The President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Roman Herzog, and four internationally renowned scholars from different cultural backgrounds and academic disciplines argue about ways to prevent the scenario of a clash of civilizations from becoming reality. Recognizing that scenario as an intellectual projection with considerable influence on policy-makers across the world, they agree on the necessity to mobilize ideas of cooperation as countervailing forces against mindsets of conflict and violence; to respect the diversity of cultures, but avoid moral relativism; to recognize the danger of fundamentalist instrumentalization of religion for purposes of political power; to cope with economic and social disequilibria that may lead to eruptions of conflict and violence; and to focus on commonalities between cultures as a strategy of peace in a globalized world.

The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in today’s geopolitical climate—with a foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication in 1996, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations pose the greatest threat to world peace, but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia have changed global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify inter-civilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. In his incisive analysis, Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, multi-civilizational world.

2001 began as the United Nations Year of Dialogue between Civilizations. By its end the phrase most widely quoted was "the clash of civilizations." The tragedy of September 11 intensified the danger posed by religious differences throughout the world. As the politics of identity replaces the politics of ideology, can religion overcome its conflict-ridden past and become a force for peace? The Dignity of Difference is Rabbi Johnathan Sack's radical proposal for reframing the terms of this important debate. The first major statement by a Jewish leader on the ethics of globalization, it introduces a new paradigm into the search for co-existence. Sacks argues that we must do more than search for common human values. We must also learn to make space for difference, even and especially at the heart of the monotheistic imagination. The global future will call for something stronger than earlier doctrines of toleration or pluralism. It needs a new understanding that the unity of the Creator is expressed in the diversity of creation.

The relationship between Western democracies and Islam, rarely entirely comfortable, has in recent years become increasingly tense. A growing immigrant population and worries about cultural and political assimilation—exacerbated by terrorist attacks in the United States, Europe, and around the world—have provoked reams of commentary from all parts of the political spectrum, a frustrating majority of it hyperbolic or even hysterical. In The Fear of Barbarians, the celebrated intellectual Tzvetan Todorov offers a corrective: a reasoned and often highly personal analysis of the problem, rooted in Enlightenment values yet open to the claims of cultural difference. Drawing on history, anthropology, and politics, and bringing to bear examples ranging from the murder of Theo van Gogh to the French ban on headscarves, Todorov argues that the West must overcome its fear of Islam if it is to avoid betraying the values it claims to protect. True freedom, Todorov explains, requires us to strike a delicate balance between protecting and imposing cultural values, acknowledging the primacy of the law, and yet strenuously protecting minority views that do not interfere with its aims. Adding force to Todorov's arguments is his own experience as a native of communist Bulgaria: his admiration of French civic identity—and Western freedom—is vigorous but non-nativist, an inclusive vision whose very flexibility is its core strength. The record of a penetrating mind grappling with a complicated, multifaceted problem, The Fear of Barbarians is a powerful, important book—a call, not to arms, but to thought.

Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "the doyen of Middle Eastern studies," Bernard Lewis has been for half a century one of the West's foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, the author of over two dozen books, most notably The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and The Muslim Discovery of Europe. Eminent French historian Robert Mantran has written of Lewis's work: "How could one resist being attracted to the books of an author who opens for you the doors of an unknown or misunderstood universe, who leads you within to its innermost domains: religion, ways of thinking, conceptions of power, culture--an author who upsets notions too often fixed, fallacious, or partisan." In Islam and the West, Bernard Lewis brings together in one volume eleven essays that indeed open doors to the innermost domains of Islam. Lewis ranges far and wide in these essays. He includes long pieces, such as his capsule history of the interaction--in war and peace, in commerce and culture--between Europe and its Islamic neighbors, and shorter ones, such as his deft study of the Arabic word watan and what its linguistic history reveals about the introduction of the idea of patriotism from the West. Lewis offers a revealing look at Edward Gibbon's portrait of Muhammad in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (unlike previous writers, Gibbon saw the rise of Islam not as something separate and isolated, nor as a regrettable aberration from the onward march of the church, but simply as a part of human history); he offers a devastating critique of Edward Said's controversial book, Orientalism; and he gives an account of the impediments to translating from classic Arabic to other languages (the old dictionaries, for one, are packed with scribal errors, misreadings, false analogies, and etymological deductions that pay little attention to the evolution of the language). And he concludes with an astute commentary on the Islamic world today, examining revivalism, fundamentalism, the role of the Shi'a, and the larger question of religious co-existence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. A matchless guide to the background of Middle East conflicts today, Islam and the West presents the seasoned reflections of an eminent authority on one of the most intriguing and little understood regions in the world.

