Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations

Book excerpt: Explicitly engaging and criticizing Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, Salter (The American U., Cairo, Egypt) places Huntington's thesis in context of long line of discourses justifying imperialism. Acknowledging a debt to post-structuralist theory, he argues that Huntington distinguishes between a civilized West and a barbarous Islam that is the natural enemy of civilization. In order to expose and delegitimize this attempt to "reinscribe imperial cartographies on the post-Cold War order," he traces the civilization/barbarian discourse through the 19th and 20th centuries, in order to illustrate the political function that the discourse serves in international relations theory. Distributed by Stylus. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR