Civilizational Conflict as Collision of Abstraction Levels: A Structural Account
Davud A. Zulumkhanov Independent researcher, Makhachkala, Russian Federation
Abstract. The concept of civilizational conflict is widely invoked but structurally undertheorized. Dominant accounts, from Huntington onward, treat civilizations as cultural wholes and explain conflict as incompatibility of contents. This article proposes a structural alternative. Civilizational conflict is reconstructed as a collision between communities operating with different criteria for recognizing another being as protected against violence. Six such criteria are ordered as a sequence of abstraction levels, derived from the logic of the sign applied to recognition: from no mediation, through four orders of sign of increasing abstraction, to the sublation of the sign into an internal disposition. The resulting asymmetries of comprehension, structural limits on transition, mixed-level encounters, and vulnerability to regression account for features of civilizational conflict that content-based theories leave unexplained. The framework redirects the central question away from the characteristics of incoming persons and toward the institutional carrying capacity of receiving societies. It is contrasted with Huntington’s thesis and with the politics of recognition, and illustrated by a short case in which it yields diagnostic leverage unavailable to content-based accounts. The sixfold structure is shown to recur in four independent domains — sensory perception, individual development, social recognition, and cosmogony — suggesting that it reflects the number of steps inherent in the passage from external to internal as such.
Keywords: civilizational conflict, levels of abstraction, recognition, social ontology, institutional carrying capacity, Huntington.
1. Introduction
Social theory has long needed a vocabulary for a kind of disagreement that does not resolve into ordinary political or moral dispute: disagreement about who counts as a proper party to the dispute in the first place. In ordinary conflict, adversaries may reject one another’s claims while still presupposing that the other is the kind of being to whom reasons, demands, and restraints are owed. In more radical encounters, that presupposition itself becomes unstable. One party does not fully recognize the other as a bearer of the kind of claim being advanced. Such encounters may appear, from within, like familiar disagreements about law, religion, territory, or values. Yet they do not resolve like ordinary disagreements, because any argument already presupposes the very frame whose absence is at issue.
The standard name for such encounters is civilizational conflict. In Samuel Huntington’s influential formulation, civilizations are the largest cultural groupings short of humankind as a whole, and conflicts among them arise when their contents prove incompatible. The thesis has been criticized for essentialism, internal homogenization, and geopolitical suggestiveness. Even so, the term survives because it gestures toward a real phenomenon that narrower vocabularies fail to capture.
This article offers a structural alternative. Its central claim is that civilizational conflict is not primarily a clash between cultural contents but a collision between recognition criteria: the rules by which a community determines whether a given being is to be counted as protected against violence and owed the community’s obligations of restraint, adjudication, and repair. When two communities operate with different recognition criteria, their members are, to one another, not fully visible as fellow persons. The resulting conflict is not simply disagreement among mutually acknowledged parties; it is an asymmetry of acknowledgment itself.
The framework identifies six such criteria, arranged as a sequence of levels. Each level succeeds the previous by an act of abstraction: a more concrete criterion is replaced by a more general one, widening the circle of recognized persons while raising the internal and institutional demands of cooperation. The sequence is not a speculative history but a structural ordering; the levels stand in a definite logical relation, and each later level presupposes the work of the earlier.
This account draws on the theory of abstraction I set out in Teoriya abstragirovaniya: Uroki svyashchennogo pisaniya (Zulumkhanov 2024). The six levels are not derived from any particular religious or cultural tradition; they are derived from the structure of abstraction itself — specifically, from the logic of the sign applied to the criterion of recognition. In my earlier work I illustrated the six levels on Abrahamic material — through the figures of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Christ — but the illustration is not the derivation. The same structural sequence could in principle be illustrated on Confucian, Roman, or any other civilizational material; the levels would remain the same, because they are given by the logic of abstraction, not by the content of the tradition used to illustrate them.
