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

possessed by states. A shift to a conception of world politics dominated by essential
civilizations might get rid of state-centrism, but essential actors would remain.
In that way, the most important potential contribution that the debate about
civilizations might make to academic International Relations would be to dissolve
essentialism along the lines that contemporary scholars of civilization have critiqued
Huntington. Loosening the theoretical definition of an actor to incorporate selfconceptions
more centrally would be a first step, since that would make room for the
emergence of actors like “Europe” out of collective identifications. Tracing the diffusion
of characteristic practices would be a second step, since that might show us how
different social arrangements that we might associate with actors like “China” or “the
Islamic world” need not always occur together. And a turn to post-essentialism, finally,
would unpack actor-hood more or less completely, allowing International Relations
scholarship to focus on how various attributions of actor-hood become
commonsensical: how it comes to make sense to say that “the Islamic world” did
something, or that “the West” reacted in a particular way. This is a phenomenon akin to
the way that it has become commonsensical to say that “France” or “the United States”
did something—a commonsensical assumption that is normally passed over in most
International Relations scholarship. Opening up this line of inquiry—paving the way
for post-essentialist scholarship in the scholarly field of International Relations—might be
the ultimate academic consequence of continuing the conversation about civilizations in
world politics.
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 43