N THIS SPECIAL OCCASION of the Tercentenary, I am especially delighted to speak in honor of a polymath and an American icon, Benjamin Franklin (fig. 1). Since his death in 1790, Franklin has been revered, memorialized, and made into an educational, financial, and political icon. Through his collective work this sage has climbed to the apex of human endeavor in the sciences, public service, and ...

We study the response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings of January 7, 2015 on Twitter across the globe. We ask whether the stances on the issue of freedom of speech can be modeled using established sociological theories, including Huntington’s culturalist Clash of Civilizations, and those taking into consideration social context, including Density and Interdependence theories. We find support for ...

The article analyzes to what extent news reporting on terrorist attacks globalized, regionalized, or country specific. We compare coverage on four terrorist incidents in the main news shows of the US edition of CNN, of Al Jazeera’s Arabic language service, of the British BBC, and of the German ARD. The analysis shows cross-national similarities in several dimensions: the analyzed media devote n...

With Huntington’s warning of a “clash of civilizations” following the end of the cold war, “cultural pluralism” has become important for enhancing world peace and supporting development. In this paper, cultural pluralism is viewed as a “knowledge society” problem, where intercultural knowledge is produced, disseminated and used within an ecosystem of mutual understanding and respect. The author...

Although the tactic of suicide terrorism is thousands of years old, it has appeared in Iraq at unprecedented levels. The predominance of suicide terrorism in the insurgency has led scholars to embrace two diametrically opposed theoretical frameworks. Whereas Huntington’s framework explains suicide terrorism in Iraq as the result of a clash of civilizations between the Western and Islamic worlds...