Three clarifications are necessary. First, the framework does not rank human worth. It compares recognition criteria and institutional forms, not the intrinsic value of persons. The language of “higher” and “lower” levels refers only to degree of abstraction. Second, “recognition” picks out one specific axis: protection against violence. Moral esteem, legal personhood, empathic concern, and political participation are related but partially distinct axes. Protection against violence is chosen because it marks the boundary condition of cooperation. Third, the unit of analysis is typological. Actual societies and individuals are usually mixed-level formations in which different domains operate according to different criteria.
2. The Concept of a Level
By a level I mean a self-contained system of distinctions in which what were previously distinguishable entities have become operands of new operations. The paradigmatic example is the progression from counting concrete groups of objects to numerals and then to abstract numbers. At the first stage, six apples are six separate things. At the second, a single sign (“six”) stands for the group. At the third, the number six becomes an abstract quantity on which operations can be performed without returning to any concrete cluster. The earlier stage is sublated: preserved as a basis while ceasing to be the immediate site of the work.
Three features matter for the present argument.
First, levels are entered by acts of abstraction, not by accumulation. No amount of additional counting produces the numeral. Transition is structurally discontinuous even when historically gradual.
Second, levels cannot be skipped. A later level presupposes the operative achievements of earlier ones; what cannot yet function as a new criterion is typically reinterpreted in terms of the old.
Third, levels can be lost. A community that once reproduced a more abstract criterion may regress under pressure. Recovery is asymmetric: a community that has lost a level rarely regenerates it from within; ordinarily, recovery depends on contact with another community where the level has been preserved.
These features — discontinuity of transition, non-skippability, and asymmetric reversibility — will return when the framework is applied to recognition. They are features of the level structure itself, not of any particular content.
3. Why Six Levels: The Structural Derivation
The application of the level concept to the human proceeds as follows. In my earlier work (Zulumkhanov 2024, chs. 5 and 7), I define the human in structural terms as the observer for whom abstraction is the mode of being. If the human is constituted by abstraction, then the levels of abstraction determine the levels of the human — not as historical stages, but as structurally necessary steps. At each level, the circle of those recognized as protected against violence is held together by a specific mechanism of holding: a device by which the community sustains the distinction between those inside and those outside the circle. The passage from one level to the next occurs when the previous mechanism is itself sublated — when what was previously the criterion of recognition becomes an operand of a new, more abstract criterion.
The question then arises: why six levels, and not five or seven? The answer lies in the logic of the sign.
Each mechanism of holding operates through a sign of a specific order. The orders of the sign are exhausted by the logic of abstraction, as follows.
Level 1: no sign. The mechanism is direct perceptual acquaintance. Recognition is limited to those I can distinguish by direct encounter. No sign mediates; the criterion is the encounter itself. This is the zero-order mechanism: recognition without mediation.
Level 2: sign of the first order — the name. The mechanism is a sign attached to a particular person or group: language, name, locality. The sign extends the circle beyond direct encounter but is still tied to concrete, perceptible features.
Level 3: sign of the second order — the manifest commitment. The mechanism is a sign attached not to a concrete feature but to a commitment: profession, rite, covenant. The sign is now conventional — it must be learned, not merely perceived. For the first time, recognition depends on something not immediately given to the senses.
Level 4: sign of the third order — the impersonal code. The mechanism is a sign detached from personal commitment and fixed in a text or stable oral tradition. The sign is the code itself; the operations it enables — interpretation, precedent, argument — are new.
Level 5: sign of the fourth order — enforced membership. The mechanism is a sign institutionally produced and maintained: citizenship, legal status, documented membership. The sign is not only impersonal but backed by institutional enforcement.
Level 6: sublation of the sign. The mechanism ceases to be a sign at all. Recognition is no longer mediated by any external marker. What holds the circle is an internal disposition: in my earlier work (Zulumkhanov 2024, ch. 14), I call it love in a technical sense — a stable configuration in which the good of the other has become as significant as one’s own without special effort to remember that it should be. Where this disposition obtains, external commandments are not broken because they cannot be broken: one cannot steal from someone whose good is indistinguishable from one’s own.
