Peoples in Motion
Harriman Institute 2011-12 Core Project
Alan Timberlake, Director
The 2011-12 Harriman Institute Core Project is a discussion on migrations, of various times and for various reasons and among various countries. Alan Timberlake, Professor of Slavic Languages and Director of the Institute on East Central Europe, is the Project Director. Marina Mikhailova, Harriman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, will investigate labor movement from Lithuanian to England as one case of migration in recent years. Dr. Mikhaylova received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where she defended her dissertation on “Projecting Europe: The Politics of Youth in Contemporary Lithuania.”
On December 1 -2, 2011, the Harriman Institute will co-host with the Kazakh Embassy a conference on the migration from Asia to the Americas.
On March 2-3, 2012, the Harriman Institute will sponsor, together with the Institute on East Central Europe, the conference “Labor Moves in the Post-Soviet World (Impetus, Experience, Effects, Policy).” The conference will examine the movement of people for economic reasons from former Soviet republics to Russia and movement of people from states of the Soviet sphere (republics and Eastern Bloc countries) westward. Much work has been done on this kind of immigration and a set of basic factors have been identified. We hope that the conference will lead to a more polyvalent approach to the mechanisms of labor migration. In addition, by including westward movement as well as movement towards Russia, we hope to encourage a comparative approach. Finally, we will invite NGO representatives who deal with the problems of migrants on the ground. For this more public discussion we will hold a special panel on the evening of Friday, March 2.
The project is fortunate to host an event in the fall that comes out of Rebecca Kobrin’s “Voices of the New Russian-Jewish Diaspora,” an autobiography contest, co-sponsored by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Harriman Institute. Kobrin is Russell and Bettina Knapp Assistant Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia.
The planning committee for this event, and the events of the year, includes: Elise Giuliano (Visiting Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, Barnard College/Harriman Institute) and Marina Mikhaylova (2011-12 Harriman Postdoctoral Fellow) and Alan Timberlake, the Core Project Director.
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Human Rights in the Post-Communist World: Strategies and Outcomes
Tuesday, 07 September 2010
Harriman Core Project 2010-2011
Principal investigators: Alexander Cooley and Jack Snyder
The post-communist region offers a wealth of experience for assessing effectiveness of different strategies for advancing human rights. Rights are flourishing as never before in some parts of the post-communist world. In other post-communist regions, however, assassinations of investigative journalists, political imprisonments, torture, stolen elections, and the dismantling of NGO networks demanding accountability have become routine elements of post-communist rule. Our project will ask how these variations are measured, what causes the variations, and what strategies have proven effective—and ineffective—in advancing human rights.
In one part of the core project, academic experts and human rights practitioners will debate the track record of various “theories of change” and their applicability to rights promotion among the post-communist states and world-wide. Another part of the project will examine how indices of human rights outcomes and ratings of human rights performance are constructed—who does this, how they acquire the status of authorities, what the consequences are of the rating enterprise, and how ratings and databases can be improved.
Link to website
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Harriman Institute Oral History Project
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
When the Institute was established in 1946, with a founding grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, it commenced a bold new enterprise: to prepare the United States for its interactions with the Soviet Union. The Institute’s original mandate was ambitious: to overcome an enormous deficit in American knowledge about the other superpower that had emerged from the Second World War; to meet the immediate policy needs of the U.S. government; and to train the first generation of U.S. specialists of the Soviet region. The Institute largely succeeded in the decades to come, ultimately preparing hundreds of Americans to provide leadership in American politics and perceptions of the region, working at the nexus of international affairs, transatlantic studies, and American policymaking.
Since 1992, the Institute has significantly broadened its mission, now studying a wider geography, and more firmly placing Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies in its global contexts. Today, the Institute has a threefold mission: the advancement of knowledge through original research; the communication of crucial information to policy leaders; and the training of the next generation of experts through a diverse curriculum.
The Oral History Project is documenting the Institute’s history, as well as individuals’ experience, from 1946 to today. We are conducting a series of interviews to document the intellectual and institutional history of the Harriman Institute. Questions may be directed to the project’s director, Nancy Walbridge Collins, nwcollins@columbia.edu., and the signup form may be downloaded to the right. We very much appreciate your participation.
