2009م - 1444هـ
In his seminal work The Clash of Civilizations and the

Remaking of World Order (1996), the Harvard political

scientist Samuel Huntington reinvented Arnold Toynbee’s

understanding of history as driven not only by impersonal

material structures—territory, capital, population, and



natural resources—but equally by interpersonal ide-

ational structures. This perception seemed supported by



empirical observation, and soon filled the intellectual and

political lacunae which had attained particular salience in

the wake of the implosion of Soviet-backed communism.

Oftentimes, the reinstatement of religion—as the single

most stable ideational structure in human history—was

referred to as ‘the revenge of God’, but for social scientists

and historians alike it became impossible to scientifically

isolate the divine variable from terrestrial imperatives in

the muddled socio-political praxes of earthlings. A casual

observation, nonetheless, would suggest that discursive

constructions about God (in politics, a short-hand for

absolute truth) have been a necessary corollary to nearly all

conflictual formations, from the substate to the transstate

levels. The intensity of this linkage, and its constancy, is

tested in this study.





body count



Objectives

The present study attempts to quantify the human death

toll of religious and political violence throughout the last



two millennia and relating these to religio-cultural civiliza-

tions. Adopting a modified version of Huntington’s civiliza-

tional taxonomy, the study progresses along the following



lines: First, a comprehensive data list of over 3,000 violent



clashes in history, 0–2008 ce was developed. We then pro-

ceeded to identify 276 of the most violent conflicts in his-

tory, all with estimated human death tolls over 10,000, and



ranked them by death toll. The result was then organized

along civilizational lines, in order to attain a comparative

understanding of socio-religiously conditioned violence.

The findings are represented in four tables, leading to a

comparative evaluation of civilizational violence.

Methodology

The study has first produced an aggregate list of major

violent conflicts in the last two millennia, incorporating

four categories of violence, namely war, civil war, democide,



and structural violence. This shows the extent to which vio-

lence has been an almost universal form of ‘doing politics’



in all parts of the inhabited world for as long as history has

been recorded. The study then proceeded to quantify the

death tolls in the most violent episodes to produce a list of

the most violent conflicts in the last two millennia. These

conflicts were then organized along civilizational lines,