Marina Blagojević

Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery:

A Gender Perspective
Izdavač:
Institut za kriminološka i sociološka istraživanja
Gračanička 18, Beograd
E-mail:
iksi@sbb.co.yu
Za izdavača:
dr Leposava Kron
Recenzenti:
Prof. dr Andjelka Milić
Doc. dr Ilidiko Erdei
Kompjuterska obrada teksta:
Slavica Miličić

Štampa:
SZR “Zuhra Simić”
Tiraž:
300
Objavljivanje ove knjige finansiralo je
MINISTARSTVO ZA NAUKU I TEHNOLOŠKI RAZVOJ
REPUBLIKE SRBIJE
 Marina Blagojević

Knowledge Production at the

Semiperiphery
A Gender Perspective

Belgrade
2009
 Contents

Acknowledgments ....................................................................... 7

Introduction ...........................................................................11

Personal Trajectory through the Knowledge Maze ...............11

The Semiperipheral Perspective:

Organization of the Book.......................................................22

Chapter 1

Non-‘White’ Whites, Non-European Europeans and

Gendered Non-Citizens: On A Possible Epistemic
Strategy from the Semiperiphery of Europe ............................27

Chapter 2

Creators, Transmitters and Users: Women’s

Scientific Excellence at the Semiperiphery of Europe ............65

Chapter 3

Gender and Knowledge at the Balkan

Semiperiphery: Women in Science ..........................................97

Chapter 4

Hungarian Women Scientists Returnees: Becoming

a Cultural Minority or Being Integrated into the Elite? ....... 119

5
Chapter 5

Women Professionals from the Semiperiphery

of Europe: New European Proletariat? .................................. 161

Chapter 6

Nomadic Scientists in a Transnational

Landscape: Practicing Intersectionality................................. 179

Chapter 7

Shifting the Paradigm: Arguing for the

Positive History Approach......................................................201

Conclusion: Towards an Abundance Paradigm.................227

Literature................................................................................. 241

6
 Acknowledgments

Being deeply aware of the fact that our own ideas come from our
embededdness into the social and professional networks and
inspiring communication that, we, as intellectuals, ceaselessly carry
on with books, people and different products of culture and media, it
is hard for me to mention even a small number of those to whom I
am grateful for influencing my thoughts. But, as I believe I should
mention concrete names and institutions out of gratitude and
humbleness, I will try to list here some of those who have made the
most concrete impact on producing this very book.
Firstly, I would like to thank the person who introduced me into the
field of women and science when I was a student, my former professor
Andjelka Milić. My sincere gratitude goes to several of my colleagues
from different countries, with whom I have had inspiring discussions
over the years: Krassmira Daskalova, Nouria Ouali, Jasna Baksić-
Muftić, Hana Havlekova, and Ruth Siefert. I am also grateful to Jeff
Hearn and Nina Lykke for understanding and supporting my ideas
related to the relevance of location and the semiperiphery. My special
thanks go to Brigitte Young who encouraged me to articulate even
further my theoretical views on the relevance of the semiperiphery
perspective for gender analysis. I am grateful to my colleagues and
members of the ENWISE expert group, CEC WYS Project and NEWS
project, with whom I had dynamic and interesting intellectual debates
over a number of issues covered in this book. I would also like to thank
the organizers of different conferences who have invited me, in the last
five years, to speak on the issues related to women, gender and science,
which was always a very important provocation to develop the ideas
further and to move on. As a professor, while teaching at CEU
Budapest, or now at the MA program on Gender Studies at the Center
for Interdisciplinary Studies in Sarajevo, I greatly profited from

7
discussions with my students, who often themselves are from the
semiperiphery, for which I am grateful.
I would like to express my warm thanks to my daughter Filipa, for
her steady support for whatever I choose to do. Both my daughter and
my mother, Ljiljana, with their never-ending questions, have been
constantly creating a kind of atmosphere in which I had to look at my
own career through the glasses of different generations of women and
their different expectations. While learning from my daughter that there
are in fact no limits to personal ambitions, I learned from my mother
that satisfaction should be found in accepting the limits. To balance
those two views is still a major challenge for me. I am grateful, also, to
the one who puts a smile on my face.
I would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology,
Government of the Republic of Serbia, for financially supporting the project
which this book is a result of. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to
the Gender Studies Department of CEU, Budapest, which provided me with
a grant (2006) to work on the issues covered in this book.
I would like to give my thanks to people who have contributed to
the process producing this book, my colleagues at the Institute for
Criminological and Sociological Research in Belgrade: Beba Kron,
Zoran Stevanović, and Slavica Miličić. My thanks also go to Anna
Szerencses for the graphic design of the cover, which actually reveal
very well different historical layers of the semiperiphery and the
complexity of women’s identities.
Special thanks go to my dear young friend Nevena Ivanović, who
proofread my English under great time pressure, and who had been
encouraging me for years to sort out my ideas and make them
accessible through a book, which I have finally done.

Belgrade, February 2009

8
“Nowadays it is not difficult to imagine that talents, capabilities,
curiosity and enthusiasm related to scientific production are evenly
distributed across gender and border lines, that each generation of
young Europeans brings renewed capacity and passion for search and
research in science, fresh commitments and desire to solve the puzzles
of the mind and troubles of the world. So, how is it possible, then, that
the scientific excellence, the one recognized as such, is so scarce, elitist,
heavily concentrated in certain locations, and so often represented by
men? Or, to paraphrase Virginia Wolf and her idea of the tragic destiny
of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, if a girl was to be born a genius in
the ENWISE countries today, would she have the opportunity to
become some Shakespeare in science, or would she, like her genius
mother, vanish or evaporate, becoming instead an average, highly
educated woman, tired of the double burden and slowly giving up her
hopes and ambitions? Would she have any chance of being better than
average, better than the helper of a male scientist if she decided to stay
in her own country surrounded by her non gender sensitive fellow male
and female colleagues, exhausting herself with daily survival,
underpaid teaching or tiresome administration, being marginalized in
team work or internal institutional division of labor? Would she be able
to follow her own understanding of what is important in terms of
research and knowledge and would she be able to build a community of
scientists who share similar epistemology and understanding of the
world? Would she be provided with adequate material and financial
conditions and would she have a decent standard of living? Or rather,
would she become a scientific nomad, “wandering like a ghost” from
one institution to another, from one country to another? Finally would
she have to make a choice, and such a difficult one, to give up personal
life and motherhood to become endlessly mobile, in order to become
competitive in the international scientific market, which functions with
vague and often unfair rules? Would she be caught up in a series of
sequential decisions, in a vicious circle, losing in the end the very reason
for making such a troublesome journey? Who will support her, who will
congratulate her, who will admire her? If she succeeds in the male
world of science, will the reward have the same flavor of success as if
she had been a man?”

(Epilogue from the ENWISE Report, 2003,

authored by Marina Blagojević, ENWISE Expert)

9
 Introduction

Personal Trajectory through the Knowledge Maze

This book is a result of a research focus, which I have had for
almost twenty years and which, although largely multidisciplinary,
could still be best described as a gender approach to sociology of
knowledge. While this is a highly important and legitimate research
topic, for me personally it was undeniably also a kind of ethical and
political commitment. The underlying ideas behind my commitment,
those of social justice and fairness, are still for me so motivational,
that I keep coming back to them over and over again. In a scientific
context, those ideas actually translate into the ideal of meritocracy,
while in the social context they translate into the quest for
knowledge, which can contribute to global balance and a type of
globalisation that would lead to social justice.
As a post/feminist researcher I regularly practice reflective
self/positioning, so I would like to offer the reader some kind of a
short, self/reflective account of how I approached the issues of
gender and knowledge in time. Tracking down my own movement
within this very wide and multidimensional field, I feel it is necessary
to introduce some of the background information, which might help
to understand better how professional, personal and political were
linked in the process of idea articulation, which resulted in this book,
and which will, no doubt, continue to inspire some of my future
research and writing. I will address here the history of my own
research relevant for this topic very briefly, since the topic of
interconnectedness of personal experiences of the knower and
knowledge production is so vast and exciting, that it would deserve
special research.

