Social Science Research Council

INTRODUCTION
By Ngeta Kabiri

This issue of the GSC Quarterly was conceived to be dedicated largely to the last GSC Fellows' Conference held in Moscow in late September 2002. The theme of that conference, collaborative work, serves as a good rallying point for the kind of articles solicited for this issue. The question of working together is taken up in varying ways in the assemblage of articles included in this issue. These range from working together in a purely academic environment to collaborative efforts among sub-national and national actors. This range is significant in that it presents a window through which we can grapple with West's organizing frame of reference on the viability of collaboration between the academy and the field (with the field being conceived broadly here). The idea emerging from West's article then is that collaboration (or, at least, its success) is not a given, but it is largely an artifact of certain conditions.

One would perhaps want to seek illumination from these articles, or from the terrain of thought the articles open up, regarding the principal contradiction that heavily informs the success of collaborative efforts. What is it that must be true of the world we operate in so as to achieve working together among groups (whether at sub-national, national or supra-national levels)? Are there any discernible central tendencies that present themselves as sufficient in order for collaboration to take place? These questions are particularly germane at a time when the world is beset with a crisis of collaboration at its highest organ, the United Nations, which is supposed to be the epitome of collaborative work at a global level. The current seeming impasse over Iraq where both the US and Britain are threatening to go it alone if they can not get the rest of the UN on board is itself a good object of reflection within the framework of the phenomenon of collaboration.

Yet, proceeding from the thematic construct laid out by West, one would expect that a rapture of collaborative tendencies would be the last signal to emerge from the UN, particularly when the issue at hand borders on conflict management. And indeed, this expectation gets much currency from Atuti's contribution whose import into this debate is to show that the contemporary tendency in responding to issues such as conflict management is to regionalize efforts geared towards resolving them. Nevertheless, Atuti's framework for activating these tendencies is problematized by Lokshina who has already had a stint in this arena. While Lokshina largely agrees with the framework put forth in Atuti, the article can be read as calling for caution. Such a framework is largely an enterprise prone to the pillars we encountered in West, namely, an absence of both rigorous divisions of labor and formal infrastructures catalyzing the relationship. While this might work for social scientists, it is a moot point whether this is not the context which precipitated the tribulations that beset Lokshina's endeavors to have the NGOs and the academy work together.

It would appear from Lokshina that the problems besetting collaboration emanate in part from the varying ways in which actors define their interests. A clash of this definition in turn defines the entombment of collaboration. And, if this holds true for the NGO-academic divide, it is much more true at the state level. This is demonstrated by the set of articles that focus less on formal academic interactions and rather examine cooperation by actors at the intra- and inter-state level. Focusing on the product of collaborative work by scholars at the Gorbachev Foundation, Kabiri suggests that there is a sense in which collaboration at the global level is bound to be difficult if states define their participation at that stage in terms of self-interest. Similarly, self-interest among perpetrators of violence could be at the center of Payne's skepticism in her discussion that throws light on the utility of working with perpetrators of violence in the project of Truth and Reconciliation that is increasingly gaining therapeutic currency in post-conflict societies. In the language of collaboration, we are here confronted with the question of whether individuals and society can work together to produce the public good of acknowledgement and collective memory. Payne provides both structural and normative basis for doubts about the flourishing of such an enterprise. In terms of the later, for example, she states: "I'm not sure that what is good for an individual is necessarily good for society…. I worry about setting up a framework around a concept that I don't like." Yet, what Payne finds aversive in the South African context, Pajo shows to be readily adopted by certain Albanians in their struggle to forestall a demolition of their structures by the state. Operating within a master frame of sorts, the protagonists locate their struggles within the framework of the terrorist war and seek to portray the state as the aggressor. And, perhaps it is from this vantage point that they seek to enlist the cooperation of Western diplomats in their struggle against the state.

From the articles that follow, it will emerge that collaboration does take various forms. In West, collaboration issues pertain to the natural and social sciences, among academics and in the field; in Atuti, collaboration relates to regions, activists, and academics; while in Lokshina, we have issues of collaboration among NGOs and the academy. Kabiri then raises the question of collaboration among states, while both Payne and Pajo lead us to think of collaboration among actors within the confines of the state. Thus it is evident that the terrain of collaboration is quite misty. This is perhaps why one can easily agree with Haynes's contention that "collaboration is easy to say and hard to do, easy to talk about and hard to define."

Last but not least, this issue of the GSC Quarterly also includes an interview with Lukas Haynes of the MacArthur Foundation in which both Zilberg and West invite him to reflect on a number of issues pertaining to the Foundation and its activities. This piece adds a funder's perspective on collaboration and is also indicative of the role that funders often play in determining the direction of research activities they sponsor.