Civilizational Analysis in International Relations: Mapping the Field and
Advancing a ‘Civilizational Politics’ Line of Research1
GREGORIO BETTIZA
European University Institute
This article maps and develops – theoretically and empirically – the
field of civilizational analysis in international relations (IR). In
particular, it teases out a more explicit ‘civilizational politics’ line of
research, which builds upon latent and underdeveloped themes in the
civilizational turn in IR. ‘Civilizational politics’ offers an avenue for
theoretically-inclined, empirically-minded, scholars to explore how
social and political actors have come to understand, change and
construct world politics as if plural civilizations existed and their
relations mattered. The article anchors ‘civilizational politics’ research
to a modernist constructivist approach to IR, and structures it around
two key steps. The first step is to recover and interpret subjective and
intersubjective meanings through participants’ discourse. The article
proposes an understanding of civilizations as ‘imagined communities’
narrated by political and intellectual elites as: essentialized or nonessentialized
entities;
and
as
clashing/conflicting
or
dialoguing/engaging with each other. The second step outlines three
causal pathways that explain how narrated civilizational imaginaries
affect world politics and turn civilizations into social facts: by guiding
and structuring social action; by shaping and becoming embedded in
formal institutions and patterned practices; and by bestowing
recognition and socially empowering actors claiming to speak for
civilizations. The empirical import of a ‘civilizational politics’ line of
research is demonstrated through a re-reading of Turan Kayaoğ lu’s
article “Constructing the Dialogue of Civilizations in World Politics: a
Case of Global Islamic Activism”.
1
Author’s note: I would like to thank Emanuel Adler, Maria Birnbaum, Adam Bower, Katerina Dalacoura,
Jörg Friedrichs, Dan Pearson, and Fabio Petito for insightful conversations about civilizational analysis
and/or useful suggestions on earlier drafts of the paper. Thanks must also go to the anonymous reviewers
and the editors of International Studies Review for their detailed and very constructive comments. The
paper benefited from feedback from the 2012 joint BISA-ISA International Conference in Edinburgh, and
the European University Institute’s International Relations as well as Religion and Politics seminars in
2012 and 2013. Finally I would like to thank EUI’s Max Weber Programme and its team for the support I
received. Any errors or mistakes are solely my responsibility.
1
Civilizational politics is gaining ground in international relations. What do I mean
by this? I mean that non-state actors, states and international organizations are
increasingly talking and acting as if civilizations, in their ‘plural’2 sense, existed and
that relations between them mattered in world politics. As Fabio Petito suggests,
“civilizations, defined in a fundamentally culturalist-religious sense” appear to be
reasserting themselves “as strategic frames of reference, not as direct protagonists,
of international politics [emphasis in original]” (2011:767). This is evident in two
types of discourses that have proliferated in the international public sphere over the
past two decades. First, are the growing public invocations about the importance of
‘Christian’, ‘Judeo-Christian’,
‘Western’, ‘Slavic’, Orthodox’, ‘Asian’, ‘Confucian’,
‘Muslim’, ‘Islamic’, ‘Hindu’, and/or ‘African’ values and identities. Second, are the
2
Civilization/s is a notoriously problematic and ambiguous concept. Broadly speaking we can research and
think of civilizations in the ‘plural’, “invoked when we discuss the criteria for distinguishing and
comparing civilizations” (Arnason, 2009:2), or of civilization in the ‘singular’, used “when we speak of the
origins, achievements or prospects of civilization” (Arnason, 2009:2). In the former case civilizations are
understood as distinct macro-cultural, macro-social, and/or macro-historical units, which may rise and fall
and interact in multiple ways, across time and space (for classical examples in history and social theory see
Braudel, 1994, Eisenstadt, 2003). In the latter case civilization is thought of as progress, as a certain
standard of attainment that distinguishes the economically, politically, socially or scientifically “civilized”
from the “un-civilized”. The scholar becomes engaged in unpacking either the sources and effects of
civilizing processes (in social theory see Elias, 1994, for an IR perspective see Linklater, 2010) or of
civilizing norms and discourses (for perspectives close to IR see Bowden, 2009, Gong, 1984, Suzuki, 2009).
Even if the two concepts of civilization – in the plural and in the singular – are distinct, they are not
necessarily mutually exclusive. We can divide the world into multiple civilizations and then impute a
higher standard of civilization to any of these entities compared to others.
2
ever more pervasive discourses about the perils of ‘clashes’ or the imperative of
‘dialogues’ among civilizations.
What is also becoming apparent, however, is that beliefs about civilizational
identities and relations are not solely emerging as frames of reference in
international discourses. They are also increasingly becoming an organizing
principle for a growing range of social actions, international institutions, and
practices. In other words, as social and political actors frame international politics in
civilizational terms, actions, institutional arrangements, and practices structured
around managing inter-civilizational relations are emerging as well. These changes
are empowering those very same people and organizations that claim to speak in
the name of civilizations. In the process a positive feedback-loop is generated
between civilizational narratives, the (re)orientation of actions, institutional
arrangements, and international practices around civilizational categories, and
processes of recognition bestowed on actors claiming a civilizational identity and
voice. This process is contributing to socially and materially construct civilizations
as meaningful and real entities in world politics. This is what I mean here by
‘civilizational politics’.
Take, for instance, American foreign policy. How the United States can best
confront, engage, or transform the ‘Muslim world’ – generally understood as a broad
category of peoples, countries and institutions that share a cultural and religious
identity – have become major preoccupations for both the Bush Jr. and Obama
administrations. Indeed, the ‘Muslim world’ is increasingly seen as an
unproblematic civilizational category, not only in American foreign policy
3
discourses, but also in its practices and institutions. Highly symbolic speeches have
been delivered, explicitly reaching out to ‘Muslims’, by presidents Bush (2001) and
Obama (2009, 2009). Countless educational, inter-faith, economic, and democracypromotion initiatives have been targeted towards a hugely diverse group of people
and countries, across multiple continents, because they are thought to belong to, or
speak in the name of, the ‘Muslim world’ (Amr, 2009). As of 2013, the United States
has two ‘ambassadors’ to Islam: a Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic
Conference/Cooperation
(OIC),
and
a
Special
Representative
to
Muslim
Communities.
It is possible to think of other glaring examples of ‘civilizational politics’
unfolding. For instance, the United Nations has long been an organization concerned
primarily with ensuring peace among nations and protecting individual human
rights. Yet, ever since the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) initiative
was institutionalized in 2006, the UN has become involved with promoting mutual
understanding among civilizations. International institutions designed along
civilizational lines such as the OIC, which claims to be “the collective voice of the
Muslim world”, and whose scope is to “galvanize the Ummah into a unified body”,3
are acquiring greater visibility. The OIC has been at the forefront in promoting
‘dialogue of civilizations’ and ‘defamation of religion’ norms at the UN, seen as a way
to curb perceived criticism of Islam and Muslims worldwide (Kayaoğlu, 2012).
IR scholars seem by and large unable, or uninterested, in making much sense
of these changes in beliefs, discourses, institutions, and practices around
3
See http://www.oic-oci.org/oicv2/page/?p_id=52&p_ref=26&lan=en (accessed July 3, 2013).
4
civilizational categories. A promising avenue does however appear to be emerging.
Indeed, although still marginal, a growing attention and interest towards
civilizational analysis is noticeably gaining ground in IR. This literature is slowly
overcoming a widespread skepticism – mostly driven by an overwhelming
repudiation of Samuel Huntington’s (Huntington, 1996, 1993) “clash of civilizations”
thesis – towards taking seriously civilizations as a concept and category in the
discipline.
So far civilizational analysis in IR has developed mainly around three broad
lines of research, or what I loosely identify as civilizational research paradigms:
‘civilizational dynamics’, ‘inter-civilizational ethics’, and ‘the politics of civilization/s’.
‘Civilizational dynamics’ research has a strong historical and sociological bent. It is
mostly concerned with the constitution and shape that plural civilizations, as
objective ontological realities, have and the multiple ways they interact with each
other. ‘Inter-civilizational ethics’ literature is mostly normative. This scholarship
also starts from a perspective that sees civilizations and, especially, cultural
pluralism as objective facts which structure social reality. Its main concern is then to
devise the appropriate normative and institutional frameworks for promoting
international peace through inter-civilizational dialogue and understanding.
Scholars in ‘the politics of civilization/s’ paradigm instead do not take civilizations
as an ontological reality. Researchers here are largely concerned with
deconstructing civilizational discourses and invocations. These discourses are
generally seen as highly political acts used to draw exclusionary boundaries
5
between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in order to sustain and legitimize unequal power
relations and practices.
This article argues that ‘civilizational politics’ would constitute a fourth line
of research, which is latent in the literature but has not yet been fully articulated
and explicitly developed. This approach shares much – as the similarity in names
attests – with ‘the politics of civilizations’ research. Most importantly both
approaches to civilizational analysis share an interpretivist epistemology skeptical
towards assigning any ontological reality to civilizations beyond the understandings
and practices of the social actors that constitute and instantiate them. Hence both
‘civilizational politics’ and ‘the politics of civilizations’ research tend to look for
civilizations mostly in the discourses and deeds of social and political actors, rather
than using civilizations as objective categories and as the starting point for
analyzing international relations.
Compared to ‘the politics of civilizations’ research, which tends to be inspired
by radical or critical variants of constructivism, and by post-structuralism and postcolonial theory, I ground ‘civilizational politics’ research within a modernist
approach to constructivism.4 Hence, unlike much of ‘the politics of civilization/s’
research, ‘civilizational politics’ research takes civilizational invocations not solely
as a rhetorical tool through which inclusionary/exclusionary practices are
legitimized and promoted, but as representing a significant shift in the way
individuals are making sense of themselves and the social world around them.
