English: Conflicts fueled by popular religious mobilization have rekindled the controversy surrounding Samuel Huntington’s theory of changing international alignments in the Post-Cold War era. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington challenged Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis that liberal democracy had emerged victorious out of Post-war ideological and economic rivalries. Based on a top-down analysis of the alignments of nation states, Huntington famously concluded that the axes of international geo-political conflicts had reverted to the ancient cultural divisions that had characterized most of human history. Until recently, however, the debate has had to rely more on polemics than empirical evidence. Moreover, Huntington made this prediction in 1993, before social media connected the world’s population. Do digital communications attenuate or echo the cultural, religious, and ethnic “fault lines” posited by Huntington prior to the global diffusion of social media? We revisit Huntington's thesis using hundreds of millions of anonymized email and Twitter communications among tens of millions of worldwide users to map the global alignment of interpersonal relations. Contrary to the supposedly borderless world of cyberspace, a bottom-up analysis confirms the persistence of the eight culturally differentiated civilizations posited by Huntington, with the divisions corresponding to differences in language, religion, economic development, and spatial distance.

1 United Arab Emirates AE 2 Angola AO 3 Argentina AR 4 Austria AT 5 Australia AU 6 Azerbaijan AZ 7 Bangladesh BD 8 Belgium BE 9 Burkina Faso BF 10 Bulgaria BG 11 Burundi BI 12 Bolivia, Plurinational State Of BO 13 Brazil BR 14 Belarus BY 15 Canada CA 16 Congo, The Democrat. Republic Of CD 17 Switzerland CH 18 Cote D'Ivoire CI 19 Chile CL 20 Cameroon CM 21 China CN 22 Colombia CO 23 Czech Republic CZ 24 Germany DE 25 Denmark DK 26 Dominican Republic DO 27 Algeria DZ 28 Ecuador EC 29 Egypt EG 30 Spain ES 31 Ethiopia ET 32 Finland FI 33 France FR 34 United Kingdom GB 35 Ghana GH 36 Greece GR 37 Guatemala GT 38 Honduras HN 39 Haiti HT 40 Hungary HU 41 Indonesia ID 42 Israel IL 43 India IN 44 Italy IT 45 Jordan JO 46 Japan JP 47 Kenya KE 48 Cambodia KH 49 Korea, Republic Of KR 50 Kazakhstan KZ 51 Lao People's Democratic Republic LA 52 Sri Lanka LK 53 Morocco MA 54 Madagascar MG 55 Mali ML 56 Mexico MX 57 Malaysia MY 58 Mozambique MZ 59 Nigeria NG 60 Nicaragua NI 61 Netherlands NL 62 Nepal NP 63 Peru PE 64 Papua New Guinea PG 65 Philippines PH 66 Pakistan PK 67 Poland PL 68 Portugal PT 69 Paraguay PY 70 Romania RO 71 Russian Federation RU 72 Saudi Arabia SA 73 Sudan SD 74 Sweden SE 75 Singapore SG 76 Slovakia SK 77 Senegal SN 78 El Salvador SV 79 Thailand TH 80 Tunisia TN 81 Turkey TR 82 Ukraine UA 83 United States US 84 Uzbekistan UZ 85 Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic Of VE 86 Vietnam VN 87 Yemen YE 88 South Africa ZA 89 Zambia ZM 90 Zimbabwe ZW