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In recent years culture has become the primary currency of politics – from the identity politics that characterised the American 2016 election to the push back against Western universalism in much of the non-Western world. Much less noticed is the rise of a new political entity, the civilizational state. In this pioneering book renowned political philosopher Christopher Coker looks in-depth at two countries that now claim this title: Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia. He also discusses the Islamic caliphate, a virtual and aspirational civilizational state that is unlikely to fade despite the recent setbacks suffered by Isis. The civilizational state, he contends, is an idea whose time has come. For whilst civilizations themselves may not clash, civilizational states appear to be set on challenging the rules of the international order that the West takes for granted. China seems anxious to revise them, Russia to break them while Islamists would like to throw away the rule book altogether. When seen in the round, Coker argues these challenges could be enough to give birth to a new post-liberal international order.

In this article I would like to examine some specific aspects of contemporary globalization as they bear on the crystallization of new distinct civilizational formations. The new very intensive processes of contemporary globalization are characterized by growing interconnectedness between economic, cultural and political processes of globalization. The full impact of the processes can be understood only in the new historical context, especially against the background of changes in the international arenas which have been closely connected with processes of globalization during this period. Among different contemporary cultural and civilization forms we note a very important component of contemporary civilization attesting to the fact that different religions are now acting in a common civilizational setting. In this context competition and struggles between religions often became vicious yet at the same time there developed strong tendencies toward the development of common encouraging interfaith meetings and encounters which focused on their relations in terms of some of the premises of the new civilizational framework rooted in the original program of modernity. These premises implied the possibility of cooperation between them indeed, even going beyond that. Such attempts at the reformulation of civilizational premises have been taking place in some movements and in new institutional formations such as the European Union, in different local and regional frameworks, as well as in the various attempts by the different 'peripheries'.

The paper advances a new comprehensive complex approach to the investigation of the civilizational aspects in the development of regional associations of countries. The research starts with the overview of historical dimensions of the civilizational approach and the contribution of the founding scholars to its development. It continues with the analysis of the scientific and methodological input of the followers and the critics of this approach. The authors suggest their theoretical approach to the identification of the modern local civilizations according to six parameters: natural, biological, technical, economic, social, and governing. The civilizational affiliation of countries and the civilizational structure of major 17 regional associations of countries are identified. The results demonstrate that some regional groups have been more homogeneous in terms of civilizational composition, others – less homogeneous, which does not interfere with their dynamic development. However, the logic of the historical dynamics of human development indicates the inevitability of changing the current situation through prolonged civilizational conflicts resulting in significant changes in the global social dynamics and the civilizational structure of the world and of regional associations of countries. The identification of the civilization structure of countries and regional associations contributes to the rational decision-making in the areas of international economic relations and to the formation of the integration/disintegration policies on the national and regional levels. It is predicted that from 2030 global social dynamics will undergo a fundamental break- through that will radically change the civilizational structure of the world and regional unions of countries.

Introduction : making contact and mapping the terrain / Johann P. Arnason -- Mauss revisited : the birth of civilizational analysis from the spirit of anthropology / Johann P. Arnason -- Approaching civilization from an anthropological perspective : the complexities of Norbert Elias / Hans Peter Hahn -- Civilizational analysis and archaeology : prospects for collaboration / Yulia Prozorova -- The use and abuse of civilization : an assessment from historical anthropology for South Arabia's history / Andre Gingrich -- Civilization as a key guiding idea in South Asia / David N. Gellner -- Indian imbroglios : Bhakti neglected; or, The missed opportunities for a new approach to a comparative analysis of civilizational diversity / Martin Fuchs -- The Indianization and localization of textual imaginaries : Theravada Buddhist statecraft in mainland Southeast Asia and Laos in the context of civilizational analysis / Patrice Ladwig -- Frontier as civilization? : sociocultural dynamics in the uplands of Southeast Asia / Oliver Tappe -- Anthropology, civilizational analysis, and the Malay world / Joel S. Kahn -- Chinese civilization in comparative perspective : some markers / Stephan Feuchtwang -- Technological choices and modern material civilization : reflections on everyday toilet practices in rural South China / Gonçalo Santos -- Theoretical paradigm or methodological heuristic? : reflections on Kulturkreislehre with reference to China / Yang Shengmin and Wu Xiujie -- Nomads and the theory of civilizations / Nikolay N. Kradin -- The "orthodox", "Eurasian", or "Russian orthodox" civilization? / Milena Benovska-Sabkova -- Afterword : anthropology, Eurasia and global history / Chris Hann

