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Zeus Network And The Commercialization Of Conflict: A Critical Analysis Of Exploitation, Representation, And Reality Television, Delante Clark

Graduate Scholarship and Creative Works

This study examines Zeus Network as a prominent example of the commercialization of conflict within contemporary digital media. Through reality based programming that frequently emphasizes confrontation, public humiliation, emotional volatility, and interpersonal disputes, the network has cultivated a profitable entertainment model built upon spectacle and controversy. Drawing upon conflict theory, critical race theory, and media sociology, this paper investigates whether Zeus functions as a platform for cultural representation and economic opportunity or as a system that monetizes dysfunction for audience consumption. Particular attention is given to the portrayal of Black women and Black communities, whose experiences often become central to …

Ai And The Music Industry: Its Current Status And A Speculative Projection Of Its Evolutionary Trajectory, Rhett D. Morris, Clayton Rosati, Stefan Fritsch

Honors Projects

Music serves as one of society's biggest cultural outlets, allowing millions to share in what used to be a uniquely human form of expression. The commodification of music has built a huge industry full of companies and platforms that have used technology and property laws to shape music's relationship with the public. This study aims to look into the future to see how AI and its implementation could affect the structure of the music industry. To look into the future, this piece establishes two of the most pressing kinds of AI technology for the music industry and looks to contextualize …

Table Of Contents

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

End Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Liah Greenfeld’S Scholarship On Nationalism, Civilizations, And Humanity, Zeying Wu

Comparative Civilizations Review

This introduction to the special issue of Comparative Civilizations Review, dedicated to the late Professor Liah Greenfeld, summarizes her original approach to the study of nationalism, civilization, and humanity. It describes her groundbreaking contributions across multiple disciplines ⎯ including sociology, political science, anthropology, economic history, and psychiatry ⎯ and introduces Greenfeld’s comparative civilizations project, an ambitious endeavor to which she dedicated her final years. The introduction concludes by examining examples of her influence on the work of scholars around the world featured in this special issue and how her intellectual legacy provides vital frameworks for understanding the world in …

Towards The Systematic Cross-Civilizational Comparison: How Civilizations Work Case 3: The Chinese Case, Tiantian Wu

Comparative Civilizations Review

Drawing on Liah Greenfeld’s (2024) framework of Systematic Cross-Civilizational Comparison, this study examines Chinese civilization as an enduring and culturally autonomous system shaped by its unique first principles, “the Great Unity”, which integrates Confucian orthodoxy, political legitimacy, and cultural tradition into a coherent worldview. Historically, this framework justified dynastic rule through moral virtue and the Mandate of Heaven, forming a durable model of statecraft that incorporated Taoist, Legalist, and Buddhist influences. Expressed and perpetuated through the Chinese language, these principles have systematically shaped the civilization’s modes of thought, ethics, and emotional patterns. Although the Opium War and subsequent “Century of …

A Historical Inquiry Into The Cpc’S Century-Long Evaluation Of Confucianism And Its Return To The “Great Unity” Cultural Tradition, Ye Liu

Comparative Civilizations Review

Since its founding, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has undergone a complex trajectory in its attitude toward Confucius and Confucianism — from fierce critique to rational inheritance, and then to confident promotion. This century-long evolution profoundly reflects shifts in the CPC’s revolutionary tasks and ideological orientations at different historical stages, and it also mirrors the continuity and transformation of the Chinese civilization’s “Great Unity” (大一统) cultural tradition within a modern political context. This evolution can be divided into four stages: the revolutionary period, the Mao Zedong period after the founding of the PRC, the reform and openingup period, and …

The First Principles Of Chinese Civilization: Relationalism And Pragmatism, Sai Zhang, Yongnian Zheng

Comparative Civilizations Review

This article examines the first principles of Chinese civilization, relationalism and pragmatism, through Liah Greenfeld’s (2024) definition of civilization as a distinct cultural reality. By comparing Chinese civilization with others, particularly in the context of globalization, we seek to identify its distinctive characteristics. Our overview analysis draws on interdisciplinary literature (including linguistics, philosophy, sociology, political economy, and social psychology). We argue that the complexities of Chinese civilization require a nuanced understanding of its first principles, which are codified in language and cognition. The article explores how these principles manifest in mainstream thoughts such as Confucianism and Legalism, influencing social structure …

