Twenty-five years have passed since Samuel Huntington first hypothesised a world torn asunder by clashing civilisations. After a lengthy sabbatical, the late Harvard political scientist is back in favour at the White House. President Donald Trump’s closest advisers are big fans. As with much else, Trump is at odds with considered opinion. Most experts want Huntington’s paradigm buried in an academic graveyard. Breathe life into this baleful concept and it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy they warn. Huntington set out his controversial thesis in a lecture to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Washington, DC, in 1992. He argued that people’s cultural identities would be the main source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Wars would not be fought primarily for ideological or economic reasons. Instead, people would fight along the cultural cleavages that divide civilisations. Of the eight different blocs that comprised his civilisational map...

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