Social Science Research Council

NGOS AND ACADEMIA - A LIAISON BETWEEN AMATEURS AND PROFESSIONALS
By Tanya Lokshina

(This presentation was made during an NGO Panel at the Russian Academy of Sciences during the GSC Fellows' Conference in Moscow, Russia, on 30 September 2002.)

It is a commonly accepted practice to make a clear distinction between the academic community and the NGO community. Such distinction, however, is quite outdated. In fact, we find numerous groups, which can be roughly labeled as "research groups", that are practically hanging in a limbo, on the crossroads of the established academia and the dynamically developing NGO sector. To be more precise, these groups, while working on research projects, do not have the status of academic institutions, and their staff-members may not have advanced or any degree in the researched field. The latter situation is, in a sense, a product of the Soviet era, when many people with great interest for humanities would nevertheless opt for a degree in science, mathematics or engineering, for the sole reason that the wide field of humanities was buried in communist ideology and access to humanitarian faculties was all in all denied to persons and groups with "flawed" ideological or ethnic background. After the fall of the Soviet Union numerous civic activists started filling the niche of social sciences.

By way of example, among such not-quite-academic groups working in Russia today, I would refer to the "Memorial," Information and Research Center "Panorama," to a certain extent my own organization - Moscow Helsinki Group - and a range of other NGOs.

It should be emphasized that one of the established major trends in the activities of contemporary human rights organizations is human rights monitoring. In the course of diversified monitoring efforts, human rights organizations invariably apply sociological methods for data gathering, such as surveys, interviews, focus, groups, etc. Also, NGOs base their reports not only on their own monitoring findings but also on data provided by different academic institutions and researchers. To illustrate, when my organization conducted monitoring of the situation with nationalism, xenophobia and intolerance in contemporary Russia, we relied, among other things, on statistics given by the All Russian Center for Public Opinion Survey (VTSIOM) and Institute of Ethnology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Even more so, there are researchers and academic groups that actively cooperate with the non-governmental sector, such as the European University in St. Petersburg, Center for Independent Sociological Research (also, St. Petersburg), Center for Pontian Caucasian Studies (Krasnodar), and other groups.

However, the relationships of the human rights sector and the academic sector are far from blissful. Academic researchers - even the most sympathetic - frequently, and with a good reason, blame human rights activists for amateurish quality of their work. Human rights groups, even those that are actively involved in research activities, are indeed amateurs particularly because their use of scientific methods is rather sporadic and their understanding of the methodological context is rather perfunctory. Human rights organizations also evidence certain neglect for thorough analysis and are prone to making strong conclusions on the basis of insufficient and not all-together verified data, or data received from non-diversified sources. These reproaches certainly ring a bell. Furthermore, academics conduct research within the framework of a given academic subject and discourse. At the same time, NGO activists are, as a rule, little if at all familiar with relevant academic context. They research only the given phenomenon, paying no attention to the academic work previously done in the field. They are only interested in the object of their research. The academic polemics around it leave them indifferent. When they look into academic publications on the subject, it is usually done in order to obtain information that their own research is lacking, to supply statistical figures or, quite rarely, interpretations. They are, in other words, lacking in academic culture.

It should be also noted that for NGOs, the result is much more important than the process. They are striving to achieve results in the shortest time possible, very often sacrificing precision and veracity of research. Moreover, as regards human rights monitoring, it is most frequently conducted in order to prove the relevance of a particular problem. In other words, human rights organizations working on such monitoring efforts, tend to develop their conclusions and recommendations prior to data gathering and then collect, summarize and structure information with the sole aim of supporting the already made conclusions. Such approach to research certainly receives no support from the academic community.

At the same time, NGO activists find a lot of good reasons to blame the academia, and their arguments are just as solid as the reproaches made by academic researchers in connection with NGO amateurs. All claims regarding data shuffling with the purpose of backing up some already made assumptions have to do with flawed research and monitoring only. And I can solemnly swear that neither myself nor my respected colleagues ever fall than low - we try to do everything possible to ensure that our research is accurate. Of course, the NGO sector delivers a great number of bad quality research publications but the same problem is pervasive in the academia, and that cannot be denied.