4
On ‘radical’, ‘critical’, and ‘modernist’ styles of constructivism see Adler (2013:116-17)
6
This article proposes to interpret civilizational discourses as the carriers of a
particular kind of intersubjective knowledge structure: the view that world politics
is divided among different civilizations and that intra- and inter-civilizations
relations are key to international peace and security at this historical juncture. I
conceive of civilizations as ‘imagined communities’ of a particular kind –
transnational, inter-human and de-territorialized cultural communities – that act as
salient identity markers in, and as strategic frames of reference to make sense of, a
globalizing and ever more complex and multilayered international system.
Thinking of civilizations as imagined communities, leads a ‘civilizational
politics’ approach to emphasize less how civilizational discourses are in constant
flux and opportunistically called upon to promote a wide range of practices, which –
as in much of ‘the politics of civilizations’ research – often have little civilizational
content to them. The focus is directed more explicitly, instead, towards teasing out
the way in which civilizational imaginaries stabilize and become institutionalized,
turning civilizations into social facts by (re)shaping the structures of world politics
around inter-civilizational relations. A ‘civilizational politics’ line of research is
hence less concerned with deconstructing civilizational discourses. It is more
interested in exploring the processes by which actors that frame international
relations along civilizational imaginaries contribute to socially and materially
construct civilizations.
Three causal pathways are outlined through which civilizational imaginaries
bring civilizations and inter-civilizational relations into being: i) by guiding and
structuring social action (i.e. ‘speech acts’ and behavior); ii) by shaping and
7
becoming embedded in the material structures of world politics, such as formal
institutions (i.e. international organizations, state bureaucracies) and patterned
practices (i.e. diplomacy, aid, military interventions); and iii) by bestowing
recognition and socially empowering those actors who claim to speak, or are
believed to be speaking for, one’s own or other’s civilizations.
In short, what is salient from this perspective is not so much to determine
which civilizations exist and how they relate to each other (pace ‘civilizational
dynamics’ and ‘inter-civilizational ethics’), nor to reveal the contingent politics of
drawing and re-drawing boundaries (pace ‘the politics of civilization/s’). What is
central is the desire to investigate how actors come to perceive the international as
a place where civilizations and their relations matter. And how actors, when
reshaping international politics along these beliefs, bring civilizations into existence
as social facts through different causal pathways at this historical juncture in world
politics.
The article is divided as follows. In the first part, I map out the civilizational
turn in IR5 onto a two-by-two matrix. This matrix helps to organize civilizational
analysis in four broad lines of research. In the second part, I seek to advance and
tease out more explicitly one of these lines of research, what I call ‘civilizational
politics’. ‘Civilizational politics’ has been only latently and sporadically developed so
far in IR. Yet, I argue in this section, a more explicit focus on this line of research can
5
Civilizational analysis has a long tradition across the humanities and the social sciences, from history to
social theory, political philosophy, and post-colonial studies. This article focuses mainly on civilizational
analysis in IR given its exponential growth over the years. Where relevant, however, the article will
highlight the main external intellectual and disciplinary influences on the different IR debates.
8
help us in important ways to understand and explain significant changes in world
politics today. I develop the theoretical foundations, conceptual toolkit and
methodological contours – rooted in a modernist constructivist “style of reasoning”
(Pouliot, 2007:361-64) – for carrying out ‘civilizational politics’ research. While
doing so I also build and extend on Jacinta O’Hagan’s (2002) insights on
‘civilizational identities’, Peter Katzenstein’s (2010b, 12-13) sketch of a
‘primordiality’ approach to civilizations, and Michael Williams and Iver Neumann’s
(2000) investigation into the relationship between civilizational-based thinking and
NATO’s policy of enlargement.
The third section briefly demonstrates the empirical import of a
‘civilizational politics’ line of research. Rather than offering an entirely new case
study, I re-read through explicit ‘civilizational politics’ lenses, Turan Kayaoğlu’s
(2012) recent article: “Constructing the Dialogue of Civilizations in World Politics: a
Case of Global Islamic Activism”. The article explains why and how different Islamic
actors came, over the past two decades, to successfully promote a series of
initiatives and institutions around the “dialogue of civilizations” in international
society. Kayaoğlu’s article is chosen because it is one of the clearest examples of
empirical research carried out, albeit implicitly, along what I would theoretically
identify as a ‘civilizational politics’ approach.
Mapping Civilizational Analysis in IR
Explicit attention to civilizational analysis entered the field of IR abruptly and most
prominently two decades ago with Huntington’s (1996, 1993) controversial “clash
9
of civilizations” thesis. In the decade that followed, the concept of civilizations as a
meaningful category in international politics, let alone the idea that these
supposedly coherent entities were destined to violently clash, was subject to a
barrage of theoretical 6 and empirical 7 critique within and outside of IR.
Huntington’s thesis was refused as too simplistic at best, if not pernicious at worst.
The very case for civilizational analysis in IR was rejected altogether as inherently
flawed or dangerous, and no respectable scholar wanted to appear to endorse it.8
Regardless of what IR scholars tended to conclude, civilizational talk –
especially in the wake of 9/11 – continued to resonate widely in public discourses
and policy circles around the world (see for example Hoge, 2010). As such, a new
wave of scholarship has slowly emerged, willing to engage in a more substantive
and direct way with civilizational analysis in IR than had been the case before. This
literature, like the earlier, generally springs from a critique of Huntington’s
conception of civilizations seen as either too conflict-prone, too static, too fixed, too
closed, too monolithic, and/or too essentialist. Yet, rather than throwing the
civilizational baby out with the Huntingtonian bath water, IR scholars have
increasingly taken civilizations seriously, both as an object of study and as an
6
For a realist critique see Walt (1997). For a liberal one Ikenberry (1997). For a Marxian critique see
Halliday (2002). For a post-colonial perspective see Said (2001). For a broader philosophical critique of
Huntington’s arguments, and against the essentialization of individuals around unique and singular
identities, see Sen (2006).
7
For a wide range of studies arguing that Huntington’s thesis of civilizational/cultural clashes has very
little, or no, empirical evidence see Chiozza (2002), Fox (2002), Henderson and Tucker (2002).
8
For an important exception, one still critical of Huntington’s essentialization of civilizations in clash, see
Puchala (1997).
10
analytical category in international politics. As Martin Hall (2007) perceptively
notes:
“Civilizational analysis is important not least because the concept of
civilization is being used. It seems, at this historical juncture, that the notion
of civilization is a significant carrier of knowledge and of thereby attendant
preferences and policies” (p.199).
Overall it is possible to identify four broad lines of research, what I also call
civilizational research paradigms, along which civilizational analysis has progressed
in IR. Of these four, three have been particularly developed: ‘civilizational dynamics’,
‘inter-civilizational ethics’, and ‘the politics of civilization/s’. A fourth line of
research, what I identify as ‘civilizational politics,’ has received only scarce
theoretical and empirical attention. These research paradigms contain a plurality of
voices across theoretical spectrums that often can, and do, profoundly disagree.
These are not sealed or purposely coherent research projects. Scholars interact and
debate across research paradigms. Yet, even if these four lines of research are not
necessarily mutually exclusive, and they can and do overlap at times, they tend to
flow from different ontological and theoretical premises.
Research paradigms can be divided along two main axes. First, they can be
split between those who treat civilizations as ontological realities and as
foundational to international politics, and those instead who do not give ontological
primacy to civilizations and take international politics as the foundation of
civilizations. Put differently, the divide is between those approaches that take plural
civilizations as the primary unit of analysis – either in terms of fixed structures or
11
evolving relations and processes – and those who do not – focusing instead on how
social and political agents understand and discursively frame the world around
them along civilizational categories.
This division largely mirrors that proposed by Peter Katzenstein (2010)
between ‘dispositional’ and ‘discursive’ modes of analysis when thinking about
civilizations. Even more so, it is in line with Patrick Thaddeus Jackson’s (2010)
distinction between ‘scholarly’ and ‘participant’ specification ontologies. The issue
for Jackson, is “who” – whether the scholar or the actors that the scholar
investigates – “gets to make the determination about what constitutes a civilization”
(p.185). In the case of a scholarly specification ontology it is the analyst who looks at
the social world and defines what civilizations are and how they relate, or ought to
relate, to each other. In the case of a participant specification ontology the scholar is
instead engaged in interpreting how human actors themselves individually and
collectively see and describe the world around them in civilizational terms.
A second distinction in civilizational analysis, which both Jackson and
Katzenstein do not directly touch upon, exists between research programs guided
largely by an analytical approach to theory and those with a normative/critical
orientation. This is an important distinction to make, especially when touching upon
sensitive and controversial subjects like civilizations. In light of this categorization,
it is possible to place these lines of research on a two-by-two matrix with scholarly
and participant specification ontologies on the vertical axis, and analytical and
normative/critical approaches to theory on the horizontal one (see Table 1).
12
[Add Table 1: Mapping Civilizational Analysis in IR]
A ‘civilizational dynamics’ research paradigm is situated on the top-left
quadrant where an analytical approach to theory meets a commitment to scholarly
specification. The premise of this line of inquiry is that there is, across time and
space, in the social world, a plurality of civilizations – broadly understood as
different macro-formations and entities organized around distinctive cultural, social
and/or economic structures/relations. Based on this premise, the scholar then
becomes engaged in defining and conceptualizing what civilizations are and do,
what s/he understands to be the internal characteristics and, possibly, the external
interactions of civilizations. There follows an investigation into the multiple ways in
which civilizations, as units of analysis, have a bearing across time and space on
world politics.