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Harriman Core Project 2009-2010
New Modes of Communication in the Post-Soviet World
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
During academic year 2009-10 the Harriman Institute is sponsoring a core project investigating New Modes of Communication in the Post-Soviet World. It centers on electronic modes of communication, above all, the internet in all its genres, with secondary attention to traditional media. The time frame is the last two decades. In broadest terms the project is open to the discussion of modes of communication throughout the geographical area defined by the Soviet Union, from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus and Central Asia; in practice the project will focus on contemporary Russia.
The internet and related developments of technology present various interesting, sometimes paradoxical, questions for analysis, including the nature of blog networks and networks of special interests; censorship, official and group generated; the use of the internet for the promotion of cultural and political agendas; the role of women; the internet as a force of political activism; the register and form of language used. In addressing these and related questions, the project will be particularly interested in examining and developing effective methodologies for studying the internet in general.
Throughout the year the project will sponsor a range of activities: a workshop involving primarily local participants (but with some invited guest speakers); a series of presentations by cultural figures of note who have been active in the Russian internet, and, more specifically, the Russian and Eurasian internet as a distinct phenomenon, to demonstrate how individuals and generations respond to the internet; and a culminative open conference at the end of the academic year. There will also be showings of selections from the tapes of Soviet TV made at the Harriman Institute by the TV Project.
Central to the activates of the project are two post-doctoral fellows, Eugene Gorny (Ph.D. University of London), who—in addition to his own active participation in Russian internet life—has written on the construction of self on the internet, and Florian Toepfl (Ph.D., University of Passau), who has investigated the relationship between print and electronic journalism in Russia and the Czech Republic.
The project is organized by Alan Timberlake, whose interest in linguistics extends into how language is used and the behavior of speakers, and Catharine Nepomnyashchy, who has a long-term interest in the interaction of culture with politics and ideologies (she is a member of the Bergen working group “The Future of Russia” on Russian language on the web).
Click here for video of the event, "A Conversation about Literature and Life with Tatyana
Tolstaya."
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Voices of the Russian-Jewish Diaspora: An Autobiography Contest for the 21st Century
Monday, 06 October 2008
This past year marked the 40th anniversary of the Let My People Go campaign, a political movement started by a handful of dissidents and Zionists in the Soviet Union that sought free Jewish emigration. This group attracted supporters in Israel, the United States and Western Europe. Through the tireless work of human rights workers throughout the world, refuseniks and prisoners of Zion forced the Soviet government to allow increasing numbers of Jews to emigrate. But what made emigration a true mass movement was ordinary Jewish families—and many non-Jews—in Riga, Kiev, Moscow, Odessa, Novosibirsk and other cities and towns across the Soviet Union. They made the often risky decision to leave their native country and to face an uncertain future abroad. They applied for an exit visa despite the danger of being left for years in limbo, without a job or a means of subsistence, if they were refused permission to emigrate.
Following examples set by early-twentieth century scholars such as Max Weinreich of the Yiddish Institute for Jewish Research and Boris Bakhmeteff of Columbia University, Rebecca Kobrin, a member of Columbia University’s History Department and Harriman Institute, seeks to collect autobiographical accounts of Russian-Jewish émigrés, before their crucial personal recollections that provide “full and free picture” of this era are lost. These autobiographies will serve as a time-capsule for today’s and tomorrow’s scholars concerned with Jewish life in the former Soviet Union as well as immigrant Jewish life in the age of mass migration and globalization.
We encourage everyone to write up their stories with honesty and accuracy. Not only will each submission be eligible for a monetary prize but those judged to be of the greatest historical and literary value will be published in a volume for world-wide distribution.
Follow link for more information and contest guidelines.