If NGOs are sometimes too much in a hurry, a great claim against the academia is that in their particularity they, as a rule, deliver their accurate findings way too late and often prove to be behind the time. The editorial cycle of academic journals is, as we all know, very lengthy and even some academic researchers frequently complain that their articles only come out one year after the submission. To emphasize, in some case it does not really matter. But in the conditions of our swiftly changing social and political realities, this kind of a delay often makes the very research worthless from the practical point of view.

Another common reproach addressed by NGOs to academic community is that they perceive their own research as a value in its own right, loosing touch with reality, with real live people, their pains and needs.

Despite the problems and conflicts described above, there is already much cooperation between the academic community and the NGO sector. A good example of such cooperation is a growing liaison NGOs and academic researchers in the field of counteracting racism and intolerance. The recently established Russian NGO Network against Racism includes not only human rights and minorities organizations but also independent research centers and individual academic researchers. Again, this is not exactly a cake-walk. By way of an example, in December 2001, a conference "Social Science, Racist Discourse and Discriminatory Practices" was organized in St. Petersburg by the independent Center for Sociological Research, Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights and "Memorial" Human Rights Center. The objective of the conference was to discuss the impact of the contemporary academia into the formation of concepts and language breeding discriminatory practices and violence on ethnic grounds. The conference, in my opinion, was generally a success. However, it rather emphasized the gap between the academic and non-academic participants. For the former, NGO statements were too simplistic, to say the least. The latter, on the other hand, could hardly deal with terminologically over-burdened presentations - the so-called pigeon language of the academia.

In any case, quite inspired by the conference, I commissioned a few articles on racism in political and academic discourse for our book "Nationalism, Xenophobia and Intolerance in the Contemporary Russia" from my friends in the academic community. Not a single one of them manage to submit their articles by the deadline and I still had to produce the publication or face the righteous wrath of the sponsor. I went ahead and published the book without waiting for their contribution. Incidentally, I learned later on that two of the three articles were almost ready by the deadline. By 'ready,' I mean that they only required some editing which I could have easily done myself. When faced with my utter frustration, my academic colleagues said that submitting a raw article is so awkward and unacceptable that they chose not to submit anything at all. Here, our interests clashed. I hope that our next attempt will be more successful.

Still, it is a tremendous achievement in itself that such cooperation is happening. Whenever our organization is preparing a publication, we now try to involve experts in preparing some of the text. We provide them with regional monitoring data. They use it in context of their academic background.

Today, numerous NGOs, including my own, already have professional sociologists on staff whose work is extremely useful in developing monitoring methodologies and processing gathered data. In addition to sociology, human rights organizations are heavily dependent on such academic disciplines as law and psychology. The assistance of academic lawyers is vital for conducting quality analysis of current legislation and for developing legislative drafts and amendments in the interests of human rights. Practicing lawyers and practicing psychologists are needed to provide quality assistance to victims of human rights violations. And amidst the on-going debate on whether amateurs should provide legal and psychological aid to victims at all or whether such assistance is more counterproductive, the ranks of human rights organizations are filling with newly established members of the legal profession or with social science graduates. These are other young people fresh out of the university and inspired with human rights values or long-term human rights defenders that found the time to get another degree - now in line with their contemporary work. The academic and the NGO communities are becoming ever more intermixed. This process is quite gradual and slow, but it is happening today. And tomorrow, the human rights community shall hopefully loose its amateurish character and become enriched with quality researchers and professionals.

Tanya Lokshina is Program Director of the MHG, coordinating all connections with international governmental and non-governmental organizations and running the following projects: Human Rights Advocacy; The Rights of Women in the Russian Federation; Roma Rights - Monitoring and Defense; Xenophobia and Nationalism in Mass-Media - Monitoring and Public Action, Human Rights and the Russian Media, Hate Speech in Russian Media, Monitoring of Nationalism and Xenophobia in Russian Regions, Human Rights for Beginners as well as numerous events, such as seminars, conferences, etc. Also, editor of the MHG general and topical reports based on monitoring findings, including: Human Rights in Russian Regions-1999, Human Rights in Russian Regions--2000, Human Rights in Russian Regions--2001 and Nationalism, Xenophobia and Intolerance in Contemporary Russia. She is also pursuing a PhD. from the Joint Program of Literary Studies at Brandeis University.