African Civilization
| Quick info | |
|---|---|
| Data type | Numeric |
| Scale | Binary |
| Value labels | 1 = Yes, 0 = No |
| Technical name | cult_african |
| Category | Culture |
| Label | African Civilization |
| Related indicators | |
Country is characterized as a member of the African civilization. Samuel P. Huntington constituted that there are insurmountable differences between nation states and or clusters of nation states that are more or less not based on economic or political, but on cultural factors. These civilizations can also be described as cultural entities that are “[…] defined both by common objective elements […] and by the subjective self-identification of people” (Huntington 1993, 24). Sharing a common history is hard to quantify and especially variables of subjective identification with one civilization is hardly measurable. The fact that individuals not only make up those civilizations, but are in one way or the other affected by being socialized and living in the respective civilization is not easily disputable. Huntington claims that the differences between civilizations are the product of centuries of cultural evolution. We follow that path by including the membership of state entities in civilizations defined by Huntington as a time invariant variable.
Coding rules
Huntington’s raw data from 1993 have been amongst others analysed by Gokmen (2012), who shows that differences in civilization have an impact on conflictual relations before the cold war, but tend to lose explanatory power after that. One explanation for that would be the overshadowing of those effects by the ideological divide in the Cold War. However, as we are only interested in cultural differences and similarities, this supports our use of the civilizations claimed by Huntington; especially using it over our whole timeframe. Gokmen (2012) provides a list of civilization membership which was used to code the membership of a country as 1 and non-membership as 0. Some countries had to be manually coded by us. We did this based on geographic closeness and/or oriented on ideologies/religions/colonial heritage. These countries are: Fiji, Vanuatu -> Western East Timor -> Islamic Kosovo, Montenegro -> Orthodox South Sudan -> African Laos -> Buddhist
For further information see the Technical Paper: Besche-Truthe, Fabian; Seitzer, Helen; Windzio, Michael. 2020 “Cultural Spheres – Creating a dyadic dataset of cultural proximity”. SFB 1342 Technical Paper Series, 5. Bremen, SFB 1342.
Bibliographic info
Citation:
Related publications: NA (no information available)
Misc
Project manager(s): Fabian Besche-Truthe, Michael Windzio, Helen Seitzer
- Version 0.001: Initial release
Revisions: No revisions yet
Sources
- Gokmen, Gunes. “Clash of Civilizations, Culture and Conflict.” NEPS Working Papers (8/2012). https://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/nepswp/2012_008.html. Accessed 16.11.2020.