11
 The most important feature of my own focus and research results
on the issues of gender and knowledge is their striking consistency
and complementarity. This is one of the reasons why in this book I
rely strongly on my own research, since over the years, it has only
gained added value, being a kind of pioneering work twenty or fifteen
years ago, especially at the semiperiphery. However, it is not my own
genius that ensured consistency, but, realistically speaking, it was the
consistency and slow change of the reality within the framework of a
researched problem. Namely, in the last twenty years, although the
problem of gender inequality in science and androcentrism of
knowledge production was “discovered,” it has certainly not been
resolved. Moreover, at the semiperiphery, the problem is even more
complex, and even more stuck into a certain kind of “vicious circle,”
since most of the semiperiphery has become in many ways
additionally peripherized during the transition since the beginning of
the 1990s. Consistency and high interest that I sustain over the years
for this topic is also heavily fuelled by many concrete existential
factors, which over and over again, simply reaffirm the reality of
multilayered exclusions. Although at the first glance my interests
have been diverse, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, a long-
term perspective somehow offers a different understanding. The
point in which all of them meet, regardless of the concrete topic or
method of research - as I have just discovered, surprisingly even to
myself, in more than twenty years of my research practice - is the
point of problematization of the application of Western knowledge to
the realities of societies I was familiar with, namely communist and
postcommunist societies. In other words, being exposed to Western
knowledge, theories, paradigms, conceptual frameworks at an early
time, while at the same time being a careful observer of social reality
in my own social context, ever since my student days, I have
discovered over and over again how theories divert from
semiperipheral realities in a fundamental way. But, interestingly

12
enough, in the context of Second Yugoslavia, this kind of critical
thinking was very much supported, at least in the intellectual circles I
belonged to. Yugoslavia had nourished the image of itself not being
West or East and being able to see both sides from a critical
perspective. In reality it was a center of development of critical leftist
and Marxist theory (for example, the Praxis school).
Some of my first research projects, already in the early 1980s, dealt
with the position of women in education and science, mainly from a
sociological perspective, and from the perspective of gender equality.
Since Second Yugoslavia had excellent gender-sensitive statistics, much
of the profound quantitative analysis could be done easily. My special
interest was connected to “successful women” as I called them then, and
which included women with PhDs. The idea behind it was to explore
those women who were already changing patriarchal practices. I
approached them as a “sample to explore the future.” So, in the mid-80s
I undertook the complex quantitative and qualitative research related to
women scientists, artists and professionals in Second Yugoslavia, which
later became my quite voluminous Ph.D. thesis (550 pages)1. One of the
most striking discoveries that I had while spending almost five years on
the road doing this huge, as it seemed at times, boundless research, was
that the knowledge which I gained while studying sociology was simply
not useful enough to deal with the problems of gender inequalities. All
the classical concepts of sociological theory seemed almost useless if
applied to women, especially women and stratification. Being an
excellent student, I was in fact terrified of this discovery, and feeling
quite lonely on this road, I needed time to gain confidence to make these
statements very clear, as I finally did in my thesis. I needed to
completely re-educate myself, to start from the beginning, in a way, to
dramatically change my own perspective, in order to be able to really

1 Professionally Successful Women in Yugoslavia (1991), Belgrade: Faculty of

Philosophy, Department of Sociology.

13
integrate a gender perspective into my complex empirical research.
Interestingly, in that research, I was already trying to figure out the
connection between women’s participation in the professions, including
science, and the level of development of a certain part of the Second
Yugoslavia. Being one country, with huge development discrepancies
between the regions (between, for example Slovenia, on one hand, and
Kosovo on the other), Yugoslavia seemed to be just the perfect case for a
comparative analysis. Also, it became clear, from large empirical
evidence, that the higher participation of women eventually results in
achieving higher positions in higher education and research &
development sectors, and supports a certain level of de-segregation of
educational and professional fields. This research also showed, in the
late 80s, that the worsening of working conditions in those sectors, as
well as the general low prestige of scientific professions, actually paved
the way for the feminization of science, even more than development
itself. In that research I was also quite critical towards “androcentric
knowledge,” and I clearly connected women’s participation in scientific
professions with the change of the knowledge paradigms. So, already in
the late 1980s, when I finished with my theoretical development of the
topic (in fact, once I wrote the thesis based on the empirical material I
collected, I had to go back and re-write it completely in the light of the
new discoveries I made), I was making a strong connection between
women and science on one hand, and gender and knowledge on the
other. That was also the time when I was connecting gender equality to
development, from both perspectives: on one hand, higher level of
development increases the chances for gender equality, and on the other
hand, higher level of gender equality is good for development. Although
those ideas might seem oversimplified today, they certainly still resonate
in my work, and they are still very much empirically grounded.
While making all that theoretical and empirical effort for years, I
not only experienced loneliness, exhaustion and insecurity, but also
had to handle, all by myself, all kinds of practical problems. At that

14
time, the economic crises in Yugoslavia was at its peak and the funds
for science and higher education were very limited. I could not buy
books, especially not foreign books, not because they were forbidden,
or because it was impossible to travel and buy them, but because I did
not have money.2 Due to the lack of funds I could not get grants and
scholarships, and since my Faculty of Philosophy did not have money
to open a position, I was unemployed for several years. When I started
working at the University, as an assistant lecturer, my salary was very
low, and did not allow for much. Since I was faced with serious
financial limitations, my strategy was not to try to find the best books
related to the subject, but to try to find out what actually existed in
Belgrade that could be related to the subject. I made full use of all the
libraries and also a number of foreign cultural centers with their
libraries. Ironically, while being fully immersed in my own research on
women, I did not know that a group of women already made a circle
called “Women and Society” and were meeting regularly to discuss the
newest feminist trends in the Western world. They were older than me,
this first wave of communist feminists, and later I became part of the
circle and an activist myself. But, I discovered feminism for
epistemological reasons, and not as an activist. I joined the women’s
movement in Belgrade when I had already finished my feminist Ph.D.
thesis, since I wanted to use the knowledge I acquired for social
change. The first concrete use of my knowledge for that purpose was to
draft the manifesto and program of our new Women’s Party (ŽEST) in
Belgrade, in 1992 (Blagojević, 1998).
The next phase of my professional development is strongly
connected to the dissolution of Second Yugoslavia on one hand and
feminist, peace and civil movements, which I was a part of, on the other.
And although I largely stayed within the field of gender studies, my

2Paradoxically, this situation did not change much, unfortunately. It is still impossible
to have decent salaries if in science, and it is extremely difficult to obtain funds for
books or travel.

15
interests, quite naturally, shifted toward some much more pressing
issues of the moment, mainly related to ethnic conflicts and gender. The
major feature of this period of my intellectual engagement was not,
however, the fact that I became a really committed activist, but that I
strongly believed in and practiced the idea that knowledge could and
should become an integral part of activism (Blagojević, 2006). It was not
“only” that activism should fuel knowledge, as it was already very well
known in feminism, but the other way around, namely that knowledge is
a precondition for “responsible activism”. (Blagojević, 1998). From that
perspective, I was using my knowledge to empower many of the civic
and women’s initiatives which were taking place in the 1990s in
Belgrade. I used my knowledge to draft slogans, to write demands for
the Parliament, to teach, to support research on activism, to empower
activism through disciplined self/reflection, and even to create strategies
for civic protests, to consolidate and encourage the civic movement. But
the most profound intervention, in fact, was the one I tried to make in
the core of knowledge itself – to shift some knowledge paradigms, which
were, to my mind, detrimental and in the core of interethnic wars. This
project of mine, of changing the knowledge paradigm, resulted in the
idea of “posthistory,” a neologism I invented to enable another
perspective on history, “positive history,” history of living together,
history of cooperation and exchange. It took me more than fifteen years
to be able to promote this idea on the international scene, which is
another indirect proof of how difficult it is to bring new knowledge and
insights from the semiperiphery to the center (Ingrao and Emmert,
2009). I always had the feeling that while being on the semiperiphery I
was either articulating the knowledge too late (related to the things
which were already in the similar manner experienced in the core), or
too early (related to the things which will only be “discovered” once the
scientists from the core make them visible).
Since the late 1990s, however, I have also had many opportunities
to exchange views and ideas with colleagues in gender studies from

16
former communist countries, as well as with Western feminists. The
encounters were mainly taking place at CEU, Budapest and at
different international conferences. This strongly motivated me to
constantly reflect on yet another dimension of knowledge
production, which is locationality. Being very sensitive towards
power relations behind knowledge production, due to my feminist
background, I also became very sensitive towards power differentials
stemming from institutional, country or even disciplinary
background. When I initiated The First Feminist Postcommunist
Conference in Belgrade in 1994, I was very much aware of two things:
that “we” feminists, and women from the East in general, should be
open, but also self-reliant, which is why the title of the conference
was “What Can We Do For Ourselves?”, and secondly, that “we” need
to speak first among ourselves and then towards the
“outside”(Blagojević, Duhaček, Lukić, 1994). It was very clear to me
that we were before the great task of defining our difference before
we could cancel it. However, that view was not so readily shared by
either side. To simplify, for the sake of clear argument, Eastern
feminists were eager to travel to the West and to learn, and Western
feminists were eager to “teach” and to feel the zest of the new
women’s movements. But there was also disillusionment on both
sides, and some issues remained unresolved, almost twenty years
after the first encounters. All this misunderstanding, which is usually
summarized by the term “East-West Feminist Debate,” is still largely
unresolved, due to the fact that critical thinking and open debate
about knowledge paradigms is virtually impossible within the
framework of the vast imbalance of resources and power. However,
my own, often informal, contacts with fellow colleagues coming from
postcommunist countries have convinced me that there is
widespread dissatisfaction with many of those encounters, and often
a shared feeling of exploitation by Western feminist scholars.

