The breakdown of infrastructures in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has made the stabilization and guarantee of scholarly access more, rather than less, complicated in the short term. To carry out its mission in this challenging new environment, IREX is able to call upon many distinctive strengths resulting from its almost twenty-five years of experience in these regions. IREX continues to foster its well-established scholarly and research programs through individual as well as collaborative projects. IREX will work with the American scholarly community to ensure that long-standing programs are adapted to a rapidly changing research environment.
An open exchange of ideas benefits American scholars in their quest for knowledge, and assists colleagues in Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet region in their efforts to join fully the international community. Such exchanges also enable IREX to consider the best means by which scholarly communities both in the United States and in the region can bring the results of basic research to bear on policy options dealing with the transition in all of its dimensions.
For a quarter century, IREX has been promoting scholarly interaction at the highest level between the United States, and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and their successor states. Through its innovative efforts to broaden research access for intellectual communities, IREX has helped build an extraordinarily valuable body of scholarship and analysis across the full spectrum of research disciplines. Having helped to train generations of scholars and policy analysts from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, IREX now finds that many of these same specialists have come into positions of authority and policy influence within the academic, political, economic and social policy elites of their respective countries.
Working with both public and private funders, IREX has maintained a bold series of programs which have had significant results. IREX programs have:
These comprehensive programs are a source of considerable pride within the academic community, IREX, and its sponsors. IREX has delivered a broad range of services to thousands of scholars and students from the United States and an array of partner countries. These services are highly valued by hundreds of universities and over fifty national scholarly associations with whom IREX has ties, and are also strongly supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. These existing programs clearly form the strong core of IREX activities upon which new initiatives can be built.