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The clash within civilisations
The important conflicts today take place inside cultural-religious blocs, not between them.
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The war in Ukraine is a war within the “Orthodox” Christian civilisation, at least as the late Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington classified it.
PHOTO: TYLER HICKS/NYTIMES
Janan Ganesh
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Before he died in 2008, Professor Samuel Huntington could have said “I told you so” without too much dissent.
The US was then several years deep into its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such violence between the Western and Islamic worlds seemed to vindicate the Harvard scholar, who had once segmented the globe into civilisations and predicted a clash among them. As our troubled millennium got going, the word “prescient” followed him around like an extra name.
