Commission on Human Rights
Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights
Working Group on Minorities
Tenth Session
March 1-5, 2004
Statement submitted by Amy Pate, Coordinator, Minorities at Risk Project, under item
3(b)
Greetings, members of the Working Group and delegates to its Tenth Session. It is a
privilege to address you today. My name is Amy Pate, and I am the coordinator of the
Minorities at Risk Project, housed in the Center for International Development and
Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, College Park. The Minorities at
Risk Project (or MAR) was founded by Professor Ted Robert Gurr in 1986. It currently
tracks the political status and activities of 285 ethnic groups around the world. The
project maintains an extensive dataset focused on state-group and interethnic relations
from 1985 to 2000. We are currently updating the dataset for the years 2001-2003. The
large number of groups included in the project, its global coverage, and its temporal span
endow the project with the ability to track global, regional and country-specific trends in
state-minority and interethnic relations.
In February 2003, the Project – in conjunction with other research endeavors in
CIDCM – published a report, Peace and Conflict 2003. In it, some encouraging
developments were reported. The continued spread of democracy has resulted in
increased respect for human rights. Furthermore, violent intrastate conflict, after peaking
in the early 1990s, has subsided to the lowest levels since 1960. Nine violent separatist
conflicts were contained in 2000-2001, primarily through negotiation.
Despite these encouraging signs, there are still numerous problems and issues that
remain. While the spread of democracy is a positive development, many of these newer
democracies remain unconsolidated. Without international support, democratization –
with all the promise it holds for minority groups – will falter. Additionally, although
democracies tend to show more respect for human – and minority – rights, the number of
democracies with mixed human rights records has increased. Electoral democracy has not
proven to be a guarantee of political and civil liberties – particularly for members of
minority groups. The U.S.-led war on terrorism has also been used as an occasion to
repress members of minorities in several states, democratic or not.
While many violent conflicts have been contained since 2000, many have not
reached more long-term settlement, and fewer are at the stage of implementation of
settlement agreements. Until final agreements are negotiated and implemented, the risk of
renewed conflict remains. Furthermore, violent conflict has also erupted in new locales.
To give one example, while conflict in East and South Africa has decreased, conflict in
parts of West Africa has erupted. Such new conflicts – in addition to long-standing
conflicts – challenge the international community to devise more effective early-warning
and risk assessment systems as well as more effective forms of conflict prevention and
management.
One of the primary missions of the Center for International Development and
Conflict Management is the linking of academic research and its findings to policy-
makers and practitioners of conflict management. Center activities have contributed to
conflict management training programs in 15 countries. The data projects housed in the
center have been used by various national and international agencies. In this vein, MAR
has developed analytic narratives and risk assessments for each group covered by the
project, focusing on those factors which research has identified as facilitating or
inhibiting state-group conflict. Additionally, the project is developing the capacity to
create statistical summaries for groups, states and regions. Finally, to be more relevant to
conflict management practitioners, we are developing a methodology for structured
comparison between similarly situated groups. This project – called CASES – will allow
members of minorities and representatives of states to step outside their own conflict
experiences and view the situation in their countries through the lens of similar conflicts
elsewhere. The core of a CASES report will be analytic narratives of possible pathways a
conflict may take based on what policy options are implemented. While this type of
scenario analysis is not uncommon, CASES will be unique in that is draws explicit,
empirically grounded analogies with other conflicts involving similarly situated groups.
The staff of MAR and the larger Center, in addition to affiliated scholars at other
institutions, strongly feel that we can provide theoretically grounded and empirically
validated models and methodologies to assist policy-makers and practitioners in the arena
of greater inclusion of minority groups in state polities and in the reduction of stateminority and interethnic conflict. Our ability to do so, however, depends largely on the
quality and reliability of the information available to us. For this reason, we are building
a network of expert scholars to assess the validity of our data. Furthermore, we are
beginning to build contacts within and relationships with non-governmental organizations
focused on advocacy and monitoring. We believe that the interaction of the scholarly,
policy and advocacy communities is crucial to the continued efficacy of each.