Temporal Legitimacy And Civilizational Logic: A Sociological Perspective On The Foundational Principles Of Chinese Civilization, Yuk Man Cheung

Comparative Civilizations Review

This article departs from the recent social-scientific analytical framework for comparative civilizations proposed by the sociologist Liah Greenfeld (2024a, 2024b, 2025) and puts forward several basic conjectures regarding the analysis of the characteristics of Chinese civilization, with the aim of assisting our understanding, execution, and integration of empirical studies. Precisely because these are conjectures, they differ from conventional academic research–especially the case-study-oriented research style dominant in contemporary Anglophone academia. Accordingly, this article can only be regarded as an attempt that, starting from sociological theory, offers preliminary conjectures and tentatively constructs a theoretical framework within which specialists from different fields may …

Cognitive Foundations Of The Absence Of Antisemitism In Japan: Towards A Civilizational Perspective, Chikako Takeishi

Comparative Civilizations Review

This paper explores the gap between civilizations in the forms antisemitism takes and the cognitive modes on which it is based, given its significance for comparative civilizational analysis. Antisemitism is characterized by two features — the expressive nature of violence and an orientation toward the elimination of an entire group — which are particularly salient compared to other forms of anti-sentiment familiar in the age of nationalism. In the first section of this paper, I argue that antisemitism exhibiting these features has not been present in Japanese history. The subsequent sections, building on Greenfeld’s theory of civilization, examine existential envy …

Children’S Literature As A Site Of Cross-Civilizational Analysis: Hong Kong In Crisis After 2019, Faye Dorcas Yung Schwendeman

Comparative Civilizations Review

This paper applies Liah Greenfeld’s cross-civilizational framework to Hong Kong children’s literature published from 2017 to the present, with emphasis on post-2019 works. Existing scholarship argues that 2019 marked the crystallization and mass diffusion of Hong Kong national consciousness; a nationalism lens therefore helps explain the intensified production of Hong Kong-centered narratives, civic pedagogy, and Cantonese-language transmission. I argue, however, that nationalism does not fully account for a crisis register that becomes salient in parts of the corpus: texts that frame the conflict as a struggle over singular truth, counter-memory, and intolerable contradiction, and that assign to ordinary people a …

The “Original Spirit” Of Chinese Civilization: Wang Huning And The Indigenization Of Reform In Post-Mao China, Chandler Rosenberger

Comparative Civilizations Review

For several centuries, modernizing intellectuals in China have struggled with the question of how to move their country forward against the inertia of a large peasant population rooted in millennia-old traditions. The Communist Party of Mao Zedong tried to fill that peasantry with revolutionary fervor, but grew fearful as chaos quickly destroyed traditions and reforms alike. In the last three decades, however, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems to have found a way to engage the population in modernizing within their own familiar cultural framework. Guided by chief ideologist Wang Huning, the CCP has embraced a civilizational approach to reform …

The Concept Of A ‘State-Civilization’ In Russia: The Contest For National Dignity In The Form Of A Civilizational Analysis, Ivan Nokhrin

Comparative Civilizations Review

This article examines the contemporary Russian concept of the “state-civilization” as articulated in official discourse, educational materials, and nationalist thought. It argues that the notion of Russian civilization functions primarily as a symbol of national dignity and exceptionalism rather than an analytically coherent concept. Through analyzing narratives surrounding traditional values, state-centrism, family, and patriotism, the study demonstrates that these themes largely reproduce longstanding patterns of Russian nationalism and its opposition to the West. Drawing on Greenfeld’s theory of civilization, the article contends that Russia is best understood as part of the broader monotheistic civilization rather than a distinct civilization of …

The Family As A Mechanism Of Civilizational Continuity: Absorption, Localization, And Rejection Of Modern Values In The Indic Case, Monika Monika

Comparative Civilizations Review

Contrary to the common view that the family socializes the individual into a given culture, this paper insists that the family performs a far more profound, indeed, a constitutive function. It is not simply the first school of civilizational values; it is the primary institutional site through which a civilization reproduces its symbolic order and, in so doing, acts as the gatekeeper of civilizational continuity and change. It is here that a civilization’s foundational principles are first internalized; and it is here, too, that modern values, or new norms thrust upon it by encounters with alien civilizations ⎯ are first …

Liah Greenfeld And Civilizational Dialogue: For Continuing A Legacy, Manindra Nath Thakur

Comparative Civilizations Review

One fine morning, I dropped into my room at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU. Monika took an appointment to meet and discuss her project. I was curious to know about her work and wanted to see if there was anything to learn from it. Within no time, I discovered that she was influenced by a professor and that we had many common concerns. I listened carefully and was convinced by her impression. We decided to initiate a conversation. Suddenly, a few months later, she informed me about Liah Greenfeld’s sad demise. Our conversation could not take off.