This type of research has dominated civilizational analysis in IR – as well as
in the social sciences more broadly. This research is also marked by considerable
internal differences and debates. The chief line of disagreement runs between those
who theorize civilizations along essentialist lines and their critiques that
conceptualize civilizations along non-essentialist lines. Essentialist approaches tend
to see civilizations as bounded, coherent, integrated, centralized, homogeneous,
consensual, and static entities. Non-essentialist ones treat civilizations as weakly
13
bounded, contradictory, loosely integrated, heterogeneous, contested entities, which
are in a constant state of flux (Hall and Jackson, 2007:7).9
The chief essentializer is Samuel Huntington who – drawing also from the
work of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Fernand Braudel – maps out the
world along nine discrete civilizational blocks marked by historical and religiocultural continuity. Huntington (1996) defines a civilization as the “highest cultural
grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of
what distinguishes humans from other species” (p.43). In Huntington’s world,
cultural and historical differences are likely to lead to civilizational clashes. In
similar essentialist lines, other scholars close to an IR perspective, have focused
more narrowly on one specific, macro-cultural grouping; whether the ClassicalChristian-Secular West (Ferguson, 2011, Gress, 1998), the Muslim world (Lewis,
1990, Lewis, 2002) or the Asian mind (Mahbubani, 2002), ascribing a coherent
history and a set of clearly identifiable values and characteristics to these entities.
Without renouncing the analytical value of parceling the world into distinct
civilizations, authors like Peter Katzenstein have been among the clearest
proponents of a non-essentialist plural and pluralist view of civilizations in IR.
Katzenstein (2010) – who draws from the work of social theorists such as Shmuel
Eisenstadt, Randall Collins, and Norbert Elias – defines civilizations as “loosely
coupled, internally differentiated, elite-centered social systems” (p.5). Civilizations
may be thought of as “configurations, constellations, or complexes. They are not
9
The distinction here between essentialist and non-essentialist approaches reflects to a great extent that
made by Jackson (1999, Jackson, 2010) between substantialist/attribute and processural/relational
ontologies when investigating civilizations in world politics.
14
fixed in space or time. They are both internally highly differentiated and culturally
loosely integrated” (p.5). These “civilizational configurations are most similar not in
their cultural coherence and tendency toward clash”, Katzenstein argues, “but in
their pluralist differences and in their intercivilizational encounters and
transcivilizational engagements” (p.7). Starting from this conceptual premise,
Katzenstein’s edited trilogy (Katzenstein, 2012, 2010, Katzenstein, 2012) then seeks
to explore the conditions that give rise to clashes, encounters, or engagements
among a plurality of internally differentiated civilizational complexes such as AngloAmerica, Europe, China, Japan, India, Islam, and the overarching Civilization of
Modernity.
Similarly to Katzenstein, a number of other scholars from constructivist
(Acharya, 2013), neo-Gramscian (Cox, 2000, Cox and Schechter, 2002), and
historical sociological (Hobson, 2004, Hobson, 2007, Puchala, 1997) perspectives
have unpacked, along non-essentialist lines, the processes which constitute
civilizations and shape their interactions – beyond clashes – in world politics and
history. Both in their essentialist and non-essentialist forms, civilizations are rarely
seen as political actors themselves. Civilizations are conceptualized as containing
various types of political units, be they non-state actors, states, empires or polities
(Huntington 1996, 44; Katzenstein 2010, 24). Civilizations are the broadest cultural
and social structures (for essentializers) or relations (for non-essentializers), which
constitute political actors’ identities and interests, determining (for essentializers)
or constraining and enabling (for non-essentializers) their actions in world politics.
15
An ‘inter-civilizational ethics’ line of research sits on the top-right quadrant
of the matrix where a scholarly specification ontology shifts towards a
normative/critical approach to theory. ‘Inter-civilizational ethics’ scholarship, like
‘civilizational dynamics’ scholarship, takes civilizations (or at least civilizational
identities) as ontological realities in the social world. Much of this literature stems
from a critique of Huntington. The bone of contention with the former-Harvard
professor is not so much with his essentialization of civilizations, but with his
predictions of clash. ‘Inter-civilizational ethics’ scholars take cultural and religious
pluralism in international society as an important, constitutive, and valuable
element of world politics. They are driven by a commitment towards avoiding
civilizational confrontations. As a result they seek to devise the intellectual,
normative and institutional frameworks that help promote international peace
through
better
inter-civilizational
(cultural
and
religious)
dialogue
and
understanding.
For Fabio Petito (2011), avoiding civilizational clashes cannot be reduced to
‘theorizing civilizational identities away’, as for example intellectuals such as
Amartya Sen10 and Edward Said11 have attempted to do. Petito finds the opposite to
be true. In a post-Cold War world, marked by the reassertion of civilizational frames
of reference, a “strong” sense of civilizational identity and tradition become
essential conditions for developing an effective dialogue among world cultures and
religions (see also Michel and Petito, 2009). Other IR scholars, for instance, have
10
Sen (2006)
11
Said (2001)
16
sought to frame and promote the European-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) as a
case for the convergence of civilizations in a post-9/11 world (Adler et al., 2006).
Fred Dallmayr (1996), a political philosopher whose work has inspired much of
Petito’s, is normatively concerned with developing a multicultural ethic for a
globalizing world. Over the years, a growing range of academics, public intellectuals,
religious and political leaders across the globe have insistently advocated for better
dialogue across civilizations (Dallmayr, 2002, Dallmayr and Manoochehri, 2007,
Esposito and Voll, 2000, Forst and Ahmed, 2005).
‘The politics of civilization/s’ is the third major line of research currently
unfolding in IR. It sits on the bottom-right quadrant of the matrix, where a
normative/critical approach to theory meets a participant specification ontology.
Much of this literature is partly inspired by the seminal work of Edward Said on
Orientalism (2003) and his critique (2001) of Huntington’s clash thesis. Scholars in
this line of research generally investigate how discourses about civilizations in the
plural, often blending with those of civilization in the singular,12 are then deployed
to draw boundaries, de-humanize the ‘other’, legitimize repressive and colonial
practices, or sustain unequal power relations. Civilizations are seen as having no
ontological reality aside from the inclusionary/exclusionary practices that their
invocations help to promote. The focus is then on unpacking how, and in whose
12
This research instructively points out how the boundaries that are drawn between civilizations, say ‘the
West’ and ‘the Rest’, often overlap with those distinguishing the ‘civilized’ and the ‘un-civilized’. Hence
discourses are reproduced, for instance, of a ‘civilized West’ as opposed to an ‘un-civilized Rest’. This
explains the dash (/) in the word ‘civilization/s’ when it comes to this research program.
17
interest, are civilizational categories and boundaries drawn, and revealing who is
included/excluded and why.
One of the clearest expressions of this approach can be found in the edited
volume by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Martin Hall, which largely focuses on the
“necessarily power-laden” processes through which civilizational “boundaries are
continually produced and reproduced” (Hall and Jackson, 2007:6).13 Jackson, in his
book Civilizing the Enemy (2006), provides a case study of how public rhetoric after
World War II was deployed to draw and redraw the boundaries of what “Western
civilization” consisted in, delegitimizing all policy options other than West
Germany’s incorporation into America’s sphere of influence. American foreign
policy, in the aftermath of 9/11, has provided a fertile ground for this kind of
analysis, with scholars seeking to unpack the ways in which controversial policies
associated with the War on Terror were legitimized by discourses that ‘othered’
terrorists and Islam as ‘barbaric’ and ‘uncivicilized’ (Adib-Moghaddam, 2011, for a
similar analysis of how civilizational discourses played out as well in Western policy
towards the Balkans in the 1990s, see Hansen, 2006:especially chapters 6 and 8,
Mullin, 2013, Pasha, 2007, Salter, 2002, Salter, 2007).
Civilizational research paradigms are not hermeneutically sealed. Some
scholars straddle various approaches to civilizational analysis in their work. Brett
Bowden (2009), for instance, exposes how the notion of civilization, as a stagemanaged account of history, has been used to legitimize imperialism, uniformity,
13
For a similar perspective, focused more narrowly on the politics involved in speaking and representing
‘the West’, see Browning and Lehti (2010)
18
and conformity to Western standards, not only during the War on Terror. but as far
back as the Crusades and the colonial era. By deconstructing the concept of
civilization (in line with ‘the politics of civilization/s’ approach), Bowden however
seeks to demonstrate that ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’ have more commonalities than
differences, and hence that a genuine inter-civilizational dialogue is possible (in line
with an ‘inter-civilizational ethics’ approach) (see also Hobson, 2007).
Table 2 shows the three main lines of civilizational research, in bold within
the matrix. The bottom-left corner – where a participant specification ontology
meets an analytical approach to theory – is filled by a potential, hence bracketed and
not in bold, ‘civilizational politics’ paradigm. Theory and research of this kind still
lacks a more self-conscious understanding of its possible contribution to IR’s
civilizational turn. The next section explains why and how a more clearly articulated
‘civilizational politics’ research agenda can move forward civilizational analysis in
IR.
[Add Table 2: Civilizational Research Paradigms in IR]
Towards ‘Civilizational Politics’ Research
This section builds upon themes latent in the literature in order to develop a more
explicit ‘civilizational politics’ line of research in IR. In the first part, I highlight the
theoretical and empirical payoffs that a more clearly defined line of research on
‘civilizational politics’ yields. At the same time I also survey some of the limits of the
19
main three unfolding civilizational research paradigms outlined above. Put
differently, I seek to answer the question why ‘civilizational politics’ research? In the
second part, I tease out the conceptual and methodological tools for doing
‘civilizational politics’ research. Here I seek to answer the question how
‘civilizational politics’ research?
Why ‘Civilizational Politics’ Research?
