Sojourner, Off our Backs and Ms., carried articles on the plight of

Afghan women living under the Taliban. The Lenos personally gave a contri-

bution of $100,000 to help kick off a public awareness campaign. Mavis Leno

testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke to Unocal share-

holders to dissuade them from investing in Afghanistan, and met with President

Bill Clinton to convince him to change his wavering policy toward the Taliban.

In addition, the Feminist Majority carried out a broad letter writing campaign

targeted at the White House. The Feminist Majority claims that it was their

work that eventually dissuaded Unocal officials to abandon their plans to de-

velop a natural gas pipeline in Afghanistan, and convinced the Hollywood-

friendly Bill Clinton to condemn the Taliban regime.

Even skeptics who are normally leery of Western feminists’ paternalistic de-

sire to “save Third World women” were sympathetic to the Feminist Majority’s

campaign. This was in part because the restrictions that the Taliban had im-

posed on women in Afghanistan seemed atrocious by any standard: They for-

bade women from all positions of employment, eliminated schools for girls and

university education for women in cities, outlawed women from leaving their

homes unless accompanied by a close male relative, and forced women to

wear the burqa (a head to toe covering with a mesh opening to see through).

Women were reportedly beaten and flogged for violating Taliban edicts. There

seemed to be little doubt in the minds of many that the United States, with its

impressive political and economic leverage in the region, could help alleviate

this sad state of affairs. As one friend put it, “Finally our government can do

something good for women’s rights out there, rather than working for corporate

profits.” Rallying against the Taliban to protest their policies against Afghan

women provided a point of unity for groups from a range of political perspec-

tives: from conservatives to liberals and radicals, from Republicans to
Democrats, and from Hollywood glitterati to grass roots activists. By the time the

war started, feminists like Smeal could be found cozily chatting with the gen-

erals about their shared enthusiasm for Operation Enduring Freedom and the

possibility of women pilots commandeering F-16s.4

Among the key factors that facilitated this remarkable consensus, there are

two in particular that we wish to explore here: the studied silence about the cru-

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CHARLES HIRSCHKIND & SABA MAHMOOD

cial role the United States had played in creating the miserable conditions un-

der which Afghan women were living; and secondly, a whole set of questionable

assumptions, anxieties, and prejudices embedded in the notion of Islamic fun-

damentalism. It was striking how a number of commentators, in discussions

that preceded the war, regularly failed to connect the predicament of women

in Afghanistan with the massive military and economic support that the US pro-

vided, as part of its Cold War strategy, to the most extreme of Afghan religious

militant groups. This silence, a concomitant of the recharged enthusiasm for the

US military both within academia and among the American public more gen-

erally, also characterized much of the response both to reports of mounting

civilian casualties resulting from the bombing campaign, and to the wide-

spread famine that the campaign threatened to aggravate. For example, as

late as early December, the Feminist Majority website remained stubbornly fo-

cused on the ills of Taliban rule, with no mention of the 2.2 million victims of

three years of drought who were put at greater risk of starvation because US

bombing severely restricted the delivery of food aid. Indeed, the Feminist

Majority made no attempts to join the calls issued by a number of humanitar-

ian organizations–including the Afghan Women’s Mission-to halt the bomb-
ing so that food might have been transported to the Afghans before winter set

in.5 In the crusade to liberate Afghan women from the tyranny of Taliban rule,

there seemed to be no limit of the violence to which Americans were willing to

subject the Afghans, women and men alike. Afghanistan, so it appeared, had to

bear another devastating war so that, as the New York Times triumphantly not-

ed at the exodus of the Taliban from Kabul, women can now wear burqas “out

of choice” rather than compulsion.

The twin figures of the Islamic fundamentalist and his female victim helped

consolidate and popularize the view that such hardship and sacrifice were

for Afghanistan’s own good. Following the September 11th attacks, the burqa-

clad body of the Afghan woman became the visible sign of an invisible enemy

that threatens not only “us,” citizens of the West, but our entire civilization. This

image, one foregrounded initially by the Feminist Majority campaign though

later seized on by the Bush administration and the mainstream media, served

as a key element in the construction of the Taliban as an enemy particularly

deserving of our wrath because of their harsh treatment of women. As Laura

Bush put it in her November 17th radio address to the nation: “Civilized peo-

ple throughout the world are speaking out in horror-not only because our

hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan, but also because in

Afghanistan, we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest

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FEMINISM, THE TALIBAN, AND POLITICS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY

of us.” Not surprisingly, the military success of Operation Enduring Freedom

was celebrated first and foremost as the liberation of Afghan women from
Taliban control.

Our main concern here is not simply to dwell on the inadequacies of the

campaign to rescue Afghan women by the Feminist Majority or other groups,

but to address the larger set of assumptions and attitudes undergirding this

campaign and that are reflected widely in American public opinion: attitudes

about the proper place of public religious morality in modern Islamic soci-

eties, and in particular how such morality is seen to shape and constrain

women’s behavior. The Taliban in many ways have become a potent symbol of

all that liberal public opinion regards as grievously wrong with Islamic societies

these days, proof of the intense misogyny long ascribed to Islam, and most em-

phatically to those movements within Islam referred to as fundamentalist. That

from the rubble left behind by the game of super power politics played out on

Afghan bodies and communities, we can only identify the misogynist machi-

nations of the Islamic fundamentalist testifies to the power this image bears,

and the force it exerts on our political imagination.

Counterinsurgency
It is striking that even among many of those who came to acknowledge the US

involvement in the civil war in Afghanistan, the neat circuit of women’s op-

pression, Taliban evil, and Islamic fundamentalism remained largely unchal-

lenged. It is worthwhile here to briefly recall some of the stunning history of the

conflict in Afghanistan. US concern for what was until then a neglected part of

South West Asia was greatly heightened when the Soviet Union invaded

Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy Carter signed a directive to begin covert

operations in Afghanistan in order to harass the Soviet occupying forces by

supplying funds, weapons, and other forms of support to the Afghan fighters

known as the mujahedeen. By 1986, under the Reagan administration, this

project had mushroomed into the largest covert operation in US history since

WW II. Overall, the US funneled more than $3 billion to the mujahedeen, with

an equal if not greater amount coming from Saudi Arabia, one of the staunchest

US allies. The Saudi monarchy had historically been lavish funders of anti-left-

ist forces around the globe. The aims of the Saudi monarchy to root out any

communist influence from the Muslim world dovetailed with the Reagan

Doctrine which had increased US support for anticommunist insurgencies

against Soviet-backed regimes in various parts of the Third World.

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Katherine Miller

CHARLES HIRSCHKIND & SABA MAHMOOD
Pakistan was the ground from which this covert operation was staged. The
then military dictator of Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq, who had just overthrown
the democratically elected prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was more than ea-
ger to oblige the Americans, not only as a means to obtain US economic aid but
also to bolster the legitimacy of his military rule. Pakistan’s Inter-Services
Intelligence agency, or ISI, was a key player in both channeling US arms to the
Afghan mujahedeen, as well as training them. The strategy that the CIA pursued
in this covert operation was quite different from the one pursued in Nicaragua
and Angola insofar as no Americans trained the mujahedeen directly-instead
the CIA trained Pakistani instructors and members of the 1SI.6
Throughout the Afghan war, critics of the CIA’s covert operation voiced two
major complaints: first, that the bulk of US aid was being funneled to the most
extreme and conservative Islamic groups from the Afghan opposition; second,
that as an indirect consequence of the CIA operation, the Afghanistan-Pakistan
region was now the largest producer of heroin as well as a sizeable marketplace
for illicit arms. Let us consider each of these. When Moscow first intervened mil-
itarily in Afghanistan in 1979, there were a variety of both Islamic and secular-
nationalist Afghan groups opposed to the Moscow-backed Communists, some
of them espousing political and religious positions we would label “moder-
ate.” Yet the majority of the US aid (as much as 75%) was channeled to the most
extremist of these opposition groups, an important consequence of which was
the marginalization of moderate and secular voices. It is widely understood that
the Pakistani agency ISI was instrumental in choosing these groups. But as the
World Policy journal noted, “There is no evidence to indicate that CIA officials
or other US policymakers strenuously objected to the channeling of aid to the
most extreme authoritarian elements of the Afghan resistance”.7
One of the most favored of these groups was headed by Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, a man known for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused
to wear the veil, and whose group received as much as 50% of US aid. When
questioned about the US support of Hekmetyar, a CIA official in Pakistan ex-
plained, “Fanatics fight better.”8 This policy of promoting extremist Islamic
groups in the region, and equipping them with the most sophisticated military
and intelligence equipment, had gradually, over a period of ten years, created
the political climate in which the emergence of the Taliban was a predictable
outcome. Even though the Taliban did not come into power until 1995, well af-
ter both the US and Soviet Union had withdrawn from the region, their meth-
ods were not much different from groups that the US and its allies had
supported. Neither, for that matter, are the practices of the United States’ more
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FEMINISM, THE TALIBAN, AND POLITICS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY
recent allies, the Northern Alliance, a fact that is becoming evident since their
seizure of power in Kabul. After the exodus of the Taliban, as the Northern
Alliance were being legitimized in Germany, the widely respected Afghan
women’s organization, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan,
put out a statement saying “The people of the world need to know that in
terms of widespread raping of girls and women from seven to 70, the track
record of the Taliban can no way stand up against that of these very same
Northern Alliance associates.” 9
The arms pipeline established between the US-ISI-Mujahedeen was notori-
ously corrupt, and many of the arms that the CIA supplied ended up being sold
in the open market as well as being channeled to groups of fighters already
known for their excessively violent tactics against non-combatant peoples liv-
ing within the area of conflict. The CIA turned a blind eye to this arms leak,
chalking it up to the necessary cost of a covert operation, and in so doing,
turned the region into one of the most heavily armed areas in the world.10 In
addition, as the Afghan mujahedeen gained control over liberated zones in
Afghanistan, they required that their supporters grow opium to support the re-
sistance. Under CIA and Pakistani protection, Pakistan military and Afghan re-
sistance fighters opened heroin labs on the border between the two countries.
By 1981 this region was supplying 60% of the US demand for heroin. In Pakistan
the results were particularly horrendous: the number of heroin addicts rose
from a handful in 1979 to one million two hundred thousand by 1995.11
In its literature, the Feminist Majority claims that “Afghanistan, under the
Taliban rule, [had] become the number one producer of illicit opium and hero-
in in the world.”12 Insomuch as the Taliban did not come to power until 1995
and Afghanistan was already the major supplier of world heroin by 1985, this
was a misrepresentation of facts. On the contrary, according to the United
Nations, the Taliban all but eliminated heroin production in the first year from
the areas under their control.13 Where heroin production did continue to flour-
ish was in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance. Its cultivation has re-
mained an important source of revenue for them, and indeed, since their rise
to power, poppy cultivation has been revived in many of the areas from which
the Taliban had managed to eliminate it. The Feminist Majority’s misrepre-
sentation of the Taliban drug policy was consistent with the overall picture
that the group sought to present, one that held the Taliban solely responsible
for the catastrophic situation that the Afghans, in particular women, faced.
Feminist Majority statements consistently ignored the devastation wrought by
two decades of warfare in which women and children had suffered most heav-
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CHARLES HIRSCHKIND & SABA MAHMOOD
ily, and instead suggested a relatively benign picture of women’s lives prior to
Taliban rule. For example, in 1998 when the Lenos announced their $100,000
contribution to the Feminist Majority campaign, Mavis Leno said, “Two years ago
women in Afghanistan could work, be educated, and move about freely. Then
the Taliban seized power. Today women are prohibited from leaving their homes
unless accompanied by a close male relative and are forced to wear the burqa.
Girls and women are banned from schooling…. No healthcare…no educa-
tion…no freedom of movement. This nightmare is reality for 11.5 million women
and girls in Afghanistan.”14 It has been common knowledge for anyone interested
in the region that Afghan men and women have long suffered from many of the
ills that the Feminist Majority attributed to the Taliban. For example, in addition
to being one of the poorest nations of the world, Afghanistan had, for a number
of years, one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates. These conditions
were only exacerbated by twenty years of war during which the delicate balance
of tribal power was radically destabilized by the influx of weapons, making or-
dinary people subject to violence on an unprecedented scale. As is often the case,
the increased militarization of Afghan society made women more subject to vi-
olence than at any time before. During this period of civil war, perhaps two
million Afghans were killed, and six million made refugees-75% of whom are
women and children. Afghanistan today remains one of the most heavily land-
mined countries in the world, with people being maimed and killed on a daily
basis. And if those weapons are inadequate, among the many types of collater-
al that the US has put into its recent deal with the country is a new stratum of
unexploded munitions. Given these conditions, the narrow focus on Taliban
rule by the Feminist Majority and other groups, and their silence on the chan-
neling of US aid to the most brutal and violent Afghan groups (of which the
Taliban were only one), must be seen as a dangerous simplification of a vastly
more complicated problem. Why were conditions of war, militarization, and
starvation considered to be less injurious to women than the lack of education,
employment, and, most notably, in the media campaign, Western dress styles?
The silence among scholars and women’s advocacy groups around these is-
sues was coupled with a highly selective and limited representation of Afghan life
under Taliban rule, one that filtered out all information that might contribute to
a more nuanced understanding of Afghan women’s situation. For example, the
Taliban decree to ban girls and women from schools affected only a tiny minority
of urban dwellers since the majority of the population reside in the rural areas
where there are few schools: approximately 90% of women and 60% of men in
Afghanistan are illiterate. Likewise, rarely was it mentioned that the Taliban
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Katherine Miller

