Bureau of the Month:

Office of the Geographer & Global Issues

he Office of the Geographer and Global Issues, or GGI, in the Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, is a jack-of-all-trades. Like other INR offices, GGI serves two primary functions: all-source objective reporting and analysis on current foreign policy issues and coordination between Department policymakers and the intelligence community.

Until a few years ago, GGI was simply the Office of the Geographer. Its roots in the Department go back 75 years to the aftermath of World War I, when the Department was grappling with territorial changes in Europe.

The office expanded considerably during World War II as U.S. policymakers realized they needed to know a great deal about far-off places where U.S. troops were being sent to fight. During much of the Cold War, the Office of the Geographer issued a steady stream of definitive studies on land and maritime boundaries.

In the mid-1980s, the office began to expand into what would become "global issues" by taking on problems that did not fit neatly into the diplomatic boxes of individual countries: refugees, expanded U.N. responsibilities, transnational and subnational ethnic conflicts and recognition of enduring international environmental concerns.

Today, GGI still provides support on boundary disputes and, under an explicit statutory authority, guides other federal mapping agencies on boundary and foreign name issues. GGI also still makes maps and charts for a wide variety of bureau and Department publications.

More recently, however, the office is using the Internet to reach a much broader audience. Working with the Bureau of Public Affairs, GGI hosts an award-winning web page, the Geographic Learning Site, which introduces kindergarten through 12th-grade students to the geography behind U.S. foreign relations. The site's address is http://geography.state.gov/index.html.

The office provides support and analysis on the diverse issues covered by the functional bureaus within the Global Affairs family: the Bureaus of Population, Refugees and Migration; Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; Political-Military Affairs; and Oceans and Inter-national Environmental and Scientific Affairs. It also supports other offices that address human rights and humanitarian concerns, including the Bureau of International Organizations, the Office of War Crimes Issues and the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

The office also works with regional bureaus and overseas posts on such thorny issues as boundary disputes and atrocity allegations.

With a staff of 19 Civil Service and Foreign Service officers, the office is stretched across three arenas of policy support on issues that often become the day's headline stories.

Office director William B. Wood said his challenge is to provide ongoing, first-rate service to senior policymakers grappling with complicated, politically sensitive and often fast-breaking multilateral challenges. None of these problems has easy fixes. GGI analysts must quickly learn the key aspects and actors involved in each problem to provide the best information available to clarify policy options.

Cartographer Leo Dillon works at a digitizing table.

While accurate, relevant and timely information is the ideal, in practice GGI analysts must wade through a vast amount of information to glean those few reports critical for decisionmakers and to provide them with value-added analysis. Since few if any global issues are static, GI analysts are always scrambling to stay current in terms of "all-source reporting," which includes everything from intelligence and diplomatic reports to press stories on a given situation. Analysts also must stay up-to-date in terms of understanding the implications of any latest change on policy objectives.

GGI's Global Issues Division provides the bulk of the office's analytical support to functional bureau "customers." On any given day, Global Issues analysts brief policy bureau front offices on intelligence reports, scan incoming electronic files into INR's state-of-the-art information retrieval system, write summaries and comments for the Secretary's morning summary and other INR memos, and confer with colleagues in other INR offices, other federal agencies and organizations outside the U.S. government. These include U.N. agencies, universities, think tanks and nongovernmental organizations engaged in humanitarian, human rights and environmental concerns.

It makes for a full day that begins early when the GGI staff prepares briefs that Assistant Secretary Phyllis Oakley uses in her morning meetings with the Secretary and other senior principals. When a high-interest concern is fast-breaking, Global Issues analysts also work late, reconciling conflicting reports or describing the motives of protagonists.

The staff's contribution to the Department's mission is a collaborative effort inside and outside GGI and includes working closely with the bureau's external research staff to organize conferences on timely issues that bring together government, academic and other specialists.

Another GGI initiative focuses on the tragedy of crimes against humanity. Two years ago, the Department established the War Crimes Unit in GGI to coordinate U.S. government­wide information support to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The unit has established a close relationship with the tribunal's Office of the Prosecutor, which has successfully investigated and prosecuted war criminals responsible for genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda.

More recently, the unit has expanded to become the War Crimes and Atrocities Analysis Unit, with a global mandate to help track current atrocities committed in such disparate places as eastern Congo and northern Afghanistan as part of a new interagency process dedicated to early warning of genocide. President Clinton announced this effort last December in his speech celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The seven-person unit troubleshoots atrocity-related diplomacy with the office of Ambassador David Scheffer, who serves as the administration's "point man" on the difficult challenge of bringing to justice perpetrators of war crimes.

So what has all this got to do with geography? Quite a bit. Many confuse geography with cartography, or mapmaking. But modern geography has a long track record of multidisciplinary research on the troubled relations between people and their environments, as well as the conflicts that arise over resources between tribes, nations and even regions.

Mr. Wood sees his office's work as "applied political geography," in a tradition that goes back a century to the works of geographers Halford MacKinder and Friedrich Ratzel. They helped define "geopolitics" as part of a dynamic international relations process that often pitted states and regions against each other.

Mr. Wood argues that, more than ever before, a political geographic perspective--which integrates demographic, ethnic, economic, environmental and natural resource constraints into foreign policy considerations--is a necessity if the Department is to make progress in implementing its international affairs strategic goals. That is where applied geography, along with powerful new geographic tools, can help.

Analysts Cathy Stump and Tom Steele review a document.

While an overarching "geographic perspective" might seem too abstract for the daily business of diplomats, the GGI staff has also been working to make geographic information systems tools more immediately available. These systems are both a methodology for organizing information as "layers" over defined spatial units such as an embassy, country or continent, as well as the software that can take disparate data, analyze it and display it to show important trends and patterns.

The GGI staff is working with several Department offices to demonstrate how geographic information systems can be applied usefully to current policy needs and to improve decisionmaking during tough budget times. Such demonstrations have analyzed territorial negotiation options, election results, war crimes and climate change impacts. More recently, they have reflected the versatility of geographic information systems to improve data sharing among security and relief agencies in troubled hot spots, and to produce maps to follow Year-2000 vulnerabilities worldwide and possible U.S. responses to requests from foreign governments.

If used properly, geographic information can help tomorrow's diplomats better understand and respond to challenges even more complex than the ones they face today. Introducing geographic information concepts to Department users will be a challenge, Mr. Wood admits, but he likens it to word processing 20 years ago, and predicts that it will soon become a standard part of every diplomat's toolkit.