There are important pragmatic and philosophical reasons why scholars may
find compelling a participant specification ontology to investigating civilizations in
IR. This is an ontology which underpins ‘civilizational politics’ research, as well as
‘the politics of civilization/s’ research, contra ‘civilizational dynamics’ and ‘intercivilizational ethics’. First, a participant specification ontology is compelling because
it firmly orients research towards empirical questions. Attention is directed towards
interpreting actors’ invocations (and possibly beliefs) about what civilizations are
and do, rather than attempting to objectively identify, through broad conceptual
abstractions, the putative characteristics of those civilizations that straddle the
international system today. As such, a ‘civilizational politics’ line of research – which
focuses on what actors, rather than scholars, take to be real – pragmatically
sidesteps seemingly endless and irreconcilable definitional debates about the
character and influence of civilizations in world politics (see also O’Hagan, 2007:21).
Second, a participant specification ontology may be appealing to those who
are dubious about a scholar’s ability to objectively identify what civilizations are
and do (or should do) in the first place. Take states for instance. There are multiple
20
and contested debates when it comes to defining what states are. Yet, their
identifiable centralized institutional underpinnings, the sovereign rights which are
bestowed upon them, and their legally recognized territorial borders, do provide
some hooks to which scholars can give states some sort of corporate agency or
conceptual coherence. Civilizations lack all of that, they are of an “intangible nature”
(O’Hagan 2002, 13). Civilizations have “no front office or central bureaucracy”
(Jackson, 2007:47), they have no legally recognized borders, nor any other sorts of
formal rights which make them clearly distinguishable. Nor are there any
international actors with the capacity to certify actions performed by, or in the
name of, whole civilizations.
Third, a participant specification approach to civilizations speaks to those
scholars that tend towards the agency side of the agency-structure dichotomy.
Scholars, who are skeptical towards assigning any ontological reality to civilizations
beyond the social actors and practices that help to constitute and instantiate them,
may find a home here. A participant specification line of inquiry shifts the attention
away from analyzing civilizations as objective structures and relations. The focus is,
instead, on interpreting why and how social and political actors come to make sense
of, and talk of, their surroundings in civilizational terms. And on the causal power
that civilizational claims and discourses exercise in social and political practice (Hall
and Jackson, 2007:4).
Within a participant specification ontology, however, there are subtle but
important epistemological and theoretical differences which come to distinguish a
‘civilizational politics’ research paradigm from ‘the politics of civilization/s’ one. The
21
former approach, as teased out here, is largely anchored to a positivist epistemology
and an analytical approach to theory – characteristic of modernist constructivists.
The latter instead rests more on a post-positivist epistemology and a critical
approach to theory – characteristic of thicker variants of constructivism and of poststructural and post-colonial theories. There are a number of theoretical and
empirical reasons for expanding research from a participant specification
perspective along an analytical approach to theory.
First, an interpretivist approach to civilizations that overwhelmingly engages
in critique, as laudable as the emancipatory purposes behind this enterprise is, often
leads only to partial portrayals of what is taking place in the social world. In fact,
‘the
politics
of
civilization/s’
research
tends
to
overwhelmingly
focus
on Western narratives that construct civilizations as essentialized entities in clash.
This however is a narrow, although clearly powerful and controversial, portion of all
civilizational invocations in the public sphere. The general concern with how
Americans and Europeans essentialize civilizations in confrontation, tends to
neglect that also ‘non-Westerners’ essentialize themselves and reify ‘the West’ just
as much (Buruma and Margalit, 2004, Halliday, 2002chapter 7, Kinnvall, 2007,
Mandaville, 2007). ‘The politics of civilization/s’ scholarship also generally gives
little recognition to the policy impact that voices, both within and outside ‘the West’,
which do not essentialize, and which do call for greater dialogue rather than conflict
among civilizations, have on international politics.
Put differently, ‘the politics of civilization/s’, often overlooks the fact
that identities, as Richard Ned Lebow (2008) has argued elsewhere, are not solely
22
constructed and maintained along essentialized categories and against negatively
stereotyped ‘others’. Hence, an analytical participant specification ontology, which
underpins ‘civilizational politics’ research, helps to expand research beyond one
particular type of civilizational discourse – however controversial that discourse is.
Research is opened up to exploring how multiple actors, in multiple locations, think
in multiple ways about themselves and others in plural civilizational terms.
Second, what is important is not just who and how actors talk about
civilizations, but also what kind of political consequences follow. Both lines of
civilizational research rooted in a participant specification ontology (contra a
scholarly specification ontology), share an interest in investigating “what the
invocation of civilizational identities does in world politics [emphasis in original]”
(O’Hagan, 2007:16). This said, analytical approaches and normative/critical ones
largely differ precisely on what they understand civilizational-based discourses and
invocations as ‘doing’ in international relations. This divergence is rooted in
different interpretations about the origins and substance of civilizational
invocations and identities themselves.
The healthy skepticism towards the ability of the scholar to understand and
explain what civilizations are, which is part of a participant specification ontology,
generally translates within ‘the politics of civilization/s’ research into a skepticism
towards most modes of civilizational-based thinking. In an attempt to demystify
essentialized civilizational discourses, the critical gaze of the scholar in this research
paradigm tends to stress the contingent and the political nature of publicly uttered
invocations of civilizational identity. Meanings appear in continuous flux, which can
23
be called upon to constantly redraw, from moment to moment, the boundaries of
civilizations or opportunistically ‘other’ new enemies.14
The possibility that public invocations are rooted in the way that social
actors may come to perceive – even if wrongly – the world as divided in plural
civilizations is generally discounted. As Fred Halliday (2002) suggests about the
‘clash of civilizations’ thesis: “Despite the fact that such myths can be revealed as
false, once generated and expressed they can acquire a considerable life of their own”
(see also Bottici and Challand, 2010, :p.7). The same can be said more broadly about
the existence of civilizations as categories and entities in world politics.
Hence, public invocations about civilizations can be understood not solely as
myths to be busted, but also as embodying subjective and intersubjectively held
meanings with considerable causal power in need of interpretation and
explanation.15 This is not to say that ideas about civilizations, as O’Hagan (2002)
carefully traces, are not historically contingent or unchangeable. Yet, the fact that at
this point in time a growing number of scholars, intellectuals, religious and political
leaders give meaning to civilizational categories, by either making sense of their
surroundings or framing international politics in civilizational terms, is socially
significant and warrants close attention to its causal effects on the structures of
international society.
14
See also Katzenstein’s (2010b, 11-12) critique of ‘discursive approaches’ to civilizations.
15
As Amir Lupovici (2009:202) emphasizes “the study of discourse should not, as some scholars suggest,
be limited to a critical revelation of hegemonic relations or discovering the ‘truth’” but can be used to
unpack emerging or dominant identities and ideas in circulation at any given time and trace their effects on
international politics.
24
‘Civilizational politics’ would put greater emphasis on how social actors treat
civilizations as if they were social facts, and carefully investigate the causal
mechanisms by which they become such facts. Social facts are those things that
“exist only because people collectively believe they exist and act accordingly”
(Finnemore and Sikkink, 2001:393). Mutually shared understandings both “set up
expectations about how the world works, such as what types of behavior are
legitimate and which identities are possible” (Klotz and Lynch, 2006:356) and are
“knowledge that makes social worlds come into being” (Pouliot, 2007:364). Social
facts “depend, by way of collective understanding and discourse, on the attachment
of collective knowledge to physical reality” (Adler 2013, 121) that is policies,
institutions and practices.
A ‘civilizational politics’ approach would concentrate on exploring how and
when civilizational-based thinking stabilizes turning civilizations into social facts by
becoming an organizing principle around which social action is conducted,
international institutions and practices are shaped, and actors are identified (see
Williams and Neumann, 2000). 16 Particular attention would be paid towards
investigating the causal processes through which emerging plural civilizational
modes of thinking, in and beyond the West, affect the way international politics
becomes reconstituted around civilizational categories and inter-civilizational
16
William and Neumann’s investigation into the background knowledge that led to the policy of NATO
enlargement following the end of the Cold War is one of the few, and one of the clearest, examples – albeit
one not directly couched in terms of an engagement with the civilizational turn in IR – of ‘civilizational
politics’ research. In their article, the authors trace how NATO’s enlargement was, among others, the
product of an explicit re-conceptualization among policymakers of the institution as “the military and
material expression of a value-based civilisational structure [i.e. the West]” (2000, 371).
25
relations. Rather than on contingency and deconstruction, the scholar’s interest is
on stabilization and social construction.17 The salient issue then is identifying the
mechanisms through which civilizations come to exist.
Overall, a ‘civilizational politics’ research paradigm builds upon and expands
what Peter Katzenstein (2010:12-13) has called a ‘primordiality’ approach to
civilizations. For Katzenstein ‘primordiality’ offers a via media between
‘dispositional’ approaches to civilizations, which take civilizations as concrete units
of analysis (similarly to what I identified as ‘civilizational dynamics’ research), and
‘discursive’ ones, which understand civilizations mostly in terms of power-laden
discourses (similar to ‘the politics of civilization/s’ research). In Katzenstein’s
words:
“Civilizations come to exist in the conventional understanding of that term
as “being believed to exist,” as tightly or loosely coupled, and taken-forgranted or highly contested cultural complexes. Being named is an
important aspect of the existence of civilizations, not just mere rhetoric or
cheap talk” (p.13).
This ‘believing’ and ‘naming’ civilizations into existence occurs for
Katzenstein mainly when civilizations are thought of in essentialist/primordialist
terms and as closed, clashing entities. Huntington’s books and articles, which have
been widely translated across the world, reaching thousands of people, have had –
17
Many of the differences outlined here between ‘civilizational politics’ and ‘the politics of civilization/s’
research paradigms, overlap with the distinctions that Iver Neumann (1999:see especially the concluding
chapter) identifies between how (modernist) constructivists and poststructuralists theorize processes of
identity formation and the role of identity in international relations.