FEMINISM, THE TALIBAN, AND POLITICS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY
policy of disarming the population, and the strict surveillance of all major areas
under their control had made it possible for the first time in years for women to
move outside their homes without fear of being raped (of course, being beaten
for a variety of moral transgressions remained a distinct possibility). According
to recent reports, this security is rapidly disintergrating. As the Agence France-
Presse recently reported, “Just 10 weeks after the Taliban fled Kabul city, Afghans
are already starting to say they felt safer under the now-defeated hardline mili-
tia than under the power-sharing interim administration that has replaced it.
Murders, robberies and hijackings in the capital, factional clashes in the north
and south of the country, instability in Kandahar and banditry on roads linking
main centres are beginning to erode the optimism that greeted the inauguration
of the interim administration on December 22.”15
Equally relevant here is the fact that even though Taliban policies had made
conditions much worse for urban women, they did not substantially affect the
lives of the vast majority of rural women either because many of the Taliban
edicts already mirrored facts of rural life, or because those edicts were never en-
forced. Sensitive writers documenting the catastrophy unfolding in Afghanistan
have occasionally pointed this out. For example, an article published in the New
Yorker noted that just outside of the urban centers, “one sees raised paths sub-
dividing wheat fields…in which men and women work together and the women
rarely wear the burka; indeed, since they are sweating and stooping so much,
their heads often remain uncovered. The Taliban has scarcely altered the lives
of uneducated women, except to make them almost entirely safe from rape.”16
As the article suggested, one consequence of the admittedly oppressive regu-
lations put into place by the Taliban was that life for the majority of Afghans had
become considerably safer.17 Despite the availability of this kind of data, the
Feminist Majority and other advocacy groups carefully kept any ambiguities out
of their case against the Taliban as the sole perpetrators of the ills committed
against Afghan women.
Taking these realities into account demands a more nuanced strategy on the
part of anyone who wishes to help the women of Afghanistan in the long run.
Already before the bombing began, one consequence of the campaign to res-
cue Afghan women was the dramatic reduction of humanitarian aid to
Afghanistan, the brunt of which was borne by women and children as the most
destitute members of the population.18 When some of those concerned protest-
ed this outcome, they were chided for being soft on the Taliban.19 It seemed like
any attempt to widen the discussion beyond the admittedly brutal practices of
the Taliban was doomed to be labeled as antithetical to women’s interests.
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Katherine Miller

CHARLES HIRSCHKIND & SABA MAHMOOD
Fundamentalism
In addition to the uncritical stance adopted towards US foreign policy by many
of those who took up the cause of Afghanistan’s women, an important factor
that inhibited a more complex analysis to emerge was the trope of Islamic
fundamentalism, one that offered a ready-made explanation for whatever vi-
olence to which Afghan women were subjected. It seemed that historical analy-
sis was unnecessary because images of veiled women, so skillfully marshaled by
organization like the Feminist Majority, were explanation enough for what
most Americans already knew: that Islam in a variety of its forms, and in par-
ticular so-called Islamic fundamentalism, is generally oppressive of women.
Afghan women are only one of its more recent and dramatic victims. A more re-
alistic assessment of the impact of Taliban rule on women living in conditions
of militarization, social disintegration, intense poverty, and endless war could
not be accommodated in this view and was therefore rejected. Instead, the
trope of Islamic extremism allowed a vast field of wrongs suffered by Afghan
women to be consolidated within a simple and singular explanatory framework,
with the fundamentalist Taliban at its center.
The point we wish to make here is that Afghanistan and Pakistan have been
entirely transformed by the roles they were recruited to play during the Cold
War conflict. The vast dissemination of arms, military training, the creation of a
thriving drug trade with its attendant criminal activity, and all of this in circum-
stances of desperate poverty, has had a radical impact on the conditions of moral
and political action for the people in the region. Colombia may serve as a useful
comparison in this regard. As it has been widely reported in the US media, the
rampant violence in Colombia is directly tied to its status as one of the largest pro-
ducers and traffickers of narcotics, and the proliferation of arms associated with
this trade. Yet while we tend to acknowledge the role of militarization and drugs
in the case of the ongoing violence in Colombia, in Afghanistan we instead seek
explanations in the psychology of the so-called fundamentalist.
The wide currency such explanations enjoy, even among materialist feminists
like Barbara Ehrenreich, is startling. In a recent op-ed piece in Los Angeles
Times, Ehrenreich complains about the lack of analysis among progressives of
the “hatred of women” that the Taliban, and Islamic fundamentalists more
generally, exhibit. 20 She then proceeds to offer an explanation for this hatred
through reference to a “global masculinity crisis” that Third World men are
supposedly facing because of women’s entry into arenas of employment and
political participation. What accounts for the Taliban’s misogyny in particular,
she suggests, is the masculinist ethos of the all-male madrasas [religious schools]
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Katherine Miller

FEMINISM, THE TALIBAN, AND POLITICS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY
devoid of the “potentially softening influence of mothers and sisters.” Since
Ehrenreich is a scholar who has often presented cogent analyses of the mate-
rial conditions of gender inequality in this country, it is surprising that when it
comes to Islam she too, like the Feminist Majority, can offer up an analysis of
the conditions of Afghan women’s lives that barely touches on the context of
persistent war, rampant ethnic and tribal violence, and the complete unravel-
ing of Afghanistan’s complicated social fabric that resulted from the country’s
incorporation into the Cold War. Instead, Ehrenreich grounds her explanations
in popular narratives of the psychological blowback produced by modernization
(“masculinity crisis”) and exemplified in the figure of the Muslim fundamentalist.
The pariahs of the world
What gives Islamic fundamentalism such explanatory power? To begin, note the
variety of ideas, images, and fears that Islamic fundamentalism evokes in the
American imagination: women wearing headscarves (now, burqas), the cutting
off of hands and heads, massive crowds praying in unison, the imposition of a
normative public morality grounded in a puritanical and legalistic interpreta-
tion of religious texts, a rejection and hatred of the West and its globalized cul-
ture, the desire to put aside history and return to a pristine past, and the quick
recourse to violence against those who are different. In other words, the notion
of fundamentalism collapses a rather heterogeneous collection of images and
descriptions, linking them together as aspects of a singular socio-religious for-
mation. Moreover, in their longstanding representation of Islam as violent spec-
tacle (like a 1400-year-old train wreck), CNN and their competitors have
managed to endow each one of these images with the power to immediately
animate all of the others, each one a falling stone capable of bringing the av-
alanche of Islamic global terror down on the US. What allows this reduction is
the idea that all of these phenomena are expressions of Islam in its dangerous
and regressive form, its fundamentalist form.
Note also that this complex of features does not fit together in the way that
the notion of fundamentalism implies, any more than, say, being a born-again
Christian in the US entails one’s willingness to assassinate doctors who per-
form abortions, or that being a Peruvian leftist is equivalent to being a supporter
of Sendero Luminoso, or, for that matter, that liberalism fits with Nazism sim-
ply because the latter emerged in a liberal democracy (recall that Hitler came
into power by popular vote). What is at stake here, however, is not simply a
problem of definition, but of political strategy: that is, the reduction effected by
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Katherine Miller

