War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

The concept of a “civilizational fault line” was popularized by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington argued that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, different countries began aligning themselves not along the ideological divide between communism and liberalism, but reverted to older sources of large-scale identity, based on belonging to various world civilizations. Huntington’s thesis provoked a storm of controversy, and I myself could quibble with many of the points that he raised. Nevertheless, the decade since he wrote the book has amply demonstrated that his main insight is correct. The events of 9/11 and the wars that the United States subsequently waged in Afghanistan and Iraq are precisely the kind of a “fault-line war” that he predicted.