The sequence is therefore: absence of sign → four successive orders of sign (perceptible, conventional, codified, institutional) → sublation of sign into internal disposition. Six levels, because this is the complete cycle of the sign applied to recognition: from no mediation, through four modes of mediation of increasing abstraction, to the end of mediation.
The sixfold structure is not unique to the domain of recognition. In an earlier analysis (Zulumkhanov 2024, ch. 15), I show that the human being possesses six basic physical senses, ordered by the range of distance at which they operate: sight (the farthest), hearing, smell, taste, touch, and sexual feeling (the nearest, requiring full bodily contact). The same sixfold arc appears in the stages of individual human growth: infancy (purely bodily, reactive), childhood (names, first signs), adolescence (rules, boundaries), youth (signs of belonging, self-identification), maturity (law, responsibility, codified obligation), and old age (inner wisdom, sublation of external markers) — with death as the seventh, the sublation of the entire series. Four independent domains — the body, society, individual development, and cosmogony (the six days of creation) — exhibit the same sixfold structure, suggesting that the number six is not arbitrary but reflects the number of steps inherent in the passage from external to internal as such.
The seventh, in all four cases, is not a seventh element of the same series but a qualitatively different operation: the sublation of the entire six-fold series into a single unit of the next level — as the seventh day sublates the six days of creation. This unit is simultaneously the completion of the old cycle and the first element of a new one: just as the natural number series, once grasped as a whole and designated by a single sign (say, k), becomes the starting point of a new series (k, k+1, k+2…), so the seventh level, once attained, would be not a resting point but the first unit of a cycle whose further structure cannot be described from within the current one.
This derivation is not parochially Abrahamic. Three brief parallels suggest the generality.
Confucian-Chinese. The Confucian tradition traces the expansion of moral obligation from family (xiao) through the five relationships to ren (benevolence toward all). The imperial system codifies this: from clan loyalty through local magistrate to the universal jurisdiction of the Son of Heaven. The sequence maps onto the six levels with different content but the same structural progression.
Roman. Roman law expanded civitas from patrician families to plebs, Italian allies, provincials, and finally (Constitutio Antoniniana, 212 CE) virtually all free inhabitants. Each expansion replaced a more concrete criterion with a more abstract one.
Buddhist. The concept of ahimsa and the bodhisattva ideal represent a movement toward Level 6: an internal disposition extending protection beyond group markers. The coexistence of this ideal with the caste system illustrates mixed-level inhabitation and the tension between abstract criterion and concrete practice.
Three objections deserve brief answers.
First: Level 6 looks like a Western liberal or Christian ideal. The objection conflates content with structure. The content of Level 6 in the Abrahamic illustration is shaped by the Christian concept of love. The structural position — the point at which recognition ceases to be mediated by any external sign — is determined by the logic of abstraction. Any tradition moving from external markers to internal disposition occupies the same structural position.
Second: the framework ignores collectivist cultures where universalism threatens thick belonging. The framework does not ignore this; it explains it. Thick belonging is the achievement of Levels 1–3. The tension between universalism and thick belonging is precisely the tension between levels, and the framework predicts it will be most acute where Level 6 encounters communities formed at Levels 2–3.
Third: where is the evidence for discontinuity? In developmental psychology (Piaget, Kohlberg), stage-like character is well documented. In cultural history, the framework predicts that transitions will be associated with a figure or institution introducing a qualitatively new mechanism, not with gradual reform. This is checkable case-by-case.
4. The Six Levels of Human Recognition
For each level, four questions are useful: what is the criterion, what holds it in place, what institutional form corresponds to it, and what is its characteristic fragility?
Level 1: Kinship. Criterion: descent from a common ancestor. Mechanism: direct acquaintance. Institutional form: minimal, personal. Strength: intense commitment. Fragility: extreme limitation of scope.
Level 2: Language, locality, and peoplehood. Criterion: shared language and territory. Mechanism: perceptible signs of belonging. Institutional form: ethnic or tribal solidarity. Strength: increased coordination. Fragility: sharp insider-outsider distinction.
Level 3: Sacred or confessional membership. Criterion: shared commitment to a sacred order. Mechanism: conventional mark (rite, confession, covenant). Institutional form: religious or ideological community. Strength: translocal solidarity. Fragility: binary division around the sign of adherence.
Level 4: Impersonal norm. Criterion: adherence to a code binding independently of who utters it. Mechanism: codified law or procedure. Institutional form: courts, textual traditions, offices. Strength: formal generality. Fragility: selective application.
Level 5: Citizenship. Criterion: membership in a political body enforcing a common code. Mechanism: institutionally enforced legal status. Institutional form: constitutional state. Strength: large-scale coordination. Fragility: persistent outer boundary for non-members.
Level 6: The human as such. Criterion: internal disposition (love in the technical sense). Mechanism: no external marker. Institutional form: education, law, civic practices stabilizing universal protection. Strength: maximal breadth. Fragility: highest demands on both institutions and individual orientation.
A further feature connects civilizational structure to individual development. The same ladder is climbed, at another scale and on other materials, by each person in the course of growing up. A child first recognizes members of her family, then co-speakers of her language, then co-members of shared commitment, then fellow participants in a codified order, then fellow citizens, and — if development proceeds — fellow humans as such. The parallel is not a loose analogy; it is the same structural ladder. This is one reason the framework cannot coherently be read as a ranking of peoples: every adult member of any society has climbed some portion of the same ladder.
Actual societies nearly always combine these levels across different domains. Mixed-level orders are the empirical norm, not the exception. The same individual can draw on kinship criteria in one domain, citizenship in another, and internalized rule in a third.
5. The Structure of Civilizational Conflict
Once recognition is understood in level terms, civilizational conflict acquires a clearer structure. Four features stand out.
5.1. Asymmetry of comprehension. A person operating at a later level can in principle model earlier criteria, because the later criterion was reached by abstracting from the earlier. The reverse is more difficult: from a more concrete criterion, a more abstract one appears not as a different criterion but as an absence of criterion — as indifference to distinctions that exhaust the question at the lower level. This asymmetry must be distinguished from normative acceptance and from embedded practice. A Level 6 person can model Level 3 recognition without accepting it; a Level 3 person cannot model Level 6 recognition without performing an act of abstraction equivalent to the transition itself.
5.2. Structural limits on transition. Because a level is entered by abstraction, the move from one to the next cannot be produced by argument conducted entirely within the lower level. Argument plays a role, but the broader process requires immersion in institutions, relationships, and forms of life built on the higher level, typically over more than one generation. Where such institutional context is absent, exhortation is ineffective, and its ineffectiveness is often misread as bad faith. Transitions are produced by a combination of argument, institutional formation, economic incentive, legal practice, and sometimes coercion — not by any one alone.
5.3. Mixed-level encounters. Most contemporary conflicts occur in contact zones between mixed-level orders rather than between pure civilizations. A constitutional state may combine Level-5 legal citizenship, Level-6 moral rhetoric, and Level-2 everyday solidarities. Incoming groups bring their own mixtures. Tension arises not primarily from incompatible values but from mismatched criteria operating in the same institutions at different speeds.
5.4. Vulnerability to regression. Under stress — war, impoverishment, rapid demographic change, institutional decay — the criteria in active use can contract. Regression need not be announced; it can proceed for long periods under the vocabulary of the higher level while practice collapses to a lower one. A high-level society does not remain high-level by the fact of its history but only by continual reproduction of the conditions under which the high-level criterion can operate.
6. Institutions and Carrying Capacity
The framework bears directly on the normative analysis of institutions in societies containing persons formed at different levels. The central issue is not the characteristics of incoming persons but the carrying capacity of the receiving institutions — the ability of an order to reproduce a given criterion of recognition across the practical sites where protection is delivered.
