For Monday: Clash of Civilizations

For Monday, read Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations? The Debate." This is the 29-page article originally published in the journal "Foreign Affairs," not the book.

The article is available in English here.

If you want to read it in Georgian, go ahead. But if your English is sufficiently good, I suggest you stick to English. We may want to read sections out loud, so try to print off a copy and bring it with you to class. The GIPA library supposedly has a copy. I don't know if it's in Georgian or English.

Also, please try to read the reply to Huntington by Fouad Ajami, the Mideast scholar at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. His short article is here.

Everyone should read Edward Said's scathing critique of Huntington here. Said's article is very powerful; he thinks Huntington's analysis is simplistic and naive.

If you want to do more reading, here is an interview with Huntington just after September 11 on how events were validating his theories. And here is a video of Edward Said lecturing at the University of Massachusetts on what he calls "the myth of culture clash."