(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
What is not well understood is why people can at one
moment share a higher level of identity that links two
or more separate identities but then drop back into plac-
ing their local level of identity first, thus leading to the
exclusion of previously accepted neighbors and, per-
haps, to conflict. For example, in Yugoslavia people for
a time accepted a trans-subgroup “Yugoslavian” iden-
tity but then, as the State apparatus rapidly crumbled,
shucked that ephemeral level of identity and returned to
giving priority to their age-old ethnic identities.
Territoriality
We are all territorial beings, exhibiting territoriality in
varying manners, depending upon in which culture we
are brought up. Although people vary from one cul-
ture to another in terms of what they regard as their
personal space, most will defend their home turf at a
personal scale—be it the home from burglars, the
team’s territory during a hockey game, or the claimed
locations for our desks in the office. At a different
scale, ethnic and national territory may also be
defended if threatened. Groups, as with individuals,
exhibit territoriality. Geographer Robert Sack (1981,
1986) notes that territoriality is a powerful and indis-
pensable geographic strategy for controlling people
and things by controlling area. Territoriality implies
the need to possess, occupy, and defend a particular
territory.
Why should people sometimes link together and at
other times not? It is not a given that some people can
cooperate and share territory whereas others must be
divided. The link between territory, identity, and terri-
toriality becomes especially dynamic when discord
exists between two or more group territorial identities
that share a single space-—such as Walloons and
Flemings in Belgium, Greek and Turkish Cypriots in
Cyprus, contrasting peoples in Sudan—-or, indeed, lie
across the shared bounds of two or more States, as do
the Kurds in Southwest Asia.
Self-Determination
When the concern for identity, territory, territoriality,
and self-determination are combined, a dynamic defini-
tion is possible: “territory is . . . space to which identity
is attached by a distinctive group who hold or covet
that territory and who desire to have full control of it
for the group’s benefit” (Knight, 1982, p. 526). Self-
determination is at once a legal concept that finds
expression in international law and a geographical con-
cept because it links identity, territory, and the desire
for control and has territorial processual consequences.
In the West there is a tendency to discuss human rights
from an individual basis, whereas in the former USSR
and in many Third World States stress is given to
group rights. Group rights form the basis for many
claims, especially when the nation is involved,
because most people today still put the needs of their
nation above personal needs—-thus the call to arms is
so often heeded in times of danger. Group rights also
find expression in self-determination, for the term is
used to refer to groups, not individuals. Maoris in
New Zealand use the word turangawaewae to refer,
literally, to “the standing place for the feet.” Implied
in this is “the rights of a tribal group in land and the
consequential rights of individual members of the
group” (cited in Knight, 1988, p. 126). This phrase
links identity, territory, and rights. Control is implied
too, for without control the people’s rights and respon-
sibilities cannot be fulfilled, and the identity within
territory is threatened. Control over both identity and
territory is self-determination. Many groups, varying
defined, claim self-determination by maintaining they
have valid links between their identity and their terri-
tory and have the expectation of rights and control that
would come from the granting of self-determination.
Despite the clamoring for self-determination and its
application following World War I in many places in
Europe, Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert
Lansing, in 1921 believed that national safety, historic
rights, and economic interests should take precedence
over self-determination. He felt the term self-determi-
nation was “loaded with dynamite!" Thus Lansing
and other politicians then and later, even to this day,
have given priority to existing States (Knight 1985).
Although the UN Charter states that “all people have
the right to self-determination," the UN--which is
made of representatives of States, after all—gives pri-
ority to respecting the territorial integrity of existing
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268