Violence is omnipresent in the world around us. On the root causes of contemporary global violence, theories abound – as theories are prone to. However, two particular lines of theorizing have come to receive much more attention than most others: one approach concentrates on the culture of societies, and the other on the political economy of poverty and inequality. Each approach has some plausibility, at least in some forms, and yet both are, I would argue, ultimately inadequate and in need of supplementation. Indeed, neither works on its own, and we need to see the two sets of influences together, in an integrated way.

I begin with the cultural approach – or more accurately, cultural approaches. Different cultural theories have something in common – they tend to look at conflicts and violence as they relate to modes of living as well as religious beliefs and social customs. That line of reasoning can lead to many different theories, some less sophisticated than others. It is perhaps remarkable that the particular cultural theory that has become the most popular in the world today is perhaps also the crudest.

This is the approach of seeing global violence as the result of something that is called ‘the clash of civilizations. The approach defines some postulated entities that are called ‘civilizations’ in primarily religious terms, and it goes on to contrast what is respectively called ‘the Islamic world’, ‘the Judeo-Christian’ or ‘the Western world’, ‘the Buddhist world’, ‘the Hindu world’, and so on. Divisions among civilizations make them prone, we are informed, to clash with each other.