CHARLES HIRSCHKIND & SABA MAHMOOD
terms like fundamentalism allows US public opinion in this moment to equate
those who attacked New York and Washington with the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, with those Islamic schools that impart a strict interpretation of
Islam, with Muslim preachers who criticize the US for its liberal social mores,
with Arab families in Detroit that have daughters who wear headscarves. In so
far as these different actors and institutions may be thought of as different faces
of a global fundamentalism, now increasingly associated with terrorism, they
may also be conceived of as legitimate targets, whether for intelligence gath-
ering or for aerial bombing.
Let us give an example that points to the problems entailed by the concept
of “global fundamentalism.” Not unlike Afghan women now, Salman Rushdie’s
name also became a cause celebre in the West in the 1980s when Ayatollah
Khomeini issued a fatwo against Rushdie’s life for having written a blasphemous
book supposedly injurious to Muslim sensibilities. Rushdie has recently written
two essays on the current crisis that are worth quoting from, particularly in light
of the moral authority he has been accorded in Europe and the US as a de-
fender of liberal freedoms. Referring to those who carried out the attacks on
September 11, Rushdie writes:
“Whatever the killers were trying to achieve, it seems improbable that
building a better world was part of it. The fundamentalist seeks to bring
down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer
just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal
adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s
rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolu-
tion theory, sex.” He continues later, “The fundamentalist believes that we
believe in nothing. In his world- view, he has his absolute certainties,
while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must
first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in
public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion,
literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s
resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.”21
This list couples, in bizarre fashion, the political principles at the heart of a lib-
eral polity, on one hand, with those titillating icons of hetero-normative pleas-
ure that trigger a warm feeling of self recognition and superiority among
cosmopolitans. It is as if Rushdie worried that the staidness of the former could
not convince without the sexiness of the latter (and here we would note that,
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FEMINISM, THE TALIBAN, AND POLITICS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY
among the multiple violences that have come to define Afghan women, it is an
article of clothing that always appears at the top of the list). The rhetoric works
something like this: a society in which women can’t wear mini-skirts is also
against adult suffrage; an equitable distribution of wealth demands kissing in
public; eating bacon sandwiches (that is, pork) equips one to enjoy literature and
movies. In other words, those who have increasingly come to see Islam as im-
portant to their lives, their politics, and their forms of public expression-and
therefore don’t eat pork, don’t kiss in public, and don’t subscribe to evolution-
ary theory-are destined to live within authoritarian, intolerant, and misogynist
societies. The implicit suggestion is that any departure from Western cultural and
political norms becomes a threat to all aspects of our lives, from our political sys-
tem to our private pleasures. That this argument occurs today at a political mo-
ment in which Americans are being told to be on constant alert for “suspicious
looking people” should give us some pause and provoke reflection.
Rushdie’s statements are also misleading in their portrayal of contemporary
Islamic movements, or what he refers to as fundamentalism. A large sector of
the Islamic movement, pace Rushdie, is neither against a multi-party political
system, nor universal suffrage and accountable government. In fact, in many
parts of the Muslim world (such as Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey, and Tunisia),
Islamic political parties contest elections when allowed, and are a part of the
voices striving for greater democratization and political liberalization. In Egypt,
for example, the Labor Party (Hizb al-Amal), in coalition with one of the major
Islamist organizations in the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood, regularly
floats candidates in local and national elections. In addition, over the last ten
years, the Egyptian unions of physicians, engineers, and lawyers have elected
Islamist activists to serve as their leaders and representatives. In many cases, it
is the quasi-secular governments of Muslim countries that have banned Islamist
political parties (as is the case in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia) from participating in the
electoral process. In doing so, they have only given weight to the militants’ ar-
gument that the sole avenue for political change is armed struggle and gueril-
la warfare. Other currents within the Islamic movement are engaged in pietistic
and welfare activities, and have little to do with electoral political reform, let
alone militant activism. In other words, the disparate currents within contem-
porary Islam, all of which are lumped together under the rubric of funda-
mentalism, do not cohere in a singular movement definable for its dangerous
regressivity. They differ in their goals, their politics, their models of society,
and their understandings of moral responsibility. It is particularly important to
recognize these differences in the context of today’s burgeoning conflict.
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Katherine Miller

CHARLES HIRSCHKIND & SABA MAHMOOD
Public religion
One reason why Islamic movements make many liberals and progressives un-
comfortable is the Islamists’ introduction of religious concerns into what are
considered to be properly political issues. The argument is often made that if
the Muslim world is to become modern and civilized, it must assign Islam to the
space of the private and personal. When religion is allowed to enter into pub-
lic debate and make political claims, we are told, it results in rigid and intoler-
ant policies that are particularly injurious to women and minorities. Once again
we quote from Salman Rushdie who reiterates this admonishment to the
Muslim world: “The restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its de-
politicization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to be-
come modern….If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on
board the secular-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and
without which Muslim countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.”22
One of the many problems with such a formulation is that it ignores the mul-
tiple ways in which the public and private are linked in contemporary society.
As many scholars have argued for some time now, the division between the pub-
lic and the private is quite porous; the two are ineluctably intertwined in myr-
iad ways. The most striking example of this linkage is the reaction that the
adoption of the veil provoked in some European and Middle Eastern coun-
tries. In France, for example, the decision on the part of Muslim schoolgirls to
wear the headscarf was denounced as injurious to French public life and in 1994
the French government banned the headscarves from public schools. Similarly,
between 1998-2000, more than 25,000 women were barred from Turkey’s col-
lege campuses because they refused to remove the headscarves, and hundreds
of government employees were fired, demoted or transferred for the same
reason.23 In all of these instances, the pleas of the young women that their
adoption of the veil was an expression of their personal faith, and not an en-
dorsement of state-censured Islamist politics, went unheeded.
Both of these examples demonstrate not simply that the private and the
public are inter-twined, but more importantly that only certain expressions of
“personal faith”-and not others-are to be tolerated even in modern liberal
societies. That is, what gets relegated to the sphere of the personal is still a pub-
lic decision. Thus we need to put to question the idea suggested by Rushdie,
among others, that were Muslims simply to privatize their faith, their behavior
would become acceptable to secular sensibilities.
One of the reasons why the veil provoked such a passionate response even
among feminists in France is the assumption that it potently symbolizes
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Katherine Miller

FEMINISM, THE TALIBAN, AND POLITICS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY
women’s subordinate status within Islam. A number of French feminists sup-
ported the ban on the headscarf because, as a leading French feminist intel-
lectual, Elizabeth Badinter, put it, “The veil…is the symbol of the oppression of
a sex. Putting on torn jeans, wearing yellow, green, or blue hair, this is an act
of freedom with regard to social conventions. Putting a veil on the head, this is
an act of submission. It burdens a woman’s whole life.”24 While the veil’s sym-
bolic meaning has been frequently discussed, particularly by those opposed to
it, the question is far more complicated than suggested here. The veil has been
freighted with so many meanings in contemporary social and political con-
flicts that any ascription of a singular meaning to it-such as ‘symbol of
women’s oppression’-is unconvincing. Think of the very different contexts
within which the practice of veiling is undertaken, for example, in Afghanistan,
France, Turkey, or for that matter the US. Whereas the veil was forced on urban
women in Afghanistan by the Taliban under the threat of physical violence, in
France its adoption has, in many instances, come in the context of young
women going against their parents’ more assimilated life-styles. In Turkey, on
the other hand, the coercive powers of the law were marshaled, back in the
1920s, to force woman to unveil. More recently, the practice of veiling has
gained ascendancy as part of an opposition movement protesting the rigid
policies of a state that insists on dictating the ways in which personal practices
of religious piety should appear in public. Note that this is not to say the veil
never works to signify women’s oppression. The point is that to speak about the
meaning of the veil in any of these contexts requires a lot more analytical
work than that undertaken by those who oppose its adoption.
It is interesting that Badinter opposes the decision to veil by young Muslims
girls on the grounds that, as an act in accord with (and therefore not in contest
with) Islamic norms of female modesty, it does not rise to the status of “an act
of freedom in regards to social conventions.” This points out the degree to
which the normative subject of feminism remains a liberatory one: one who
contests social norms (by wearing torn jeans and dying her hair blue), but not
one who finds purpose, value, and pride in the struggle to live in accord with
certain tradition sanctioned virtues. Women’s voluntary adoption of what are
considered to be patriarchal practices are often explained by feminists in terms
of false consciousness, or an internalization of patriarchal social values by
those who live within the asphyxiating confines of traditional societies. Even
those analyses that demonstrate the workings of women’s subversive agency in
the enactment of social conventions remain circumscribed within the singular
logic of subordination and insubordination. A Muslim woman can only be one
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CHARLES HIRSCHKIND & SABA MAHMOOD
of two things, either uncovered, and therefore liberated, or veiled, and thus still,
to some degree, subordinate. Can our bras, ties, pants, miniskirts, underwear,
and bathing suits all be so easily arrayed on one or the other side of this divide?
Can our daily activities and life decisions really be captured and understood
within this logic of freedom or captivity?
We need a way to think about the lives of Muslim women outside this sim-
ple opposition. This is especially so in those moments of crisis, such as today,
when we tend to forget that the particular set of desires, needs, hopes, and
pleasures that liberals and progressives embrace do not necessarily exhaust
the possibilities of human flourishing. We need to recognize that, whatever ef-
fect it has had on the women who wear it, the veil has also had a radical impact
on our own field of vision, on our capacity to recognize Muslim societies for
something other than misogyny and patriarchal violence. Our ability to re-
spond, morally and politically, in a responsible way to these forms of violence
will depend on extending these powers of sight.
NOTES
1 We would like to thank Noah Solomon and Scott Richard for their research assistance in
gathering the pertinent data for this article.
2 Stacie Stukin, “Warrior Princes,” George, July 1999.
3Stukin, p. 45.
4 Sharon Lerner, “Feminists Agonize Over War in Afghanistan: What Women Want,” The
Village Voice, October 31, 2000.
5 The Afghan Women’s Mission reported that according to UNICEF, “Two million people do
not have enough food to last the winter, and 500,000 of them will be unreachable after snow
begins to fall in mid-November.” From the press release issued by Afghan Women’s Mission,
October 2001, http://www.afghanwomensmission.org.
6 Steve Coil, “Anatomy of a Victory: CIA’s Covert Afghan War,” The Washington Post, July 19, 1992.
1 World Policy ournal, “The Unintended Consequences of Afghanistan,” Spring 1994, p. 81.
8 Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of Soviet Withdrawal
(New York: Oxford University Press), pp.62-63.
9 Reuters Wire Service, “Afghan Women’s Group Gloomy of the Post-Taliban Era,” December
10, 2001.
10 Electronic Telegraph reported that the CIA had spent “more than L70 million in a belated
and often bungled operation to buy back the missiles” it had provided to the Afghan re-
sistance (Daniel Mcgrory, “CIA Stung by Its Stingers,” November 3, 1996).
11 Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (New York: Lawrence Hill Books), pp. 445-460.
12 From “Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan Organizational Co-Sponsor
Resolution,” http://www.feminist.org/afghan/afghanresolution/html (July 4, 2000).
353
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Katherine Miller

