Documents / FOIA release

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

Central Intelligence Agency · 1995-10-01 · 205 pages · text from the file's own layer

This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.

  • p. 50 …For example, Muslim Serbs and Muslim Croats never defined them- selves as a people. They never…
  • p. 51 …I think that’s very crucial to under- standing why the Albanians never claimed Kosovo. Of…
  • p. 62 …be taught as a second foreign language, never as the first, and d_) less information and…
  • p. 78 …It never was. It might be useful, instead, to view the Soviet Union as a colonial…
  • p. 91 …As such, the ability of states to get from their people what they want has never…
  • p. 92 …The peoples of Africa never chose what their bound- aries should be—they were imposed by…
  • p. 93 …I never would have sent them in the first place. I thought our job was to…
  • p. 109 …Most of the provisions of this agreement were never imple- mented, and Kurdish autononiy became a…
  • p. 110 …those remaining in Lebanon, that prospect was never accepted by Muslims. The absence of believable data…
  • p. 112 …the vast majority of them—who have never known democracy. Other hopes can be enter- tained…
  • p. 114 …But in this region we can never say never, as evi- denced by the recent gasp…
  • p. 116 …Although Sovietologists could never have predicted the rapid events that dismantled the USSR at the beginning…
  • p. 119 …The Chinese, in my opinion,‘ never take China for granted, culturally, politically, or otherwise. This is…
  • p. 120 …What is going on here? National identities, although imagined, are never arbi- trary but arise in…
  • p. 121 …be one reason why these categories have never been challenged. The very Confucian practice of the…
  • p. 123 …These ethnic identities are “imagined” in Ben Ander- son’s (1983) terms, but they are never…
  • p. 133 …Inter- vention in the cause of the exacerbation of ethnic conflict should never be justified. Intervention…
  • p. 141 …Sociocultural identities in South Asia have never been fixed. The corporate mobility of particular groups, some…
  • p. 147 …Although never posing a serious challenge to Congress, the Mahasabha was particularly influential in the period…
  • p. 157 …were always moderate and that the extremists never represented the Sikh rank and file. One fundamental…
  • p. 166 …These are the people who have never had any form of internationally recognized status and who…
  • p. 169 …ways to enter as illegal immigrants and never get counted. 1 I Another important point to…
  • p. 177 …The -French nation never managed to incorpo- rate the adjacent French-speaking Belgian Walloons or the…
  • p. 186 …The reason Armenians still hate Turks is that there has never been reconciliation. Similarly there will…
  • p. 204 …You are never going to have total agreement on mov- ing boundaries. In fact, hundreds of…
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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far-reaching weapons and technology. So the Defense
Department, and the US Government in general, has
quite an interest in this phenomenon and is trying to
understand it and construct a; strategy to address it.
In attempting to grapple with this issue, initial think-
ing on a Clinton national security strategy has focused
on three elements?
' Engagement. The United States is committed to
remaining engaged in international affairs.
~ Prevention. We want to prevent or contain the
effects of ethnic conflict. We want to use all the ele-
ments of national power, development assistance,
and trade assistance to prevent conflict, and, if that
does not work, we want to act early to keep the con-
flict small. ,
~ Partnership. We want to expand the core group of
like-minded democratic countries that we forged
during the Cold War and have this group work as a
I
1 In July 1994, the Clinton Administration published its first com-
prehensive national security strategy, which used as its concep-
tional framework the elements of "engagement" and
"enlargement." _
partnership to either prevent or to contain conflict.
We need to work together in a variety of multilateral
and bilateral ways to marshal all those resources
together as a partnership for addressing the issue.
The govemment needs much more analysis to under-
stand in a robust way the phenomenon of ethnic and
national conflict. We need academic researchers to
tum toward applied robust, rigorous, and predictive
research that we can bring inside the govemment in
testable ways and see if we can motivate policy. We
are not interested in sponsoring more original
research; as Dr. Ted Gurr wrote in his book on conflict
a few years ago, there are 686 books on the theory of
conflict—we do not want a 687th. What we want are
robust, testable, applied research and models that we
can bring inside the govemment. We take this problem
seriously. It is a critical issue of US national security.
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268

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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.