Ethnic Dilemmas in Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan as Security Problems

Abstract

Notwithstanding their profound historical and demographic differences, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan share characteristic internal ethnic diversities and national borders which cut across local ethnic groups in all directions. As elsewhere, these legacies of the past in current practice make ethnicity a security problem. The problem is usually conceived of as one of artificial frontiers. But ethnic identities pose issues which transcend frontiers here not only because ethnic groups transcend those boundaries; specific continuities between internal and external relations make ethnicity an issue, at its most vexed, of loyalties. To unravel what is at issue, it is necessary to relate what ethnicity means in Southwest Asia and how the states there have dealt with it as a problem for their security to a specific structure of relations whose most familiar but by no means only manifestation is the Great Game.1 KeywordsEthnic IdentityPolitical LifeSecurity ProblemIntergroup RelationPolice PowerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.