17
 My next phase of dealing with the issues of women in science took
place after 2002, when I became an ENWISE (Enlarge Women in
Science to the East) expert for the European Commission. ENWISE
was set up to deal with the issues of women in science in “New”
Europe3. In many ways, this great opportunity enabled my return
into this field, where I have remained active ever since. For me that
was a “return into the future,” since the topic I dealt with previously
had only then became relevant on the European level. My own
context, however, did not really express an interest, either then or
today, at least not beyond purely scholarly debates involving only a
few. Owing to ENWISE engagement, I got the opportunity to present
my texts at some of the key European conferences dealing with issues
of women in science in Europe, during the last several years. In most
of the cases I was invited to deliver a keynote or introductory speech,
and often my arguments provoked vivid discussions and great
interest. Experiences at these conferences, and feedback from the
publications in which some of those texts appeared, convinced me
that there is a lot to be told in this emerging field of exploration, and
that a combination of approaches, which includes gender, location
and knowledge production, could be a very fruitful field of further
research. At the same time, emphasis on the semiperiphery seems to
be fully justified and not overlapping with postcolonial criticism.
The papers included into this book were presented at the
following conferences:
• Conference: Gender and Science, Sarajevo, Centre for
Interdisciplinary postgraduate Studies, 4-5 September, 2008,
keynote speech: Scientific Excellence at the Semiperiphery:

3ENWISE Report: Waste of Talents: turning private issues into a public debate (2003)
ISBN92-894-6750-9. European Commission,
http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/science-society/women/ENWISE/-
events_en.html

18
 Hierarchies, Exclusions and Possible New Feminist Strategy of
Knowledge Production
• 5th European Conference on Gender Equality in Higher
Education, Berlin 2007, Humboldt-University Berlin, August
28-31, 2007, keynote speech: Gender and Excellence:
Hierarchies, Exclusions and Illusions
• European workshop on gender and diversity programme in
science, Brussels, 11th October 2007: Gender, Migration and
Globalisation: Situating Science Policies
• Globalisation and the Semiperiphery, Limerick, Ireland 12th
March, 2006, presentation: Gender and Policy making at the
Semiperiphery: The cost of un/intended ignorance
• Intersectionality, Identity and Power – Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Intersectionality Studies, Vadstena, Sweden,
11.10.2006 - 15.10.2006, keynote speech: Nomadic Scientist in a
Transnational Landscape: Social, Institutional, Epistemic and
Personal Consequences of Practicing Intersectionality
• Migrating feminisms, Budapest January 21, 2006, presentation:
Migrating gender scholar from the semiperiphery: Epistemic
and other consequences
• Canon of Our Own? Vienna, 28.11.2005-29.11.2005, introductory
speech: Canons and Contexts: Towards Transnational Gender
Epistemic Communities
• Gender and science: Women making a difference? Vienna,
March 1, 2005, presentation: Gender and Knowledge at the
Balkan Semiperiphery
• First Balkan Conference on Gender: Troubles with the Balkans
(Politics of gender differences and key feminist concepts of
social action) Sarajevo, November, 1-3, 2004, presentation:

19
 Creators, Transmitters and Users: knowledge and gender at
the semiperiphery of Europe
• Women in Science-SEE Conference, Sofia, October 19-20,
2004, keynote speech, Gender and Knowledge at the Balkan
Semiperiphery
• Enlarging Europe with/for Women Scientists, ENWISE
valorization Conference, Tallinn, Estonia 10 Sept., 2004,
keynote speech: Presentation of the ENWISE REPORT- Waste
of Talents: turning private struggles into a public issue
• Minimizing gender bias in the definition and measurement of
scientific excellence (EUI), Florence 23-24 October, 2003 –
presentation: Gender and Excellence in ENWISE countries
Some of the texts have been published/presented in different
countries (Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Austria, BiH), but some are
new or in the process of being published. Since this is largely a new
field of investigation, where three different fields overlap
(semiperiphery, knowledge production, gender), this book is also
largely multidisciplinary. It was written in English, in order to reach
the wider audience of international scholars dealing with gender and
knowledge production.
In addition to those conferences, it is worth noting, that much of
the material, inspiration, and fruitful collegial exchange is also
connected with my engagements in different expert roles: ENWISE
expert group of the EU Commission (2002-2004), CEC-WYS project
on women and youth in science (2005-2006)4, and NEWS project on
minority women in science in the EU (2006-2007)5. In 2003, in the

4 Central European Centre for Women and Youth in Science, http://www.cec-

wys.org/html/.
5 EU-funded Sixth Framework NEWS project (Network on Ethnicity and Women

Scientists), coordinated by Dr. Nouria Ouali, Université Libre de Bruxelles,

http://www.ulb.ac.be/socio/gem/Membres/en_membres.htm.

20
capacity of an ENWISE expert, I was engaged in organizing the
workshop “Starting Debate with Women Scientists from the Balkan
Region” (Brussels, 11-12 November, 2003), dealing with the issues of
women scientists from the Balkans. Those expert projects offered
precious insights, which “fed” my imagination and often provided
evidence for my own theoretical ideas. It should be emphasized that
beyond these “coincidental” meetings of an expert and a scientist in
the same person, the idea of a necessary connection between theory,
research and policy is my guiding principle and also the guiding idea
of this book.
My interest related to women scientists started already in the late
1980s, much before it became a salient topic in the EU. However,
since 2000, the EU has been giving considerable attention to this
issue, within the project of development of the European Research
Area. However, it seems that the social and political, as well as the
scientific contexts in Serbia, are still ignoring the relevance of the
questions dealing with knowledge production, knowledge economy,
science, innovation, or women’s inclusion in that field. The paradox
of the present situation is that an author from Serbia is experiencing
recognition of scientific excellence when dealing with scientific
excellence at the semiperiphery, while this excellence is not
recognized within the very context of the semiperiphery. But this
book tries to explain, on a theoretical level, why this is so.
Finally, one can say that as much as we choose the topic, we are
also “chosen” by the topic. It seemed to me, too often, that I simply
cannot escape the questions:
• Who creates knowledge?
• Why does s/he create knowledge?
• Who is benefiting from that knowledge?
• Where do the “blind spots” come from?

21
 • What are the social, political, economic and personal
consequences of what we “know” or “do not know”?
Answering these questions is a never-ending task, but I am,
nevertheless, passionately driven to try to do that, within the limits of
my mind, my position and my context. On a personal level,
answering these questions was closely connected to my personal
empowerment and growth, not only to my career development. One
of the most powerful lessons from feminism is that it benefits those
involved in the most direct way, exactly through personal
empowerment.

