Book Reviews 175 

Dialogue of Civilizations: A New Peace 

Agenda for a New Millennium 

Majid Tehranian and David W. Chappell, eds. 
London and New York: LB. Tauris & Co. Ltd in association with The 

Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, 2002. 302 pages. 

This book arose from a series of conferences held as part of the Toda 
lnstitute's research project, Human Security and Global Governance, ini-







178 The American Journal of lslamic Social Sciences 20:3 & 4 

I commend the editors for bringing together such diverse voices to the 
dialogue and for engaging in the "politics of discourse" to rescue the con­

cept of civilization from its abuse at the hands of Huntington et al. One 
does not have to fall prey to either the view of inevitable clashes nor to the 
anti-essentialist trap of seeing everything in its local and plural forms. But 
neither should we reduce the concept of civilization to the singular, based 

on a mode of production, nor to one based on a technological determinism 
that denies the important differences between cosmologies. What we need 
is an analysis that takes seriously all theoretical elaborations on dialogue, 
civilizations, modernity, and traditional cosmologies. 

Ali Hassan Zaidi, Doctoral Candidate 

Department of Sociology 
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada