The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe: Market Reforms (1999)

• Report rights infringement
• published: 04 Apr 2016
• views: 140

Janine R. Wedel is a university professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Senior Research Fellow of the New America Foundation. She is the author of several books and many articles on some key systemic processes of the day. She is the first anthropologist to win the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, an honor typically reserved for political scientists (previous recipients include Samuel Huntington and Mikhail Gorbachev). Wedel received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. She writes about governing, corruption, foreign aid, and influence elites through the unique lens of a social anthropologist. A university professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, Professor Wedel has contributed many articles and opinion pieces to more than a dozen major outlets, including The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Nation, The National Interest, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Salon, The Boston Globe, Washington Times and Politico. Professor Wedel has been a pioneer in applying anthropological insights to topics that are typically the terrain of political scientists, economists, or sociologists. After 25 years studying the role of informal systems in shaping communist and post-communist societies, Professor Wedel also turned her attention to the United States, and has identified some surprising parallels. Professor Wedel's work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Hungarian, Danish, and Chinese. She has testified before Congressional committees and subcommittees and appeared on television and radio programs, including BBC, CNN, NPR, and PBS's Frontline, and associate-produced three PBS documentaries. Her stops on the university lecture circuit include Harvard, Yale, Columbia, MIT, Chicago, Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, and Central European University, the Freie Universität (Berlin), and Central European University. Her non-university audiences include TEDx (Berlin), the Bruno Kreisky Institute (Vienna), the European Journalism Observatory (Lugano, Switzerland), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Press Club, and National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences workshops. Professor Wedel is co-founder and president of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy formerly known as the Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe was generally well received, despite being controversial. In granting the book and Wedel’s work on the subject the 2001 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, the selection committee noted: "This is a book that is bound to have a long-term impact on the practice and politics of foreign aid from the West to non-western economies.”[13] Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor, wrote about Collision and Collusion: "Very critical and troubling analysis of the shortcomings of Western aid policy, particularly to Russia. The implications of Wedel's critical assessment need to be seriously taken into account." The book was named "impressive and informative" by Foreign Affairs while American Ethnologist called it “a tribute to the high caliber of Wedel's journalistic and anthropological abilities alike and a reminder of the need for a re-envisioned and effective anthropology brought to bear on pressing social issues.” The Wall Street Journal wrote that "Janine Wedel's admirable new book... argues convincingly that the lack of accountability on both sides ultimately compromised all those involved....Aid, it seems, can hurt as well as help." Other academics have recently given the name FOZZ affair collectively to scandal of Polish corruption at the time.[14] Wedel's research about western aid in former-Soviet states may in the future help to shed light on the untimely death in 1991 of the president of the Polish Supreme Audit Office, Walerian Panko. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_R._Wedel Image By Jenavieve [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons