Civilizational Politics: Identity, Legitimacy, and Political Order

The end of the Cold War brought questions of cultural and religious identity to the forefront of debates over domestic and international political order. Samuel Huntington’s influential and controversial ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis offered one of the most prominent attempts to interpret the post-Cold War international order through the lens of civilizational identities and divisions. More than three decades later, the growing prominence of civilizational narratives, claims to civilizational statehood, populist identity politics, and multipolar geopolitical rivalries invites renewed examination of how civilization operates as a category of contemporary politics.
Rather than treating civilizations as fixed and predetermined cultural blocs, this panel approaches civilizational identities as historically grounded, politically contested, and subject to reinterpretation, while regarding their coherence and boundaries as open analytical questions. It examines how civilizational politics shapes collective identities, claims to political legitimacy, and competing visions of domestic and international order. More specifically, it asks how political actors articulate and mobilize civilizational narratives, how these narratives intersect with national, religious, ethnic, and regional identities, and under what conditions they acquire political salience. A further concern is the broader political implications of these processes, particularly their effects on regime legitimation, competing visions of modernity and sovereignty, and efforts to reproduce, challenge, or reconfigure regional and global hierarchies.
The panel welcomes theoretical, comparative, and empirical contributions addressing civilizational politics in diverse contexts. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
• Civilizational discourse and the discursive construction of civilizational identities
• Religion, religious identity, and civilizational politics
• Political legitimacy, populism, and illiberalism
• Postcolonialism, decoloniality, and civilizational narratives
• Authenticity, cultural revival, and the politics of civilizational belonging
• Historical memory, heritage, and civilizational narratives
• Civilizational states and competing visions of political order
• Foreign policy, geopolitics, and civilizational imaginaries
Drawing on perspectives from comparative politics, international relations, political sociology, nationalism studies, and political theory, the discussion aims to deepen our understanding of civilizational politics as a distinct dimension of contemporary political life and to examine its implications for collective identity, political legitimacy, and changing configurations of domestic and international order.