Terrorism, Instability, and Democracy in Asia and Africa

Chapter 3: A Clash of Civilizations, the Democratic Peace, the Poverty–Terrorism Nexus, or Regime Instability

chapter 3 A Clash of Civilizations, the Democratic Peace, the Poverty–Terrorism Nexus, or Regime Instability O ne of the main focuses of this book is to explain terrorism in Africa and Asia. To this end, we examine four factors that may inhibit or encourage terrorist activity. We will examine the effect that differences in civilization, democratization levels, poverty, and instability have on both international and domestic terrorism levels. The Clash of Civilizations Thesis and the Democratic Peace Thesis are both well-established theories in political science. The poverty–terrorism nexus is a more recent theory in political science. Instability has been used quite often in studies of conflict as both a control and an explanatory variable. Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington’s 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, “The Clash of Civilizations ?,” and his subsequent book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) serve as the seminal works on the civilization thesis . These works are not without controversy, and many scholars have found the arguments contained within to be xenophobic. The main gist of the Huntington argument is that the post–Cold War world will be increasingly defined by a clash of divergent and incompatible civilizations. For Huntington , relationships between states will not be predominantly defined by realist notions of power relations or liberalist adherence to international institutions and international law. Instead, conflict and cooperation between states will increasingly be defined by cultural similarities and differences. Huntington identifies eight major “civilizations” and argues that international and domestic fault lines, where conflict becomes likely if not inevitable , emerge when disparate civilizations bump up against one another. 26 Huntington further argues that globalization is simultaneously separating people from national identities, thus causing them to identify with more amorphous and far broader notions of civilization, while also placing disparate civilizations into closer proximity through rapid and easy transportation and communication outlets (1993: 26). Huntington also notes that religious revival provides a new basis for identity that “transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations” (1993: 26). Finally, Huntington notes that conflict between Arab Islamic civilization and Western/Christian civilization is one of the “great antagonistic interaction[s]” (1993: 33). Why did Al-Qaeda perpetrate the World Trade Center bombings and Pentagon bombings on 11 September 2001? For Huntington it was because ease of global transportation and communication made it possible for the Islamic civilization to strike out against the Western/Christian civilization. Huntington is no longer the lone voice envisioning a serious clash between Islamic and Christian culture. From the “Terrorist Notebooks”— notes kept by members of an Uzbekistani Islamic, fundamentalist, terrorist group—we find a connection between the clashes of civilizations, Islam versus Christianity, being used as a justification to rise up against secular governmental rule. In one of the recovered notebooks it was written , “To make a declaration of the fact that unbelievers and the government are oppressors; that they are connected with Russians, Americans and Jews to whose music they are dancing; and they don’t think about their people” (Olcott and Babajanov, 2003: 36). In the Uzbekistani terrorist mind, any government that is not predominated by Islamic teachings and/or that traffics with Western/Judeo-Christian states is illegitimate. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon relate that a document procured at an Al-Qaeda terrorist training camp speaks about a continued clash of civilization between the Islamic and Western/Christian world. The “letter of introduction ” to the training camp reads, “The Jihad today is an appointed duty and every Muslim has no legal excuse. It is a sin to abandon the jihad, for if one inch of Muslim land is occupied, it is the duty of the Muslims to save that inch” (2002: 8). What is most disturbing about this Al-Qaeda directive is that Osama bin Laden has stated, on several occasions, a state that is considered need not be all or even predominantly Islamic. Any state with a “significant” Muslim population must be liberated. What percentage must be Muslim has never been defined by Al-Qaeda. The fault line between Islam and Christianity is also apparent in United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting patterns. Islamic states voted in line with Western states during the Cold War. But Erik A Clash of Civilizations 27 Voeten found that “Islamic countries were, in the 1990s, relatively further removed from the ‘West’ than during the Cold War era,” which he attributed to “increasing civilizational conflict between the Western...