Parag Khanna: Is there a clash of civilizations?
Khanna doesn't think there ever was.
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The World
Posted at:
12:39 PM on March 11, 2008
Parag Khanna:
I don’t believe there ever was such a thing as the clash of civilizations, there was a term that caught on. Many people used it because they were afraid it might happen, in a way it was negatively aspirational [phonetic] in the sense of this is what we want to avoid but was there ever genuinely any monolithic civilizations to be clashing, no they weren’t civilizations have always been far too broad to be defined in that way and to be so exclusive as the term lead people to believe. So I don’t really think there is a clash of civilizations.
Recorded on: 3/3/08
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Parag Khanna is Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He is author of the international best-seller The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (Random House, 2008), which has been translated into over a dozen languages. During 2007 he was a senior geopolitical advisor to United States Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. From 2002-5, he was the Global Governance Fellow at the Brookings Institution; from 2000-2002 he worked at the World Economic Forum in Geneva; and from 1999-2000, he was a Research Associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Parag is a host of InnerView on MTV. He is also on the Executive Committee of the Young Lions of New York Public Library. In 2008 he was named one of Esquire’s 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century, and one of fifteen individuals featured in WIRED magazine’s “Smart List.” He also served in the foreign policy advisory group to the Barack Obama for President campaign.
Parag has traveled in close to 100 countries, and is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Explorers Club, and was honored in 2009 as a Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum.
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