A civilization or civilisation is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication, and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.
A nation state is a state in which the great majority shares the same culture and is conscious of it. The nation state is an ideal in which cultural boundaries match up with political ones. According to one definition, "a nation state is a sovereign state of which most of its subjects are united also by factors which defined a nation such as language or common descent." It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group.
A nation is a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
The Clash of Civilizations is a hypothesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures. It was proposed in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
An ethnic conflict is a conflict between two or more contending ethnic groups. While the source of the conflict may be political, social, economic or religious, the individuals in conflict must expressly fight for their ethnic group's position within society. This final criterion differentiates ethnic conflict from other forms of struggle.
Samuel Phillips Huntington was an American political scientist, adviser and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor. During the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Huntington was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council. During the 1980's Apartheid era in South Africa, he served as an adviser to P.W. Botha's Security Services. He is best known for his 1993 theory, the "Clash of Civilizations", of a post–Cold War new world order. He argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic extremism would become the biggest threat to world peace. Huntington is credited with helping to shape U.S. views on civilian–military relations, political development, and comparative government even into the current Trump administration.
Foreign Affairs is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. Founded in 1922, the print magazine is currently published every two months, while the website publishes articles daily and anthologies every other month.
Westernization (US) or Westernisation (UK), also Europeanization/Europeanisation or occidentalization/occidentalisation, is a process whereby societies come under or adopt Western culture in areas such as industry, technology, politics, economics, lifestyle, law, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, diet, clothing, language, alphabet, religion, and philosophy. During colonialism it often involved spread of Christianity.
An insurgency is a rebellion against authority when those taking part in the rebellion are not recognized as belligerents. An insurgency can be fought via counter-insurgency warfare, and may also be opposed by measures to protect the population, and by political and economic actions of various kinds and propaganda aimed at undermining the insurgents' claims against the incumbent regime. As a concept, insurgency's nature is ambiguous.
A population pyramid, also called an "age-sex- pyramid", is a graphical illustration that shows the distribution of various age groups in a population, which forms the shape of a pyramid when the population is growing. Males are conventionally shown on the left and females on the right, and they may be measured by raw number or as a percentage of the total population. This tool can be used to visualize and age of a particular population. It is also used in ecology to determine the overall age distribution of a population; an indication of the reproductive capabilities and likelihood of the continuation of a species.
World order is an international-relations term describing the distribution of power among world powers.
Safar bin Abdul-Rahman al-Hawali al-Ghamdi is a scholar who lives in Mecca. He came to prominence in 1991, as a leader of the Sahwah movement which opposed the presence of US troops on the Arabian peninsula. In 1993, al-Hawali and Salman al-Ouda were leaders in creating the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, a group that opposed the Saudi government, for which both were imprisoned from 1994 to 1999.
The Coming Anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet is an influential article written by journalist Robert D. Kaplan, which was first published in the February 1994 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. It is considered to be one of the fundamental theses on the state of current world affairs in the post Cold War era, and is ranked on the same level of doctrinal importance as Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man theses. U.S. President Bill Clinton reportedly recommended the article to White House staff. It has also been criticized as a Malthusian reading of the world, for blaming the situation on its victims and for overlooking alleged political and economical causes such as neoliberal policy.
Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami introduced the idea of Dialogue Among Civilizations as a response to Samuel P. Huntington’s theory of a Clash of Civilizations. The term was initially used by Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler who in 1972, in a letter to UNESCO, had suggested the idea of an international conference on the "dialogue between different civilizations" and had organized, in 1974, a first international conference on the role of intercultural dialogue with the support and under the auspices of Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor.
East-Central Europe is the region between German-, West Slavic- and Hungarian-speaking Europe and the Eastern Slavic lands of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Those lands are described as situated "between two": "between two worlds, between two stages, between two futures". In the geopolitical sense, East-Central Europe can be considered alongside Western and Eastern Europe, as one of the "Three Europes".
The Western world, also known as the West, refers to various nations depending on the context, most often including at least parts of Europe, Australasia, and the Americas, with the status of Latin America disputed by some. There are many accepted definitions, all closely interrelated. The Western world is also known as the Occident, in contrast to the Orient, or Eastern world. It is often correlated with the Northern half of the North-south divide.
Criticism of multiculturalism questions the ideal of the maintenance of distinct ethnic cultures within a country. Multiculturalism is a particular subject of debate in certain European nations that are associated with the idea of a single nation within their country. Critics of multiculturalism may argue against cultural integration of different ethnic and cultural groups to the existing laws and values of the country. Alternatively critics may argue for assimilation of different ethnic and cultural groups to a single national identity.
Global apartheid is a term used to mean minority rule in international decision-making. The term comes from apartheid, the system of governmental that ruled South Africa until 27 April 1994 when people of all races were able to vote as equals for the first time.
Cultural conflict is a type of conflict that occurs when different cultural values and beliefs clash. It has been used to explain violence and crime.
Geopolitical imaginations are constructed views of the world that reflect the vision of a place’s, a country’s or a society’s role within world politics. Geopolitical imaginations are constituted by shared assumptions and representations of power relations and conflicts in world politics within a certain geographical territory. By critically analyzing how and why these imaginations are constructed, it is possible to reveal underlying power relations and to get a better understanding of various conflicts. Therefore, geopolitical imaginations are closely connected to the academic field of critical geopolitics.
