Terror = civilizations in conflict?

When people from Western countries are killed in a terrorist attack carried out by a fanatical Islamist group, some media commentators are tempted to refer to the cross-civilization conflict.

In his now famous but controversial 1993 Foreign Affairs essay (later a book) "The Clash of Civilizations", political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that the great divisions among humankind will in future be cultural, and the chief cultural fault line in the post-Cold War world occurs where the West meets Islam.

Huntingdon was writing pre-9/11 and before the US led-invasion of Iraq. Had he put his finger on the pulse of human affairs or was his anaylsis too glib and too offensive for a complex world? Was his equation too simple?

Whatever your opinions or beliefs, the notion of cross-civilization conflict has firmly established itself in the human psyche. DW has assembled an online archive to help you chart your way through a subject that affects nearly all of us.

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