Samuel P. Huntington and his ideas Samuel P. Huntington authored the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order which was published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster Inc. The book is an expanded version of an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine in 1993 titled The Clash of Civilizations? When the article came out during the post-Cold War era, it provoked a debate among foreign relations experts because of its contrary view that conflicts will continue to threaten world stability. The prevailing sentiment then was that the end of the Cold War signaled the end of hostilities among nations. Huntington argued that while ideological differences were behind the Cold War, cultural and religious animosities will fuel the new conflicts. Born in New York in 1927, Huntington was a soldier, scholar, teacher and foreign relations expert. At age 18, he graduated with honors at Yale University , after which he served in the US Army . He returned to civilian life by working for a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago followed by a PhD at Harvard University , where he started teaching at age 23. From 1950 until his death in 2008 at age 81, Huntington was a member of Harvard’s Department of Government. He also served as deputy director of Columbia University’s Institute for War and Peace studies, and consultant to the US Department of State at the same time. Huntington’s first major book was The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (1957), which is considered the most influential book on American civil-military relations . This was followed by the book Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), which challenged the conventional view of modernization theorists that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently decolonized countries. When Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations? for Foreign Affairs magazine, it made the same ripple effect such that he expanded it to book length and published it as The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996. In the book, Huntington maintains that while conflicts in the Cold War occurred between the communist East and capitalist West, they will now occur among the world’s major civilizations with religious and cultural underpinnings. Fault line conflicts and core state conflicts The clash of civilizations theory postulates that the bloodiest conflicts in this century would take place between Islamic and Western civilizations. According to this thesis of Huntington, the fall of communism signaled by the breakup of the former Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Cold War era in which the protagonists were the forces of democracy and communism. In place of these opposing forces, the clash theory holds that the post-Cold War world will be increasingly polarized between Islamic and Western civilizations and societies. The new world order seen by Huntington after the Cold War, in which the bloodiest clashes will occur between Islam and the West, was actually prefigured by events in early history that included the European forays of Islamic forces in Europe. Troops carrying the Islamic flag supposedly attacked and conquered the Ottoman Turks in Vienna and parts of Eastern Europe but they were later repulsed from Iberia. In effect, there had always been an