Johnson's Russia List
#4661
30 November 2000
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Moscow Times
November 30, 2000
U.S. Professor Wins $200,000 For Research Into Western Aid
By Valeria Korchagina
Special to The Moscow Times
An American anthropologist who has spent more than a decade assembling
research critical of U.S. foreign aid to Russia and Eastern Europe has won a
$200,000 academic prize for her work.
Janine Wedel, a professor with the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School
of Public and International Affairs, was on Thursday to be awarded the
University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for
2001.
Wedel's work was chosen from among 51 nominations and represents
groundbreaking research and writing on how the U.S. government, via the U.S.
Agency for International Development, used aid money in the early and
mid-1990s to support the programs and careers of Anatoly Chubais and his
allies.
Writing in The Nation, an American weekly magazine, and also in her book
"Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe
1989-1998," Wedel has also been a vocal critic of USAID's relationship with
the Harvard Institute for International Development.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a legal suit in September against two
principal scholars at Harvard University and their wives. The scholars were
accused of gaining profits while being under a contract from USAID to provide
economic and legal advice for privatization in Russia.
Wedel said in a telephone interview from Washington that she thought the
problems in Russian-American foreign aid relationships that she had written
of were far from unique.
"With the ongoing processes of globalization, the nationality of actors is
becoming increasingly irrelevant," Wedel said. "And global elite who have
more connections to one another and fewer to the nation state see themselves
not as much as American or Russian, but as members of an exclusive club."
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