Key dimensions of carrying capacity include: administrative capacity (can institutions process claims impartially at scale?), normative legitimacy (do citizens regard the abstract criterion as binding?), pedagogical induction (do schools transmit the common norm effectively?), economic burden-sharing (is the cost of expanded protection distributed sustainably?), and security maintenance (can institutions protect without regressing to narrower criteria?).
A society whose institutions robustly reproduce the higher level can absorb substantial numbers of persons whose formation is at a lower level, provided those institutions continue to operate. A society whose institutions have weakened cannot reliably transmit the level even to those already inside it. The outcome in the second case is not the destruction of the higher level by newcomers; it is the revelation, under stress, that the level was no longer being reproduced even before the newcomers arrived.
The framework makes testable predictions. It predicts that the intensity of civilizational conflict correlates with the gap between levels of the parties, not with cultural distance as such; that success of integration correlates with indicators of carrying capacity, not with the volume of intake alone; and that two societies with comparable carrying capacity but different intake volumes will show similar outcomes, while two societies with comparable intake but different carrying capacity will diverge. If these correlations are not observed, the framework is refuted. The concrete magnitude of the carrying-capacity threshold is an empirical question that the framework identifies but does not answer.
One clarification: the framework does not imply that the higher level is unconditionally to be preferred. Each level is a coherent order with its own goods and costs; Level 2 sustains thick belonging that Level 6 often cannot, and Level 6 sustains the recognition of strangers that Level 2 cannot. Levels are not interchangeable, and the coexistence of levels within a single polity creates a determinate problem whose terms the framework makes available for analysis.
7. Comparisons and Illustrative Case
7.1. Huntington reconsidered. The framework shares Huntington’s intuition that some conflicts do not reduce to interest or ideology. It differs in locating the source not in incompatible contents but in mismatched recognition criteria. This explains observed asymmetries of comprehension (which content-based accounts do not predict), predicts intra-civilizational tensions (which Huntington’s framework does not expect), and relocates the normative question from the defence of contents to the reproduction of institutional conditions.
7.2. Relation to recognition theory. The framework complements Taylor and Honneth by operating one level below: before identities or persons can be recognized in their sense, a prior criterion must decide whether the being is the kind of being to whom recognition applies at all.
7.3. Illustrative case. The leverage of the framework is most visible where content-based accounts do not predict conflict. Consider recurrent disputes within contemporary liberal societies over protection owed to beings whose status is itself contested — the unborn, the terminal patient, the detained non-citizen, the enemy combatant, the subject of algorithmic decision. On Huntington’s account these are puzzling: they occur within a single civilization. The framework sees them as conflicts about the scope of the abstract criterion itself: one party presses Level 6 toward its logical maximum; another holds that the criterion in practice depends on markers of membership. The dispute is about how abstract the criterion can be sustained — precisely the question the framework was designed to analyze.
8. Conclusion and the Horizon of a Seventh Level
Civilizational conflict is best understood not as a clash of cultural contents but as a collision between recognition criteria, arranged in a sequence of six structural levels. The sequence is derived from the logic of the sign, not from any single tradition. Its structural features — asymmetry of comprehension, limits on transition, mixed-level encounters, vulnerability to regression — account for properties of civilizational conflict that content-based accounts leave unexplained. The framework reorients institutional analysis toward carrying capacity and away from the characteristics of persons.
The six levels describe what has been attained. A seventh level, if it exists, would not be a seventh sign but an exit from the sign-structure: the point at which the recognition of the human no longer requires internal effort because it has become a condition of existence. This unit would be simultaneously the completion of the current cycle and the first element of a new one — as the natural number series, once grasped as a whole, becomes the starting point of a new series. Whether such a level is achievable cannot be answered from within the first six. It can only be answered by the institutions that either succeed or fail in making it actual.
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