Abstract Huntington (1993a, 1993b, 1998, 2000) argued that the fundamental source of con ‡ict in the post-Cold War world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic, but the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of con ‡ict will be cultural and religious; as such, the primary axis of con‡ict in the future will be along civilizational lines. To that end, in addition to confronting several of Huntington's hypotheses we scrutinize the impact of culture on militarized interstate disputes and test whether countries that belong to di¤erent civilizations tend to be more involved in con ‡ict than countries that belong to the same civilization. We show that over the period of 1816-2001 civilizational dissimilarity in a dyad increases the probability of con ‡ict calculated at the means of the variables by up to 62.8 percentage points. More strikingly, even after controlling for geographic, political, military and economic factors, being part of di¤erent civilizations in the post-Cold War period brings about 71.2 percentage points higher con ‡ict probability than belonging to the same civilization while it reduces the probability of con ‡ict by 25.7 percentage points during the Cold War. JEL Classi…cation: D74, N40, N70, Z10
