World conflict Has Not Become More Civilizational

Samuel Huntington predicted that with the end of the Cold War, world conflict, including ethnic conflict, would become more civilizational. For the purposes of the MAR data set, this means that the percentage of ethnic conflicts that are civilizational should increase, and civilizational ethnic conflicts should become more violent in comparison to non-civilizational ethnic conflicts. Neither of these predictions, in fact, came true. During the Cold War, 37 percent of ethnic conflicts could be termed civilizational, which increased slightly to 39 percent in 2000. However, this slight increase is nowhere near the paradigmatical shift Huntington predicted. In fact, the mean level of ethnic rebellion in civilizational conflicts was lower than the mean level of rebellion in non-civilizational conflicts from 1950 until 2000.

Furthermore, all the quantitative studies of Huntington’s theory of which I am aware unanimously contradict his predictions. In addition to analyses of the MAR data set, this includes analyses of the Uppsala and State Failure data sets on domestic conflict, the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set, the International Crisis data set, and both the domestic and international conflict versions of the Correlates of War data set. These data sets together constitute the majority of the most widely recognized data sets on conflict in political science and international relations. The unambiguous and consistent refutation of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis is as clear a refutation of the theory as is possible using such data.

This opens the question of how religion is shown to influence conflict while Huntington’s concept of civilizations, which is largely based on religion, does not. (The overlap between the two in the MAR data is between 78.5 percent and 82.8 percent, depending on how it is measured.) The answer is in the nature of the claims made. The claim made here is that religion is not the primary cause of ethnic conflict, but it does have an influence. Huntington makes the more ambitious claim that his civilizations will become the defining factor in world conflict. The evidence falls short in proving Huntington’s paradigmatic claims but is more than sufficient to prove the less extreme claims made here.

Furthermore, in head-to-head comparisons of the impact of religion and civilization on ethnic conflict, religion usually provides a better explanation than civilization can. Huntington’s civilization thesis falls short even as a surrogate variable for religion.

Religion is More Important in Muslim conflict

Another of Huntington’s claims, among others, is that Muslim groups will be more violent. There is some statistical evidence for this assertion. During the 1990s, Muslim minorities engaged in higher average levels of rebellion than did other ethnic minorities. They are also more likely to be involved in ethnic conflict than groups of other religions when taking their proportion of the world population into account. In addition, religion is more important in ethnic conflicts involving Muslims. Religious discrimination by Muslim majorities is 4.7 times the average level by Christian majorities, and religious legitimacy in Muslim states is 1.7 times that in Christian states. Also, Muslim minorities’ demands for more religious rights are 3.4 times higher than those of Christian minorities.

However, even these results are not fully in line with Huntington’s predictions. There was little change in conflict patterns involving the Islamic civilization with the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, Islamic groups constituted 24 percent of all groups involved in conflict. While this rose to 28 percent in 2000, this is hardly the increase in conflict one would expect of groups said to have increasingly “bloody borders.” Furthermore, during the Cold War, 52 percent of conflicts involving Muslims could be considered civilizational, this dropped to 47 percent by 2000. Therefore, while Islamic groups may be disproportionally violent, this is not new to the post-Cold War era, and much of this violence is intra-civilizational.

Religion as a Prevailing Factor

Four decades ago, Karl Deutsch warned of the dangers of relying upon “introspection, intuition, and insight” in order to analyze social phenomena. He believed that this anecdotal approach often resulted in people seeing what they expected or wanted to see rather than what is actually there. In any case, such a methodology is not verifiable among researchers. The exceptionally large differences of opinion over the role of religion in conflict, including the vigorous debate over Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory, show that in this case Deutsch’s fears have been realized.

Deutsch proposes systematic quantitative analysis as the solution to this problem. The methodology applied here shows that the truth regarding ethic conflict, as best as it can be determined from the MAR data, is somewhere between the predictions of religion’s demise and the predictions that it will be the defining factor in world conflict. This brief review of the larger body of analysis shows that while religion is not the defining factor for ethnic conflict, neither is it absent. Rather, it influences ethnic conflict in a number of ways. In some cases religious factors exacerbate conflict and in others they inhibit ethnic conflict. Also, Muslim and Christian groups have different conflict patterns. Thus, while ethnic conflict cannot be fully understood without taking religion into account, religion cannot provide the sole explanation for ethnic conflict.