Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist who popularised the expression “clash of civilisations”, died on Christmas eve at age 81. Obituaries have been evenly divided about whether he outlived the world he described. The phrase was coined by Bernard Lewis, the scholar of Islam, in 1990, but it was Huntington’s essay of that name, published in 1993, that encapsulated the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,” Huntington wrote. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”