civilizational

Civilizational is an adjective used to describe phenomena related to civilization or to the large-scale cultural, social, and political patterns that characterize a civilization or group of civilizations.

In scholarly writing, civilizational is used to qualify nouns such as change, identity, discourse, institutions, or conflict, signaling a macro-level perspective that extends beyond a single society.

The term appears across disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, and political science and is common in discussions of civilizational change, civilizational difference, and civilizational imaginaries—the ideas people associate with their civilizations.

Related concepts include the civilizational state, a term used to describe a state organized around a civilizational identity. The concept has been invoked in debates on nationalism, geopolitics, and modernization, and it is contested by some scholars who warn against essentialism or deterministic readings of cultures.

In usage, civilizational should be defined clearly within a given study, since it can risk overgeneralization if applied without specificity. It is distinct from civilization as a concrete historical entity; rather, civilizational denotes the pattern or framework that spans civilizations or runs across long historical periods.