CARNEGIE CORPORATION COMMITS $2.5 MILLION TO CENTERS IN WESTERN EURASIA, SOUTH CAUCASUS

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Wed, Mar 17 2010

NEW YORK-Asserting scholarly research and education in the arts,
humanities, and social sciences are not luxuries in difficult times
but vitally necessary for emerging nations as they articulate new
civic and cultural identities, Carnegie Corporation president Vartan
Gregorian announced a $2.5 commitment over the next two years to
further strengthen centers for advanced study focusing on western
Eurasia and the south Caucasus.

A single western Eurasia center covers Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.

There are three South Caucasus centers in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and
Georgia. The center for Armenia is based at Yerevan State University.

The grants announced today represent a significant renewal of support
for the four advanced study centers originally launched by Carnegie
Corporation in 2003, bringing the foundation’s total investment in
these centers to $14 million.

"The intellectual and academic resources in these centers of excellence
are helping to advance the transformation of the region’s higher
education institutions into modern and more comprehensive research
universities," said Gregorian. "The women and men supported by the
centers-the intelligentsia-are the region’s engine of reform.

Hence, we must continue to invest in them as they contribute to
economic development, political and legal reform, and the formation
of post-Soviet civil society."

Though started in 2003, the center for western Eurasia and the
three south Caucasus centers grew from work initiated by Carnegie
Corporation to prevent degradation of the academic sector in the wake
of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Nine Centers for Advanced Study and
Education (CASEs) were established in Russia, in partnership with
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Russian
Ministry of Education and Science. Over the past 10 years, the CASEs
enabled several thousand Russian academics to engage in research,
publication and international exchanges. These university-based centers
have helped to build up the capacities of the region’s intellectuals
and have contributed to stanching brain drain.

"Carnegie Corporation has worked with regional academics, educators
and officials to create access to scholarly resources and programs
aimed at enhancing the post-Soviet transformation of these societies.

Continued investment will help solidify the processes that strengthen
the role of academia in paving the way toward the countries’ future,"
said Deana Arsenian, the vice president, International Program, and
program director, Higher Education in Eurasia, Carnegie Corporation.

South Caucasus centers providing resources

A $2 million grant to the Eurasia Foundation will continue to fund
the Caucasus Research Resource Center (CRRC), a network of resource
and training centers established in the capital cities of Armenia,
Azerbaijan, and Georgia. The centers, which partner with local
universities, offer scholars and practitioners stable opportunities
for integrated research, training, and collaboration in the region.

Academics supported through the centers have helped to strengthen
social science research and public policy analysis in the south
Caucasus.

Over the past seven years, more than 100 promising young scholars have
received research support from one of the three Caucasus-based centers
through fellowship programs. And the network of regional centers has
sponsored workshops, conferences, and seminars in social science
research methods as well as on policy-relevant topics in fields
such as sociology, legal studies, economics, demography, political
science, public policy, and environmental studies. The CRRC centers
have assembled public access libraries and IT labs, created print
and electronic publishing resources, and have also offered training
in quantitative research methods and statistical analysis.

"Eurasia Foundation’s partnership with Carnegie Corporation over
several years has enabled us to create something entirely new in the
Caucasus-an international-caliber academic network covering the entire
region," said William Horton Beebe-Center, president of the Eurasia
Foundation. "The regional network advances the skills of participating
students and researchers, connects them with international colleagues
in the neighborhood and beyond, offers scholars viable career paths
in their native country, and provides a fact-based foundation for
policymakers throughout the region to steer their countries in
directions that improve the lives of ordinary citizens."

One of the Caucasus Research Resource Center’s core programs has been
the large-scale data collection and analyses of local and regional
developments known as the Data Initiative. A response to the dearth
of reliable, up-to-date and accessible data on social, political,
and economic issues, the Data Initiative collects household and other
data on issues such as poverty, employment, education, migration,
and crime across the Caucasus region.

Border region center focuses on social transformation

A $500,000 grant to the American Councils for International Education
will continue support for a cross-regional center covering Belarus,
Moldova, and Ukraine. The center, initially established at the European
Humanities University (EHU) in Minsk, Belarus, now operates at the
"university in exile" in Vilnius, Lithuania, following the closure
in 2004 by the Belarus government of EHU’s Minsk campus.

Scholars supported by the EHU-based center have worked to explore the
social transformations in the border regions of western Eurasia. An
informal network of scholars from across the region, with support
from the center, have worked together to publish academic monographs
and innovative serials such as "Perekrestki" (Crossroads), with
special attention to long-neglected (or proscribed) themes and new
methodologies in religious studies, folklore, philosophy, history,
and cultural studies.

"The Belarus CASE has successfully taken root in the intellectual space
of western Eurasia and is providing unique research opportunities as
the only independent social science center in Belarus. It has become
the hub for a network of both established and younger scholars from
Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine," said Dan Davidson, president of the
American Councils for International Education.

"The center has offered research and travel support to more than
100 scholars, including scholars working on a study of comparative
national identities; developing university curricula in border
studies; and an analysis of the role of the Russian minority in
Moldova," said Arsenian. "The center’s research is methodologically
rigorous and, even from afar, is closely linked to the reform of
research and education in numerous regional higher educational
institutions. Situated in Lithuania, a country outside of those
on which its work focuses-Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine-allows the
center to operate with a degree of intellectual freedom it might not
otherwise have. Yet the center’s exile status also keeps it keenly
focused on its goal of eventual return to Belarus."

Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic foundation created
by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to do "real and permanent good in this
world." The foundation has a long history of supporting work focusing
on Eurasia including the establishment in 1948 of the Russian Research
Center at Harvard University to foster a comprehensive understanding
and multidisciplinary study of Russia and the Soviet Union. Prior to
the existence of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the center
provided a way for the United States to become informed about the
Soviet Union in its role as a new world power.