The Semiperipheral Perspective:

Organization of the Book
This book is organized in seven chapters. The first one, “Non-
”White” Whites, Non-European Europeans and Gendered Non-
Citizens: On a Possible Epistemic Strategy from the Semiperiphery of
Europe” deals with the issue of “strategic silence” about the
semiperiphery and the process of de-development it has gone through.
Because of the specificities of the semiperiphery, a specific epistemic
strategy, following the feminist tradition, is advised. That strategy
should be twofold: on one hand, it should re-affirm the standpoint,
with the semiperiphery being a strategic standpoint for knowledge
articulation, and on the other, it should re-affirm a connection
between the ontology and the epistemology of gender
(Wickramasinghe, 2006). This kind of twofold strategy can establish a
link between actual gendered experiences and locationality, such as the
semiperiphery.
In the second chapter, “Creators, Transmitters and Users: Women’s
Scientific Excellence at the Semiperiphery of Europe,” the focus is on the
exploration of obstacles that women scientists from the semiperiphery

22
are facing. This chapter analyzes the actual system of exclusions, which
operates vertically from the global level to the level of individual woman
scientists from the semiperiphery. A system of “translations” exists
between the globalized knowledge production mainly shaped by the
centre, which creates coordinates for both “scientific knowledge” and
“scientific excellence” at the semiperiphery and influences the
conditions of knowledge production at the semiperiphery on one hand,
and the individual women scientists from that very semiperiphery, on
the other. There are also, mechanisms through which and by which her
position, her way of knowing, her production of knowledge, and possible
recognition of her “excellence” are connected. The link between global-
individual, which cuts through the semiperiphery, different statehoods,
different local knowledge institutions, local gender regimes, cultural
traditions, symbolic orders, and group experiences, even different
histories of resistance, at the end largely shapes her possibilities to
produce “excellent” knowledge, or the knowledge that will be recognized
as such, regardless of her personal talents, capacities or even
productivity. In other words, there are many structural barriers to the
recognition of scientific excellence for an individual woman scientist.
In the third chapter, “Gender and Knowledge at the Balkan
Semiperiphery: Women in Science” the problem of women in science
is treated through the lenses of “multiple transitions” of the
semiperiphery. These “multiple transitions” in the lives of individual
women scientists become “multiple constraints,” which they need to
handle. This results in inadequate use of their resources, as well as in
an impossibility to advance professionally in a setting which largely
undervalues the relevance of science.
The fourth chapter, “Hungarian Women Scientists Returnees:
Becoming a Cultural Minority or Being Integrated into the Elite?”
discusses the results of a small explorative research on women
scientists who came back to Hungary after they were on grants or

23
scholarships for a longer period. This research aims to investigate the
consequences of “brain circulation” for a women scientist from the
semiperiphery. It shows that international professional migrations,
although very relevant for personal professional development, often
create additional tensions in home countries and home institutions.
The fifth chapter, “Women Professionals from the Semiperiphery
of Europe: New European Proletariat?” is also related to migrations,
but of professional women from the semiperiphery into the Western
countries. This chapter on one hand deconstructs the negative
stereotypes about women’s position at the semiperiphery, while on
the other hand, it shows, again, how mobility can have quite
contradictory effects: financial gains are often connected with a
decrease of social status.
The sixth chapter, “Nomadic Scientists in a Transnational
Landscape: Practicing Intersectionality” connects the intersectionality
paradigm with the exploration of the nomadism of women scientists.
While exploring a set of different intersectionalities, this chapter not
only tries to expand the very notion of “intersectionality,” but it also
advocates “transectional” approach as a logical continuation in
knowledge production, towards holistic knowledge. Intersectionality of
the knowers, when reflected and accepted by the knowers themselves
by self/reflective positionality is integrated into their understanding of
the process of knowledge production, which necessarily leads to
holistic knowledge. Holistic knowledge relies on discovery and
understanding of interconnectedness: between the core,
semiperiphery and periphery; between different spheres of social life;
different social groups, including genders; different ways of knowing;
different disciplines.
Chapter seven, “Shifting the Paradigm: Arguing for the Positive
History Approach” is a kind of concrete application of different
epistemic lessons developed within feminism. This chapter is devoted

24
to the foundation and explication of an alternative model of history
interpretation, the one which would emphasize the “positives,” instead
of conflicts, and which would reaffirm the everyday life perspective.
Building on concrete examples from Second Yugoslav society, this text
offers a model of positive history, which is developed from feminist
epistemic legacies: standpoint theory, critical gender analysis of
knowledge production, empowerment of the powerless, and research
of the “invisible” in the lives of the powerless. This model represents a
theoretical contribution, which emerges exactly from the specific
semiperipheral experience of de-development, reverse development,
and inadequacy of dominant theories to deal with the contextualized
and contextual knowledges of the semiperiphery. Positive history
should become a new metanarrative and a shift of knowledge should
encourage a shift of reality.
Finally, in the conclusion of this book, “Towards an Abundance
Paradigm,” another model is created to deal with the issue of scientific
excellence. Instead of building on the “scarcity model,” which is closely
connected to extreme competition, exclusions, and dispenses with a
large pool of human potentials, the abundance model offered here is
highly inclusive, both in gender and locationality terms. It also
encourages a different approach to knowledge production, and
consequently leads to the change of dominant knowledge paradigms.
This model connects the characteristics of knowledge paradigms with
the conceptualization of scientific excellence. The abundance model of
scientific excellence has a high potential for destabilizing dominant
androcentric knowledge paradigms, as well as male dominated
scientific institutions. It puts the emphasis on social responsibility of
the knowers, and consequently on diversity and inclusiveness of
science itself.
Although these chapters cover a full range of different topics,
what connects them all is an effort to establish a set of new

25
approaches, concepts and possible paradigms, while building on
feminist epistemic contributions. The whole book, although
composed of texts which are focused on a set of different issues,
reaffirms the concept of the semiperiphery through its connection
with both gender and knowledge. It offers different epistemological
and theoretical innovations, which could possibly inspire further
research in the same direction, and which can contribute to the
creation of knowledge in service of a better balance in the global
world and between genders.

26
Chapter 1

Non-”White” Whites, Non-European

Europeans and Gendered Non-Citizens:
On A Possible Epistemic Strategy from The
Semiperiphery of Europe6

“Is Serbia, according to UN discourse, on the South

or on the North?” (M.B. question to UNDP representative in
Belgrade, Serbia, June 2007).
“It is on the East.” (UNDP representative, smiling).

After much of the optimism in the beginning of the 90s that “the
transition” will create a logical catching-up with Western
democracies, a new wave of skepticism is taking place, especially
with increasing global economic and environmental crises, terrorism,
and new threats of violent confrontations or even revival of “cold
war” divisions. In the light of the present global financial crises, those
initial assumptions seem even more naive and misleading. If we put
aside the question whether or not and for whom “the transition” is
over, there are still too many similarities between the different
countries at the semiperiphery of Europe, to be ignored.
This chapter has a focus on knowledge construction about women
and about gender in the countries which are usually denoted as
Eastern European Countries, Central European and South-Eastern
European countries. Definitions and classifications are conflicting

6 This text will be published in a book by Brigitte Young (ed.) Gender Knowledge and

Gender Networks (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag) 2009.

27
between themselves, showing how the symbolic geographies are
extremely dynamic, changing borders of inclusions and exclusions,
due to the definitions mainly applied from the “outside” (Wolff, 1994;
Todorova,1997; Goldsworthy, 1998; Bijelić and Savić, 2002).
Regardless of the fact that some countries from the semiperiphery
are already EU members, and others are in different stages of the
Accession process, the fact remains, that those countries are mostly
more similar than different between themselves (Antohi and
Tismeneanu, 2000). If their geostrategic position, namely their
closeness to western EU borders, were to be ignored as an important
factor in the dynamics of Accession, it would become even clearer
how their developmental characteristics, still, with few exceptions,
cluster them together (Blagojević, 2003).
The transition of former communist countries, preformed within
the formula of “democratization, privatization and market economy”,
in its major aspects was actually influenced by structural adjustment
economic policies (Stiglitz, 2003, 2007). Although East European
countries experienced in many spheres of their social life the major
process of de-development, those costs were largely ignored or pushed
aside, or simply treated as “necessary”. Countries in transition were
faced with increased social insecurity, decreased social protection and
stability, increased crime and violence, population crises, increased
mortality, and even “barbarization” through the violent conflicts
(Antohi and Tismaneanu, 2000; Poznanski, 2000; Verdery, 2000;
Stiglitz, 2003; Mundiju-Pipidi and Krastev, 2004). While economic
indicators might have been improved, the change of social climate and
feelings of loss were, and still are, overwhelming for much of the
population (Nations in Transit, 2004). The losers of the transition
have been many, and the losses were highly gendered (Gal and
Kligman, 2000a; Blagojević, 2003). Both men and women were the
losers, but in different ways. Some sophisticated feminist research
projects in the mid 90s have identified different sources and aspects of

