Integration should be not only in economy and policy, but also in research and development.
Foreign states often contribute to the study of the region and cooperation of experts, but it’s high time for academics of Central Asia to come together on their own, as was emphasised by participants of the regional meeting “Joint researches of problems in Central Asian states: challenges and opportunities.”
The event was held in Almaty and organised by the IWPR representative office in Central Asia and analytical platform cabar.asia. It was held in the framework of the second School of Analytics cabar.asia, which was run in April 17-21 in Almaty (participants were young analysts from all five CA states).
During the event, researchers and experts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan shared their opinion about their cooperation and issues they encounter during joint researches of the region. They also discussed and suggested possible ways of stable cooperation within the research and expert community.
The speakers at the event were: Yerkin Baidarov, senior researcher of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Science Committee of the ministry of education and science of the Republic of Kazakhstan (Kazakhstan); Yuli Yusupov, director of Center for Economic Development (Uzbekistan); Maral Sagynalieva (Kyrgyzstan), senior lecturer at Ala Too international university, independent researcher; as well as other young researchers and experts of Central Asian states.
According to independent political analyst Eduard Poletayev, the Central Asian states have common problems: labour migration, extremism, geopolitical games, border issues, energy cooperation and others.
“Specialists of one country will never have an opportunity to carry out field researches in other countries because this issue can be solved via cooperation of all countries involved. A research will look like a politically committed one if it doesn’t involve specialists of various countries and will be open to criticism. Experience shows that no matter how competent you are, you can make mistakes due to the lack of knowledge of local mindset, peculiarities,” Poletayev said.
Researches in a range of countries involve heavy financial expenses. Now researches are carried out only by order of governmental agencies or international organisations.
Senior researcher of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Science Committee of the ministry of education and science of the Republic of Kazakhstan Yerkin Baidarov said that joint researches in Central Asian states were at their embryo stage.
“There are certain researches supported by international foundations that allocate money to them and unite researchers of various countries. They hold particular conferences. Today we have few general researches of Central Asia. The countries seem to compete with each other in terms of who’s more civilised, ancient. It’s important that academic institutions work in this direction,” Baidarov said.
He told that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) funded the drafting of the history of Central Asia with involvement of regional researchers. As a result, six volumes in English were published in France. This proves that foreign organisations are interested in the regional studies but the result of their work has not yet become available to the public in these countries. Joint works within the region, if any, are implemented mainly due to personal ties and enthusiasm of the researchers. He thinks it’s necessary to work jointly with other researchers in the region, not relying on international grants.
According to Yuli Yusupov, director of the Center for Economic Development (Uzbekistan), there is an urgent need for the solution of common economic issues. In his opinion, the countries suffer colossal losses due to a vast majority of barriers that prevent working in a single economic and cultural space.
“We don’t use division of labour, restrict markets of domestic goods to local markets, suffer from high level of monopolisation and unequal market conditions. We lose much because we don’t attract foreign investors sufficiently. There are also obstacles to the movement of people in our countries, information flow in our countries is limited,” Yusupov said.
Analysts and experts must get together to protect common interests from external actors. For example, all Central Asian states respond differently to the devaluation of rouble. It may be reasonable to develop a common tactics.
According to him, we need to create dialogue forums on the internet and share information, opportunities and discuss ideas. The researchers should make efforts to seek funding, apply jointly, while donors should prefer cross-country researches.
Independent researcher from Kyrgyzstan, Maral Sagynalieva, thinks the process of uniting Central Asian experts has already begun. The Aral international forum of sustainable development and Central Asian expert forum were held in 2016, where cooperation issues were raised. According to her, the process has been launched, and now the task is to do the job together to a good quality.
“The funding issue remains an essential part of joint researches. We need to ensure the link between science and higher education, the link between science and business. Our business sector cooperates with science; they have many concepts. There is a range of small and medium business development projects in progress. I would like to work with other universities to create some new discipline or a module to promote development of the society. We are planning to open a centre for financial studies and invite regional experts for joint work,” Sagynalieva shared her plans.
An analyst from Tajikistan, Dmitri Zavialov, suggested considering the experience of European countries and Russia and creating a network of regional experts. A forced creation of a think tank without links between analysts, researchers leads to poor results, like in Skolkovo. In Europe, analytical cooperation was based on university clusters. A system of cooperation between universities and analysts, Erasmus, was established in 1976. Over time, the programmes have expanded and turned into the single Erasmus+, and now they invite specialists from other countries.
“Many specialists of Central Asia take part in programmes and leave. It’s a brain drain. There’s a concept of academic tourism, when a person goes to see the country, not to write a research,” Zavialov said.
According to him, local programmes must be created to avoid the mistakes of Skolkovo and a brain drain.
He also recommended creating a new format of network expert communities, which require little organisational and financial resources in order to exist.