From the Editors 9

From the Editors (Spring 2003)

Western donors have spent millions of dollars since 1988 to help people in Armenia and, at the same time, to change Armenian society, presumably for the better. The investors in this transformation have included western government agencies and multilateral institutions, as well as Armenian and non-Armenian foundations, religious groups, organizations, and individuals.

Who determines the new shape that society in Armenia is supposed to take? How effective have these western interventions been? Armine Ishkanian, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, takes up these vital questions in this issue of Armenian Forum. Four others respond to her article. Two are prominent activists in Armenia: Hasmik Gevorgyan, a professor of sociology at Yerevan State University, and Susanna Vardanyan, a physician. The other two are anthropologists who have closely studied similar issues in the Russian context: Michele Rivkin-Fish, a professor at the University of Kentucky, and Julie Hemment, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Rounding out the exchange, Ishkanian replies to her interlocutors.

Ishkanian finds that donors almost all say they are trying to build democracy and establish civil society in Armenia (and other countries “in transition”). Just what “civil society” means is not entirely clear. But it is definitely understood to entail the development of a vibrant set of organizations engaged in social activism and social programs.

Whereas in the West such organizations often rely on members and activists for support, in Armenia, because of pervasive poverty, it is the activists who tend to rely on the organizations for support. And the organizations rely exclusively on foreign funding, Ishkanian reports.

The problem, Ishkanian argues, is that there is often a mismatch between donors’ priorities and those of social activists in Armenia. Moreover, donors tend to insist on packaged solutions that are ineffective or even counterproductive in the local context. Some organizations in Armenia try to customize funded programs to meet local priorities. But overall, as organizations adopt donors’ priorities and solutions over local ones, they appear to be contractors and agents. Along with the organizations, it is the concept of civil society that loses credibility.

As a case in point, Ishkanian focuses on domestic violence, with special reference to an article on the topic that appeared in this journal’s pages not so long ago. She argues that the issue is a priority for donors, whereas activists in Armenia have tended to consider crises like poverty to be more urgent concerns. Moreover, Ishkanian writes, visiting foreign experts do not know enough about Armenian society to offer suitable and credible advice.

In the exchange, several themes emerge:

(1) Western organizations, in setting priorities and developing grants within their broad program areas (such as empowering women, building democratic institutions), must make an effort to listen respectfully to activists in Armenia.

Echoing Ishkanian’s own critique of western consultants who fail to recognize the multiple socioeconomic interests and identities of people in Armenia, however, Hasmik Gevorgyan notes that Armenian society is complex enough that different groups of people within it have different priorities. Thus, for example, “leading upper-class specialists” may have played down the urgency of the problem of domestic violence, whereas others may have considered it extremely urgent. (Gevorgyan herself, it is interesting to note, started a suicide hotline in 1989, only to find that most of the calls were from battered women seeking help. She adjusted her work accordingly.)

(2) Programs implemented in Armenia must be informed by the particular experience of Armenia. This experience includes a state that started advocating for women’s equality eighty-five years ago, and used to send delegates in the 1920s to urge children “to report cases of child beating, wife beating, and forced marriages,” as Ishkanian points out.

But what to make of this history? Ishkanian argues that Armenians built up and reinforced kinship networks as a way of resisting an intrusive state; it is thus important to tread carefully where family is concerned. Gevorgyan argues that Armenians reject everything associated with the Soviet era, the good as well as the bad, and thus western society fills an important void in insisting on women’s rights. Susanna Vardanyan, in turn, warns against more or less sophisticated forms of “populist pseudonationalist” sloganeering: an awareness of Armenian history should not leave Armenia off the hook.

Michele Rivkin-Fish urges western donors to adopt a new approach to women’s rights. Instead of pursuing neoliberal policies that are “connected in popular consciousness with hostility toward men, children, and the institution of the family,” they should adopt a maternal feminism that frames “issues affecting women, such as domestic violence, male alcoholism, and poverty . . . through a concern with ‘society’s’ welfare.”

(3) Rivkin-Fish and Julie Hemment both call for more ethnographic research on Armenia, and Gevorgyan, describing the role of the husband’s mother (kesur) as “the female head of many households,” offers a glimpse of what such research would entail.

(4) Hemment proposes further research into the difference between the reception of diaspora and nondiaspora donors, and about the role of Armenians (from Armenia or the diaspora) in western donor agencies. She draws attention to the work of the Armenian Assembly of America’s NGO Training and Resource Center—which Ishkanian credits with empowering local activists—and the Armenian International Women’s Association (AIWA).

Writing in the AIWA Newsletter for Autumn 1991, Martha Boudakian suggested that “Armenian women in the industrial West need to be supportive of the struggle of our sisters in Hayastan, hang back, watch, listen, [engage in] dialogue, share our resources, and then, only if asked, offer advice. And maybe we can practice a new exercise—looking for and heeding the advice our sisters in Hayastan may offer us.” Based on the exchange in this issue, we would have to say this was good advice not only for Armenian women, but for Armenian and non-Armenian organizations alike. Let’s hope more of them will heed it. We would welcome further comments on the topic.

The war in Iraq—and the doctrine of international relations that it represents—raises many questions and concerns for people throughout the world. The proximity of Armenia to the theater of conflict, and the presence of significant Armenian communities in Iraq and neighboring countries, raise particular concerns for Armenians. We explore some of these questions with Gérard Chaliand, one of the world’s leading experts on geopolitics, war, and strategy—and a man with first-hand experience on the ground in Kurdistan.

In an article in these pages, Victoria Rowe, author of A History of Armenian Women’s Writing, provides an insightful review of a particular genre of Armenian-American literature: memoirs by women who survived the Armenian Genocide and made their lives in the United States. Whereas members of later generations tend to see the women of that generation as “the locus of Armenian identity,” these women themselves struggled with what it meant to be Armenian, what it meant to be a woman, and indeed, a refugee woman, Rowe argues. They also struggled with what it meant to be held responsible for bearing and upholding Armenian identity, Rowe demonstrates.

Readers who lived in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s opened their weekend newspapers eagerly anticipating where Gregory Lima would take them this time: along a treacherous mule track winding through steep mountainsides to the newly discovered ruins of a glorious civilization under the forests off the Caspian Sea? to the annual festival of arts in Shiraz? under Spiro Agnew’s tent in Persepolis in 1971? or to Qum, to talk to the newly arrived Ayatollah Khomeini and find out what makes him tick? Now, after a long hiatus (far too long, if you ask us), readers can travel with Gregory Lima again, this time to Armenia and Gharabagh on the wings of five books of photographs under review.

Finally, Professor David Kazanjian (whose book, Loss, appeared recently) reviews Marc Nichanian’s Writers of Disaster, which draws on Armenian literature to call for new ways of thinking through the catastrophe that befell Armenians in 1915. Click here for the full text of the review. (Adobe Acrobat Reader required. Click here to get it for free.)

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