(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Africa, for instance. While they might not necessarily
have a great deal of meaning to the local peoples, they
have a tremendous impact in terms of how the intern a-
tional community officially views various popula-
tions.
Ethnicity and Identity
Another concept related to forced migrations, which
Dr. Knight referred to yesterday, is the primacy of
identity and the inability of people to adjust quickly
their primary identity. It is important to understand in
this context the role. of a catalyst or a trigger that
might cause a nation either to latch more strongly onto
a specific identity or to change its primary identity.
Ethnicity in most of the world, in fact, is quite dor-
mant most of the time; it is only once ethnic forces are
activated that they become politicized and can lead to
conflict. We can try to understand ethnicity and the
relationships between ethnic groups and regions, but
that alone has little predictive value. That is why when
addressing policy options—trying to be proactive as
opposed to reactive—it is not enough to know a
region and the nature of its ethnic groups. What might
be a passive ethnicity can very quickly become acti-
vated if something is denied a particular group or if a
group perceives a threat to its territorial homeland,
language, culture, or religion. The interrelationship
between ethnicity and territory is quite complex.
I want to mention, briefly, the factor of warfare. War-
fare is quite obviously the major cause of forced
migrations in terms of'generating ethnic populations
on the move, and national territoriality is frequently
the underlying cause of much of this fighting. What is
important to understand about situations where territo-
riality acts as a catalyst to politicize ethnicity is that,
even in warfare situations that are not based on ethnic
conflict, groups are often dislocated because of their
ethnicity. Warfare leads to ethnic-selective disloca-
tions when a particular region that has been overrun
has a concentration of one ethnic group or contains
groups that are economically vulnerable or culturally
isolated. So that even when the cause of a conflict is
not rooted in ethnicity, it can result in ethnic “modifi-
cation” of-a region by selectivity of the forced
migrants.
Geography of Refugee Populations
What can probably be agreed upon in trying to under-
stand ethnic conflict is the importance of scale and of
having the appropriate approach to investigate events
at the substate or intrastate level. I want to briefly
present a few maps here to show how different scales
might operate in terms of attempting to understand the
ethnic components of forced migration.
Africa is the most turbulent continent in terms of num-
bers of refugees (see figure 16). Most African refugees
tend to be the economically deprived and, as a result,
they do not move far across neighboring borders. The
African continent is also where the largest number of
intemally displaced peoples exists; when they cannot
cross the border, they tend to congregate along the
fringes of states, often beyond the limits of central
authorities. In Africa, there are three or four times as
many displaced persons as refugees.
In the former Soviet Union, there is a combination of
short- and long-distance migration (see figure 17).
Most of this movement is based on national conflict in
the non-Slavic south. The economically able groups
can move farther, often before the outbreak of vio-
lence.
Bringing it down to a larger scale, within the states of
Tajikistan and Georgia, for example, one gets below
the ethnic and into the various historical and factional
clan conflicts that are at the basis of ‘groups attempting
to reestablish historical regions by pushing people off
territory and back from whence they came (see figure
18).
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268