How to Think About Civilizations - The Watson Institute for ...

through colonial domination. Civilizations in these conceptualizations remain separate
from one another, but conflictual consequences do not inevitably follow.
“Dialogue among civilizations” arguments, however, are susceptible to two
different avenues of critique. Civilizational essentialists criticize dialogue much the way
that International Relations realists have been known to criticize liberal and
constructivist strategies for promoting peaceful relations among states: as long as
civilizations remain essentially separate from one another, the possibility of conflict
remains eternally present, and a prudent civilization (or its prudent representatives)
needs to take this into account…which basically vitiates any effort to permanently
escape a clash of civilizations. Post-essentialist scholars would call attention to the fact
that the very idea of a dialogue implies separate parties to that dialogue, and that
separation makes calls for dialogue collapse into a hopelessly optimistic view of what
separate civilizations would do in relation to one another; their prescription, of course,
would be to move even further away from essentialism and focus on boundary
practices if one actually wants to avoid a clash of civilizations. But where civilizational
essentialists might claim that no cross-civilizational interaction can do much to alter the
underlying dynamics of inter-civilizational relations, post-essentialist scholars might
argue that a series of dialogues and debates might have an effect if—and only if—they
resulted in the production of novel conceptual tools for making sense of global
diversity, and if those tools were subsequently disseminated far and wide enough to
affect the conditions of possibility for action of public officials and ordinary people
alike.
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 37