Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, dated October 1995, contains the proceedings of a conference on ethnic conflict held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored it. Academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials presented papers on ethnic and territorial conflict in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. They also discussed what these conflicts mean for US policy. The document contains no UFO material.
“The Advance”17 pages
C00123268 The Demographic Backdrop to adjustment of demographic data. Most such data, Ethnic Conflict: A Geographic moreover, are not seen as threatening by governments. Overview Certainly there are cases where certain population information is viewed as terribly dangerous (Lebanon or Iraq's religious compositions, for example), but, Gary Fyller even when this is the case, other demographic data Professor of Geography and unrelated to policymakers' phobias may be unaf- Population Studies fected. Finally, censuses have to be conducted openly. University of Hawaii Information about their quality and the nature of their biases is widely circulated in the demographic com- munity, and sometimes "corrections" are advanced by Introduction demographers outside the country. The only effective way to keep demographic data secret is not to collect Following the breakup of the former Soviet Union, them. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan strongly criticized US intelligence estimates that, he alleged, had ignored Soviet demographic and health statistics. Moynihan Demographic Indicators of Instability argued that any society that exhibited the symptoms of the USSR-which included rising overall mortality Consider also that certain demographic trends corre- and a high incidence of alcoholism-could not be a late highly with socioeconomic variables; were it notlegitimate economic or military threat to the United for this fact, demographic transition would be an States. The criticism is unfair in one sense, since it arcane model of little interest to any but abstract theo- does not require national health or sobriety to launch rists. Thus, it requires only a small logical step to seemissiles. Nevertheless, Moynihan's observation about that socioeconomic data and trends (perhaps closely the role of demographic statistics in intelligence anal- guarded or disguised) are imbedded in demographic ysis is insightful. data that are open and aboveboard. Hungary offers an interesting example. As a former Warsaw Pact mem- States sometimes go to great lengths to disguise data ber, Hungary was quite guarded in releasing social about their economies and societies, usually with the and economic data, but its population data are among motive of misleading their enemies (and perhaps their the best in the world. own citizens as well). More commonly, however, accurate data are elusive because they are difficult and I do not mean to imply either that censuses ought toexpensive to collect, analyze, and interpret. I once replace electronic surveillance in the intelligence kit spent several months visiting and collecting data from bag or that demographic data can entirely compensate remote family planning clinics in Chile, and I was for a lack of socioeconomic data. My point is thatstruck with how different thesituation at the clinics population data are a rich vein that is not mined suffi-was compared with the official reports in Santiago. ciently and that academic researchers and intelligence My experience is highly typical, I think, and is shared analysts have the opportunity to use census data inby most who have done field research. creative ways that give new insight into societal trends. Perhaps because the data are easy to come by,Demographic data are almost'always the best data that their value is not fully appreciated. are available for a society. This is not to say that they, are good; indeed, they are often very poor. I am only A comprehensive case for the value of the demo-here advancing a comparative judgment. Govern- graphic perspective in assessing intelligence issuesments collecting demographic data (whether censuses, would require more space than I have available. I hopevital registers, or surveys) can call upon an impressive a few aspects of the "correlation" I mentioned earlierbody of international experience and knowledge con- will suffice. cerning the planning, execution, interpretation, and 151
Not linked to a story yet.
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.