28
this process of social regress, but since mainly based on qualitative
methodology they never really succeeded to be convincing enough for
an audiences of the development planners or global decision makers
(Gal and Kligman, 2000b; Jahnert et al. 2001). Some demographic
data, on the other hand, was convincingly showing extremely high
human costs due to the chaos of the transition, but those facts because
of the nature of their collection, processing and dissemination,
appeared too late in public. However, although one can put the blame
on the absence of data, absence of research, or simply delayed
“discoveries” of the evidence, another explanation could be equally
valid. Namely, it could be supposed that there was a kind of a “strategic
silence” about gender and economic policy (Bakker, 1994). The major
blame throughout the 90s for the worsening of women’s conditions
was put on traditional patriarchal values, regressive ideologies,
communist failed promises, and a conservative climate, while the
influence of structural adjustment was treated as only secondary, and
highly necessary (Gal and Kligman, 2000a; 2000b). However, already
in the 80s, even before the transition of the communist countries of
Eastern Europe had started, it was evident that there was no simple
connection between development (mesaured by economic indicators)
and gender equality, and that the first does not necessarily benefit the
second. Still, that knowledge has not been integrated into the policy
recommendations for the countries entering into “transition” in the
90s. The key issue is that restructuring was an integral part of the
neoliberal agenda of globalisation, and it was not done with the aim to
contribute necessarily to development, as much as to enable fast
growth of global financial institutions and multinational corporations.
This strategy becomes even clearer in this exact moment of the global
financial collapse. Restructuring could be seen, therefore, from a very
different angle:
“Restructuring can be analyzed as a series of cumulative and
conjectural crises in the international division of labour and the

29
global distribution of economic and political power; in global
finance; in the functioning of national states that are loosing
economic and political control of national economies; in the decline
of the Keynesian welfare state and the established social contracts
between labour, government and business; and in the increasing
exploitation of marginal forms of labour performed by women,
youth and minorities”. (Bakker, 1994: 2)
The same scenario was repeated for the transitional countries of
Eastern Europe, not because it has proved to be good recipe for
development, but because simply both global and local (national)
constellations of power structures called for it to be implemented
(Stiglitz, 2000; 2003). There was no immanent rationality related to
this scenario, but post factum rationalization of this scenario was
invented over and over again, even with the help of “scientists”. The
paradoxical situation is that a neoliberal approach nowadays might
be even more popular among the economists at the semiperiphery
than among those at the core countries. Part of the explanation lies in
anticommunist feelings widely spread among the new
postcommunist elite. Also, while communist institutions were
collapsing, the simple scenario which already existed seemed to be
easy to apply. At that point, the costs could have been ignored, and in
fact, they still are. Costs in some ways were beneficial for the
developed part of the world - for example through cheap caring work
(Lutz, 2002; Sassen, 2003), or low wage zones (Brigitte Young,
2005). But the benefits were not equally distributed, and in fact they
also increased inequalities of the core. At the same time, caring work
and sex work, in combination with the fashion industry, enormously
strengthened patriarchal, phalocentric and androcentric type of
globalisation, and intensified ageism, especially against women. The
semiperiphery was exporting cheap care labour through migrations,
but it also became a site for cheap services of different kinds,
including the sex industry or health care. Those new developments

30
benefited large numbers of citizens in the core European countries,
including career women, for example, who could afford to have cheap
qualified care workers while keeping male models of professional
advancement (Lutz, 2002).
The major outcomes of restructuring was fast changing
configuration of negotiation powers of different social and political
agents in the countries at the semiperiphery, and also decreasing
negotiation power of those countries in relation to the core.
Kovačević (2008) explains how:
“…old Orientalisms surface in the Cold War period, re-
articulated in narratives that define a European or civilisational
ideal as an essentially liberal-democratic project against the
discoursive palimpsest of totalitarian, barbarian, and Oriental
communists. The establishment of this discourse has helped to
justify the transitions to market economy and liberal-civic society in
postcommunism. These developments increasingly provincialize
Eastern Europe through suppressing its communist histories and
legacies, placing it in an economically and politically subordinate
position with respect to the EU and the US, and continuing its
dependence on the West as a point of reference for a definition of its
identity.” (Kovačević, 2008: 1)
While the communist institutions were collapsing together with
the welfare state, a void was created which only additionally
disempowered those who were already a weaker side, women
especially. The fact that the main employees in the education and
health sectors were women and that they accepted to maintain those
sectors although severely underpaid, actually enabled the extraction
of their resources in an unprecedented way (Blagojević, 2003).
Women in countries in the transition became primary “survival
agents”, both in private and in public spheres.

31
 But, not only that the semiperiphery is veiled by a “strategic
silence” about the impact of macro-economic policies on gender
relations, but the semiperiphery itself is “strategically silenced”. The
semiperiphery almost does not have a name, neither is it theorized.
The lack of a name, of a label, is in fact creating over and over again its
invisibility and decreasing its negotiable power in the global context.
Moreover, in cultural studies, the problem of Eastern Europe, as being
“semi”, has been explored (Kovačević, 2008), but it has not so much
been really connected to the very mechanism of neoliberal
globalisation. Economic and political issues of the semiperiphery have
been simply integrated into the “global picture”, or into EU
enlargement discourse, and reduced mainly to crude economic and
demographic indicators. The semiperiphery has not been recognized
by any official discourse practiced by the major international players.
It is classified as either North or South, depending on some formal
criteria (EU Enlargement) and gender policies, donors, activities, even
the stakeholders are defined depending on the stage on which the
country is situated in the continuum of former-communist (Global
South) – future European (Global North). The usual representation of
the semiperiphery is just by geographical regions, or through the status
of countries in relation to the EU. In other words, there is almost no
effort to deal with the specificities of the semiperiphery as a part of the
world which has some substantive characteristics of its own.
In a paradoxical way, gender issues in postcommunist countries
were an object of interest to gender scholars from the West since the
early 90s. However, although that interest resulted in quite a few
collections of articles which have some documentary value, the
theoretical approach was not really developed, or was mainly biased
since the transition was treated in a mode of uniliniear (progressive)
development. But at the beginning of the 90s, also the so called
“East-West feminist debate” took place, with Eastern scholars trying
to articulate their voice of difference (Weiner, 2004; Wohrer, 2004).

32
However, this debate up till now has not resulted in a clearly
articulated theoretical position on differences about gender at the
semiperiphery and at the core. Part of the problem is that before
gender could be analyzed it is essential to understand what is in fact
semiperiphery in structural terms.

The semiperiphery:
More Life than a Construct
“Yugoslavia was too good an example, therefore it needed to be
destroyed”. (Žarana Papić, feminist from Belgrade, in personal
conversation)

The semiperiphery has several crucial characteristics that

differentiates it both from the core and the periphery, although this
very classification is subject to change and intensely drifting
cartography, especially in the context of the present overall economic
and financial crises (Wallerstein, 1979; Arrighi, 1985; Wallerstein,1991;
Roncevic, 2002; Adam at al, 2005). However, using the concept of the
semiperiphery as a “strategic concept” (Harding, 1998), or ideal type in
Weberian sense, is necessary to argue for an adequate development
strategy. And, the other way around, ignoring the differences and
pushing the semiperiphery either to the core or to the periphery, not
only that sustains distortions, but, through inadequate policies, creates
in fact many invisible, underconceptualized losses and losers, in
addition (Verderdery, 2000; Poznanski, 2000).
Firstly, the semiperiphery is positioned between the center and
the periphery and it contains the characteristics of both, therefore it
is a large scale social hybrid. It is essentially shaped by the effort to
catch up with the core, on one hand, and to resist the integration

33
into the core, so not to lose its cultural characteristics, on the other
hand. This creates a paradox in the very identity of the
semiperipheral nations, since it is not simply one-directional
“colonization” as much as it is a “desire for the West” and “self-
colonizing tendency”, as observed by Kovačević:
“Because of Eastern Europe’s direct geographic, political and
cultural proximity to Western Europe and indirectly, to North
America, its acceptance of Western models has, overall, been far
smoother, more voluntary and more urgently executed than in
other colonial locales. In fact, it is this voluntary – and largely
unrecognized – self-colonizing tendency vis-à-vis the West which
distinguishes Eastern Europe from other targets of Western
colonialism”.(Kovačević, 2008:5)
The semiperiphery is in its essence transitional, in a process of the
transition from one set of structures to another set of structures, and
therefore it is unstable, and often has characteristics of the void,
chaos, or the structurelessness7. The instability of the semiperiphery
comes from the fact that it is open to two different set of possibilities
at the same time: those coming from the center, and those coming
from the periphery. It can turn into the one or the other almost at
any moment, and its dominant state is most often one of “wobble”.
This is in many ways reflected in its political life, which is continually
confronted with both types of forces: those that advocate
“modernisation”, “Westernization”, or nowadays “globalisation”, and
those which oppose change in the name of tradition (or, more
precisely, pragmatic interpretation of tradition) and advocate
isolation or autarchy. Being between the core and the periphery

7 The open issue is whether the process of transiting to the center is really going to

continue for much longer, since the center is profoundly changing its character in the
global crises. New energy solutions and environmental pressure will also link with
political reconfiguration and new balances between global and local. Those changes
are all difficult to predict at the moment.

