Recent publications on this research:
Gray, Patty A. 2011. Looking 'The Gift' in the mouth: Russia as Donor. Anthropology Today, Vol.27, No.2, pp.5-8.

Gray, Patty A. 2011. The Emerging Powers and the Changing Landscape of Foreign Aid and Development Cooperation: Public Perceptions of Development Cooperation. Summary Paper 4: RUSSIA.

In the 1990s, Russia was the recipient of development aid flowing from the U.S. and Europe; today, Russia is rapidly emerging as an international aid donor in its own right, whose legitimacy is validated by such international agencies as the OECD and the World Bank. The global configuration of donors and recipients is changing.

But what does this mean for Russians in cultural terms, in social terms? Is this a purely strategic move on the part of the Russian government, or is this a new position in the world that Russians themselves will embrace? Will the leagues of aid volunteers that have for decades been circulating between the "developed" and "developing" regions of the world begin to find themselves rubbing shoulders with Russian volunteers?

And how does Russia's entry into the global "club" of aid donors affect the well-worn development discourse of "global north" vs. "global south", "the west" vs. "the east", and the popular conception that aid "naturally" flows from the former to the latter?

This Irish-Russian collaborative project investigates Russia's past and current relationship to international development aid as a cultural and social phenomenon. The project theoretically examines Russia's seemingly awkward position within development discourse, drawing not only from anthropological theories but reaching across disciplinary boundaries to engage in a wide-ranging dialogue on Russia's role in international development. Working in particular with theories of the gift, as inspired by Marcel Mauss but  further debated extensively by anthropologists fascinated by the vicissitudes of giving and receiving, the project critically interrogates existing ideas about the "proper" vectors of development aid in the international community.

This project was funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, which is gratefully acknowledged.

Photo credit: Pierre-Louis Ronny receives medical attention from a Russian search and rescue team after being rescued from under the rubble one week after the Haitian earthquake in January 2010. 19/Jan/2010. Port-au-Prince, Haiti. UN Photo/Logan Abassi. www.un.org/av/photo/

Related project:
The non-DAC states and the role of public perspectives in shaping the future of development cooperation

Patty Gray is a social anthropologist whose main interests revolve around international development projects, humanitarian aid, and charity. She is working with theories of the gift as a means to open up new insights into the relations between donors and recipients in international aid contexts. She has conducted research in the Russian Far East regions of Chukotka and Magadan, as well as in Russia's capitals of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Her book, The Predicament of Chukotka's Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far North, is published by Cambridge University Press. Her project website can be visited at http://sites.google.com/site/russiaasdonor/.