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