Religious Radicalism and Security in South Asia

Abstract : In the immediate aftermath of its publication, Harvard University Professor Samuel P. Huntington's 1993 Foreign Affairs article entitled The Clash of Civilizations? generated a firestorm of debate. Critics called it an overstatement, simplistic, even mischievous. A decade later, his central thesis that conflicts between religion- based civilizations would dominate world politics in the coming century seemed to be holding its ground. Indeed, more than a few seasoned observers of world politics were expressing the view that Huntington's argument had been substantially vindicated by events that, by almost any imaginable measure, religion had emerged in the first years of the twenty-first century not only as a central issue of international public discourse but also as a central ingredient in violent global conflict. It is unlikely that Huntington himself could have foreseen either the rapidity or extent of religion's rise to prominence in world affairs. He had warned, of course, that Islam had especially bloody borders; but that the rough outlines of a global fault line war pitting the West against the Islamic world, or at least against its most refractory components, would be in place less than a decade hence was clearly beyond anyone's powers of prophecy.