Reflection On Liah Greenfeld’S Influence On My Work: National Consciousness And The Sociological Imagination, Oliver Benoit

Comparative Civilizations Review

Few scholars have influenced my intellectual development as much as Liah Greenfeld. While my academic interests emerged from an attempt to understand the Grenada Revolution and its collapse in 1983, it was Greenfeld's work that provided clarity to the questions I asked and the conceptual tools I employed to answer the question: What caused the collapse of the Grenada Revolution? Her scholarship redirected my attention away from conventional explanations rooted exclusively in economics, ideology, or political institutions and toward the cultural foundations of modernity itself. More specifically, Greenfeld's theory of nationalism provided a framework through which I came to embrace …

Unconventionality In Liah Greenfeld's Thought, Francesco Duina

Comparative Civilizations Review

As certainly all of her readers recognize and many of the contributions to this special issue will point out, Liah Greenfeld’s writings covered an almost unparalleled breadth of themes and empirical levels ⎯ from the very macro to the very micro. Hence, she produced seminal contributions to the study of empires, globalization, states in history, nationalism, economic systems, the arts, religions, groups and organizations, terrorism, animals and humans, the social sciences, science in general, mental illnesses, and the mind. Most recently, she had turned her attention to civilizations (Greenfeld, 2016, 2025). The rigor of her writing was equally impressive: it …

Following Through Dialogues: A Chinese Scholar’S Reminiscence Of Professor Liah Greenfeld, Xinqi Jia

Comparative Civilizations Review

Ordinarily, a Chinese teacher of ethics who had never set foot in a Western country before the age of forty and a Jewish-American sociologist born in the former Soviet Union would have no reason to cross paths. Yet, throughout 2010, they spent an entire year in Boston in close contact. Should anyone someday write a biography of the late Professor Liah Greenfeld, this story alone would be excellent material for exploring how her theory has influenced the world, and how, as an outstanding theorist, she continually expanded the boundaries of our understanding of it.

Liah Greenfeld On Antisemitism As A Defining Characteristic Of The Monotheistic Civilization, Efraim Karsh

Comparative Civilizations Review

One cannot overstate the scholarly and intellectual loss occasioned by the untimely death of Boston University Professor Liah Greenfeld. Through her prodigious interdisciplinary research, Professor Greenfeld has established herself as one of the foremost social science theorists of our time and a worthy heir to the great firstgeneration nationalism scholars, in particular Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Anthony Smith.

Was Love Invented In Sixteenth-Century England? A Few Comments On Liah Greenfeld’S Theory Of Emotions, Dmitri Panchenko

Comparative Civilizations Review

According to Liah Greenfeld, there are three kinds of emotions. Primary emotions (such as pain, pleasure, fear, positive and negative excitement, hunger, and satiation) and secondary emotions (such as affection, sorrow, and anger) can be observed in both animals and humans. However, most human emotions ⎯ tertiary emotions ⎯ are more complex. “These, though not unusual among our pets, do not exist in the wild. Tertiary emotions are emotions such as love, ambition, pride, self-respect, shame, guilt, inspiration, enthusiasm, sadness, awe, admiration, humility and humiliation, sense of justice and injustice, envy, malice, resentment, cruelty, hatred; one can go on almost …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Before Urgent Fury: U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Grenada During The Ford And Carter Administrations, Nicholas Jake Durell

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

When the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, it experienced a military and psychological defeat unlike any in its modern history. Following President Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford, the House Minority Leader who had become Vice President, now assumed the presidency of a deeply fractured nation. As the Cold War persisted, Washington struggled to reassert its superpower status globally while desperately avoiding further foreign entanglements. Consequently, the Ford administration adopted a cautiously detached approach to foreign policy, a strategy vividly illustrated by its posture toward the Eastern Caribbean. This calculated ambivalence, continued by the …

