By Donald Sassano
In Homeland Security Contributor
Not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a splashy new clash-conscious text by Harvard’s Samuel Huntington mocked realism’s all-encompassing statist paradigm. Realists’ laser-like focus on the state as central actor, argued Huntington, could no longer fully account for heightened global instability, including what realists believed to be an emerging security competition between Russia and Ukraine. Instead, Huntington turned to examine the “civilizational fault lines” that often divide states, including Orthodox eastern Ukraine and its Uniate west. Absent communism and bi-polarity, Huntington argued that “identity” conflicts would become more prevalent, yet would likely be misidentified by realist and liberal camps alike.