34
opens up an almost third dimension of the semiperiphery, a kind of
unintelligible chaotic condition.
The social change at the semiperiphery is either too fast or too
ambivalent, or both at the same time, to enable creation of the stable
structures. Often it is not even the real social change, as much as it is
“eventfulness”, an illusion of the change created on the very surface
of the social life, while in deeper layers things remain the same,
unchanged. Often, as it is in the case of EU Accession, acceptance of
the change stays on the level of the normative alliance on the elite
level, while the rest of the society is showing profound resistance to
the change.
The semiperiphery during the transition has been exposed largely
to the process of de-development, which has been ignored or treated
as an almost coincidental and temporary state, instead of the
fundamental consequence of the neoliberal globalisation, with long
lasting devastating effects. De-development of the semiperiphery is
closely connected to the global process of the “informalization” of the
economy. As stated by Young: “Despite important differences
between the industrial countries, East European transitional
countries, and many parts of the developing countries, globalisation
has invariably produced cheap-wage zones”(Young, 2005). Informal
economy, according to Young, has become a permanent feature of
the formal economy. The “informalization of the economy” (Young,
2005) is thus no longer a marginal or transitional phenomenon. It is
an immanent part of economic globalisation.
Many of the problems existing at the semiperiphery at the
moment, such as a high level of corruption, tribalism, clientelism, re-
patriarchalisation, criminalization etc. in fact are founding the
ground, even being revitalized, exactly within this gap, between the
new norms introduced by the transition and the old social structures
(Fraser, 1997; Gal and Kligman, 2000 a, b; Inglehart, 2000; Antohy,

35
2000; Poznanski, 2000; Verdery, 2000; Adam at al, 2005; Einhorn,
2006). The impossibility of reality to catch up with the normativistic
change is reinforcing the gap. In the policy domain this translates
often into the set of counterproductive policy measures, which only
deal with one piece of the problem at the time, thus actually
reinforcing gaps in reality and an overall blockade of the real
comprehensive social change.
The semiperiphery often finds itself in a condition of “permanent
reform”, which in reality means that one reform is following the
other while the previous has not been finalized, nor its effects
explored. Those reforms are over and over again aimed at
“modernisation”, and they imitate or follow the models from the
core. But implemented at the semiperiphery they necessarily produce
different effects. However, that state is not clear for those social
agents who are at that moment the major proponents of the social
change. They see their participation as essential and ground
breaking, although in realty it is often a small cycle within a set of
very similar cycles. A gaze from a historical distance, on the other
hand, could reveal an overall repetition of unfinished reforms,
constant cyclical trials which end up often at a lower level than where
they started from. In other words, the progressivness of change or
reform is often disputable, as visible in many examples (Poznanski,
2000; Verdery, 2000).
On the other side, really deep, or even innovative social change at
the semiperiphery is often doomed to defeat even when it is, or
exactly because it is, progressive and “revolutionary”. Former
Yugoslavia with its developed welfare state, the high level of
guarantees and protection of minority rights, the “social ownership”
project8, “self-management”, balanced federal set up, strong

8In former Yugoslavia, social ownership coexisted with state ownership and private
ownership. Social ownership meant that workers were the co-owners of the factories

36
involvement and leadership in the nonalignment movement, high
openness to the East and West, North and South, strong promotion
of peace and security on international level, and strong supporter of
women’s rights, locally and internationally, etc. was in many ways
“more modern” than the restrictive position of the country at the
semiperiphery could allow it to be. The global pace of change is in
fact determined by the core, and the timing of “progress”, as well. An
innovation in the social and political change has a very similar
destiny as innovation in science: the location determines the
appropriate timing and recognition, as feminist critique has
convincingly shown (Harding, 1998).
In a comparison to the core, the semiperiphery is in a condition of
“being different, but not being different enough”, while from the
perspective of the periphery, the semiperiphery is “different, and not
similar enough”. This results in an attitude of the core which is
reflected in constant efforts to “improve” the semiperiphery, through
some kind of paternalistic behavior, with colonial and neocolonial
taste. We-know-what-is-good-for-you-because-we-have-already-
done-it-philosophy resonates in most of the core-semiperiphery
communication, as also very visible in Accession “conditionality”
logic. From the perspective of the core, the semiperiphery is always
“lagging behind” and it needs to be “updated”, exposed to the newest
knowledge, skills and inventions which have “just” been created in
the center and which are being ready for export, or selling on the
international “know-how” market. As Arrighi (1985) had noticed
already in the 80s, the relevant distinction between societies is not
the one based on the production of industrial versus primary goods,
but between “intellectual” activities (i.e. those that involve strategic

they were employed in, and they were making decisions about the production and
distribution based on self-management process. Far from ideal, this system was still
innovative and highly rewarding for lower classes, securing high support for the
communist political leadership.

37
decision-making, control and administration, R&D, etc.) and
“executive” activities.
From the perspective of the periphery, the semiperiphery is “too
white”, too industrial, too developed and it does not share the colonial
experience, at least not in the sense of how the concept is dominantly
used when referring to the “South”. This is why, in feminist activist
circles, where hierarchisation of victimhood is still very much alive,
possible coalitions between women from the semiperiphery and the
women from the periphery seem to fail, over and over again.
The image that the semiperiphery has about itself is largely
reflecting this impression of “lagging behind”. However, from the
perspective of the Eastern European semiperiphery, it is itself
“European”, but it is often described as more “oriental” or “nesting
Orientalisms” (Bakić Hayden, 1995). As argued by Kovačević,
Eastern Europeans feel not to be “quite there” and they feel
themselves to be “more like semi-European, semi-developed, with
semi-functioning states and semi-civilized manners” (Kovačević,
2008:3). The semiperiphery usually addresses itself and describes
itself as being “in-between” the East and the West. This “in-
betweness” has numerous local interpretations and meanings.
However, this “melting pot” quality of the semiperiphery can be
easily tracked in all spheres of social, political and especially
everyday life, where different civilisational layers are still active and
in interplay.
Because of the essential quality of structurelessness, chaos, void,
transition and reform as ongoing processes, the scientific analysis of
the semiperiphery often slips away from a framework of a rational
discourse which is a characteristic of scientific discourse. Processes
which keep it more structurless than structured, more often in
dynamism than in stability, could be addressed better and approached
by terms and concepts which reflect ambivalences, paradoxes,

38
discontinuities, chaos, entropy etc. Also, the very characterization of
the semiperiphery as “lagging behind”, which comes out as a
consequence of evolutionary understanding of social development,
prevents objective understanding of the set of developmental and
cultural advantages of that exact “lagging behind” and “in-betweness”.
Dealing with the semiperiphery should imply not only very
scrutinized judgments to ensure that statements which reflect
colonial or neocolonial feelings of some “civilisational superiority”
are avoided, but also, almost a different epistemic approach. While
structural analysis might be of great value there where structures and
stability prevail, in the case of the semiperiphery it is the search for
the nucleus of the social change which really is an issue. The lack of
system based determinism which arises as a consequence of a
structural void being reflected in the “epistemic void” (Iveković,
1993) largely creates different epistemic challenges. This is actually
the main reason why the semiperiphery can not simply rely on a
theoretical framework created in the core and then just “add up”
local examples (Blagojević, 2006).
The epistemic consequences of these ontological characteristics of
the semiperiphery are enormous. This is what is certainly validating a
need for the specific paradigms, coming from the semiperiphery itself,
in the form of contextual knowledge, and often in the form of
grounded theories. In other words, it would be unreasonable to claim
that knowledge created at the center could “cover” the realities from
the semiperiphery. The knowledge which claims to be universal should
strive to incorporate the knowledges from both the semiperiphery and
the periphery, otherwise “universal knowledge” simply reproduces
power imagery of the core, that the world could be understood, and
consequently, successfully governed, based on the “knowledge from
above”. “Globalisation from above” corresponds well with these
epistemic illusions. However, from “the below” only a few things could

