Scholars Challenge Assumptions about Gender in Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Islam is viewed as an empowering force by some women in Bosnia. After the mass violence against women during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, some Muslim women have said that wearing the hijab offers a sense of security and protection.

Mothers of children with disabilities in Russia are some of the most successful activists in promoting increased rights for this population. Their role as mothers and caregivers is seen as lending them greater legitimacy and moral grounding as civil society actors.

Displacement affects men and women differently. In Georgia, men displaced by civil conflict experience further trauma from the loss of their traditional status as breadwinners. They often describe women as more capable of finding new livelihoods.

Ten scholars met in April to share these and other insights at the 2011 Regional Policy Symposium, “Gender in the 21st Century in Eastern Europe and Eurasia,” held at National Harbor, Maryland. The group of scholars, which included graduate students and early-career professors, met to discuss their research, often challenging commonly held views about gender related to this region of the world. Linking academia to action, scholars then presented policy-relevant insights to officials at the US Department of State. The topics ranged from international migration of nurses from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, to single motherhood in Russia, to legal decisions on women’s issues in Tajikistan.

A defining feature of the Regional Policy Symposium, which is hosted jointly each year by IREX and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is that the participants engage both their peers and a group of senior scholars in a discussion of their research projects. The senior scholars, who are specialists in gender issues and have backgrounds in academia and government, provided substantive commentary on the projects, from citing additional sources to questioning their gender frameworks. The interdisciplinary nature of the Symposium also allows the scholars to see their own work from different perspectives. Timothy Nunan, a Symposium participant and M.Phil. Candidate from the University of Oxford, explained, “Too often, historians like myself fail to communicate with other scholars -- anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists -- working on similar problems or areas to our own. As a historian working on Soviet policies toward women in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Symposium was helpful because I was able to meet other scholars across disciplines and compare perspectives.”

On the final day of the Symposium, the scholars traveled to the State Department to present their research at an open networking event. Each scholar created a poster showcasing the results of their research, often including data, maps, and photos from their fieldwork – and, in one case, a set of Russian matryoshka nesting dolls. The poster fair gave US government policy analysts direct access to researchers with on-the-ground experience in their areas of focus. For example, University of Wisconsin-Madison PhD Candidate Lauren McCarthy’s poster on sex trafficking in Russia drew the attention of a State Department specialist on human rights issues.

“The poster fair at the Department of State was a unique opportunity to share my research directly with policymakers,” commented Liliya Karimova, a PhD Candidate from University of Massachusetts-Amherst. “While I was there, I received valuable feedback that reinforced the relevance of my academic work for the policymaking community and inspired me to seek new ways to identify policy implications of my research on Muslim women in Russia.”

If you would like to learn more about the research presented at the 2011 Regional Policy Symposium, please explore the research summaries.