26
according to Katzenstein (2010:13) – a powerful effect in shaping intersubjective
knowledge about what civilizations are and do in world politics today. Yet, why not
extend the ability to construct civilizations to those who understand them in nonessentialist ways (as, for example, Katzenstein and others do)? Furthermore, why
not extend the ability to construct civilizations to those who think about them as
likely to enter into dialogue and engage with one another rather than clashing (as,
for example, Petito and others do)? In the next section I will tackle in greater detail
the issues raised by these questions.
How ‘Civilizational Politics’ Research?
In this section I develop the theoretical, conceptual and methodological
framework for a more explicit ‘civilizational politics’ line of research anchored to a
modernist constructivist style of reasoning. Most constructivists share a dual
understanding of the “social construction of knowledge” and the “construction of
social reality” (Adler 2013, 113). By highlighting the interplay of how knowledge
and social reality are mutually constitutive of each other, constructivists see (and
investigate) the world as ‘coming into being’ rather than taking it a priori ‘as it is’.
These common assumptions have then led to the development of a wide variety of
constructivisms. A modernist constructivist lens “results from the combination of
objective hermeneutics with a ‘conservative’ cognitive interest in understanding and
explaining social reality [emphasis in original]” (Adler, 2013:116, see also Wendt,
1998). Modernist constructivists generally explore how “new ideas change political
discourse and the basic categories through which actors see reality” (Tannenwald,
27
2005:19-20) and how actors holding and reproducing these new ideas, discourses
and categories mobilize and change social reality.
For ‘civilizational politics’ research, understanding is involved when
recovering and interpreting the multiple ways in which social actors subjectively
and intersubjectively make sense of world politics in civilizational terms. Explaining
involves tracing instead the causal pathways and mechanisms that link emerging
ideas and discourses about civilizations to particular kinds of changes in world
politics along similar categories. Here I go into more detail into each of the steps
associated with understanding and explaining.
“The ideational capacities or mechanisms that enable ideas and beliefs to
affect policies”, Albert Yee (1996:94) highlights, “can be illuminated if networks of
ideas and systems of beliefs are viewed as languages or discourses.” Discourses are
“systems of signification”, that is “structure[s] of meaning-in-use” (Milliken,
1999:231), whose analysis and interpretation can reveal how actors define their
social realities. To recover widely held ideas about civilizations requires a turn
towards analyzing discourses, which are first and foremost the medium for “the
construction of intersubjective meanings” (Adler 2013, 125).
Yet this does not entail that we should simply borrow the language of the
actors under investigation and accept uncritically what they say. Actor’s discourses
are a springboard toward broader and deeper inquiries into the type of
intersubjective knowledge and meanings that have social and political power at any
given time. Actors’ interpretations of their reality, accessible to the scholar mostly
through the language actors use, require a process of objectification.
28
Put differently, the scholar needs to engage in interpretations of
interpretations. This is what is generally known as the hermeneutic circle (Klotz and
Lynch, 2006:356, Pouliot, 2007:364-68), which highlights the issue of relating
individual parts (specific beliefs and discourses) to the larger whole (a broader
system of meaning), while recognizing that the whole cannot be understood without
also comprehending its parts. The aim here is to chart a middle road between taking
uncritically the perspective of the practitioners in the field under investigation, and
unreflectively imposing one’s own categories on the social world. Objectification
from a participant specification perspective is oriented towards recovering what
agents understand to be real in the social world, interpret their subjective
knowledge in the context of intersubjective meanings, place these structures of
meanings within a historical context, and draw the social and political implications
that follow (Pouliot 2007, 364).
Over the past two decades two broad sets of discourses have come to
circulate in the international public sphere that can be interpreted as forming the
webs of meaning that sustain a larger turn towards thinking along civilizational
categories in world politics. First, actors have increasingly publicly come to define
themselves and others with broad cultural and religious categories such as, among
others, the ‘West’ (whether defined as Christian, Judeo-Christian, or Secular), the
‘Muslim/Islamic world’, ‘Asian values’ and ‘Confucian civilization’. Second, actors
have persistently come to discuss the dangers of existing or emerging conflicts, or
the need for improved dialogue and engagement, between, say, ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’
or ‘civilizations’, more broadly.
29
When actors participate in discourses about what the West, Muslim world or
Confucian culture are, and how these entities relate to each other, – whether
through conflict or dialogue – they are, among other things, participating in a larger
conversation about the place and role of civilizations in world politics. We can
interpret these two webs of discourse, as underpinning a broader intersubjective
structure, based on the idea that international life is increasingly structured around
plural civilizations, mostly understood in cultural and religious terms, and that what
happens within and between these entities matters to peace and security in
international relations.
This larger intersubjective structure of meaning can be understood to
represent a turn towards understanding one’s own and others’ identities along
‘civilizational imaginaries’. The notion of civilizational imaginary here builds on
Benedict Anderson’s (2006 [1983]) understanding of the nation-state as an
‘imagined community’ (see also O’Hagan 2002). As often observed, an imagined
community is not solely tied to nations, but can be understood more broadly to
underpin the way people come to believe they share a common identity, history and
destiny – also beneath and beyond territorially defined nation-states – with others
who they have never met but they believe share their values and expectations of
proper behavior (Adler, 1997:249-50, Buzan, 2004:135, O’Hagan, 2002:11-14).
The notions of ‘imaginary’ and ‘imagined community’ are important because
they help clear the conceptual ground for taking seriously the ways in which actors
come to understand, individually and collectively, the world around them in
civilizational terms. Anderson’s (2006 [1983]) effort to interpret nationalism as an
30
important carrier of knowledge and meaning was very much centered on his
understanding of ‘imagination’, which he conceptually contrasted with Ernest
Gellner’s view of nations as ‘invented’:
“Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that ‘Nationalism is not
the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents [sic.] nations
where they do not exist.’ The drawback of this formulation however, is that
Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false
pretences that he assimilates ‘invention’ to ‘fabrication’ and ‘falsity’, rather
than to ‘imagining’ and ‘creation’. In this way he implies that ‘true’
communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In
fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact
(and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished,
not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are
imagined”. (p.6)
This point elegantly captures what is at stake between taking civilizational
imaginaries and discourses mostly as reflections of the political, or instead on their
own terms. That is, either as genuinely believed by social agents or, at least, as
providing shared meanings that powerfully constitute identities and help make
reality more intelligible. As O’Hagan (2002) points out, civilizational identities can
“influence the way people believe the world should be, the goals that should be
striven for and, perhaps more fundamentally, the things that are at stake.” (p.11-12).
Hence, a ‘civilizational politics’ perspective is – following Anderson – less concerned
with establishing the falsity/genuineness of the concepts social actors use to frame
31
the world around them, concentrating instead on unpacking the ‘style’ in which
communities are imagined and talked about at a particular historical juncture.
Civilizational imaginaries appear today as imagined communities of a
particular kind. The end of the Cold War, the ensuing processes of globalization,
along with the unexpected events of 9/11, has been a time of rapid change and
fostered the sense of an uncertain future for many around the world. Under these
conditions, a growing sense of ‘ontological insecurity’ (Kinnvall, 2004) and ‘identity
crisis’ (Guzzini, 2012), some argue, is leading people to (re)imagine old and new
identities and ‘homes’ for themselves (see also Adler 1997, 250). For Barry Buzan
(2004), the end of the Cold War ushered in “a new world disorder defined by the
degree to which interhuman identities whether kinship, ethnonational, religious,
political-ideological, cultural or epistemic have spilled out of the state” (p.137). In
unsettled periods questions such as ‘who we are?’ and ‘how should we live?’ come
prominently to the fore of political life, in such circumstances cultural and religious
values and symbols can often provide important building blocks for the construction
of identities (see also Kinnvall, 2004, Lapid and Kratochwil, 1997, Swidler, 1986).
In parallel, processes of economic, political and cultural globalization have
brought to the fore of international politics a wide range of sub-state actors
(multinational corporations, transnational social movements, international nongovernmental organizations, religious institutions, terrorist networks, and so on)
and supra state organizations (whether international organizations, such as the UN,
or regional ones, such as the European Union or the Organization for Islamic
Cooperation). These actors have come to exist and act side-by-side, but also beyond,
32
beneath and through, nation-states. As John Gerard Ruggie (1993) points out,
territoriality is becoming ever more ‘unbundled’.
First, an important way in which ‘self’ and ‘other’ identifications are changing,
and boundaries are being re-imagined beyond territory is along what Adler calls
“cognitive regions”, that is “transnational nonterritorial regions constituted by
peoples’ shared values, norms, and practices” (Adler 1997, 252). This concept helps
also to capture the ways in which identities are being decoupled beyond the strict
confines of the nation-state. How people are increasingly subjectively and
intersubjectively giving meaning to their social existence, how they come to see
themselves fitting together and with others, in a world of plural civilizations.18
Second, in light of globalizing trends, civilizational imaginaries may function
as ‘strategic frames of reference’ (Petito, 2011) that give meaning to a complex and
multilayered international sphere on whose stage a dizzying array of political actors
increasingly perform - whether secular or religious individuals, non-state
organizations and movements, or supranational institutions. Civilizational
imaginaries capture the fact that, and help order a world where, international
18
This is not to say that states and national identities are withering. Indeed, the idea that the growth in
transnational flows and identities would render the state irrelevant is, using Ruggie (1993), “fundamentally
misplaced” (p.142). Moreover, identities are rarely singular, but operate as “concentric circles” (Adler 1997,
265) and through a “range of scales” (Buzan, 2004:135). These can go from more circumscribed
communitarian identities (family, clan, ethnicity), to larger ones (nations, religions), up to universally
shared identities (human race). Since individuals have multiple, parallel, and layered identities, the
identification of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in civilizational terms – while appearing, as O’Hagan (2002) also notes,
to be “an increasingly important one” (p.12) – does not necessitate however giving up other narrower
identities.