39
be understood as well, so it is equally limited. Many of the structural
changes in the globalisation process could not be understood from the
semiperiphery itself, which inclines to overemphasize “small
differences” and overlook wider, more general global trends of social
change. Although knowledge is essential for development, for the core
no less than for the semiperiphery, there is still not much genuine
incentive to produce knowledge with the critical edge which would
contribute to the real understanding of the interconnectedness of the
human condition globally, interconnectedness of the core, the
semiperiphery and the periphery. That interest and incentive largely
does exist, neither in the core, nor in the semiperiphery. At the
semiperiphery, intellectual elites are either eager to get integrated into
the core, or they, on the other hand, express narrow minded resistance
to the integration. Therefore, sadly, the opportunity for constructive
analysis of the interconnectedness is largely missing.
The epistemic strategy should be the one which would enable
both translations and integration of different layers of knowledge
formation, from “below” to the “top”, and which will, therefore,
include also contextual knowledges coming from the semiperiphery.
The feminist strategy of the epistemic standpoint could be largely
advocated both for the core and for the semiperiphery, or the
periphery. However, the precondition for the cognitive leap is not in
summing up different “standpoints”, but in creating deeper
understandings of why and how different ways of knowing and
different knowledges are shaped by those standpoints, and how that
is connected to global power hierarchies. The real challenge is to
understand how the core is reproducing the semiperiphery and how
the semiperiphery is reproducing both the core and the periphery,
through their exchanges and interconnectedness.

40
 Gender Regimes at the Semiperiphery
Different as it is, the semiperiphery necessarily sustains also
different gender regimes, in comparison to the core countries. With
the focus on Eastern Europe, Central Europe and South Eastern
Europe, one could say that gender regimes at the semiperiphery of
Europe have largely been characterized by the major feature of the
semiperiphery itself, which is an effort to catch up with the core. In
many ways gender regimes in those countries simply reflect this
effort, and major characteristics of the gender regimes at the
semiperiphery can be explained by this fact.
Catching up with the core required that the gender regimes are
shaped in such a way to massively use and exhaust women’s human
resources, both in private and in public spheres. Therefore, women’s
human resources are often mobilized and exploited for the gap
between the center and the semiperiphery to be bridged. At the same
time, conservative patriarchal ideologies were used to pacify women
and justify extraordinary high exploitation of women. For example, to
effectively use women’s resources in public sphere countries at the
semiperiphery relatively early allowed women’s public education, or
even voting rights. The first women’s university graduates from
Eastern Europe studied in Zurich in the 1870s. Official
institutionalization of women’s enrolment at universities at state level
took place from 1883 in Romania and from 1922 in Lithuania.
Clandestine women’s college were founded in Poland 1885 (the “Flying
University”) and in 1911 at the University of Tartu (Estonia). There was
compulsory attendance at grammar schools by boys and girls in the
Hapsburg monarchy from 1774 and in Bulgaria since 1878 (ENWISE
Report, 2003:22). In Eastern and Central Europe women’s movements

41
also started relatively early9. In some countries at the semiperiphery,
contrary to the general misconceptions and prejudices about the
“backward women from the East who need feminist enlightenment
from the West”, voting rights were granted quite early: in Estonia,
Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland in 1918, in Czechoslovakia in 1920,
Romania- 1929, Bulgaria – 1937 (ENWISE Report, 2003:23). Women
were needed for national movements, so they had relatively high
negotiation power. Also, during communism, official ideology and
politics of equality strongly encouraged women to get a good
education. Education, besides Communist Party membership, was the
most important personal asset for upward mobility. Employment of
women was considered “normal” and an uninterrupted career model
was granted to women owing to high level job security and often quite
generous maternal leave. However, the burden of the double shift was
very heavy, regardless of employment.
The semiperiphery regularly produces a paradoxical combination
of strong patriarchies which exhaust woman’s resources in the
private domain, together with the ideological “fog” of gender
equality. The result is, from the Western point of view, a strange
amalgam of a “super woman”, strong, powerful, but at the same time,
sacrificial woman, who is “more than equal” (“Polish mother”, for
example). This is very similar, but not identical, to the “development”
of the Third world countries, where intensive exploitation of the
women’s resources has been the precondition for the
“modernisation” of those societies (Harding, 1998) In comparison to
the Third world countries, however, in the semiperipheral societies,
use of the women’s resources does not differ so much by the extent,

9 The League of Romanian Women was founded in 1866. The Association for Women’s

Education “Zivena” was founded in Slovakia in 1869, the Central Association of Czech
Women was set up in 1897. The Bulgarian Union of Women was founded in 1901, and
the Baltic Women Union in 1909. In Poland, the Women’s League, founded in 1916,
comprised as many as 12 000 members. (ENWISE Report, 2003: 21).

42
as much by the quality: former industrialized societies with strong
egalitarian ideology created educated women power with high
inclination to employment. “Male bread winner” model in fact was
non-existent, or very weak, in communist countries, since both
partners were employed (Bodrova and Anker, 1985).
Communist societies had largely different stratification models, so
high was woman’s inclusion into the public sphere, and even some
very prestigious positions, for example within science or academia,
was reflecting more the unfavorable position of certain professions
being severely underpaid, than real equality of women. Feminization
of science became even stronger during the transition, exactly
because of the real collapse of scientific institutions and problems
with their funding (Blagojević: 1991; ENWISE Report, 2003). In
other words, without the wider context of the habitual high
exploitation of women’s resources and cultural patterns supporting
this, it would be impossible to understand women’s self/sacrificial
behavior, both in private and in public domain. Underpayment of the
labor force in general, and especially of those sectors where women
have been employed, together with the very backward and time
consuming household economy, extracted women’s resources
through the over-exploitation of women in comparison to men
(Blagojević, 1991).

Simulacrum versus Knowledge

What is essential from the epistemological point of view is that
the semiperiphery is not some unimportant residual category, but
that semiperipheral condition creates deep needs for very different
knowledge paradigms. Inadequate knowledge paradigms, briefly
discussed in the beginning of this text, and inadequate public policies
derived from them, leave their negative consequences in reality, even

43
when they are dismantled, criticized or deconstructed. Within this
changed climate of expectations, both at the core and at the
semiperiphery, as well as the growing structural inequalities world-
wide and within societies, both the “transition” and
“Europeanization” are slowly being perceived, in theory and in
policy, as much more complex processes than initially it was believed
(Antohy and Tismeneanu, 2000). The process of Europeanization is
ambivalent and complex, and often related to extremely high costs
for some parts of the population, since it is part of the “globalisation
from above” (Young, 2005), which pushes many social actors into the
position of “losers”. The logical question is: how the development of
the semiperiphery could have been achieved with the least possible
negative effects, once it became so obvious that “shock therapy”, was
simply too “expensive” from the perspective of human development.
Responding to this question, could open the door wide for a kind of
theory advocated by Sylvia Walby:
“Complexity theory offers a new set of conceptual tools to
understand the diversity of modernities and how they inter-relate.
This is a trans-disciplinary theoretical development that provides
new concepts, methods and epistemology to grasp the complexity of
the contemporary world. Central to this development is the notion
of emergence and the ability to address more than one layer of
determination yet still retain holistic concepts, holding at its core an
anti-reductionist analytic strategy. I think that this is parallel to
core analytic concerns of sociology, which seeks to combine an
understanding of both individual and social structure, that does not
deny the autonomy of the individual while yet theorising changes in
the social totality. ” (Walby, 2003:10).
Complexity theory, thus, enables one to sustain the traditional
sociological approach of linking individuals to social structures, on the
one hand, and of understanding interconnectedness of different

44
societies/states on a global scale, on the other hand. Within this
epistemic field, it is possible to argue that successful implementation
of gender policies at the semiperiphery has proven to be a highly
controversial endeavor. Not only because globalisation as such was
having very different effects on de/modernizing gender regimes in the
core and at the semiperiphery, but also because those different
developments, different directions of developments, were in fact
mutually connected. Further on, negotiation power of women, as
noticed by Walby, also differentiates between developed and
developing countries, including those of the semiperiphery. And
finally, knowledge about gender regimes at the semiperiphery is either
missing, incomplete, distorted, dislocated or being devoid of its
political and often practical relevance. Many structural obstacles for
the successful implementation of gender policies coming from the
economic, cultural or political spheres were under-theorized and
under-researched, leading to a weak knowledge base for policies. In
other words, social engineering to which these countries have been
exposed, in the process of “the transition” from socialism back to
capitalism, which in fact is a part of globalisation process, and
“Europeanization” (European Accession), largely overestimated their
capacity for change, by ignoring their social, political, cultural even
demographic structural dispositions. Further on, this contributed to a
deepening of the problems, since what that engineering was
encouraging, were changes on the surface, “on paper”, in public
discourses, and not on the level of social realities. Paradoxes of
prescribed transformation will be even more fully seen by objective
scientists in the near future: devastating effects of privatization, of
“shock therapy”, “structural adjustment” lack of moral and even
economic justification in the light of present financial crises, and the
fact that Western states are at the moment heavily supporting financial
institutions and corporations, in fact controlling the markets.

