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far-reaching weapons and technology. So the Defense partnership to either prevent or to contain conflict.
Department, and the US Government in general, has We need to work together in a variety of multilateral
quite an interest in this phenomenon and is trying to and bilateral ways to marshal all those resources
understand it and construct a strategy to address it. together as a partnership for addressing the issue.
In attempting to grapple with this issue, initial think- The government needs much more analysis to under-
ing on a Clinton national security strategy has focused stand in a robust way the phenomenon of ethnic and
on three elements: 2 national conflict. We need academic researchers to
turn toward applied robust, rigorous, and predictive
- Engagement. The United Slates is committed to research that we can bring inside the government in
remaining engaged in international affairs. testable ways and see if we can motivate policy. We
are not interested in sponsoring more original
- Prevention.We want to prevent or contain the research; as Dr. Ted Gurr wrote in his book on conflict
effects of ethnic conflict. We want to use all the ele- a few years ago, there are 686 books on the theory of
ments of national power, development assistance, conflict-we do not want a 687th. What we want are
and trade assistance to prevent conflict, and, if that robust, testable, applied research and models that we
does not work, we want to act early to keep the con- can bring inside the government. We take this problem
flict small. seriously. It is a critical issue of US national security.
- Partnership.We want to expand the core group of
like-minded democratic coontries that we forged
during the Cold War and have this group work as a
2 In July 1994, the Clinton Administration published its first com-
prehensive national security strategy, which used as its concep-
tional framework the elements of "engagement" and
"enlargement."
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