33
politics is no longer simply about inter-state relations, but also about relations
between and across supra-state, state, and sub-state levels.
In sum, I suggest that, at this point in time, civilizational imaginaries appear
to be underpinning a view of world politics that is not exclusively structured around
relations between institutionally-defined territorially-based states. But one that also
perceives international affairs as governed by relations among broad transnational
non-territorially based communities of peoples understood as sharing a common
history and identity – often based on cultural and religious values and markers. As
O’Hagan (2007), similarly puts it, the concept of civilizational identity provides a
“useful framework with which to understand how agents locate their identities in
broad, transnational, transtemporal cultural identities” (p.19, see also O’Hagan 2002,
11-13).
Nation-states do not disappear from this view of the international system.
They remain one of the most important political units through which people
mobilize and act along with other agents, thought, such as secular and religious substate and supra-state actors and organizations. All are thought of, however, as
embedded within, and representative of, particular civilizations. Civilizations (as
imagined communities), are perceived as underpinning the identities of most actors
in world politics, while also providing important frames of reference for making an
international reality, which has witnessed an exponential growth in non-state
political agency, more intelligible.
Civilizational imaginaries are conveyed and constructed through discursive
narratives (Browning and Lehti, 2010:20-22, Williams and Neumann, 2000:362).
34
There are multiple ways in which civilizations are subjectively and intersubjectively
imagined and publicly narrated by social actors.19 Civilizational narratives can take
the form, for example, of decline/triumph20 or superiority/inferiority.21 A set of
powerful civilizational narratives that have come to pervade understandings and
discussions about plural civilizations and their international relations following the
end of the Cold War, are also clearly reflected in the debates animating the current
literature on civilizations in IR.
Specifically, civilizational imaginaries are being narrated in: i) essentialist
and non-essentialist terms; and ii) as destined to violently clash and conflict, or as
able to dialogue and peacefully engage with each other. This categorization yields a
two-by-two matrix with essentialist and non-essentialist narratives about what
civilizations are on the vertical axis, and clash/conflict and dialogue/engagement
narratives about how civilizations relate to each other on the horizontal axis (see
Table 3).
[Add Table 3: Civilizational Narratives]
In order to fill the empty boxes above, we need to ask: who gets to narrate
civilizations? Also, whose civilizational imaginaries have the greatest influence on
19
For an excellent overview of the multiple and complex ways in which, across history, ‘Westerners’ have
narrated civilizations see O’Hagan (2002).
20
Narratives that are amply explored, when it comes to ‘the West’, in the volume by Browning and Lehti
(2010).
21
Narratives that are amply explored in the edited volume by Hall and Jackson (2007) and, from a non-
western and more historical perspective, in Cemil Aydin’s (2007) book.
35
international relations and its practices? Michael Barnett and Emanuel Adler (1998)
have found that “transnational identities are generally an elite-centered
phenomenon” (p.426). Recall Katzenstein’s ‘primordiality’ approach to civilizations,
which can be subsumed and expanded under a ‘civilizational politics’ paradigm. For
Katzenstein (2010), it is elites – such as Harvard-based professors like Samuel
Huntington – who are among the central carriers and constructors of primordial
civilizational identities:
“[Civilizations are] Deeply meaningful to many members of the cultural elite,
as self-conscious and lived identities, civilizations do not rank at the top for
most people and typically do not manifest themselves in an everyday sense
of strong belonging.” (p.12)
A ‘civilizational politics’ research paradigm would understand primordiality
as but one way in which civilizations can be narrated by political and intellectual
elites. We can picture the current civilizational scholarship in its entirety, for
instance, partaking in building narratives about what civilizations are and do.
Indeed we can even tentatively add scholars and scholarship explored in this very
same article at various intersections of the civilizational narratives matrix (see
Table 4). For example, the way Huntington understands the post-Cold War world
very much fits in the top-left corner of essentialized cultural-religious civilizations
in clash. Petito emphasizes the importance of recovering, rather than dismissing,
civilizational identities in order for genuine inter-cultural and inter-religious
dialogue and understanding to occur. His narrative, of what civilizations are and
36
(should) do, fits in the top-right corner where essentialization meets dialogue and
engagement.
Scholarship in ‘the politics of civilization/s’ can be added in the bottom-left
corner instead, where non-essentialization meets clash. This scholarship explores
the contested nature of civilizations, and especially civilizational discourses. In a
way this literature leaves a space open for tracing both essentialized and nonessentialized narratives of what civilizations are, but its critical lens leads it to
overwhelmingly focus on how particular interpretations of what civilizations are
and do crystallize around an understanding of civilizations as coherent, mutually
exclusive, conflicting entities. Lastly, in the bottom right corner, where nonessentialist perspectives meet dialogue, we can add Katzenstein’s understanding of
civilizations as marked predominantly by internal difference, rather than similarity,
and inter-civilizational encounters and engagements, rather than clashes.
Scholars and intellectual elites are important carriers of civilizational
imaginaries. However, research – as the following case study will show – can focus
also on the narratives put forward by secular and religious norm entrepreneurs,
epistemic communities, policymakers and political leaders.
[Add Table 4: Civilizational Analysis and Civilizational Narratives]
Identifying civilizational imaginaries and narratives and those who utter
them, is crucial along with understanding the evolution of intersubjective meanings
also to establishing causality. In fact, while discourse enables us to recover “the
37
actors’ understanding of the social world of which they are part”, it also “constitutes
and defines the social parts and practices of this world” (Lupovici, 2009:45).
‘Civilizational politics’ research, hence, should carefully trace the “fate of ideas”
(Pouliot, 2007:371) about civilizations – how they are displacing dominant beliefs,
whether there is congruence between ideas and behavior, and whether they are
becoming institutionalized. Attention to discourse is complemented with a
methodological interest in tracing the process and mechanisms22 through which the
carriers of civilizational imaginaries socially construct civilizations as meaningful
entities by causally influencing world politics.
There are three distinct, yet overlapping and often complementary, causal
pathways through which civilizational imaginaries and narratives – of essentialized
or non-essentialized civilizations in clash or dialogue – shape world politics and
socially construct civilizations as social facts. First, by guiding and structuring social
action (i.e. behavior and ‘speech acts’). Second, by shaping and becoming embedded
in the material structures of world politics such as formal institutions (i.e.
international organizations, state bureaucracies) and patterned practices (i.e.
diplomacy, aid, military interventions). Third, by bestowing recognition and socially
empowering those actors who claim to speak, or are believed to be speaking, for
civilizations.
22
As Lupovici (2009) suggests, “discourse analysis combined with process tracing can show that reality in
other time periods not only could have a different interpretation, but could have been differently developed”
(p.203). On combining discourse analysis and process tracing to establish causality in modernist
constructivist research see also Pouliot (2007), and Klotz and Lynch (2006).
38
The first pathway pays attention to the way civilizational narratives guide
and constrain social action in two ways: through ‘speech acts’ and through the
‘quasi-causal effect of intersubjective meanings’ on behavior. ‘Speech acts’, Adler
(2013, 125) points out, “have an ‘illocutionary’ dimension (doing something by
saying something); hence not only do they describe reality, they also construct it”.
Speech acts also socially construct reality by having perlocutionary effects (the
effects of utterances on listeners) (Yee, 1996:95), especially by producing rhetorical
responses and discursive interactions (Risse, 2000). Social agents “produce and
reproduce the intersubjective structures of meanings” – in this case civilizational
imaginaries –“through their communicative practices” (Risse, 2000:10).
Beyond speech acts, intersubjective meanings can “quasi-causally affect
certain actions”, Yee highlights, “by rendering these actions plausible or implausible,
acceptable or unacceptable, conceivable or inconceivable, respectable or
disreputable, etc.” (Yee, 1996:97). More specifically, meanings and ideas (embedded
in discourses), can be seen as constitutive of actors’ identities and preferences and
hence provide broad orientations and reasons for behavior (Tannenwald, 2005:14).
‘Civilizational politics’ research would investigate how civilizational imaginaries and
narratives provide “particular cognitive scripts and shape interpretations and
understandings of permissible actions” in the global arena (O’Hagan, 2007:21). In
sum, when social action, whether through speech or behavior, is oriented around
and towards a particular civilizational imaginary, by the simple fact that that
civilizational category is taken into account in words and deeds, contributes to
calling that community into existence.
39
A second causal pathway, through which civilizational imaginaries and
discourses influence international relations and reproduce civilizations as social
facts, is by shaping and becoming embedded in material institutions and practices.
The focus here is on unpacking how social agents create new, or reorient old,
international institutions and practices in accordance with their civilizational
narratives – whether essentialized or non-essentialized, and in conflict or in
dialogue. A ‘civilizational politics’ framework can draw here from the vast literature
on the causal mechanisms that secular and religious norm entrepreneurs, epistemic
communities, and policymakers employ to transmit and institutionalize their ideas
and beliefs.23
Civilizations, hence, also come to exist when civilizational imaginaries
become embedded in institutions and in policy practices. Constructivists have long
shown how institutions are the material manifestations of ideas and norms, as well
as the perpetuators of those ideas and norms that are encased within them (see also
Berman, 2001:237-41, Finnemore, 1996:405-07, Yee, 1996:88-92). More recently,
greater focus has been given to the material embodiment of ideas and meanings in
practices (Adler and Pouliot, 2011, Neumann, 2002, Pouliot, 2008). From a
‘civilizational politics’ perspective, practices can be thought of – to quote and
paraphrase Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot (2011) – as “socially meaningful
patterns of action, which, in being performed more or less competently,
23
See Finnemore and Sikkink (1998) for pioneering work on norm entrepreneurs and Adler and Haas
(1992) on epistemic communities. For religious actors as norm entrepreneurs and epistemic communities
see respectively Adamson (2005) and Sandal (2011). For an overview of ideational causal mechanisms see
Finnemore and Sikkink (2001:400-03), Tannenwald (2005:29-33), Yee (1996:86-92).
