Sounding like something from a Frank Miller novel, the UN's Alliance of Civilisations, a supergroup of statesmen and scholars, unveiled its findings in Istanbul Monday. Its aim, quintessentially comic-book: to save the planet from fanatics.
We’re going to immobilize extremists, prevent their actions. Nobody should doubt our victory.
Whilst admiring their ambition, I doubt their effectiveness. They admit a few tricky problems must be resolved first.
That the Israeli/Palestinian conflict inflames muslim and jewish opinion world-wide and must end.
That victimhood is rife in the muslim world (and must end).
And that the language of conflict debate must change.
Most interestingly they expand on this last point to argue that the political and media framing of the debate in Huntingdon's stereotypical and essentialist 'clash of civilisations' theory is self-fulfilling. That it turns negotiable disputes into intractable conflicts.
To return to the metaphor at the beginning, the language of politics increasingly imitates the simplistic world of daring-do books. Axis of Evil, Clash of Civilisations, these terms hide the complex realities and worse, exacerbate the difficulties of conflict resolution. Even the Alliance of Civilisations in buying into (if inverting) the terminology is undermining a clearer understanding of humanity.