FEMINISM, THE TALIBAN, AND POLITICS OF COUNTER-INSURGENCY
13 New York Times reported that the Taliban’s “ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to
have wiped out the world’s largest crop in less than a year” (Barbara Crossette, “Taliban’s Ban
on Poppy A Success, U.S. Aides Say, May 20, 2001). The Times acknowledged that poor farm-
ers were most adversely affected by this ban since they could not grow any other crop that
would fetch them the same kind of income.
14 “Mavis Leno to Chair Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid,”
http://www.feminist.org/news/pr/pr102198.html, July 4, 2001.
15 Agence France-Presse, Friday January 25, 2002, http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020125/
1/2crv0.html.
16 William Vollmann, “Letters from Afghanistan: Across the Divide,” The New Yorker, May 15,
2000, p. 67.
17 Vollmann, pp. 64-65.
18 See Megan Reif, “Beyond the Veil-Bigger Issues,” Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 2000.
Also see “Afghanistan-UN Denies Aid,” Off Our Backs, 28, no.5 1998.
19 See, for example, the response to Megan Reif’s article (May 3, 2000) by Mavis Leno in the
Christian Science Monitor, May 18, 2000, p. 8.
20 Barbara Ehrenreich, “Veiled Threats,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2001.
21 Salman Rushdie, “Fighting the Forces of Invisibility,” The Washington Post, October 2, 2001.
22 Salman Rushdie, “Yes, This is About Islam,” New York Times, November 2, 2001.
23 Molly Moore, “The Problems of Turkey Rest on Women’s Heads; Islamic Scarves Seen as
Threat to Secular State,” The Washington Post, October 9 2000.
24 Quoted in Norma Claire Moruzzi, “A Problem with Headscarves: Contemporary Complexities
of Political and Social Identity,” Political Theory, vol. 22, no. 4, November 1994, p. 662.
354
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Contents
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354
Issue Table of Contents
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Spring, 2002), pp. 239-445
Front Matter
[Photograph]: Swearing in of New Citizens, Washington, DC. June 1995
Civil Religion Redux [pp. 239-267]
Monumentality, Identity, and the State: Local Practice, World Heritage, and Heterotopia at Swayambhu, Nepal [pp. 269-316]
Social Thought and Commentary
Writing the Self [pp. 317-321]
Genetics, Identity, and the Anthropology of Essentialism [pp. 323-330]
Authenticity, Anthropology, and the Sacred [pp. 331-338]
Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency [pp. 339-354]
Development in Theory
Encountering Archaeology in Tanzania: Education, Development, and Dialogue at the University of Dar es Salaam [pp. 355-374]
Remembering Pierre Bourdieu 1930-2002 [pp. 375-380]
New Releases
Review: Waiting to Inhale: The Moral Economy of African Trade [pp. 381-392]
Review: The Politics of Life and Death in Thailand [pp. 393-401]
Review: Navigating Citizenship [pp. 403-411]
Book Review Essay
Review: Begging to Differ: On Pluralism and “Civil” Society [pp. 413-418]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 419-422]
Review: untitled [pp. 423-426]
Review: untitled [pp. 427-431]
Review: untitled [pp. 433-436]
Review: untitled [pp. 437-439]
Review: untitled [pp. 441-445]
Back Matter

The Clash of Civilizations?
Author(s):

Samuel P. Huntington

Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 22-49
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
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The Clash of Civilizations?

Samuel P. Huntington

THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT

World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have
not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be?the end of his
tory, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the
decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and
globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the
emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect
of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this
new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of
conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful
actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will
occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash
of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between
civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evo
lution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after
the emergence of the modern international system with the Peace of

Westphalia, the conflicts of the Western world were largely among

Samuel P. Huntington is the Eaton Professor of the Science of

Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic
Studies at Harvard University. This article is the product of the Olin
Institute’s project on “The Changing Security Environment and
American National Interests.”

[22]

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The Clash of Civilizations?

princes?emperors, absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs
attempting to expand their bureaucracies, their armies, their mer
cantilist economic strength and, most important, the territory they
ruled. In the process they created nation states, and beginning with
the French Revolution the principal lines of conflict were between
nations rather than princes. In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, “The wars
of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun.” This nineteenth
century pattern lasted until the end of World War I. Then, as a result
of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of
nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism,
fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between commu
nism and liberal democracy. During the Cold War, this latter conflict
became embodied in the struggle between the two superpowers, nei
ther of which was a nation state in the classical European sense and
each of which defined its identity in terms of its ideology.

These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were
primarily conflicts within Western civilization, “Western civil wars,”
as William Lind has labeled them. This was as true of the Cold War

as it was of the world wars and the earlier wars of the seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the end of the Cold War,
international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center
piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western
civilizations and among non-Western civilizations. In the politics of
civilizations, the peoples and governments of non-Western civiliza
tions no longer remain the objects of history as targets of Western
colonialism but join the West as movers and shapers of history.

THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATIONS

During the cold war the world was divided into the First,
Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It
is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their
political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic
development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization.
What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is

a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, reli

FOREIGN AFFAIRS – Summer 1993 [23]

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Samuel P. Huntington

gious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural
heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be dif
ferent from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a
common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German vil
lages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that
distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs,
Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cul
tural entity. They constitute civilizations. A civilization is thus the
highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural
identity people have short ofthat which distinguishes humans from
other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such
as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the sub
jective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a
resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of inten
sity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a

Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level
of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and
do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and
boundaries of civilizations change.

Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with China
(“a civilization pretending to be a state,” as Lucian Pye put it), or a
very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A
civilization may include several nation states, as is the case with

Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the
case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend and
overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has
two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its
Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless
meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom
sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they
divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations
disappear and are buried in the sands of time.

Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principal actors in
global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries.
The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civi

[^4] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume^No^

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The Clash of Civilizations?

lizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major
civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world.

WHY CIVILIZATIONS WILL CLASH

Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the
future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interac
tions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include

Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox,
Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most impor
tant conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines sep
arating these civilizations from one another.
Why will this be the case?
First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are

basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, Ian
guage, culture, tradition and, most important,
religion. The people of different civilizations
have different views on the relations between

God and man, the individual and the group, the
citizen and the state, parents and children, hus
band and wife, as well as differing views of the
relative importance of rights and responsibili
ties, liberty and authority, equality and hierar

chy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not
soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences
among political ideologies and political regimes. Differences do not
necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean vio
lence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations
have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts.

Second, the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions
between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these
increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and
awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities

within civilizations. North African immigration to France generates
hostility among Frenchmen and at the same time increased receptiv
ity to immigration by “good” European Catholic Poles. Americans

FOREIGN AFFAIRS – Summer 1993 [25]

The conflicts of the

future will occur along
the cultural fault lines

separating civilizations.

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Samuel P. Huntington

react far more negatively to Japanese investment than to larger invest
ments from Canada and European countries. Similarly, as Donald
Horowitz has pointed out, “An Ibo may be … an Owerri Ibo or an
Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he
is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an

African.” The interactions among peoples of different civilizations
enhance the civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn, invig
orates differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch
back deep into history.

Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change
throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local
identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity.
In much of the world religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in
the form of movements that are labeled “fundamentalist.” Such

movements are found in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism
and Hinduism, as well as in Islam. In most countries and most reli
gions the people active in fundamentalist movements are young, col
lege-educated, middle-class technicians, professionals and business
persons. The “unsecularization of the world,” George Weigel has
remarked, “is one of the dominant social facts of life in the late twen

tieth century.” The revival of religion, “la revanche de Dieu,” as Gilles
Kepel labeled it, provides a basis for identity and commitment that
transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations.

Fourth, the growth of civilization-consciousness is enhanced by
the dual role of the West. On the one hand, the West is at a peak of
power. At the same time, however, and perhaps as a result, a return
to the roots phenomenon is occurring among non-Western civiliza
tions. Increasingly one hears references to trends toward a turning
inward and “Asianization” in Japan, the end of the Nehru legacy and
the “Hinduization” of India, the failure of Western ideas of socialism
and nationalism and hence “re-Islamization” of the Middle East, and
now a debate over Westernization versus Russianization in Boris

Yeltsin s country. A West at the peak of its power confronts non
Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the resources to

shape the world in non-Western ways.
In the past, the elites of non-Western societies were usually the

[26] FOREIGN AFFAIRS- Volumey2No.3

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The Clash of Civilizations?

people who were most involved with the West, had been educated at
Oxford, the Sorbonne or Sandhurst, and had absorbed Western atti
tudes and values. At the same time, the populace in non-Western
countries often remained deeply imbued with the indigenous culture.
Now, however, these relationships are being reversed. A de
Westernization and indigenization of elites is occurring in many non
Western countries at the same time that Western, usually American,
cultures, styles and habits become more popular among the mass of
the people.

Fifth, cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and
hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and eco
nomic ones. In the former Soviet Union, communists can become
democrats, the rich can become poor and the poor rich, but Russians
cannot become Estonians and Az?ris cannot become Armenians. In

class and ideological conflicts, the key question was “Which side are
you on?” and people could and did choose sides and change sides. In
conflicts between civilizations, the question is “What are you?” That
is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to
the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can

mean a bullet in the head. Even more than ethnicity, religion dis
criminates sharply and exclusively among people. A person can be
half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously even a citizen of two
countries. It is more difficult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim.

Finally, economic regionalism is increasing. The proportions of
total trade that were intraregional rose between 1980 and 1989 from
51 percent to 59 percent in Europe, 33 percent to 37 percent in East

Asia, and 32 percent to 36 percent in North America. The importance
of regional economic blocs is likely to continue to increase in the
future. On the one hand, successful economic regionalism will rein
force civilization-consciousness. On the other hand, economic
regionalism may succeed only when it is rooted in a common civi
lization. The European Community rests on the shared foundation
of European culture and Western Christianity. The success of the
North American Free Trade Area depends on the convergence now
underway of Mexican, Canadian and American cultures. Japan, in
contrast, faces difficulties in creating a comparable economic entity

FOREIGN AFFAIRS Summer 1993 [27]

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Samuel P Huntington

in East Asia because Japan is a society and civilization unique to itself.
However strong the trade and investment links Japan may develop
with other East Asian countries, its cultural differences with those
countries inhibit and perhaps preclude its promoting regional eco
nomic integration like that in Europe and North America.

Common culture, in contrast, is clearly facilitating the rapid
expansion of the economic relations between the People s Republic of
China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese
communities in other Asian countries. With the Cold War over, cul

tural commonalities increasingly overcome ideological differences,
and mainland China and Taiwan move closer together. If cultural
commonality is a prerequisite for economic integration, the principal
East Asian economic bloc of the future is likely to be centered on
China. This bloc is, in fact, already coming into existence. As Murray

Weidenbaum has observed,
Despite the current Japanese dominance of the region, the Chinese-based
economy of Asia is rapidly emerging as a new epicenter for industry, com
merce and finance. This strategic area contains substantial amounts of tech
nology and manufacturing capability (Taiwan), outstanding entrepreneurial,
marketing and services acumen (Hong Kong), a fine communications net
work (Singapore), a tremendous pool of financial capital (all three), and very
large endowments of land, resources and labor (mainland China)…. From

Guangzhou to Singapore, from Kuala Lumpur to Manila, this influential net
work?often based on extensions of the traditional clans?has been described

as the backbone of the East Asian economy.1

Culture and religion also form the basis of the Economic
Cooperation Organization, which brings together ten non-Arab
Muslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghan
istan. One impetus to the revival and expansion of this organization,
founded originally in the 1960s by Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, is the
realization by the leaders of several of these countries that they had
no chance of admission to the European Community. Similarly,
Caricom, the Central American Common Market and Mercosur rest

1Murray Weidenbaum, Greater China: The Next Economic Superpower?, St. Louis:
Washington University Center for the Study of American Business, Contemporary

Issues, Series 57, February 1993, pp. 2-3.

