Zuhra Halimova – Foreign Aid to Eurasia: Donors’ Agendas, Local Perceptions, and Lost Illusions

Various donor agencies have become active players in defining and drafting strategies of transition from communist heritages and pasts to modern democratic societies and market economies, as well as in funding the implementation of these strategies.   However, after a quarter century of independence, most of Eurasia’s political elites have transformed into more autocratic regimes, with high level of corruption effectively undermining reforms, democracy development agendas, media freedoms, access to information, the independent judiciary, and the rule of law. In her presentation, Zuhra Halimova will discusses donors’ agendas and local perceptions of them, while proposing different possible reassessments of what seems to have been predominantly a failure of foreign aid in many post-Soviet countries.

Zuhra Halimova is a visiting scholar at IERES. From 1997 to 2016, she worked as the Executive Director of the Open Society Institute in Tajikistan.  A graduate of the Department of Oriental Studies at the Tajik State University and the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi, India), she has served as a member of the International Harm Reduction Program Advisory Board and of OSF’s International Youth Program and Education Support Program Advisory Boards for several years.  She has also been a member of the Council of the Global Fund for Women and of the Asian Women in International Affairs Initiative for many years.

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