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

35). It was therefore relatively easy for mainstream International Relations scholarship
to absorb civilizational essentialism as one among other sources of state interest, adding
civilizational membership to the list of potential factors affecting state action.
Unfortunately, once scholars did this and began to comparatively evaluate the relative
importance of civilizational ties versus other factors, like religious affiliation (Fox 2001)
and traditional state concerns with power and wealth (Russett, Oneal, and Michael Cox
2000), civilizational considerations started to drop out of the equations, and these days
Huntington’s famous thesis receives little sustained scholarly attention in most of the
field of International Relations.
Civilizational essentialism, then, had little to offer to academic International
Relations scholarship after a brief flurry of excitement in the late 1990s (and in point of
fact, most of that excitement was played out in policy journals like Foreign Affairs and
The National Interest rather than in social-scientific journals—good for the circulation of
some essentialist commonplaces, perhaps, but less good as a vehicle for shaping the
field). In fact, even if one wanted to persist with the state-centrism of academic
International Relations, other quadrants of the conversation might prove more fruitful.
A focus on civilizational processes and constellations as part of the structural context
within which states act might provide a more nuanced way to analyze patterns of
alliance and enmity between states than a search for dispositional essences in the sphere
of basic values; in this volume, Lawrence and Kang incline the most clearly in this
direction. A focus on civilizational identity might attack that problem from the opposite
angle, updating classic work on “security communities” by looking more closely at the
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 40