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.
“Nevers”25 pages
C00123268 What is not well understood is why people can at one is attached by a distinctive group who hold or covet moment share a higher level of identity that links two that territory and who desire to have full control of it or more separate identities but then drop back into plac- for the group's benefit" (Knight, 1982, p. 526). Self- ing their local level of identity first, thus leading to the determination is at once a legal concept that finds exclusion of previously accepted neighbors and, per- expression in international law and a geographical con- haps, to conflict. For example, in Yugoslavia people for cept because it links identity, territory, and the desire a time accepted a trans-subgroup "Yugoslavian" iden- for control and has territorial processual consequences. tity but then, as the State apparatus rapidly crumbled, shucked that ephemeral level of identity and returned to In the West there is a tendency to discuss human rights giving priority to their age-old ethnic identities. 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 Territoriality claims, especially when the nation is involved, because most people today still put the needs of their We are all territorial beings, exhibiting territoriality in nation above personal needs-thus the call to arms is varying manners, depending upon in which culture we so often heeded in times of danger. Group rights also are brought up. Although people vary from one cul- find expression in self-determination, for the term is ture to another in terms of what they regard as their used to refer to groups, not individuals. Maoris in personal space, most will defend their home turf at'a New Zealand use the word turangawaewaeto refer, personal scale-be it the home from burglars, the literally, to "the standing place for the feet." Implied team's territory during a hockey game, or the claimed in this is "the rights of a tribal group in land and the locations for our desks in the office. At a different consequential rights of individual members of the scale, ethnic and national territory may also be group" (cited in Knight, 1988, p. 126). This phrase defended if threatened. Groups, as with individuals, links identity, territory, and rights. Control is implied exhibit territoriality. Geographer Robert Sack (1981, too, for without control the people's rights and respon- 1986) notes that territoriality is a powerful and indis- sibilities cannot be fulfilled, and the identity within pensable geographic strategy for controlling people territory is threatened. Control over both identity and and things by controlling area. Territoriality implies territory is self-determination. Many groups, varying the need to possess, occupy, and defend a particular defined, claim self-determination by maintaining they territory. have valid links between their identity and their terri- tory and have the expectation of rights and control that Why should people sometimes link together and at would come from the granting of self-determination. other times not? It is not a given that some people can cooperate and share territory whereas others must be Despite the clamoring for self-determination and its divided. The link between territory, identity, and tern- application following World War I in many places in toriality becomes especially dynamic when discord Europe, Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert exists between two or more group territorial identities Lansing, in 1921 believed that national safety, historic that share a single space-such as Walloons and rights, and economic interests should take precedence Flemings in Belgium, Greek and Turkish Cypriots in over self-determination. He felt the term self-determi- Cyprus, contrasting peoples in Sudan-or, indeed, lie nation was "loaded with dynamite!" Thus Lansing across the shared bounds of two or more States, as do and other politicians then and later, even to this day, the Kurds in Southwest Asia. 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 Self-Determination made of representatives of States, after all-gives pri- ority to respecting the territorial integrity of existing When the concern for identity, territory, territoriality, and self-determination are combined, a dynamic defini- tion is possible: "territory is.. . space to which identity 19
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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.