PER Archive and Institutional History

The Council for Inclusive Governance (CIG) is the successor organization to the Princeton-based Project on Ethnic Relations (PER). By preserving PER’s publications and records on the CIG website, CIG seeks to maintain public access to PER’s work and to carry forward its institutional legacy of discreet, inclusive Track 1.5 dialogue on difficult political and interethnic issues, and conflict prevention and resolution.

PER was founded in 1991 by Allen H. Kassof, who served as its founding president until 2005. He subsequently continued as president emeritus and senior adviser until PER concluded its operations in 2012. CIG’s founding president, Alex Roinishvili Grigorev, joined PER in 1995 and was its final executive director.

An international nongovernmental organization headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, PER maintained offices or representations in Bulgaria, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, and Slovakia. It organized and conducted high-level dialogues and negotiations addressing the interethnic disputes and conflicts that accompanied and followed the collapse of communist regimes in Europe.

PER was an independent organization. In carrying out its work, it cooperated and consulted closely with the Council of Europe, the European Union, NATO, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe; national governments and parliaments; political parties; universities and academic institutions; and civil society organizations. In the United States, PER worked with both houses of Congress, the Department of State, and the National Security Council.

PER’s work was supported by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Balkan Trust for Democracy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the Eurasia Foundation; the Alfred and Carol Moses Family Fund; the People Technology Foundation; the Starr Foundation; the Open Society Foundations; NCH Capital Inc.; the Council of Europe; the Stability Pact for South East Europe; the governments of Great Britain, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Sweden, and Switzerland; the United States Department of State; and the United States Agency for International Development.

Among those associated with PER as members of its Executive Board or its advisory Council for Ethnic Accord were Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel; former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance; U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; U.S. Ambassadors Harry Barnes, Donald Blinken, Richard Miles, Alfred Moses, John Scanlan, and Jenonne Walker; Professors Steven L. Burg (now a member of CIG’s Board of Directors), Donald Horowitz, Alexei M. Salmin, Vojislav Stanovcic, Galina V. Starovoitova, Valery Tishkov, and Susan Woodward; former PolishMinister of Foreign Affairs Bronislaw Geremek; Swiss Senator Peter Sager; and many others.

PER’s digital and paper organizational records have been deposited at Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. The collection is catalogued as the Project on Ethnic Relations Records, 1990–2016—collection MC249—and can be consulted through Princeton University Library’s online finding aid: findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC249.

The PER materials preserved on the CIG website include reports, publications, meeting records, and other documentation of the dialogues, negotiations, and activities conducted by PER.

Together, these materials provide a substantial record of efforts to manage interethnic conflict, promote political dialogue, and develop negotiated solutions during a period of profound
political transformation in Europe.

The collection is intended as a resource for historians, social scientists, policymakers, practitioners of conflict resolution, and others studying interethnic relations, democratic transitions, and the political development of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.