NEW YORK, Dec 27: Influential US political scientist Samuel Huntington, author of “The Clash of Civilisations” and a professor at Harvard University, has died at the age of 81, the university announced on its website on Saturday.

Huntington, who retired from teaching in 2007 after 58 years at Harvard, died on December 24 in Martha’s Vineyard, Massa-chusetts, the university said.

He was co-author or editor of 17 books, mostly on US government, democratisation, military politics, civil-military relations and political development.

Huntington was perhaps best known for believing that in a post-Cold War world violent conflict would come from cultural and religious differences among the world’s major civilisations, and not ideological differences between nation states.

This view was fully explained in the 1996 book “The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order,” which has been translated into 39 languages.

—AFP