The 1995 CIA World Factbook

The 1995 CIA World Factbook is more than a reference work. It's a freeze-frame of how the world's most powerful intelligence agency viewed the planet on the eve of the twenty-first century. Here the Soviet Union has been gone just four years, Bosnia burns, and the global map remains frozen in a configuration that would soon undergo sweeping transformation. This edition captures 267 territories in meticulous detail: populations, economies, military capacities, political structures, and geographical realities. For researchers, journalists, historians, and the casually curious, it offers an invaluable time capsule. What makes this edition singular is what it contains that no longer exists: nations that have since dissolved, borders that have shifted, leaders who have fallen. It's a document of American geopolitical perception in 1995, assumptions and all, preserved for anyone who wants to see the world as it looked before the internet, before 9/11, before the twenty-first century remade everything.