This edited volume presents a constructivist approach to the discourse on civilizations in world politics that has been dominated by Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” (CoC) thesis. Responding to what they view as deficiencies in Huntington's primordialist rendering of civilizations as discrete, monolithic, homogeneous actors in world politics that are prone to “clash,” most of the authors follow Peter Katzenstein's thesis in the opening chapter and insist that civilizations are both plural (there are many in the world) and pluralist (they are comprised of convergent and divergent actors and processes—including different cultures). While civilizations may appear as Huntington suggests, they are actually “loosely coupled, internally differentiated, elite-centered social systems” that “express different modes of thought,” and integrate “different conceptions of the relations between individual and community; and differently understood cosmologies about the relations between humanity, nature, divinity, and cosmos” (pp. 5–6). They are fluid, evolving, “weakly institutionalized” constellations that “are most similar not in their cultural coherence and tendency toward clash but in their pluralist differences and in their intercivilizational encounters and transcivilizational engagements” (pp. 5–7). With this as a point of departure, the subsequent chapters examine several “civilizations” while casting the CoC as a foil; but, in privileging the “hybridity” of civilization over “essentialist” renderings of the concept, they do not adequately problematize “civilization” as an analytical concept. As a result, they fail to demonstrate the utility of the concept for analyses of world politics.

In addition, at times, the authors seem to misconstrue several of Huntington's core claims. For example, Katzenstein asserts that “Huntington views civilizations as coherent, consensual, and able to act” (p. 6) and as “coherent and unified actors” (p. 9) or as “a kind of mega nation-state” (p. 8). This is a popular misconception. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (1996, 44) does not argue that civilizations are actors in world politics—much less the main actors. Instead, he insists that “civilizations are cultural not political entities[;] they do not, as such, maintain order, establish justice, collect taxes, fight wars, negotiate treaties, or do any of the others things which governments do.” For Huntington (1996, 36) “[n]ation states are and will remain the most important actors in world affairs, but their interests, associations, and conflicts are increasingly shaped by cultural and civilizational factors.” Thus, Huntington's CoC is a “cultural realist” thesis in which states are the major actors but their foreign policies are largely motivated by cultural—more than ideological—concerns. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson recognizes the state-centeredness of the CoC (p. 196); but he, in turn, incorrectly suggests that Huntington views the CoC as “more or less inevitable (p. 194), neglecting Huntington's stated motivation of proferring the CoC to provide U.S. foreign policymakers a strategy to prevent U.S. involvement in “clashes”—hardly a fatalist position. Further, Huntington's main argument is not that “all conflict” but only “major conflict” in the post–Cold War era will be marked by clashes of civilizations; therefore, the examples—even many examples—of cooperation among civilizations or diversity within them provided by the volume's authors do not refute the CoC thesis.

Ironically, in attempting to challenge Huntington's claims, the authors often employ some of the most troubling aspects of his thesis. For example, James Kurth's analysis of the United States as a civilizational leader accepts Huntington's view that religion is “the basic foundation and central essence of a civilization” (p. 44), although Kurth views civilization as a discursive rather than a dispositional construct, and he focuses on clashes within Western civilization. He views the United States as the first “core state” of Western civilization (after 1945), and a leader of successive phases of Western civilization. This civilization is rooted in American Protestantism, exemplified in the American Creed and its notions of individual rights, which subsequently spawned a new regime in “universal human rights.” A cursory review of Gunnar Myrdal's (1944) American Dilemma—among many other works—challenges Kurth's rendering of foundational norms in the United States. Opposing a U.S. focus on individual rights and against hierarchy, Kurth ignores the long history of racist oppression in the United States, which imposed a hierarchy based on “whiteness” and denied the individual rights of those constructed as nonwhites. Moreover, one of the chief institutions of this racial hierarchy was the white American Protestant Church. An engagement of racism as central to the construction of the “American Creed” and U.S. identity as a “core state” would both inform and challenge Kurth's myopic conception of U.S. “civilization.”

No less troubling is Emanuel Adler's discussion of European civilization through an analysis of the European Union as a “community of practice” in his attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of civilizations as a “unit of analysis” (p. 69). He argues that “when it comes to resolving international conflicts, Europe may be de facto entering a post-modern phase” (p. 67) in which it has institutionalized “dependable expectations of peaceful change” (p. 73). This contention is difficult to reconcile with the post–Cold War military involvement of France in its former colonies in Africa, including its support of the genocidal regime in Rwanda, or the deployment of British forces to Sierra Leone and the Blair government's support of the U.S. “preventive” war in Iraq. Where Huntington opines that there is “possibly” an African civilization, Adler similarly refers to “civilizational entities … for whom war is still imaginable and doable,” but he does not include Africa, although the war in Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo has been responsible for roughly three million deaths and is the largest war in the post–Cold War era (p. 74). Remarkably, Adler insists that the CoC is not between the West and Islam but “between Europe and the rest of the world,” “between post-modernity, represented by Europe … and modernity, represented by the international system as a whole” (p. 74). Thus, his pluralist/constructivist argument leads him to concur with Huntington that the world faces a clash of civilizations based on the “West vs. the Rest.”

