O terrorismo e o choque de civilizações

Abstract

After the Cold War there was the emergence of the announcement of a new model of international relations that corresponded to the uni-multipolar reality. Huntington, who during his long academic career has produced works of great relevance in contemporary debates, proposes the clash of civilizations thesis, relating the coming tensions to the cultural aspects between distinct civilizations, notably between Islam and the Western world. Such a conception helps in the analysis of contemporary terrorist attacks, whose motivating aspect is, in principle, the cultural one. The alarming numbers of terrorist acts with fundamentalist religious motivations corroborate the sometime mistaken understanding of the vast Islamic world, as well as its customs, imposing ambiguous understanding and sometimes prejudiced Western views, relying prominently on in precepts of the Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis. The evolution of modern terrorism, with its suprastate conception and scope of action, makes the understanding of the various waves of terrorism, especially the Religious Wave, object of analysis and comparison with Huntington's precepts. The absence of an unambiguous definition for the term terrorism supports the need for a broader study to enable energetic and assertive action to mitigate this problem, which stands out on the international agenda. In analyzing Huntington's thesis, we seek to embrace cultural interactions as well as the adequacy of its precepts for a better understanding of the motivations of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist attacks in a diffuse global environment, with the narrowing of borders, fruit of constant technological development, globalization and the remarkable presence of new non-state actors with broad and distinct influences.