Racial distribution
Any division of mankind by race – i.e., on genetic grounds – is problematic. Early ethnographers, able only to measure overall physical characteristics, created a tripartite division of humanity into Caucasians, Mongoloids and Negroes. For the most part, they also took it as granted that different races had different characteristics, intelligence, and other cultural traits. This view is now highly controversial and the tripartite model is viewed as, at best, a generalization.
The politics of racial differences, expressed most extremely in the enslavement or extermination of one race by another, continued to disfigure human relations into the 20th century. Currently, outright race wars are comparatively rare, although inter-communal racial attacks and riots remain a common phenomenon in many countries.
The division on this map into 14 racial groups, although a simplification, seeks to give an overall picture of the distribution of racial types worldwide.
Racial groups
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Conflicts in which racial differences play a signficant role include:
Australia
Brazil
China
Darfur
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Fiji
Guatemala
Guyana
Kalimantan (Borneo)
Kurdistan
Laos
Mauretania
Namibia
South Africa
South Sudan
Sudan
Zanzibar
Zimbabwe
The text and maps on this page are adapted from Fields of Fire – An Atlas of Ethnic Conflict
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