40
simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and
discourse”, about civilizations, “in and on the material world” (p.4).
I am not arguing here for the conceptualization of civilizations as institutions
or as ‘communities of practice’ (contra Adler, 2010). What I suggest is that, carefully
tracing how old or new institutions and practices are (re)designed around and
(re)oriented in line with civilizational narratives, helps illuminate how material
changes instantiate and reproduce civilizational imaginaries in world politics also
through the “play of practice” (Milliken, 1999:230).
A third pathway towards empirically explaining why, when and how
civilizational imaginaries can shape international politics and become reified
entities, is to trace processes of social recognition and empowerment. Both insiders’
and outsiders’ narratives play an important role in defining what civilizations are
and how they relate. As William and Neumann (2000) point out “[the] successful
embodiment of a given identity depends also on the recognition by others of the
narrative itself and of their acquiescence to its adoption by the particular actor
involved” (p.363; see also Browning and Lehti 2010b, 24-27). The point here is that
civilizations are socially constructed when people somewhere not only identify
themselves but are also recognized by others as either the archetype
representatives of a civilization (when essentializing), or as representing a
part/section of an internally differentiated civilization (when non-essentializing).
Recognition socially legitimizes and materially empowers old and new actors
that understand themselves, or are understood by others, as representatives of this
or that civilization. Scholars may want to empirically trace how emerging social
41
actions, institutional arrangements, and material practices structured around
civilizational imaginaries, channel authority and material resources to actors who
claim for themselves, or are perceived by others, as speaking and acting for
civilizations – either as the onward soldiers of civilizational clashes, or as the
promoters of inter-civilizational dialogues.
Islamist Actors and ‘Dialogue of Civilizations’
There are few cases of ‘civilizational politics’ research being conducted – especially
research that explores the social and material reification of civilizations beyond
clashes and beyond the West. A rare example, albeit one which is not framed
explicitly in ‘civilizational politics’ terms, is Turan Kayaoğlu’s (2012) article
“Constructing the Dialogue of Civilizations in World Politics: a Case of Global Islamic
Activism”.
Kayaoğlu opens by noting how, since the 1990s: “The dialogue of civilizations
has been increasingly institutionalized in world politics” (p.129).24 In order to
explain this puzzle, the author investigates the way in which a number of Islamic
actors increasingly came to see the world split along civilizational lines, and how
24
For example the UN designated 2001 as the Year of Dialogue among Civilizations. UNESCO selected
‘dialogue among civilizations’ as a ‘strategic objective’ for the period 2002–07. In 2004 the Spanish Prime
Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cosponsored the Alliance of Civilizations, which generated a UN High-Level Group on the dialogue of
civilizations in 2006. A growing number of NGOs have emerged in the last decade also calling for
civilizational dialogues, such as: the Foundation for Dialogue among Civilisations, the Institute for
Interreligious Dialogue, the Center for Dialogue, the World Public Forum ‘Dialogue of Civilizations’, the
Comprehensive Dialogue among Civilizations, the Dialogue Euroasia Forum, and the Anna Lindh EuroMediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue Between Cultures.
42
they successfully took the lead in promoting and institutionalizing a series of
“dialogue of civilizations” initiatives. In this section I re-read Kayaoğlu’s article
through a more explicit ‘civilizational politics’ lens in order to explore the empirical
import of such a research paradigm.
Kayaoğlu starts by implicitly distancing himself from civilizational analysis
research rooted in a scholarly specification ontology, and in particular from what I
identified earlier as ‘inter-civilizational ethics’ research. “Unlike other works, which
focus on the ‘true’ nature of the dialogue of civilizations and its importance for
global coexistence and peace,” Kayaoğlu explains, “the focus of this article is the
emergence and spread of this agenda among Muslims” (p.129).
Kayaoğlu takes a markedly interpretivist approach to empirical enquiry into
civilizations. Unlike the majority of ‘the politics of civilization/s research’, however,
his article focuses on exploring the diffusion of norms and processes of social
construction (evident also in the article’s title), rather than on deconstructing
narratives. Given the author’s implicit preference for a participant specification
ontology, he does not provide us with a definition of what the ‘Muslim world’ or the
‘West’ are or are not. Nor does he tell us whether civilizations are destined to clash
or not. Kayaoğlu’s main concern is instead to investigate the meanings that
individual and collective actors assign to the Muslim world and to intercivilizational relations.
The focus in the first part of the article is on recovering and interpreting
civilizational imaginaries and narratives. Attention is devoted to a plurality of
Islamist voices that suddenly emerged following the end of the Cold War, calling for
43
a civilizational dialogue between the Muslim world and other civilizations and
religions, especially the West and Christianity. As a ‘civilizational politics’
framework anticipates, Kayaoğlu finds the clearest articulation of ‘dialogue of
civilizations’ norms among political and intellectual elites, most prominently
Mohammad Khatami former-president of Iran.
In the post-Cold War and then post-9/11 worlds, the Muslim narratives of
dialogue are shown in relation, and direct in competition, with other civilizational
narratives. With essentialized narratives of civilizations in clash coming from
certain Islamists actors such as those of Sayyid Qutb and Osama Bin Laden which
portray “Islamic and Western values [as] mutually exclusive and antagonistic”. As
well as clash narratives coming from outside the Muslim world, especially those of
American-based scholars such as “the historian Bernard Lewis” and “the political
scientist Samuel Huntington” (p.131). In this context, Islamic actors would mostly
frame the dialogue of civilizations in two ways. As an opportunity to promote an
Islamic revival through learning and engagement with other civilizations in a
globalizing world, and as a tool to help overcome misconceptions of Islam and
Muslims across cultures and religions (p.133). In the process, Kayaoğlu’s paper
shows how a re-conceptualization of international politics along inter-civilizational
relations is taking place between Muslim and non-Muslim elites.
The motives (i.e. the politics) leading Islamist actors to call for dialogue are
multiple. Probably there is an element of material interest, especially in the case of
president Khatami, seen as attempting to score political points vis-à-vis domestic
opponents (p.134). Yet, Kayaoğlu argues, instrumentalist logics cannot fully explain
44
Khatami’s continued support for the dialogue of civilizations, even after his tenure
as president.25 Khatami’s endorsement of civilizational narratives of dialogue seems
to go beyond political expediency and appears to be rooted, according to Kayaoğlu,
in his intellectual appreciation of Habermasian communicative rationality, his
preference for a multicultural international society, and his view of world history as
cyclical, where civilizations rise and decline, rather than linear and progressive,
directed towards a teleological secular-liberal endpoint (pp.134-35).
Implicit in Khatami’s view, is an understanding of civilizations in nonessentialist terms. Khatami is shown to recognize the plurality of voices, both within
the West and the Muslim world, that believe in the possibility (in the case of
Huntington), or the necessity (in the case of Bin Laden), of a clash of civilizations. In
order to sideline these voices, and turn the clash into a distant nightmare rather
than a present day occurrence, Khatami is seen to relentlessly advocate for ties
across civilizations, and especially with those in the West willing to enter into a
dialogue.
All in all, hence, whether dialogue of civilizations narratives are adopted for
instrumental reasons, or genuinely believed, is of marginal importance. What
emerges from Kayaoğlu’s investigation is how such narratives become meaningful
to Khatami and other Muslim actors as a way to either make sense of, or advance
their interests in, the post-Cold War world. “Muslim groups and leaders support this
agenda because it constructs a frame of reference (a meta-frame) that provides
25
Khatami established in 2004 a Tehran-based International Institute for Dialogue among Cultures and
Civilizations, and in 2007 a Geneva-based Foundation for Dialogue among Civilizations.
45
symbols and a vision” – Kayaoğlu explains – “that empowers some Islamic
discourses, groups, and normative positions over and against other Islamic and nonIslamic discourses, groups, and normative positions” (p.130).
The three broad causal pathways through which civilizational imaginaries
become instantiated within, and reproduced through, the structures of international
society are present to different degrees in Kayaoğlu’s account. First, Khatami’s
interpretation of world politics in need of improved inter-civilizational
understanding becomes closely linked to the former Iranian president’s lobbying
activities, and a series of speeches delivered, particularly within the context of the
OIC. Khatami most clearly and publicly introduced the dialogue of civilizations
agenda in 1997, when chairing OIC’s 8th Summit Conference in Tehran. Khatami’s
advocacy was effective in bringing on board OIC member states as the Summit
Conference ended with a declaration calling for, among others things, greater
emphasis on the dialogue of civilizations.
Second, the author carefully traces the passages through which Khatami –
thanks to mechanisms of communicative action and persuasion – was able to
progressively reorient the OIC, its institutional structures and practices, towards
dialogue of civilizations imaginaries. Throughout the 1990s, the term ‘dialogue’
within the OIC progressively shifted from one centered on “dialogue and
cooperation among all nations”, to one where dialogue “took on an increasingly
religious and cultural connotation” (p.136). From the late 1990s onwards,
particularly following Khatami’s efforts, the dialogue of civilizations “became an
integral part of the OIC’s global vision and agenda […] both as a means to change
46
Islam’s image in international society and as a perspective on international relations”
(pp.136-37). Three OIC bodies were then directly assigned to carry forward this
agenda: the Dawa Affairs Committee; the Research Centre for Islamic History, Arts
and Culture (IRCICA); and the Islamic Educational Scientific and Cultural
Organization (ISESCO).
