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Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Partition, and U.S. Foreign Policy


Start:	Wednesday, January 15, 2003 9:00 AM

End:	Wednesday, January 15, 2003 5:15 PM

Location:	The St. Regis Hotel Potomac Room 923 16th Street NW Washington, D.C.

The symposium will examine the merits of various policy strategies for resolving ethno-religious conflict - particularly some form of partition - in countries of major interest to the United States: Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and India.

Rather than displace the policy challenge of global ethnic conflict, the war on terrorism heightens its urgency. For international terrorism has necessitated increased American involvement in several ethnically divided countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, India, and Indonesia. What are the most appropriate strategies for fostering long-term ethnic peace and political stability in these countries of immense strategic significance to the United States? In Afghanistan and Iraq, marked by deep ethnic and religious divisions, how can the U.S. ensure that new regimes will endure, much less be stable and reasonably democratic? How can the U.S. help India and Indonesia - two key states on the front lines in the war on terrorism - manage their own ethnic and religious conflicts in order to contain terrorist violence and civil strife rather than unwittingly foment them?

Our symposium closely examines two different kinds of strategies: partition and integration. Whereas partition seeks the separation of ethnic groups into mono-ethnic states or semi-autonomous political enclaves, integration seeks the creation or reinforcement of a single multiethnic political framework. Rather than debate the relative merits of each strategy in the abstract, we propose to do so with reference to the strategically significant cases noted above. A special objective of our symposium is to attend to the usually neglected - and frequently maligned - case for some form of ethnic partition as a means of securing a more permanent ethnic peace. We are confident that the discussions will yield context-specific and policy-relevant insight.

9:00 Welcome

� Dr. Hillel Fradkin, President, EPPC

9:05 Introduction: To Make Peace, Should We Give Partition a Chance?

� Dr. Timothy Samuel Shah, Research Fellow, EPPC

9:15 Afghanistan: Is Ethnic Federalism a Recipe for Peace?

� Dr. Marin Strmecki, Vice-President, Smith Richardson Foundation

� Dr. David Isby, Director, Committee for a Free Afghanistan

10:45 Iraq: Making Ethnic Peace after Saddam

� Dr. Kanan Makiya, Professor of Middle East Studies, Brandeis University

� Dr. Patrick Clawson, Deputy Director, Washington Institute for Near East Policy

12:15 Lunch

12:30 Keynote Address: Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Partition, and U.S. Foreign Policy

� Amb. Richard N. Haass, Director of Policy Planning, U.S. State Department [invited]

1:15 India: Prospects for Ethnic Partition in Kashmir and the Northeast

� Dr. Sumit Ganguly, Professor of Asian Studies & Government, University of Texas at Austin

� Dr. Radha Kumar, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations [invited]

2:45 Indonesia: Is Ethnic Partition Inevitable?

� Dr. Harold Crouch, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Political and Social Change, The Australian National University

� Dr. Muthiah Alagappa, Director of the Washington, D.C. Office of the East-West Center

4:15 Debating the Merits of Ethnic Partition: A Roundtable Discussion

� Dr. Chaim Kaufmann, Professor of International Relations, Lehigh University

� Dr. Donald Horowitz, Duke Professor of Law and Political Science, Duke University

� Dr. Ashutosh Varshney, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Michigan