Documents / FOIA release
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.
“Anderson”6 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 political analyses; Its power is ultimately to root our understanding of ethnicity in a context that is not simply one of political leadership and political initia- tives. By focusing on the locational, territorial, and environmental dimensions of ethnic conflict, a geo- graphical perspective directs attention to basic opportu- nities and constraints, to issues that may precipitate tensions, and to vital connections across international boundaries that may be missed if we approach ethnic conflict on a state-by-state basis. Maps can be extraor- dinarily important tools in this endeavor, for they encourage us to think about the relationships between ethnic processes on the one hand and their territorial and environmental contexts on the other. Maps should not be seen as ends unto themselves, however. Rather, their usefulness is in helping us to see relationships and issues that otherwise might be missed. The perspectives on ethnic conflict outlined in this paper are suggestive of a larger challenge for US for- eign policy: the need to redefine our national interest in a way that transcends conventional assumptions about the power and static character of the existing political-territorial order. Ethnic conflicts are likely to intensify, not abate, in the years ahead, and in places they may_well lead to changes in the political organi- zation of territory. Since there is little the United States can do to alter this situation, US foreign policy should not be driven by the assumption that regional stability is most likely to occur in places where there are no changes in the world political map. Instead, long-term stability is likely to be achieved only in sit- uations where political and territorial arrangements are organized to protect the basic cultural and political rights of ethnic groups. This implies the need for a US foreign policy that is open to political-territorial structures that promote representative pluralism, whether or not those structures reflect the existing pattern of states. 12 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 above. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.