Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2005
International Peace and Security
The Corporation’s grantmaking strategy shifted
again in 1997-1998 when it became evident that after seven years of pursuing
market and democratic reforms, Russia was on the verge of economic collapse,
political stalemate, military breakdown and national identity crisis.
The tightening of the Gordian Knot of great power contraction, dysfunctional
public and private institutions and socioeconomic decline seemed to be
taking its toll on every aspect of the country’s national security
and on the confidence needed to deepen international cooperation. The
U.S.-Russian relationship was enveloped by acrimony on critical issues
ranging from WMD proliferation, to the management of regional challenges
in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Korea, to the importance of
international organizations and U.S. global leadership. The attendant
uncertainty about Russia’s developmental trajectory and strategic
orientation motivated incoming Corporation president, Vartan Gregorian,
to retain prevention as the central rationale for grantmaking but to explore
creative directions for extending it to meet new pressing global security
and non-security challenges, as well.
Under the aegis of the International Peace and Security (IPS) program
formed in 1999, the Corporation infused established priorities on nonproliferation
and U.S.-Russian relations with special attention to two new elements.
The first centered on promoting Russia’s deep and irreversible political,
economic and security integration with the Euro-Atlantic community. According
to Deana Arsenian, current chair of the program, the key to restoring
Russia’s national capacity “moved away from discrete technical
assistance programs toward cultivating new approaches to unraveling the
country’s profound and interlocking ailments.” As a result,
the Corporation began to explore ways to best help Russian political,
business, civic and military leaders “to help themselves”
gain confidence and resources needed to attain full integration with the
West. Integral to this effort has been support for transitioning the region’s
institutions of higher learning into modern, competitive and self-sustaining
entities capable of addressing global educational challenges. Second,
there was renewed focus on common U.S.-Russian strategic interests and
developing assets for contending with contemporary global threats. Here,
the IPS program has featured methods for engaging and reassuring Russia
that treat it as “part of the solution” to managing these
challenges, rather than as “part of the problem.”
Two clusters of projects were emblematic of the IPS program strategy.
The first centered on the development, execution and follow-up to the
Corporation’s “Russia Initiative.” Determined to bring
international attention to the threats posed by a weak Russia, to clarify
Russia’s political and economic predicament, and to redress compartmentalized
thinking on Russia, Gregorian and the IPS staff, with intellectual contributions
by the Corporation’s three Academic Fellows (Rajan Menon, John Steinbruner
and Thomas G. Weiss), committed $1 million to form four interdisciplinary
study groups. Each group was comprised of Western and Russian experts
with diverse intellectual and professional backgrounds and was charged
with investigating a specific dimension of Russia’s political, financial,
sociodemographic, and security problems. The capstone of the project was
an integrated policy-relevant report and video that presented a holistic
picture of Russia’s current predicament and strategic trajectory.
In addition to generating in-depth follow-on studies, the Russia Initiative
provided the anchor for the Corporation’s continued support for
high-level dialogues, as well as for U.S.-based research on specific issues
related to Russia’s nonproliferation policies, conflict management
in the Caucasus and Central Asia and bilateral security issues. To keep
focus on Russia and to revitalize systematic understandings of Moscow’s
strategic posture, the Corporation also provided grants to the Center
for Strategic and International Studies to administer the Program on New
Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS). This consists of a group of young
American and Russian scholars on Russia and various aspects of U.S.-Russian
relations who use an electronic network and meetings to enhance their
research, integrate their work and make their research relevant to the
American policy-making community through annual policy conferences in
Washington, D.C.
In light of the Corporation’s
long-term commitment to higher education in the U.S. and abroad, and given
the dire state of higher education and the economic crisis that followed
the Soviet collapse, Gregorian and the Corporation’s board of trustees
extended the grantmaking focus to spearhead formation of the Higher Education
in the Former Soviet Union (HEFSU) initiative aimed at strengthening universities
and academic communities in the region. A particular emphasis was placed
on the social sciences and the humanities, “fields that have been
comparatively neglected by Western donors in the past,” noted Gregorian.
At the core of this initiative has been support—in partnership with
several American foundations, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation, and the Russian Ministry of Education and Science—for
creation of nine Centers for Advanced Study and Education (CASEs) at Russian
regional universities. Each CASE serves as an umbrella for stimulating
research in the social sciences and humanities, bridging research with
teaching, transforming curricula and pedagogy, upgrading university libraries,
forging academic links both across Russia and with American institutions,
and nurturing a new generation of scholars. In addition, the first nine
CASEs in Russia provided the springboard for four additional centers in
the South Caucasus and Belarus, as well as parallel projects aimed at
advancing fundamental scientific research in Russia and promoting desperately
needed administrative reforms at universities across Russia and the NIS.