Link to website
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Great Power(s) in the Mediterranean
Wednesday, 30 July 2008–Wednesday, 31 December 1969, 7:00pm
The European Institute, with generous support from the Harriman Institute, is launching a two-year project focusing on “Great Power(s) in the Mediterranean” this autumn. The “s” in parenthesis highlights that the EI will be analyzing the Mediterranean area from the perspective of the longstanding conflicts of multiple powerful states. Given that the region has been the millennial crossroads of major civilizations and that there have been so many powerful contenders for influence, the project will consider the wide range of forces and resources the Great Powers must deploy to establish and sustain their influence. The project is thus concerned with studying not only major shifts in geopolitical influence and trade patterns, but also the domination pursued through commercial exchange, religious crusades, and the imposition of new developmental and cultural models, as well as the resistance to them. The focus is mainly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But anybody familiar with the Mediterranean area is aware of the longue durée.
What makes this collaborative project especially significant is that it signals Russia’s presence among the Great Powers acting in the region and at all levels from the eighteenth century to the present. To assist planning, as well as to carry on their own projects, the Harriman grant has enabled us to appoint two postdoctoral fellows: Elena Astafieva, visting from the CNRS in Paris, who will introduce us to her project on “Pilgrims in the Holy Land,” and Rinna Kullaa of the University of Maryland, who is working on “Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned World in the Cold War.” That between them they command nine different languages suggests not only their wonderful skills but also the scholarly capacities required to study the Mediterranean area.
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Russia and Islam: Religion, the State and Modernity during and after the Age of Empire
Harriman Institute Research Theme, 2007-08
Directed by Mark Mazower (History Department), this research project proposes a new historical framework for understanding Russia’s place in the world. It seeks to reconsider the relationship between religion and modernity, by highlighting the role played by religious institutions, policies and ideas in the transformation and modernization of the imperial and post-imperial state. Focusing, in particular, on Russia’s relationship with Islam it seeks to foster a reappraisal of the geopolitical significance of the long-term Russian interaction – through the Tsarist and Soviet eras – with its southern neighbors.
More information about activities, participants, publications and working papers can be found on the webpage of the project.
Link to website
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Limited Sovereignty and Soft Borders in Southeastern Europe and the Former Soviet States
Directed by Alexander J. Cooley, Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, and Gordon N. Bardos, Assistant Director of the Harriman Institute, this series is intended to provide leading academic experts with an opportunity to present their original work to the policy community and provide for a fruitful dialogue between the two communities. The seminar series has three main objectives: First, it seeks to identify how the semi-sovereign status of several entities in both areas generates distinct problems, both in terms of security and economics. Second, the series examines how future changes in the legal status of these territories may impact the security and economy of each region. Third, the series seeks will explore what alternatives may exist to “classical sovereignty’ for these regions.
Link to website
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Eurasian Pipelines
A two year colloquia entitled “Eurasian Pipelines – A Road to Peace, development and Interdependencies” will be hosted by the Harriman Institute through 2008. The colloquia, chaired by Professor Jenik Radon, will consist of 4-5 conferences on different oil and gas pipeline projects in the Eurasian space.
As the world’s demand for energy is steadily growing, it is crucial to examine the supplier, as well as the consumer, nations of natural resources in order to understand the political, economic, environmental and social impact and ramifications of the transnational pipelines by which a number of these nations are linked and tied to each other. These ties create interdependencies, and also challenges, between and among the exporting and importing countries, energy companies, and the people of the respective regions and nations. Accordingly Europe, Russia, Central Asia and East Asia represent one of the most pivotal energy systems in the world.
The goal of the colloquia is to bring experts and public figures from different fields together to examine the challenges, political, economic and environmental, presented by intertwined Eurasian energy space and their implications.
Link to website
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Networks, Institutions, and Economic Transformation in Postsocialism
Harriman Institute Research Theme, 2006-07
Directed by David Stark (Sociology & SIPA), the year-long project will bring together leading researchers, scholars at Columbia and the New York area, Harriman post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students whose research explores the social, institutional and cultural context of economic transformation in Russia and Eastern Europe. A central aim of the initiative is to understand how political and economic reforms during the first years of post-socialism led to the emergence of powerful economic actors, politicians with close ties to the economy, and fluid and contested institutions. Moreover, scholars connected with the initiative seek to understand the implications of these changes for the polities and political economies of the postsocialist countries.
More information about activities, participants, publications and working papers can be found on the webpage of the project.
Link to website
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