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The Clash of Civilizations?

on common cultural foundations. Efforts to build a broader

Caribbean-Central American economic entity bridging the Anglo
Latin divide, however, have to date failed.

As people define their identity in ethnic and religious terms, they
are likely to see an “us” versus “them” relation existing between them
selves and people of different ethnicity or religion. The end of ideo
logically defined states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet

Union permits traditional ethnic identities and animosities to come
to the fore. Differences in culture and religion create differences over
policy issues, ranging from human rights to immigration to trade and
commerce to the environment. Geographical propinquity gives rise
to conflicting territorial claims from Bosnia to Mindanao. Most
important, the efforts of the West to promote its values of democra
cy and liberalism as universal values, to maintain its military pre
dominance and to advance its economic interests engender
countering responses from other civilizations. Decreasingly able to
mobilize support and form coalitions on the basis of ideology, gov
ernments and groups will increasingly attempt to mobilize support by
appealing to common religion and civilization identity.

The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro

level, adjacent groups along the fault lines between civilizations
struggle, often violently, over the control of territory and each other.

At the macro-level, states from different civilizations compete for rel
ative military and economic power, struggle over the control of inter
national institutions and third parties, and competitively promote
their particular political and religious values.

THE FAULT LINES BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS

The fault lines between civilizations are replacing the political
and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for cri
sis and bloodshed. The Cold War began when the Iron Curtain
divided Europe politically and ideologically. The Cold War ended
with the end of the Iron Curtain. As the ideological division of
Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between

Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity

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Western
Christianity
circa icoo

Orthodox
Christianity
and Islam

MILES c^SP^
Source: W. Wallace, THE TRANSFORMATION OF
WESTERN EirROPE. London: Pinter, 1990.
Map by lb Ohlsson for FOREIGN AFFAIRS.

Samuel P. Huntington

and Islam, on the other, has reemerged.
The most significant dividing line in
Europe, as William Wallace has suggested,
may well be the eastern boundary of
Western Christianity in the year 1500. This
line runs along what are now the boundaries
between Finland and Russia and between

the Baltic states and Russia, cuts through
Belarus and Ukraine separating the more
Catholic western Ukraine from Orthodox

eastern Ukraine, swings westward separat
ing Transylvania from the rest of Romania,
and then goes through Yugoslavia almost
exactly along the line now separating
Croatia and Slovenia from the rest of
Yugoslavia. In the Balkans this line, of
course, coincides with the historic bound
ary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman
empires. The peoples to the north and west
of this line are Protestant or Catholic; they
shared the common experiences of Euro
pean history?feudalism, the Renaissance,
the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the
French Revolution, the Industrial Revo
lution; they are generally economically bet
ter off than the peoples to the east; and they
may now look forward to increasing
involvement in a common European econ
omy and to the consolidation of democrat
ic political systems. The peoples to the east
and south of this line are Orthodox or

Muslim; they historically belonged to the
Ottoman or Tsarist empires and were only
lightly touched by the shaping events in the
rest of Europe; they are generally less
advanced economically; they seem much

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The Clash of Civilizations?

less likely to develop stable democratic political systems. The Velvet
Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the
most significant dividing line in Europe. As the events in Yugoslavia
show, it is not only a line of difference; it is also at times a line of
bloody conflict.

Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civi
lizations has been going on for 1,300 years. After the founding of
Islam, the Arab and Moorish surge west and north only ended at
Tours in 732. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the
Crusaders attempted with temporary success to bring Christianity
and Christian rule to the Holy Land. From the fourteenth to the sev
enteenth century, the Ottoman Turks reversed the balance, extended
their sway over the Middle East and the Balkans, captured
Constantinople, and twice laid siege to Vienna. In the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries as Ottoman power declined Britain, France,
and Italy established Western control over most of North Africa and
the Middle East.

After World War II, the West, in turn, began to retreat; the colo
nial empires disappeared; first Arab nationalism and then Islamic
fundamentalism manifested themselves; the West became heavily
dependent on the Persian Gulf countries for its energy; the oil-rich

Muslim countries became money-rich and, when they wished to,
weapons-rich. Several wars occurred between Arabs and Israel (cre
ated by the West). France fought a bloody and ruthless war in Algeria
for most of the 1950s; British and French forces invaded Egypt in
1956; American forces went into Lebanon in 1958; subsequently

American forces returned to Lebanon, attacked Libya, and engaged
in various military encounters with Iran; Arab and Islamic terrorists,
supported by at least three Middle Eastern governments, employed
the weapon of the weak and bombed Western planes and installations
and seized Western hostages. This warfare between Arabs and the

West culminated in 1990, when the United States sent a massive army
to the Persian Gulf to defend some Arab countries against aggression
by another. In its aftermath nato planning is increasingly directed to
potential threats and instability along its “southern tier.”

This centuries-old military interaction between the West and

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Samuel P. Huntington

Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent. The Gulf
War left some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam Hussein had
attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also left many feeling
humiliated and resentful of the West’s military presence in the
Persian Gulf, the West’s overwhelming military dominance, and
their apparent inability to shape their own destiny. Many Arab coun
tries, in addition to the oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic
and social development where autocratic forms of government
become inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become
stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already
occurred. The principal beneficiaries of these openings have been
Islamist movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western democra
cy strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may be a passing
phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations between Islamic
countries and the West.

Those relations are also complicated by demography. The spec
tacular population growth in Arab countries, particularly in North

Africa, has led to increased migration to Western Europe. The move
ment within Western Europe toward minimizing internal bound
aries has sharpened political sensitivities with respect to this
development. In Italy, France and Germany, racism is increasingly
open, and political reactions and violence against Arab and Turkish
migrants have become more intense and more widespread since 1990.

On both sides the interaction between Islam and the West is seen

as a clash of civilizations. The West s “next confrontation,” observes
M. J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, “is definitely going to come
from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from

the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will
begin.” Bernard Lewis comes to a similar conclusion:

We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and
policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of
civilizations?the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient
rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the world

wide expansion of both.2

2Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 266,
September 1990, p. 60; Time, June 15,1992, pp. 24-28.

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The Clash of Civilizations?

Historically, the other great antagonistic interaction of Arab
Islamic civilization has been with the pagan, animist, and now
increasingly Christian black peoples to the south. In the past, this
antagonism was epitomized in the image of Arab slave dealers and
black slaves. It has been reflected in the on-going civil war in the
Sudan between Arabs and blacks, the fighting in Chad between
Libyan-supported insurgents and the government, the tensions
between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Horn of Africa,
and the political conflicts, recurring riots and communal violence
between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria. The modernization of
Africa and the spread of Christianity are likely to enhance the prob
ability of violence along this fault line. Symptomatic of the inten
sification of this conflict was the Pope John Paul IPs speech in
Khartoum in February 1993 attacking the actions of the Sudans
Islamist government against the Christian minority there.

On the northern border of Islam, conflict has increasingly erupt
ed between Orthodox and Muslim peoples, including the carnage of
Bosnia and Sarajevo, the simmering violence between Serb and
Albanian, the tenuous relations between Bulgarians and their
Turkish minority, the violence between Ossetians and Ingush, the
unremitting slaughter of each other by Armenians and Az?ris, the
tense relations between Russians and Muslims in Central Asia, and
the deployment of Russian troops to protect Russian interests in the
Caucasus and Central Asia. Religion reinforces the revival of ethnic
identities and restimulates Russian fears about the security of their
southern borders. This concern is well captured by Archie Roosevelt:

Much of Russian history concerns the struggle between the Slavs and the
Turkic peoples on their borders, which dates back to the foundation of the
Russian state more than a thousand years ago. In the Slavs* millennium-long
confrontation with their eastern neighbors lies the key to an understanding
not only of Russian history, but Russian character. To understand Russian
realities today one has to have a concept of the great Turkic ethnic group that
has preoccupied Russians through the centuries.3

The conflict of civilizations is deeply rooted elsewhere in Asia.
The historic clash between Muslim and Hindu in the subcontinent

3Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing, Boston: Little, Brown, 1988, pp. 332-333.

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Samuel P. Huntington

manifests itself now not only in the rivalry between Pakistan and
India but also in intensifying religious strife within India between
increasingly militant Hindu groups and Indias substantial Muslim

minority. The destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in December 1992
brought to the fore the issue of whether India will remain a secular
democratic state or become a Hindu one. In East Asia, China has

_ outstanding territorial disputes with most of its
neighbors. It has pursued a ruthless policy
toward the Buddhist people of Tibet, and it is
pursuing an increasingly ruthless policy toward
its Turkic-Muslim minority. With the Cold

War over, the underlying differences between
China and th? United States have reasserted

themselves in areas such as human rights, trade
and weapons proliferation. These differences

are unlikely to moderate. A “new cold war,” Deng Xaioping report
edly asserted in 1991, is under way between China and America.

The same phrase has been applied to the increasingly difficult rela
tions between Japan and the United States. Here cultural difference
exacerbates economic conflict. People on each side allege racism on
the other, but at least on the American side the antipathies are not
racial but cultural. The basic values, attitudes, behavioral patterns of
the two societies could hardly be more different. The economic issues
between the United States and Europe are no less serious than those
between the United States and Japan, but they do not have the same
political salience and emotional intensity because the differences
between American culture and European culture are so much less
than those between American civilization and Japanese civilization.

The interactions between civilizations vary greatly in the extent to
which they are likely to be characterized by violence. Economic com
petition clearly predominates between the American and European
subcivilizations of the West and between both of them and Japan. On
the Eurasian continent, however, the proliferation of ethnic conflict,
epitomized at the extreme in “ethnic cleansing,” has not been totally
random. It has been most frequent and most violent between groups
belonging to different civilizations. In Eurasia the great historic fault

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The crescent-shaped
Islamic bloc, from the

bulge of Africa to
central Asia, has

bloody borders.

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The Clash of Civilizations?

lines between civilizations are once more aflame. This is particularly
true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of
nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs
between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the
Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and
Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.

civilization rallying: the kin-country syndrome

Groups or states belonging to one civilization that become in
volved in war with people from a different civilization naturally try to
rally support from other members of their own civilization. As the
post-Cold War world evolves, civilization commonality, what H. D.
S. Greenway has termed the “kin-country” syndrome, is replacing
political ideology and traditional balance of power considerations as
the principal basis for cooperation and coalitions. It can be seen grad
ually emerging in the post-Cold War conflicts in the Persian Gulf,
the Caucasus and Bosnia. None of these was a full-scale war between

civilizations, but each involved some elements of civilizational rally
ing, which seemed to become more important as the conflict contin
ued and which may provide a foretaste of the future.

First, in the Gulf War one Arab state invaded another and then

fought a coalition of Arab, Western and other states. While only a
few Muslim governments overtly supported Saddam Hussein, many
Arab elites privately cheered him on, and he was highly popular
among large sections of the Arab publics. Islamic fundamentalist
movements universally supported Iraq rather than the Western
backed governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Forswearing Arab
nationalism, Saddam Hussein explicitly invoked an Islamic appeal.
He and his supporters attempted to define the war as a war between
civilizations. “It is not the world against Iraq,” as Safar Al-Hawali,
dean of Islamic Studies at the Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca,
put it in a widely circulated tape. “It is the West against Islam.”
Ignoring the rivalry between Iran and Iraq, the chief Iranian religious
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a holy war against the

West: “The struggle against American aggression, greed, plans and

FOREIGN AFFAIRS – Summer 1993 [35]

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Samuel P. Huntington

policies will be counted as a jihad, and anybody who is killed on that
path is a martyr.” “This is a war,” King Hussein of Jordan argued,
“against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone.”

The rallying of substantial sections of Arab elites and publics
behind Saddam Hussein caused those Arab governments in the anti
Iraq coalition to moderate their activities and temper their public
statements. Arab governments opposed or distanced themselves from
subsequent Western efforts to apply pressure on Iraq, including
enforcement of a no-fly zone in the summer of 1992 and the bomb
ing of Iraq in January 1993. The Western-Soviet-Turkish-Arab anti
Iraq coalition of 1990 had by 1993 become a coalition of almost only
the West and Kuwait against Iraq.
Muslims contrasted Western actions against Iraq with the West’s

failure to protect Bosnians against Serbs and to impose sanctions on
Israel for violating U.N. resolutions. The West, they alleged, was
using a double standard. A world of clashing civilizations, however,
is inevitably a world of double standards: people apply one standard
to their kin-countries and a different standard to others.

Second, the kin-country syndrome also appeared in conflicts in
the former Soviet Union. Armenian military successes in 1992 and
1993 stimulated Turkey to become increasingly supportive of its reli
gious, ethnic and linguistic brethren in Azerbaijan. “We have a
Turkish nation feeling the same sentiments as the Azerbaijanis,” said
one Turkish official in 1992. “We are under pressure. Our newspapers
are full of the photos of atrocities and are asking us if we are still seri
ous about pursuing our neutral policy. Maybe we should show
Armenia that there’s a big Turkey in the region.” President Turgut
Ozal agreed, remarking that Turkey should at least “scare the
Armenians a little bit.” Turkey, Ozal threatened again in 1993, would
“show its fangs.” Turkish Air Force jets flew reconnaissance flights
along the Armenian border; Turkey suspended food shipments and
air flights to Armenia; and Turkey and Iran announced they would
not accept dismemberment of Azerbaijan. In the last years of its exis
tence, the Soviet government supported Azerbaijan because its gov
ernment was dominated by former communists. With the end of the
Soviet Union, however, political considerations gave way to religious

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The Clash of Civilizations?

ones. Russian troops fought on the side of the Armenians, and
Azerbaijan accused the “Russian government of turning 180 degrees”
toward support for Christian Armenia.

Third, with respect to the fighting in the former Yugoslavia,
Western publics manifested sympathy and support for the Bosnian
Muslims and the horrors they suffered at the hands of the Serbs.
Relatively little concern was expressed, however, over Croatian
attacks on Muslims and participation in the dismemberment of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the early stages of the Yugoslav breakup,
Germany, in an unusual display of diplomatic initiative and muscle,
induced the other n members of the European Community to follow
its lead in recognizing Slovenia and Croatia. As a result of the pope s
determination to provide strong backing to the two Catholic coun
tries, the Vatican extended recognition even before the Community
did. The United States followed the European lead. Thus the lead
ing actors in Western civilization rallied behind their coreligionists.
Subsequently Croatia was reported to be receiving substantial quan
tities of arms from Central European and other Western countries.
Boris Yeltsin s government, on the other hand, attempted to pursue a
middle course that would be sympathetic to the Orthodox Serbs but
not alienate Russia from the West. Russian conservative and nation

alist groups, however, including many legislators, attacked the gov
ernment for not being more forthcoming in its support for the Serbs.
By early 1993 several hundred Russians apparently were serving with
the Serbian forces, and reports circulated of Russian arms being sup
plied to Serbia.

Islamic governments and groups, on the other hand, castigated the
West for not coming to the defense of the Bosnians. Iranian leaders
urged Muslims from all countries to provide help to Bosnia; in viola
tion of the U.N. arms embargo, Iran supplied weapons and men for
the Bosnians; Iranian-supported Lebanese groups sent guerrillas to
train and organize the Bosnian forces. In 1993 up to 4,000 Muslims
from over two dozen Islamic countries were reported to be fighting
in Bosnia. The governments of Saudi Arabia and other countries felt
under increasing pressure from fundamentalist groups in their own
societies to provide more vigorous support for the Bosnians. By the

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Samuel P Huntington

end of 1992, Saudi Arabia had reportedly supplied substantial fund
ing for weapons and supplies for the Bosnians, which significantly
increased their military capabilities vis-?-vis the Serbs.

In the 1930s the Spanish Civil War provoked intervention from
countries that politically were fascist, communist and democratic. In
the 1990s the Yugoslav conflict is provoking intervention from coun
tries that are Muslim, Orthodox and Western Christian. The paral
lel has not gone unnoticed. “The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has
become the emotional equivalent of the fight against fascism in the
Spanish Civil War,” one Saudi editor observed. “Those who died
there are regarded as martyrs who tried to save their fellow Muslims.”

Conflicts and violence will also occur between states and groups
within the same civilization. Such conflicts, however, are likely to be
less intense and less likely to expand than conflicts between civiliza
tions. Common membership in a civilization reduces the probability
of violence in situations where it might otherwise occur. In 1991 and
1992 many people were alarmed by the possibility of violent conflict
between Russia and Ukraine over territory, particularly Crimea, the
Black Sea fleet, nuclear weapons and economic issues. If civilization
is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between

Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, pri
marily Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each
other for centuries. As of early 1993, despite all the reasons for
conflict, the leaders of the two countries were effectively negotiating
and defusing the issues between the two countries. While there has
been serious fighting between Muslims and Christians elsewhere in
the former Soviet Union and much tension and some fighting
between Western and Orthodox Christians in the Baltic states, there

has been virtually no violence between Russians and Ukrainians.
Civilization rallying to date has been limited, but it has been grow

ing, and it clearly has the potential to spread much further. As the
conflicts in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and Bosnia continued, the
positions of nations and the cleavages between them increasingly
were along civilizational lines. Populist politicians, religious leaders
and the media have found it a potent means of arousing mass support
and of pressuring hesitant governments. In the coming years, the

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The Clash of Civilizations?

local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those, as
in Bosnia and the Caucasus, along the fault lines between civiliza
tions. The next world war, if there is one, will be a war between civ
ilizations.

THE WEST VERSUS THE REST

The west is now at an extraordinary peak of power in relation
to other civilizations. Its superpower opponent has disappeared from
the map. Military conflict among Western states is unthinkable, and

Western military power is unrivaled. Apart from Japan, the West
faces no economic challenge. It dominates international political and
security institutions and with Japan international economic institu
tions. Global political and security issues are effectively settled by a
directorate of the United States, Britain and France, world econom
ic issues by a directorate of the United States, Germany and Japan,
all of which maintain extraordinarily close relations with each other
to the exclusion of lesser and largely non-Western countries.
Decisions made at the U.N. Security Council or in the International
Monetary Fund that reflect the interests of the West are presented to
the world as reflecting the desires of the world community. The very
phrase “the world community” has become the euphemistic collec
tive noun (replacing “the Free World”) to give global legitimacy to
actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western
powers.4 Through the imf and other international economic institu
tions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes on other
nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate. In any poll of
non-Western peoples, the imf undoubtedly would win the support
of finance ministers and a few others, but get an overwhelmingly
unfavorable rating from just about everyone else, who would agree

4Almost invariably Western leaders claim they are acting on behalf of “the world com
munity.” One minor lapse occurred during the run-up to the Gulf War. In an interview
on “Good Morning America,” Dec. 21,1990, British Prime Minister John Major referred
to the actions “the West” was taking against Saddam Hussein. He quickly corrected him
self and subsequendy referred to “the world community.” He was, however, right when
he erred.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS – Summer 1993 [39]

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Samuel P. Huntington

with Georgy Arbatovs characterization of imf officials as “neo
Bolsheviks who love expropriating other people s money, imposing
undemocratic and alien rules of economic and political conduct and
stifling economic freedom.”
Western domination of the U.N. Security Council and its deci

sions, tempered only by occasional abstention by China, produced
U.N. legitimation of the West s use of force to drive Iraq out of
Kuwait and its elimination of Iraq s sophisticated weapons and capac

The very phrase “world
community” has
become a euphemism to

give legitimacy to the
actions of the West.

ity to produce such weapons. It also produced
the quite unprecedented action by the United
States, Britain and France in getting the
Security Council to demand that Libya hand
over the Pan Am 103 bombing suspects and
then to impose sanctions when Libya refused.

After defeating the largest Arab army, the
West did not hesitate to throw its weight
around in the Arab world. The West in effect

is using international institutions, military power and economic
resources to run the world in ways that will maintain Western pre
dominance, protect Western interests and promote Western political
and economic values.

That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new
world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view.
Differences in power and struggles for military, economic and insti
tutional power are thus one source of conflict between the West and
other civilizations. Differences in culture, that is basic values and
beliefs, are a second source of conflict. V. S. Naipaul has argued that

Western civilization is the “universal civilization” that “fits all men.”

At a superficial level much of Western culture has indeed permeated
the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western con
cepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations.

Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human

rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the
separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic,
Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures.

Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction

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The Clash of Civilizations?

against “human rights imperialism” and a reaffirmation of indigenous
values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by
the younger generation in non-Western cultures. The very notion
that there could be a “universal civilization” is a Western idea, direct

ly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their
emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another. Indeed, the
author of a review of ioo comparative studies of values in different
societies concluded that “the values that are most important in the

West are least important worldwide.”5 In the political realm, of
course, these differences are most manifest in the efforts of the

United States and other Western powers to induce other peoples to
adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights.

Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has
developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the product of

Western colonialism or imposition.
The central axis of world politics in the future is likely to be, in

Kishore Mahbubani s phrase, the conflict between “the West and the
Rest” and the responses of non-Western civilizations to Western
power and values.6 Those responses generally take one or a combina
tion of three forms. At one extreme, non-Western states can, like
Burma and North Korea, attempt to pursue a course of isolation, to
insulate their societies from penetration or “corruption” by the West,
and, in effect, to opt out of participation in the Western-dominated
global community. The costs of this course, however, are high, and
few states have pursued it exclusively. A second alternative, the equiv
alent of “band-wagoning” in international relations theory, is to
attempt to join the West and accept its values and institutions. The
third alternative is to attempt to “balance” the West by developing
economic and military power and cooperating with other non

Western societies against the West, while preserving indigenous val
ues and institutions; in short, to modernize but not to Westernize.

