Thread by @YoniAbramson

What do we think about the rise of this new political entity, called “the civilizational state”? Several #IR works offer guidance regarding the relationship between #civilizations and the liberal international order. A (long!) thread--->

https://twitter.com/bentleyballan/status/1102923326006145029

1) The discussion often starts with an understanding of civilizations as culturally distinct units. For Huntington, a consensus-based liberal order is not durable because civilizational differences are incommensurable.
amazon.com/Clash-Civiliza…

2) But as Huntington’s critics have shown, civilizations have porous borders and are internally pluralistic. Katzenstein’s trilogy, for example, shows that there are more trans-civilizational engagements and inter-civilizational interactions.
amazon.com/gp/product/041…

3) Acknowledging that there is an ethical and political crisis of the liberal order, @Petito_F underscores a “dialogue of civilizations” to build a new normative foundation for an international order.
academic.oup.com/isr/article/18…

4) But there is still a question of whether civilizations are useful as descriptive labels to organize social reality. Civilizations are also categories of practice: Invoking “civilizations” brings a certain vision of social reality and mobilize people to realize this vision.

5) Jackson (@profptj) shows that the notion of a “Western civilization” emerged as a rhetorical commonplace during legitimation contests. Following this logic, the durability of “the West” is dependent upon the rhetorical strategies and the communal practices that constitute it.

6) Jackson's book can be found here: amazon.com/Civilizing-Ene…

A good review of civilizational analysis is Bettiza (2014):
academic.oup.com/isr/article/16…

7) Civilizational discourses of foreign policy, combining universalism and exceptionalism, are not new in China, Turkey, Russia, or India. The question is when civilizational discourses become salient and why.

8) Some chapters in Guzzini’s edited volume show that civilizational discourses become dominant in response to foreign policy identity crisis due to their essentializing and anchoring characteristics.
amazon.com/Return-Geopoli…

9) Finally, this discussion is directly related to a new phenomenon of international relations, the reconfiguration of the relationship between states and their #diaspora and the emergence of “Global Nations.” But this is for another thread...