The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author (Publishers Weekly). Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building’s elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome. With language as colorful as the neighborhood it describes, each character takes his or her turn “giving evidence.” Their various stories reveal much about the drama of racial identity and the anxieties of a life spent on society’s margins, but also bring to life the hilarious imbroglios of this melting pot Italian culture. “Their frequently wild testimony teases out intriguing psychological and social insight alongside a playful whodunit plot.” —Publishers Weekly

This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misleadingly simplistic, culturally ill-informed, and politically dangerous. Mixing critical reflection with insights from their own fieldwork, twelve distinguished anthropologists respond by offering fresh perspectives on globalization, ethnic violence, social justice, and the biological roots of behavior. They take on such topics as the collapse of Yugoslavia, the consumer practices of the American poor, American foreign policy in the Balkans, and contemporary debates over race, welfare, and violence against women. In the clear, vigorous prose of the pundits themselves, these contributors reveal the hollowness of what often passes as prevailing wisdom and passionately demonstrate the need for a humanistically complex and democratic understanding of the contemporary world.

Oxford-educated historian Joseph P. Farrell delivers the sequel to his best-selling Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations, part of his book series on suppressed technology, Nazi survival, secret finance and postwar hidden conflicts. His customary meticulous research and sharp analysis blow the lid off of a worldwide web of nefarious financial and technological control that very few people even suspect exists. Farrell delves deeper into the breakaway civilizations created by the Nazis in South America and other parts of the world. He elaborates on the advanced technology that they took with them at the “end” of World War II and shows how they created a huge system of hidden finance with the involvement of leading financial institutions around the world. He exposes the secret space programs used by the breakaway civilizations and reveals the clash of civilizations—a virtual secret war going on around us. He investigates the current space secrecy that involves UFOs, suppressed technologies and the hidden oligarchs who control planet Earth for their own gain and profit. Farrell probes the mystery surrounding Dr. Kurt Debus and his links to NASA and Werner von Braun. He uncovers the covert operations of Richard Bissell, the flying saucer designs of Alfred Loedding and T. Townsend Brown, and strange activity on Mars involving UFOs. He explains the magneto-hydrodynamic anti-gravity drives that would easily power such craft. He includes a continued discussion of “emulational” technologies (those that can imitate acts of god/nature, like earthquakes and storms) from the standpoint of the culture of “full spectrum dominance” and the culture of “plausible deniability.” Farrell includes plenty of astounding accounts, documents and speculation on the amazing alternative history of hidden conflicts, secret oligarchies and super technology.

"Civilization" is a constantly invoked term. It is used by both politicians and scholars. How useful, in fact, is this term? Civilization and Its Contents traces the origins of the concept in the eighteenth century. It shows its use as a colonial ideology, and then as a support for racism. The term was extended to a dead society, Egyptian civilization, and was appropriated by Japan, China, and Islamic countries. This latter development lays the groundwork for the contemporary call for a "dialogue of civilizations." The author proposes instead that today the use of the term "civilization" has a global meaning, with local variants recognized as cultures. It may be more appropriate, however, to abandon the name "civilization" and to focus on a new understanding of the civilizing process.

Intellectual activity in the twentieth century took place largely under the banner of science and society. As the new millennium develops, it is becoming evident that science and society are not words that represent an unmitigated good, nor for that matter, do they exhaust what is new in the human condition. Past writing on the theme of culture has emphasized the growth and expansion of human capabilities. Recent use of the term "civilization" has placed great emphasis on the fall from grace of human beings. The use of both terms is rapidly changing. Culture and Civilization develops critical ideas intended to produce a positive intellectual climate, one that is prepared to confront threats, and alert us to the opportunities of the twenty-first century. It recognizes that the twenty-first century presents people in all fields and of all faiths with shared challenges. Culture and Civilization embraces the work of novelists, journalists, cultural figures, technologists, physical sciences, historians, and policy personnel who range beyond social science areas. What they have in common is a view that civilization is under assault and that it represents a cause worth advancing and defending. This publication does not embrace idiosyncratic visions of the clash of world civilizations or the end of Western civilization. It does attempt to bring together immediate issues of the century that are substantially new and challenging. We see that the essential polarity between democracy and autocracy has now taken on larger, deeper dimensions in a different political, economic, and ecological terrain: the central issue of our day is now civilization versus barbarism. The character of democratic culture is central to the global equation and the systemic challenge. This publication is a sober response to such a challenge.