Shifting Faith Among Indigenous People In Arunachal Pradesh, India: Revisiting Greenfeld's Civilizational Framework, M. Amin Khan

Comparative Civilizations Review

This paper examines changing religious demography in Arunachal Pradesh through Liah Greenfeld's theory of civilization as a self-generating and self-reproducing symbolic reality. Using decadal Census data (1971–2011), it traces the demographic decline of Indigenous/Tribal religions classified under “Other Religions and Persuasions” (ORP) alongside the widespread growth of Christianity and the more limited growth of Hinduism. The analysis argues that these demographic shifts reflect more than religious conversion; they reveal differential capacities for cultural reproduction. Whereas civilizations endowed with codified first principles and enduring institutions sustain continuity across generations, Arunachal Pradesh's largely localized and orally transmitted indigenous traditions have proven less …

Professor Greenfeld’S Last Class: Notes For Online Lectures On “The Science Of Humanity,” Delivered To Students And Scholars Primarily From India, July 2025, Liah Greenfeld

Comparative Civilizations Review

The question for this class is: What is humanity?

We all believe we all know what it is, don’t we? After all, there is hardly any subject more important for us, a question on the answer to which other subjects depend — political, social, economic. Answers to questions such as: what are human economic needs and desires; what political structures are optimal for humans; is democracy, for instance, a universal human desire; should politics in every nation be democratic, or, perhaps, authoritarian governments are better; is freedom a natural need, does it make life better, does equality?

Jison Jiei: Offensive Realism And Imperial Japan's Spiral Toward Regional Hegemony, John William Dodd

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis examines Imperial Japan’s march from the Mukden Incident of 1931 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 through the lens of offensive realism. It asks to what extent Japan’s prewar grand strategy can be understood as a bid for regional hegemony, and what that interpretation reveals about the relationship between power politics, international law, and future great-power crises. Rather than treating Japanese expansion as irrational madness or reducing it only to ideology or militarism, this thesis argues that Japanese leaders acted according to a recognizable strategic logic.

Proceeding from theory to historical analysis, this project first situates …

Religious Practice And Attitudes Toward Immigration And Racial Justice In America, Amya Douglas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

This study aims to understand how Christians’ knowledge of Scripture and involvement in the church have an impact on their social-political views, specifically, racial justice and immigration. By using the survey responses from the 6th wave of the Baylor Religion Survey, more frequent church attendance and reading Scripture were correlated with a greater recognition of racism in terms of being against white supremacy and white nationalism, supporting racial justice when asked about racial gaps, and possessing greater support for immigrants. This study highlights the distinction between religious affiliation and religious practice, and it suggests that certain policy sentiments can be …

Guest Editor’S Introduction: Liah Greenfeld And The Future Of Comparative Civilizational Studies, Monika Monika, Guest Editor

Comparative Civilizations Review

Every scholarly life leaves behind unfinished questions. Professor Liah Greenfeld was acutely aware of this. Throughout a career spanning more than four decades, her research never settled into the repetition of established arguments. Each major work emerged from the unresolved problems of the previous one, enlarging both the scope of its inquiry and the range of disciplines with which it engaged. Nationalism led her to questions of modernity (Greenfeld, 1992) and the foundations of economic development (Greenfeld, 2001). The growth of the modern economy and the emerging new forces of globalization, in turn, raised broader questions about the self and …

In Memoriam: Liah Greenfeld A Reflection From The President Of The Comparative Civilizations Forum, Bibi Pelić

Comparative Civilizations Review

It is with sorrow and gratitude that the Comparative Civilizations Forum dedicates this special 2026 Fall issue of the Comparative Civilizations Review to the memory of Professor Liah Greenfeld, who passed away in May of this year.

Professor Liah Greenfeld was a sociologist, an anthropologist, a political scientist — and more than any single label can hold. Across four decades at Harvard and then at Boston University, she built a body of work, from Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity to The Spirit of Capitalism to Mind, Modernity, Madness, that stepped outside the boundaries the modern academy likes to draw. …

Liah Greenfeld: Scholar, Thinker, Friend, Joseph Drew

Comparative Civilizations Review

Professor Liah Greenfeld and I met several years ago when she submitted an article to the Comparative Civilizations Review. Her thoughtful demeanor and personal kindness to all were quickly evident, but so, too, was her scholarship, especially her probing theories of state, society, and civilization.

Full Issue

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.