Carnegie Corporation Commits $2.5 Million to Centers for Advanced
Study in Armenia
By Asbarez
Mar 19th, 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, Vice President, International Program, and
Program Director, Higher Education in Eurasia at Carnegie Corporation.

South Caucasus Centers Supporting Scholars, 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, 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,’ commented 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 Carnegie Corporation’s Deana 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
U.S.S.R. in its role as a new world power.