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Professor Janine R. Wedel, a participant in the UNU/WIDER project "Why Some Countries Avoid Conflicts While Others Fail", has won the 2001 Grawemeyer World Order Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
Prof. Wedel received the US$200,000 award for her 1998 book Collision and Collusion; The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-98 (St. Martin's) in which she argues that the American government helped wreak economic and social disaster in Russia by providing inappropriate policy advice and aid to corrupt power brokers. A raft of fly-in, fly-out consultants and reforms financed by Western taxpayers did little to help Russia and other former Soviet bloc nations build themselves as democratic, free-market states. "This is a book that is bound to have a long-term impact on the practice and politics of foreign aid from the West to non-Western economies," said the Grawemeyer selection committee. Professor Wedel is an anthropologist at University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and director of research development at Pittsburgh's Ridgway Center. She is also a fellow at the National Institute of Justice in Washington D.C.
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