David Kang's analysis marks the turn of the volume's focus to Asian civilizations, and his conclusions also converge with Huntington's major claims. In clear and jargon-free prose, Kang examines the role of ideational factors in intercivilizational relations, focusing on the impact of cultural similarity on international stability. He concludes that China established stable relations with East Asian states such as Korea, Vietnam, and Japan when the latter adopted civilizational identities and practices that were culturally similar to China's—especially those that showed acceptance of Chinese cultural superiority in the diplomatic realm. Yet, stable relations were not established with those that were culturally dissimilar, such as the seminomadic peoples of the northern steppes. In a manner not inconsistent with CoC claims, Kang asserts that there were “two international orders” in East Asia: “a civilization encompassing the Sinic states” and a different order “that regulated relations between the Sinic states and ‘barbarians’” (p. 112). Put differently, one may argue that what Kang observes in East Asia is a hegemonic stability system mediated by cultural similarity—a view also consistent with a “cultural realist” perspective.

In contrast to Kang's approach, David Leheny “take[s] issue with the idea that civilizations or civilizational states can be defined and deployed as part of an explanatory framework for international politics” (p. 115). In his analysis of Japanese civilization, Leheny rejects the notion of Japan's “cultural essence” as it is often employed by conservative Japanese to justify their policy preferences—although he accepts that such discourse “cannot easily be divorced from notions of ‘civilization’” (p. 115). He provides an incisive discussion of the different manifestations of cultural essentialism in Japanese popular and academic discourse. Nevertheless, while Leheny opposes CoC claims, the prevalence of a discourse of Japanese “cultural essence” is not incompatible with Huntington's claims.

It is such an essentialist view of civilization that Susanne Hoeber Rudolph challenges in Huntington's claims regarding Hindu civilization. She begins by challenging the merits of the name “Hindu” for the civilization, which she prefers to classify as “Indian.” She insists on the prevalence of syncretism and hybridity in Indian civilization, and she discusses the variants of external and internal conceptualizations of Indian civilization. Rudolph traces the “fluid and changing life forms” of civilizations through her analysis of what she calls the “four variants” of Indian civilization, which are mainly discursive formations rooted in prevailing ideologies. Over time, these have included Orientalist, Anglicist, liberal nationalist, and Hindu nationalist variants. For her, the fluidity of civilizations challenges essentialist renderings of the concept, but she appreciates—like Katzenstein and Leheny—that Huntington's essentialist claims may serve culturally hegemonic interests. For example, she describes how some Hindu leaders invoke parallel arguments of Huntington's claim that an influx of Latinos threatens America's Anglo-Protestant civilizational identity as a justification for their assertion of the “essential character” of India as a Hindu rather than a Muslim society. Rudolph assails Huntington's argument as “a sophisticated defense of white Protestant hegemony,” and its Hindu analogue as a similar defense of Hindu hegemony.

Unlike the other authors, Bruce B. Lawrence provides a clear and explicit definition of civilization as “the broadest, most capacious envelope of cultural traits related—directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly—to geographical location and temporal shifts” (p. 157). His view of civilizations as “culture writ large” is verbatim with Huntington's (1996, 41). In his analysis of Islamic civilization, Lawrence argues that Ibn Khaldun “founded civilizational discourse” and provided “the first major work to deal with Civilization as an analytical category.” In his dialectical approach to civilization analyses, he “never cease[d] to frame all issues in terms of competing or complementary sets of two” (p. 163). Lawrence critiques successors of this civilizational discourse such as Immanuel Wallerstein, whose materialist conception of world systems neglects culture and dismisses “major Muslim nations” (p. 166). Lawrence prefers a focus that is more sensitive to cultural factors such as religion, which are able to provide “sophisticated resistance strategies” or “hidden transcripts” rooted in their symbolic capital. He argues that there are “polyvalences” in Islam, and that religious conflicts framed in civilizational terms are often contests over political authority. He also contends that future research should focus on groups rather than charismatic leaders in order to understand “the actual dynamics of historical struggle and human contingency in shaping civilizational politics” (p. 171).

With an eye toward future research, Jackson's concluding chapter eschews a straightforward summary of the works and a discussion of how they might contribute to an integrated constructivist vision of civilization discourse to inform our understanding of world politics. He opts, instead, to draw on the works in order to “forge and refine useful conceptual tools for the investigation of future, as-yet unknown situations” (p. 178). He constructs a 2 × 2 matrix to differentiate perspectives on civilization with respect to whether they focus on an attribute or process ontology, and whether their determinations rest on scholarly or participant specifications. He then subdivides each quadrant into an additional 2 × 2 matrix to capture further nuance. Nevertheless, Jackson fails to situate all of the works into the categories of his matrices, and so the utility of his scheme in integrating the works in the volume is not evident. The upshot of his conclusion is his call to reject essentialism and to “[trace] the diffusion of characteristic practices” of “different social arrangements” that might be presently associated with “civilizations.”

Jackson does not seem to appreciate that apart from critiquing Huntington's thesis, the authors in this volume are obliged to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of civilization, itself. Since civilizations are ideational constructs rather than political agents, they are devoid of decision-making power or control over political or economic resources; therefore, analysts wishing to employ them as units of analysis are obligated to demonstrate their influence on individual, group, or institutional behavior or processes in world politics. This was in many ways the objective of Katzenstein's (1996) Culture and National Security, which took as its focus “national culture”; but the present work requires a similar demonstration of how plural and/or pluralist “civilizations” influence outcomes in world politics—notwithstanding Huntington's claims. On the whole, the book offers interesting analyses of the discourse of civilizations in different regions, but it largely fails to demonstrate the purchase of utilizing “civilization” as an analytical construct in world politics.