An astonishingly creative response to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations
, this groundbreaking analysis examines political trends through the prism of emotion, arguing that fear, humiliation and hope might be as influential as the cultural, social and economic factors that breed political conflict. Shedding keen light on the limitations of the geographic and cultural determinism that currently dominates international relations discourse, Moïsi uses these definitions to remap the world's political regions. Dexterously avoiding cliché or sentimentality, Moïsi studies how emotions interact (e.g., fear is the absence of confidence; hope is the expression of confidence; humiliation is the loss of hope that results from wounded confidence) and plumbs the roots of Asia’s culture of hope, the historical humiliation feeding Islamic extremism and the long-dominant emotions in the West: a fear of the “other,” confusion about national identity and an anxiety to maintain global relevance. This elegant thesis presents the very real consequences of the “Clash of Emotions” and concludes with well-reasoned if tentative conjecture about how these currents will shift in years to come. (June)