Along with institutions, changes in practices, based on improving intercivilizational relations, followed. New policies and programs started being
implemented by the OIC, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. “Symposia, seminars,
and workshops on Islamic culture” were held to “disseminate ‘correct’ ideas about
Islam” and “improve Islam’s global image” (p.138). “Interfaith dialogue” activities
were undertaken to “highlight the beliefs and practices shared by all faiths” (p.138).
OIC’s ISESCO became particularly active in organizing conferences “both among
Muslim-majority states and between Muslim and non-Muslim states”, and
supporting “dialogue-related publications”, as well as “lobbying for the dialogue of
civilizations at UNESCO” (p.139).
The third causal pathway for socially constructing civilizations is also
present in Kayaoğlu’s account. With Muslim majority states empowering the OIC to
seek a dialogue with other civilizations, the organization has increasingly come to
conceive of itself, and has become perceived by non-Muslim actors alike, as a
legitimate representative and speaker for Muslim civilization. As Kayaoğlu points
out: “[the] OIC’s sense of importance and legitimacy grew as the idea of dialogue of
civilizations found broader international acceptance” (p.137). In the process the OIC
has increasingly come to “internalize the dialogue agenda as its defining quality in
47
its engagement with the organs of broader international society” (pp.137-38). In
2008, its charter was revisited to provide the OIC with an even greater role for
dialogue of civilizations objectives.
Changes in actions, institutions and practices, along with the emergence of
voices recognized as embodying a civilizational narrative of dialogue between the
Muslim world and others, were not limited to the OIC. Thanks to Khatami’s initial
efforts and to the OIC’s growing ownership of the dialogue agenda, further
initiatives and practices gained ground from the late 1990s onwards. In November
1998, the UN General Assembly debated and then agreed to President Khatami’s
proposal to designate the year 2001 as the UN year of Dialogue among Civilizations.
Following Khatami, the OIC then “became the intergovernmental basis through
which Islamic groups and activists have promoted the dialogue agenda [and
pushed] for change within the UN” (p.135). This prepared the ground that lead the
Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to co-sponsor, in 2004 in the post-9/11 climate, a
UN initiative known as the Alliance of Civilizations. This initiative became fully
institutionalized in the UN’s structure in 2006.
Kayaoğlu further traces how the rise of civilizational narratives of dialogue
led to changes not only within international organizations, but also opened the
space for activities at the civil society level. Multiple Muslim activists developed an
interfaith discourse from the 1990s onwards to accommodate the religious other,
established interfaith-oriented NGOs and initiatives, and reached out to followers of
other religions at both the grassroots and elite levels. Two examples are given of
48
Muslim religious leaders who felt increasingly empowered to provide theological
justifications for including the dialogue agenda in Islamic political thought: the
Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen, founder of the Gülen movement; and a broadbased coalition of Muslim scholars and leaders signatory to the ‘A Common Word’
document lead by Prince Ghazi, director of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic
Thought in Jordan. Both sought to challenge “the basic assumption of the clash of
civilizations and pave the way for a dialogue of civilizations within a religious
framework” (p.144). These initiatives “both strengthened and extended the dialogue
agenda, substantiating it with religious ideas and thus legitimizing it among Muslim
organizations and the masses” (p.140).
Dialogue of civilization imaginaries have led with time, Kayaoğlu observes, to
a “deep-rooted change in Islamic thought and practice regarding world politics”
(p.145). The meanings embedded within the sum of actors’ (sub-state, state and
supra-state) discourses and actions, the changes in institutions and practices to
manage inter-civilizational relations, along with the growing recognition bestowed
on claimants of a civilizational identity, appear to be inescapably turning
civilizational dialogues into a social fact for many in the Muslim world and its
beyond.
Conclusion
This article sought to comprehensively map out the emergent field of civilizational
analysis in IR and identify avenues for future theoretical and empirical inquiry. On
the one hand, civilizational research was divided according to whether it is rooted in
49
a scholarly or a participant specification ontology. On the other hand, IR’s
civilizational turn was divided among scholars taking an analytical approach to
theory and those taking a more normative/critical one. The payoffs of dividing the
field in this way are multiple. Most importantly, in terms of this article, the mapping
exercise highlighted how a line of civilizational research which combines a
participant specification ontology with an analytical approach to theory has
received little sustained theoretical and empirical attention thus far. I called this
research paradigm ‘civilizational politics’.
A more self-conscious and explicit ‘civilizational politics’ line of research has
the ability to broaden and move forward the nascent civilizational turn in IR in
promising ways. By virtue of being anchored to a participant specification ontology,
this line of research pragmatically sidesteps broad, abstract, and, for some,
politically-tainted conceptual debates seeking to define and identify what
civilizations are and do. These debates have tended to dominate the civilizational
turn in IR. ‘Civilizational politics’ offers instead an important avenue for
theoretically-inclined, empirically-minded, scholars to get on with the business of
exploring how individual and collective actors have come to understand and change
world politics as if plural civilizations existed and their relations mattered.
Moreover, a ‘civilizational politics’ research paradigm anchors more firmly –
than has been the case thus far – a participant specification ontology lens to an
analytical, rather than a critical, approach to theory. Critical participant research has
overwhelmingly been concerned with showing how exclusionary boundaries
between selves and others are opportunistically re-drawn from moment to moment,
50
highlighting the contingent nature of (mostly) essentialized Western discourses
about civilizational ‘others’ and their legitimating effects on policies. First, an
analytical participant approach to civilizations would broaden the focus towards the
multiple ways in which civilizations are thought of and talked about in multiple
locations. Second, it directs particular attention to the causal pathways through
which meanings become fixed and civilizational-thinking turns civilizations into
social facts. Such an interpretative line of civilizational research – which Katzenstein
(2010) partially identifies in his discussion of ‘primordialist’ approaches to
civilizations – is only latent in the literature.
Most importantly, the article sought to tease out the theoretical, conceptual,
and methodological grounding for conducting ‘civilizational politics’ research in IR.
First, it suggested that the growing invocations of plural civilizations in public
discourses be understood as the instantiation and reproduction of a particular kind
of subjective and intersubjective knowledge structure. Building on O’Hagan (2002),
the article contended that actors are increasingly conceiving of their, and mapping
others’, identities along broad cultural, transnational, inter-human, and deterritorialized imagined communities. These are what were called civilizational
imaginaries. Civilizational imaginaries are instantiated by narratives, which at this
historical juncture regularly frame civilizations as: (i) essentialized or nonessentialized entities, (ii) that interact either through clashes and conflict or through
dialogue and peaceful exchange.
Making sense of civilizations as multiple narrated imagined communities
places greater emphasis on the fact that such imaginaries are powerful carriers of
51
meaning and knowledge, rather than debating at length the ‘falsity/genuineness’
(Anderson, 2006 [1983]:6) of these beliefs. Narrated civilizational imaginaries mark
a shift, especially among elites, from interpreting international peace and security as
determined exclusively by what occurs within and between states, to one that is also
dependent on what goes on within and between a plurality of civilizations.
The second step was then to outline how narrated civilizational imaginaries
turn inter-civilizational relations into social facts by affecting world politics through
processes of enactment, institutionalization, and recognition. In terms of enactment
and institutionalization, the focus was placed on causally tracing how social actions,
international institutions and patterned practices are (re)shaped towards narrated
civilizational imaginaries – whether essentialized or non-essentialized and in clash
or in dialogue. In terms of recognition, attention was placed on identifying how
changes in discourses, actions, institutions and practices can normatively legitimate
and materially empower those actors seen as representing civilizations.
In sum, this article has attempted to advance an explicit framework for IR
scholars to make sense of how actors are re-imaging themselves, and explaining
how they are transforming and re-constituting international politics, around
multiple civilizational imaginaries. The empirical import of a ‘civilizational politics’
line of research was explored through a re-reading of Turan Kayaoğlu’s (2012)
investigation into how non-essentialized narratives of civilizational dialogue have
become a significant component of contemporary Muslim and international thought,
institutions, and practices.
A ‘civilizational politics’ framework, however, opens up a host of further
52
interesting questions and avenues for research. It can be used to explore, for
instance, the multiple narratives among American elites about the ‘Muslim world’.
Scholars, for instance, have neglected that many American elites have often
emphasized dialogue and engagement (see for instance the US-Muslim Engagement
Project, 2009), rather than solely clash and confrontation with the Muslim ‘other’.
These narratives seem, for instance, to have found their way into Obama’s (2009)
Cairo Address and the activities that followed (Lynch, 2010).
Further research could also explore why and how Zapatero and Erdoğan took
the lead in institutionalizing the Alliance of Civilization at the UN. A closer look
should also be given to the Alliance of Civilization itself. Which actors and narratives
dominate the agenda, representing and reifying which civilizations? How does the
UN negotiate its commitment to nation states and individual human rights, with the
recognition it increasingly bestows also on civilizational identities? The hope is that,
by advancing a more explicit ‘civilizational politics’ framework for research, IR
scholars pay ever more sustained theoretical and empirical attention to the causes,
consequences and meaning of these remarkable changes in international society.
53
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Tables
Table 1: Mapping Civilizational Analysis in IR
Analytical Theory
Normative / Critical
Theory
Scholarly Specification
Ontology
Participant Specification
Ontology
Table 2: Civilizational Research Paradigms in IR
Analytical Theory
Normative / Critical
Theory
Scholarly Specification
Civilizational
Inter-Civilizational
Ontology
Dynamics
Ethics
Participant Specification
(Civilizational Politics)
The Politics of
Ontology
Civilization/s
60
Table 3: Civilizational Narratives
Clash/Conflict
Dialogue/Engagement
Essentialist
Non-Essentialist
Table 4: Civilizational Analysis and Civilizational Narratives
Clash/Conflict
Dialogue/Engagement
Essentialist
Samuel Huntington
Fabio Petito
Non-Essentialist
‘The politics of
Peter Katzenstein
civilization/s’
61