(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
perceptual attributes of territory, the ways in which
territory acquires significance in human affairs, and
the nature and impact of competing strategies to con-
trol territory (Knight l982). Much of the social sci-
ence and public policy literature on ethnicity fails to
consider these issues; instead, territories are treated
simply as fixed units within which political and social
developments are situated. This does not mean that
territories are entirely ignored. Questions are asked
about the role of Quebec in Canadian national politics,
the political tactics of the Armenian minority living
within Azerbaijan, the social consequences of ethnic
heterogeneity within the states of India, and the prob-
lems that interstate resource inequalities pose for
political stability in Nigeria. These questions tend to
be addressed, however, without any consideration of
the historical development, perceptual attributes, or
spatial configuration of the territorial units involved.
The importance of such questions becomes immedi-
ately apparent if we pose a series of counterfactual
questions. Would ethnolinguistic identity and inter-
group conflict in Canada be different if Quebec had
developed as three separate provinces instead of one?
Would Armenian-Azerbaijani relations be any differ-
ent if Stalin had not created an Armenian enclave
within Azerbaijan? Would ethnic relations in Nigeria
be different if the state had been divided into 30
instead of 19 constituent units? The obvious “yes” that
each of these questions commands indicates the
importance of going beyond approaches that take the
territorial status quo for granted.
Two related territorial issues are at the heart of geo-
graphical work on ethnic conflict: (1) the nature and
scope of ethnic senses of territory and (2) the develop-
ment and institutionalization of particular political-
territorial arrangements. Turning to the first issue, the
habit of taking territorial arrangements for granted
means that we often do not consider the disjunction
between territorial structures and group sense of terri-
tory. Yet a map showing group sense of territory can
tell us much more about the likelihood of conflict than
can a static political map. It is, of course, difficult to
delimit a group’s sense of territory with any precision,
but insights can be gained through an examination of
historical political pattems, group rhetoric and ico-
nography, population concentrations, and the distribu-
tion of sites with particular ethnocultural significance
(see Gottmann 1973). When the same area clearly
falls within more than one group’s sense of territory,
the potential for conflict is heightened (see, for
instance, White 1992).
It is important to note that not all senses of territory
are monoethnic in character. One of the fundamental
flaws of many analyses of pre-civil-war Bosnia is the
failure to recognize the strength of a multiethnic Bos-
nian sense of territory. The number of people in Bos-
nia who were declaring themselves as “Bosnian” on
census and survey forms grew steadily in the post—
World War II era, and many inhabitants came to think
of the country as a territorial synthesis of cultures. The
recent partition plans developed for Bosnia fail to
grasp this reality. Instead they propose dividing the
country into ethnically discrete units. Since such pro-
posals neither can build upon preexisting senses of
territory nor can possibly lead to the establishment of
truly monoethnic territ0ries—the groups are too inter-
mingled for that to happen—their implementation
would at best create a highly unstable situation; each
of the new subdivisions would have an explicitly
monoethnic rationale, yet each would be ethnically
heterogeneous and would fall within more than one
group’s sense of territory (Jordan 1993).
The Bosnian example suggests that, when policies are
implemented that ignore underlying territorial ideolo-
gies, instability is likely to result. The issue of sense of
territory is thus closely linked to the second core terri-
torial issue: the development and institutionalization
of particular political-territorial arrangements. Focus-
ing on the process by which formal territories come
into being is important because it can provide insights
into how territorial arrangements shape ethnic identity
and interaction, how conflicts develop and are sus-
tained, and how territory is used to advance particular
political ends (see generally Sack 1986).
Many groups sharing basic cultural traits did not
become self-conscious ethnic groups until fairly
recently. Some 200 years ago there was no widespread
sense of Palestinian, Kurdish, or Flemish identity.
Those identities were forged in the context of politi-
cal-territorial developments that served to differentiate
peoples based on cultural characteristics. In the case
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268