Culture Wars from a Global Perspective

Are culture wars defining struggles of our time, or the noisy surface of deeper economic, social, and geopolitical transformations? This book is a much-needed global account of today’s high-stakes struggles over cultural legitimacy—conflicts in which competing ways of life confront one another.Moving beyond the field’s Anglo-American default, the volume tracks how culture-war conflicts travel across borders, adapt to local histories, yet reproduce familiar dynamics of moral polarization and struggles over cultural legitimacy. “Hot-button issues” vary sharply from case to case; what recurs is the underlying contest over which ways of life count as legitimate and who gets to draw the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Across theoretically driven, empirically rich case studies—Russia’s state-sponsored “traditional values,” Brazil’s battle for democracy and moral authority, Sweden’s canon debates, France’s far-right politics of humor, Japan’s wars over imperial memory, India’s “culture peace” around yoga, South Africa’s post-apartheid conflicts over tradition, language and justice, and a long historical view of America’s recurring eruptions—the contributors map culture wars in their local specificity and global entanglement.Comparative and conceptually sharp, the book offers scholars a reframed vocabulary for analyzing culture wars, while remaining accessible to undergraduates, postgraduates, and non-specialist readers.