5Hany C. Triandis, The New York Times, Dec. 25,1990, p. 41, and “Cross-Cultural
Studies of Individualism and Collectivism,” Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol.
37> ?989, PP- 41-133

6Kishore Mahbubani, “The West and the Rest,” The National Interest, Summer 1992,
PP- 3-*3

FOREIGN AFFAIRS – Summer 1993 [41]

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Samuel P. Huntington

THE TORN COUNTRIES

In the future, as people differentiate themselves by civilization,
countries with large numbers of peoples of different civilizations,
such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are candidates for dismem
berment. Some other countries have a fair degree of cultural homo
geneity but are divided over whether their society belongs to one
civilization or another. These are torn countries. Their leaders typi
cally wish to pursue a bandwagoning strategy and to make their coun
tries members of the West, but the history, culture and traditions of
their countries are non-Western. The most obvious and prototypical
torn country is Turkey. The late twentieth-century leaders of Turkey
have followed in the Attat?rk tradition and defined Turkey as a mod
ern, secular, Western nation state. They allied Turkey with the West
in nato and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the
European Community. At the same time, however, elements in
Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued
that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern Muslim society. In addi
tion, while the elite of Turkey has defined Turkey as a Western soci
ety, the elite of the West refuses to accept Turkey as such. Turkey will
not become a member of the European Community, and the real rea
son, as President Ozal said, “is that we are Muslim and they are
Christian and they dont say that.” Having rejected Mecca, and then
being rejected by Brussels, where does Turkey look? Tashkent may be
the answer. The end of the Soviet Union gives Turkey the opportu
nity to become the leader of a revived Turkic civilization involving
seven countries from the borders of Greece to those of China.

Encouraged by the West, Turkey is making strenuous efforts to carve
out this new identity for itself.

During the past decade Mexico has assumed a position somewhat
similar to that of Turkey. Just as Turkey abandoned its historic oppo
sition to Europe and attempted to join Europe, Mexico has stopped
defining itself by its opposition to the United States and is instead
attempting to imitate the United States and to join it in the North
American Free Trade Area. Mexican leaders are engaged in the great
task of redefining Mexican identity and have introduced fiindamen

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The Clash of Civilizations?

tal economic reforms that eventually will lead to fundamental politi
cal change. In 1991 a top adviser to President Carlos Salinas de
Gortari described at length to me all the changes the Salinas govern
ment was making. When he finished, I remarked: “That’s most
impressive. It seems to me that basically you want to change Mexico
from a Latin American country into a North American country.” He
looked at me with surprise and exclaimed: “Exactly! That’s precisely

what we are trying to do, but of course we could never say so pub
licly.” As his remark indicates, in Mexico as in Turkey, significant ele

ments in society resist the redefinition of their country’s identity. In
Turkey, European-oriented leaders have to make gestures to Islam
(Ozal s pilgrimage to Mecca); so also Mexico’s North American-ori
ented leaders have to make gestures to those who hold Mexico to be
a Latin American country (Salinas’ Ibero-American Guadalajara
summit).

Historically Turkey has been the most profoundly torn country.
For the United States, Mexico is the most immediate torn country.
Globally the most important torn country is Russia. The question of
whether Russia is part of the West or the leader of a distinct Slavic
Orthodox civilization has been a recurring one in Russian history.
That issue was obscured by the communist victory in Russia, which
imported a Western ideology, adapted it to Russian conditions and
then challenged the West in the name of that ideology. The domi
nance of communism shut off the historic debate over

Westernization versus Russification. With communism discredited

Russians once again face that question.
President Yeltsin is adopting Western principles and goals and

seeking to make Russia a “normal” country and a part of the West.
Yet both the Russian elite and the Russian public are divided on this
issue. Among the more moderate dissenters, Sergei Stankevich
argues that Russia should reject the “Atlanticist” course, which would
lead it “to become European, to become a part of the world economy
in rapid and organized fashion, to become the eighth member of the
Seven, and to put particular emphasis on Germany and the United
States as the two dominant members of the Atlantic alliance.” While

also rejecting an exclusively Eurasian policy, Stankevich nonetheless

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Samuel P Huntington

argues that Russia should give priority to the protection of Russians
in other countries, emphasize its Turkic and Muslim connections,
and promote “an appreciable redistribution of our resources, our
options, our ties, and our interests in favor of Asia, of the eastern
direction.” People of this persuasion criticize Yeltsin for subordinat
ing Russia’s interests to those of the West, for reducing Russian mil
itary strength, for failing to support traditional friends such as Serbia,
and for pushing economic and political reform in ways injurious to
the Russian people. Indicative of this trend is the new popularity of
the ideas of Petr Savitsky, who in the 1920s argued that Russia was a
unique Eurasian civilization.7 More extreme dissidents voice much
more blatantly nationalist, anti-Western and anti-Semitic views, and
urge Russia to redevelop its military strength and to establish closer
ties with China and Muslim countries. The people of Russia are as
divided as the elite. An opinion survey in European Russia in the
spring of 1992 revealed that 40 percent of the public had positive atti
tudes toward the West and 36 percent had negative attitudes. As it
has been for much of its history, Russia in the early 1990s is truly a
torn country.

To redefine its civilization identity, a torn country must meet three
requirements. First, its political and economic elite has to be gener
ally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move. Second, its pub
lic has to be willing to acquiesce in the redefinition. Third, the
dominant groups in the recipient civilization have to be willing to
embrace the convert. All three requirements in large part exist with
respect to Mexico. The first two in large part exist with respect to

Turkey. It is not clear that any of them exist with respect to Russia’s
joining the West. The conflict between liberal democracy and

Marxism-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their
major differences, ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equal
ity and prosperity. A traditional, authoritarian, nationalist Russia
could have quite different goals. A Western democrat could carry on
an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be virtually

7Sergei Stankevich, “Russia in Search of Itself,” The National Interest, Summer 1992,
pp. 47-51; Daniel Schneider, “A Russian Movement Rejects Western Tilt,” Christian
Science Monitor, Feb. 5,1993, pp. 5-7.

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The Clash of Civilizations?

impossible for him to do that with a Russian traditionalist. If, as the
Russians stop behaving like Marxists, they reject liberal democracy
and begin behaving like Russians but not like Westerners, the rela
tions between Russia and the West could again become distant and
conflictual.8

THE CONFUCIAN-ISLAMIC CONNECTION

The obstacles to non-Western countries joining the West vary
considerably. They are least for Latin American and East European
countries. They are greater for the Orthodox countries of the former
Soviet Union. They are still greater for Muslim, Confucian, Hindu
and Buddhist societies. Japan has established a unique position for
itself as an associate member of the West: it is in the West in some

respects but clearly not of the West in important dimensions. Those
countries that for reason of culture and power do not wish to, or can

not, join the West compete with the West by developing their own
economic, military and political power. They do this by promoting
their internal development and by cooperating with other non

Western countries. The most prominent form of this cooperation is
the Confucian-Islamic connection that has emerged to challenge

Western interests,

values and power.

Almost without exception, Western countries are reducing their

military power; under Yeltsin’s leadership so also is Russia. China,
North Korea and several Middle Eastern states, however, are
significantly expanding their military capabilities. They are doing
this by the import of arms from Western and non-Western sources
and by the development of indigenous arms industries. One result is
the emergence of what Charles Krauthammer has called “Weapon

8Owen Harries has pointed out that Australia is trying (unwisely in his view) to
become a torn country in reverse. Although it has been a full member not only of the

West but also of the ABC A military and intelligence core of the West, its current lead
ers are in effect proposing that it defect from the West, redefine itself as an Asian coun
try and cultivate close ties with its neighbors. Australia’s future, they argue, is with the
dynamic economies of East Asia. But, as I have suggested, close economic cooperation
normally requires a common cultural base. In addition, none of the three conditions nec
essary for a torn country to join another civilization is likely to exist in Australia’s case.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS Summer 1993 [45]

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Samuel P. Huntington

States,” and the Weapon States are not Western states. Another
result is the redefinition of arms control, which is a Western concept
and a Western goal. During the Cold War the primary purpose of
arms control was to establish a stable military balance between the
United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. In the

post-Cold War world the primary objective of arms control is to pre
vent the development by non-Western societies of military capabili
ties that could threaten Western interests. The West attempts to do
this through international agreements, economic pressure and con
trols on the transfer of arms and weapons technologies.

The conflict between the West and the Confucian-Islamic states

focuses largely, although not exclusively, on nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means
for delivering them, and the guidance, intelligence and other elec
tronic capabilities for achieving that goal. The West promotes non
proliferation as a universal norm and nonproliferation treaties and

inspections as means of realizing that norm. It
also threatens a variety of sanctions against
those who promote the spread of sophisticated

weapons and proposes some benefits for those
who do not. The attention of the West focus

es, naturally, on nations that are actually or
potentially hostile to the West.

The non-Western nations, on the other
hand, assert their right to acquire and to deploy

whatever weapons they think necessary for their security. They also
have absorbed, to the full, the truth of the response of the Indian
defense minister when asked what lesson he learned from the Gulf

War: “Don’t fight the United States unless you have nuclear
weapons.” Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and missiles are
viewed, probably erroneously, as the potential equalizer of superior

Western conventional power. China, of course, already has nuclear
weapons; Pakistan and India have the capability to deploy them.
North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria appear to be attempting
to acquire them. A top Iranian official has declared that all Muslim
states should acquire nuclear weapons, and in 1988 the president of

[46] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume72No.3

A Confucian-Islamic
connection has

emerged to challenge
Western interests,

values and power.
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The Clash of Civilizations?

Iran reportedly issued a directive calling for development of “offen
sive and defensive chemical, biological and radiological weapons.”

Centrally important to the development of counter-West military
capabilities is the sustained expansion of Chinas military power and
its means to create military power. Buoyed by spectacular economic
development, China is rapidly increasing its military spending and
vigorously moving forward with the modernization of its armed
forces. It is purchasing weapons from the former Soviet states; it is
developing long-range missiles; in 1992 it tested a one-megaton
nuclear device. It is developing power-projection capabilities, acquir
ing aerial refueling technology, and trying to purchase an aircraft car
rier. Its military buildup and assertion of sovereignty over the South
China Sea are provoking a multilateral regional arms race in East
Asia. China is also a major exporter of arms and weapons technolo
gy. It has exported materials to Libya and Iraq that could be used to
manufacture nuclear weapons and nerve gas. It has helped Algeria
build a reactor suitable for nuclear weapons research and production.
China has sold to Iran nuclear technology that American officials
believe could only be used to create weapons and apparently has
shipped components of 300-mile-range missiles to Pakistan. North
Korea has had a nuclear weapons program under way for some while
and has sold advanced missiles and missile technology to Syria and
Iran. The flow of weapons and weapons technology is generally from
East Asia to the Middle East. There is, however, some movement in
the reverse direction; China has received Stinger missiles from
Pakistan.

A Confucian-Islamic military connection has thus come into
being, designed to promote acquisition by its members of the
weapons and weapons technologies needed to counter the military
power of the West. It may or may not last. At present, however, it is,
as Dave McCurdy has said, “a renegades’ mutual support pact, run by
the proliferators and their backers.” A new form of arms competition
is thus occurring between Islamic-Confucian states and the West. In
an old-fashioned arms race, each side developed its own arms to bal
ance or to achieve superiority against the other side. In this new form
of arms competition, one side is developing its arms and the other

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Samuel P Huntington

side is attempting not to balance but to limit and prevent that arms
build-up while at the same time reducing its own military capabili
ties.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE WEST

This article does not argue that civilization identities will
replace all other identities, that nation states will disappear, that each
civilization will become a single coherent political entity, that groups
within a civilization will not conflict with and even fight each other.
This paper does set forth the hypotheses that differences between civ
ilizations are real and important; civilization-consciousness is
increasing; conflict between civilizations will supplant ideological
and other forms of conflict as the dominant global form of conflict;
international relations, historically a game played out within Western
civilization, will increasingly be de-Westernized and become a game
in which non-Western civilizations are actors and not simply objects;
successful political, security and economic international institutions
are more likely to develop within civilizations than across civiliza
tions; conflicts between groups in different civilizations will be more

frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between
groups in the same civilization; violent conflicts between groups in
different civilizations are the most likely and most dangerous source
of escalation that could lead to global wars; the paramount axis of
world politics will be the relations between “the West and the Rest”;
the elites in some torn non-Western countries will try to make their
countries part of the West, but in most cases face major obstacles to
accomplishing this; a central focus of conflict for the immediate
future will be between the West and several Islamic-Confucian states.

This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civi
lizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what the future
maybe like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however, it is necessary
to consider their implications for Western policy. These implications
should be divided between short-term advantage and long-term
accommodation. In the short term it is clearly in the interest of the

West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civi

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The Clash of Civilizations?

lization, particularly between its European and North American
components; to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern
Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the

West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and
Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization conflicts into
major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion of the military
strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction
of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in
East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among
Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups
sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen interna
tional institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and
values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in
those institutions.

In the longer term other measures would be called for. Western
civilization is both Western and modern. Non-Western civilizations

have attempted to become modern without becoming Western. To
date only Japan has fully succeeded in this quest. Non-Western civi
lizations will continue to attempt to acquire the wealth, technology,
skills, machines and weapons that are part of being modern. They

will also attempt to reconcile this modernity with their traditional
culture and values. Their economic and military strength relative to
the West will increase. Hence the West will increasingly have to
accommodate these non-Western modern civilizations whose power
approaches that of the West but whose values and interests differ
significantly from those of the West. This will require the West to

maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its
interests in relation to these civilizations. It will also, however, require
the West to develop a more profound understanding of the basic reli
gious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations
and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests.
It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between

Western and other civilizations. For the relevant future, there will be
no universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations,
each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others. ?

FOREIGN AFFAIRS Summer 1993 [49]

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Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. I-X, 1-152, 1-14, 153-222
Front Matter
Editor’s Note: A New Look for Foreign Affairs [p. IX-IX]
Comments
A Common Discontent: Revisiting Britain and Germany [pp. 2-6]
Lessons of Chernobyl: The Cultural Causes of the Meltdown [pp. 7-11]
The Post-Cold War Press: A New World Needs a New Journalism [pp. 12-16]
Reining in the U.N.: Mistaking the Instrument for the Actor [pp. 17-20]
Essays
The Clash of Civilizations? [pp. 22-49]
Debate
The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent [pp. 50-66]
The Case against a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent [pp. 67-80]
䄠偲潦楬攠潦⁓汯扯摡渠䵩汯š敶椁ܠ孰瀮‸ㄭ㤶�
Invitation to War [pp. 97-109]
A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing [pp. 110-121]
The Case for War Crimes Trials in Yugoslavia [pp. 122-135]
The Next Great Arms Race [pp. 136-152]
The Plutonium Genie [pp. 153-165]
Superpower without a Sword [pp. 166-180]
Reviews
Review Essay
Review: Clinton’s Emerging Trade Policy: Act One, Scene One [pp. 182-189]
Review: The Stain of Vietnam: Robert McNamara, Redemption Denied [pp. 190-193]
Recent Books on International Relations
Political and Legal
Review: untitled [p. 194-194]
Review: untitled [pp. 194-195]
Review: untitled [p. 195-195]
Review: untitled [p. 195-195]
Review: untitled [p. 195-195]
Review: untitled [p. 196-196]
Military, Scientific and Technological
Review: untitled [p. 196-196]
Review: untitled [pp. 196-197]
Review: untitled [p. 197-197]
Review: untitled [p. 197-197]
Review: untitled [p. 197-197]
Review: untitled [pp. 197-198]
Review: untitled [p. 198-198]
Review: untitled [p. 198-198]
The United States
Review: untitled [p. 199-199]
Review: untitled [p. 199-199]
Review: untitled [p. 199-199]
Review: untitled [p. 200-200]
Review: untitled [p. 200-200]
Review: untitled [p. 200-200]
Review: untitled [p. 201-201]
Review: untitled [p. 201-201]
Review: untitled [pp. 201-202]
Western Europe
Review: untitled [p. 202-202]
Review: untitled [pp. 202-203]
Review: untitled [p. 203-203]
Review: untitled [p. 203-203]
Review: untitled [p. 203-203]
Review: untitled [p. 203-203]
Western Hemisphere
Review: untitled [p. 204-204]
Review: untitled [p. 204-204]
Review: untitled [p. 204-204]
Review: untitled [pp. 204-205]
Review: untitled [p. 205-205]
Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
Review: untitled [p. 205-205]
Review: untitled [p. 205-205]
Review: untitled [p. 206-206]
Review: untitled [p. 206-206]
Review: untitled [p. 206-206]
Review: untitled [pp. 206-207]
Review: untitled [p. 207-207]
Review: untitled [p. 207-207]
Review: untitled [pp. 207-208]
Middle East
Review: untitled [p. 208-208]
Review: untitled [p. 208-208]
Review: untitled [p. 209-209]
Review: untitled [p. 209-209]
Review: untitled [p. 210-210]
Review: untitled [p. 210-210]
Review: untitled [p. 211-211]
Review: untitled [p. 211-211]
Review: untitled [p. 211-211]
Review: untitled [p. 212-212]
Review: untitled [p. 212-212]
Review: untitled [p. 212-212]
Review: untitled [pp. 212-213]
Asia and the Pacific
Review: untitled [p. 213-213]
Review: untitled [pp. 213-214]
Review: untitled [p. 214-214]
Review: untitled [pp. 214-215]
Review: untitled [p. 215-215]
Africa
Review: untitled [p. 215-215]
Review: untitled [p. 216-216]
Review: untitled [p. 216-216]
Review: untitled [p. 216-216]
Review: untitled [p. 216-216]

Letters to the Editor
Fundamentalism’s Modern Origins [pp. 217-218]
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy [p. 218-218]
Democracy in Cuba [pp. 219-220]
Beyond the Balkans [pp. 220-221]
The Russian Work Force [pp. 221-222]

Back Matter

Reading Journal Assignment

The backbone of this course is the reading journal you will keep throughout, with entries for each assigned set of readings (so two entries per week). Entries should be completed by class time on the day the assigned readings are due.

Each journal entry should be at least

400-500 words, and ideally should not exceed 1,000 words. While your writing may be less formal or structured than in a typical college paper, your train of thought should be clear and expressed in complete sentences and paragraphs. No in-text citations or bibliography is needed, but when referring to a specific quote, claim or anecdote, do give the page number.

Make sure to leave enough time so that, after you do each day’s readings, you can sit down and spend at least half an hour reflecting–on paper–about what you’ve just read. Don’t feel you have to come to any hard and fast conclusions; instead think of this as exploratory writing, a chance to record your initial reactions and insights. This should, however, not be in outline or ‘note’ format, but should be connected prose. I think you’ll find that the very act of putting your ideas into full sentences will make you see more connections and possibilities in the text you’ve just read than merely jotting down scattered notes does.
If the reading has been very complicated, you may want to begin by summarizing the main ideas or arguments, or any key facts or anecdotes, in order to sort out the information covered. But you should not stop there. Go on to tell me what you think of what you’ve read– try to make sense of it in light of what you’ve read or previously known about the subject. Some specific questions you might answer are:

· What connections to previous reading or information do you see in this material? Does it alter earlier opinions you may have formed? Does it deepen your understanding of the subject? You can think in terms of what we are learning about “Islam” from the reading, but also in terms of what we learn as anthropologists interested in human social and cultural life in general. What anthropological concepts or themes that are relevant to the reading? Do you note interesting comparisons with other cultural contexts?

· What did you not understand? Were there any unfamiliar words or references? What else would you need to know in order to make sense of the author’s arguments or the ethnographic vignettes presented? What things do you hope will be explained further as you read more or hear more in class?

· Would you argue with the author on any points? Can you imagine others who would? Do you think the author is ignoring anything vital or misrepresenting reality in any way? Does this seem to be a conscious or unconscious choice?

· Have you had any personal experience with the subject that makes you see it in a different light? Have you talked with anyone else who has?

· What seem to be the major concepts key terms in this piece of reading? How important are they likely to be in the course in the long run? What significance might they have for people outside of this course or this discipline?

These are just a few of the hundreds of questions you can ask of your reading. The main point of this kind of writing is to use it to take some time to reflect and to examine the reading in a more thoughtful and rigorous way than we do when we read casually. But at the same time this should allow you to do freer, more creative writing than the focused, structured essays teachers may usually ask you to write. In this writing it may help sometimes to think of yourself as talking back to me (the instructor) or to the author you’ve just read.

Evaluation:

Good journal entries will do more than summarize the claims or report on the facts covered in the readings: they will engage thoughtfully, critically and/or creatively with the ideas and information and above all will make connections—between different ethnographic anecdotes or cases, between data and ideas, between different readings or between what you are learning in the course and what you knew previously (including what you know about popular images and understandings of the subject).

I will read and respond to your journals once a week for the first three weeks of the course, and then at three-week intervals after that. These journals represent a significant portion of the writing and thinking you’ll be doing in the course, so you will get credit for them. I will evaluate them as follows:

· Journal entries that are adequate in length (at least 400 words), show evidence of familiarity with the day’s readings, and demonstrate even a modest degree of thoughtful engagement with the reading will automatically receive a +, which indicates a score equivalent to a B+ or 85%.

· Entries that show more than a minimum of rigorous, critical or creative/insightful engagement with the material will receive a ++ (A-) or +++ (A+).

· Entries that are minimal in length, do not demonstrate adequate thought or effort, or that suggest that the student has not done the reading beyond the first few pages will receive a Ö, or a score of 50%.

· Missing entries will receive a 0. More than two missed entries will affect your final grade for the reading journal.

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