Date of Award

Winter 2020

Degree Type

Honors Project

School

College of Liberal Arts

First Advisor

Nurith Zmora

Abstract

Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote, taught, and advised on United States defense and foreign policy for over fifty years. The 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, is by far the most prominent of Huntington’s works. Though the work pertained to the world order following the collapse of the Soviet Union, his urging to understand factors that would set up the next stages of world conflict seem to hold truth throughout the last thirty years, and even in the present. Huntington argues that culture and identity will be at the forefront of global conflict. Though the ideological war of the twentieth century has ended, history, culture, and identity will be the forefront of conflict in the next era. Contrary to the notions that the United States and democracy had won after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Huntington wants to remind the reader that history, cultures, ideologies, and identities are as complex as they are important to our political and global realities. The goal of this research is to examine how and why the ideas Huntington argued in Clash of Civilizations have remained. This is done first by understanding Huntington as a person and how he thinks. Next, to understand the context of the nineties, the work Clash of Civilizations and the discussions about and around this theory. Lastly, to put Huntington in the context of how meaning has been assigned to him and his theory. In the present, Huntington’s ideas are considered vital works, but more often than not, they are looked upon unfavorably, as his ideas are associated with conservative ideology. How meaning has been prescribed to Huntington’s theory offers a depiction of the history and direction of the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union in the nineties up to the present.

dc_type

text

dc_publisher

DigitalCommons@Hamline

dc_format

application/pdf

dc_source

Departmental Honors Projects

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