Srinagar, July 8 -- In the final decade of the 20th century, political scientist Samuel P. Huntington proposed a theory that would reshape geopolitical discourse: the idea that the next major conflicts of the world would not arise from ideological or economic differences, but from deep-rooted civilizational fault lines. His essay, and later his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, warned that as the world became more interconnected, it would also become more fragmented-fragmented not along national borders, but across cultural and religious identities.

Huntington mapped out several broad civilizations-Western, Confucian, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox, African, Latin American-and argued that as modernization eroded...