Discussions about the applicability of the civilizational approach in political science correlate with methodological and discursive rethinking of linear philosophical and political interpretive projects. The search for new epistemological and ontological optics of modern political constructions is largely focused on the value-symbolic parameters underlying the civilizational approach. The civilizational paradigm is one of the conceptual schemes of political theory, which makes it possible to interpret political institutions, processes, and world politics through the lens of more stable and deeper factors - value systems and culture. Becoming the identifying basis of politics and the legitimizing ideological and semantic content of instrumental strategies, the civilizational approach appeals to the multiplicity and equality of the paths of historical and political formation. In political discourse, the relevant intentions are the plots of ensuring the completeness of sovereignty, historical memory and falsification of history, a common value-semantic space, national unity, and many others. The point of concentration of scientific and ideological-political search is the definition of the civilizational status of Russia. According to the authors, giving Russia a civilizational status allows us to offer adequate explanations of its socio-political ontology and phenomenology, stable and transient parameters, invariant and innovative characteristics. The emphasis is on the metaphysics of Russian statehood as determined by the specifics of civilization.

The articles included in this Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam are focused on two perspectives: Some link the comparative analysis of Islam to ongoing debates on the Axial Age and its role in the formation of major civilizational complexes, while others are more concerned with the historical constellations and sources involved in the formation of Islam as a religion and a civilization. More than any other particular line of inquiry, new historical and sociological approaches to the Axial Age revived the idea of comparative civilizational analysis and channeled it into more specific projects. A closer look at the very problematic place of Islam in this context will help to clarify questions about the Axial version of civilizational theory as well as issues in Islamic studies and sociological approaches to modern Islam.

The liberal model of globalization, proceeding from the "naturalness" of the unipolar world, essentially personifies the "modern barbarism": sustainable development of the Western civilization is a priori meant to be at the expense of other countries. Today, its functioning is running into the resistance from local civilizations, whose economic and political weight has increased significantly in the 21st century, allowing the non-Western countries to become important actors in international relations claiming to realize their national interests and own type of sustainable development. Alliances are emerging among these countries, based on an alternative type of globalization, which implies both mutually beneficial cooperation and national development outside anyone's external dictate. In fact, a global-local reality is being formed in the context of the multipolar world formation. The reaction of the West is to maintain its dominance by all means, holding back the creation of new international poles. These processes demand "rediscovery" of the established "universalist" approaches to sustainable development of human civilization: the problem of its alternative type has an independent scientific and practical significance for Russia as well as for the countries of non-Western civilization. In this regard, the study on the mutual influence of global and local factors that produce complex risks to sustainable development is being updated. Their complex nature is manifested in the fact that under the influence of hybridization of socio-techno-natural realities and inter-civilizational confrontation, they simultaneously cover a number of life spheres, overlapping each other, thereby acquiring an interference character. The author sees the answer to the challenges of these risks in the actualization of long-term functioning factors of a humanistic nature, which should be included in Russia's strategy of a global-local sustainable development.

The article analyzes the problem of productivity of using a civilizational ap­proach to the analysis of the current state of Russia and its history. The content of the term "civilization" is discussed. The necessity of understanding civili­zation in two modes of implementation is proved: as a process and as a state. "Civilization" is interpreted by the author as an interdisciplinary category to de­note the diversity of cultural and historical types of development of economi­cally and politically connected large communities of people and/or their aggre­gates (communities), subjectively and symbolically integrated into a relatively unified whole through historical and social imagination, cultural meanings, val­ues and norms that serve as the cause, purpose and basis for the organization and functioning of these communities. This definition is concretized by revealing the dialectics of the relationship of social, cultural, cognitive and institutional components of "civilization" using the example of Russia in the historical range from Kievan Rus to the modern Russian Federation. The most important institu­tional factors in the formation and development of civilizations, their interaction and expansion over long distances were "universal States" – "kingdoms" and "empires". Studying the formation and development of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Russian Empire and the USSR, the author comes to the conclusion that historically these political forms had several civilizational embodiments.