45
 All these paradoxes, together, and complex historical forward-
backward movements taking place at the semiperiphery, created now
an even wider epistemic gap, between the core and the
semiperiphery, between the dominant paradigms and the realities of
the semiperiphery. The “knowledge” is misleading since very
different social realities are being “covered” by the same technocratic
vocabulary related to the “the transition”, “Europeanization”, or
“globalisation”. Many of the indicators of the social development,
economic development, human development etc. are more hiding
than revealing the existing gap in the quality of social realities, which
has dramatically and regressively changed for the majority of the
people living in those countries. Policy makers are faced with the real
lack of adequate “indicators” to deal with the increasing fears, value
confusion, frustrations, exploitation, alienation, unhappiness,
insecurity, depression, criminalization, fear from crime and violence,
lack of leisure time etc. of the populations in question.
Throughout the transition, numbers of indicators which were and
are used to “measure” women’s position are simply misleading. For
example, the employment rate is blurring the fact that, on one hand,
if unemployed, women are largely engaged in the grey economy, and
that they are additionally exposed to exploitation and, on the other
hand, if they are employed, they are severely underpaid. Gender gaps
in salaries in countries with a high percentage of the gray economy
does not really reveal the problem, especially when salaries are in
general very small. For women, under the new market conditions, it
could be additionally difficult to finance their own costs related to
employment, such as, for example, dressing or make-up, or
transportation costs (Tallos, 2001). Further on, if difference in
salaries between women and men in countries in question would be
compared with differences West-East it would become obvious that it
is not gender, but location, which has a much higher influence. But,
although this fact is so self-evident, it is undertheorized in women’s

46
and gender studies, which usually give preponderance to gender,
without question. Also, the often high education of women at the
semiperiphery is blurring the fact that education, although extremely
important for personal empowerment, in reality is not really paid,
nor being reflected into upward social mobility. Similarly,
participation of women in politics, as yet another key indicator for
measuring women’s position in countries in transition, can not be
analyzed separately from the fact that the real political decisions in
those countries are often made outside the official institutions, and
that women in politics are often simply representatives of a new
political class, and not gender aware political players. Citizenship in
countries at the semiperiphery is strongly limited not only by the
intra-state power hierarchies, but even more so, by global hierarchies
between the core, the semiperiphery and the periphery.
However, regardless of the very different gender regimes in the
context of the semiperiphery, as well as within the semiperiphery,
most of the policies are simple shortcuts: dvocacy of policy measures
which should help those societies to “adjust” to the center. Much of
the emphasis is on campaigns, changes of discources, or simple
institutional changes (gender mechanisms, for example), instead of
structural changes or full recognition of the obstacles coming from
the reality of economic and political structures. The result of those
policies is then, not surprisingly, formalized and formal adjustment
which is full of traps and counterproductive effects. While on the
formal level, these societies comply with the demands of the center,
on the social level there are evident processes of de-development,
resistance, chaos, entropy or anomie, which is even increasing,
except in few successful cases (Adam, et al. 2005). What concept will
be used to describe this condition is a matter of one’s theoretical
approach, but the fact is that the transition being part of the
globalisation process is producing very different effects for different
segments of the semiperipheral societies, often enlarging differences

47
between the semiperipheral societies themselves, and increasing an
overall uncertainty about the future direction of social change, on the
state level, as well as on the global level. The cost of globalized
ignorance is global uncertainty.
The whole discourse on gender at the semiperiphery was shaped
within the transition paradigm (“transitology”, according to Wessely,
1996), which was itself a stereotype of uniliniear progressive
development, which in many counties of the transition, and in large
parts of their population never actually happened. Since the
transition after all, has not proven to be simple step forward, but
instead set of multiple processes some of which were favoring
modernisation and globalisation, and some of which were favoring
re-traditionalisation and ethno-centrism, the result is the existence
of societies which have a complex hybrid nature, which is also
reflected in their gender regimes. That hybridity is an outcome of
intensified diachronicities (pre-modern, modern and postmodern
elements), as well as of complex and ambivalent processes of
globalisation itself, which largely re-shape classic institutions of
polity, society and economy. Multiplicity of different social agents,
with the help of “identity politics” creates a cacophony of different
voices, where the ground for social and political alliances is
increasingly becoming difficult and problematic, especially because
of the value vacuum created during transition. (Inglehart, 2000).
Further on, semiperipherality, the prevailing condition of the
semiperiphery, is not a set of stable characteristics, more, it is
unstable condition, conditional reality, a mixture of simulacrum and
authenticity, part of the continuum between the core and the
periphery, and above all, it is a context-as-a-whole. To explain or
understand any social phenomena at the semiperiphery one has to
fully acknowledge the power of the context, which means that
everything is above all shaped by the context as a complex system,

48
open to its environment on different levels. If the context is ignored,
or treated superficially, as a set of measurable characteristics, using
the set of problematic indicators, than the power of the context-as-a-
system is seriously underestimated10, and the explanations which
follow will necessarily be limited, and policies not applicable or
inefficient. But context here is not taken as a concrete historical,
economic and political context (now measured by internationally
established “indicators” which allow global comparisons for global
decision makers). Rather, “the context” is itself a theoretical concept,
which calls for an integrated and complex approach which will enable
vivid and substantial dialogue between the local and international,
contextual and contextualized knowledges and the knowers.11
The semiperiphery might have a very similar institutional set up,
but the essence of the institutional life might be very different. It
often has a deceiving similarity; it is in many ways a simulacrum. For
those designing public policies it is often striking how under the
same “official names” of institutions and bodies, a huge variety of
practices exist in different countries. What is called a “university” is
strikingly different, for example, in terms of conditions, equipment,
and requirements, in different countries. NGO entities are yet
another striking example, with obvious differences East and West.
But, also, the semiperiphery, exactly because of its complex
relationship with the core, has different intellectual traditions which
makes the simple import of knowledge paradigms from the “West”
highly problematic. For example, as shown by Nannette Funk very

10 This is why so many collections of articles related to Eastern Europe in fact have very

low heuristic value; they do not bring new epistemic insights, but just allow for
superficial comparisons.
11 Contextual knowledge is the one articulated within the context, and contextualized,

on the other hand, is the one imported and adjusted to the context. This is purely
theoretical difference, since in reality, it is impossible to have them separated.
However, for heuristic purposes, it is important to understand the difference.

49
different intellectual traditions “West” and “East” contain very
different relations towards liberalism. Funk argues that
[Liberal thought …] did develop differently and exists in different
theoretical, political, and historical contexts. In both pre and post
socialism, liberal thought varies widely and differs from many of
the classical and dominant forms of liberalism in Western Europe
and the United States.” (Funk 2004:696).
Most of those differences still stay invisible and unrecognized
because they do not fit into the dominant theoretical framework which
is defined by the center. Feminist critiques developed in the “West” are
largely missing the point when applied to liberal thought in the “East”,
since Eastern liberal thought also developed partly in a counter
position to Western liberal thought. In other words, if the
semiperiphery is not taken as a context from which one can
understand ambivalent relationships towards the core, feminist
critique of the Eastern liberal tradition is impossible. Feminist scholars
in the East are faced with contradictory requirements, unless the
semiperiphery as such, is taken as a kind of explanatory variable.
Simulacrum created by the theories and concepts which were
“imported” to the semiperiphery to ease up its road to globalisation,
which were not adequately linked to the realities of the semiperipheral
countries, shaped and still are shaping much of the “knowledge” and
policies based on it, including gender policies. This simulacrum is
hiding a bitter fact that the semiperiphery has experienced de-
development and that it is being pushed, with a few exceptions,
towards the periphery, towards high instability, insecurity, economic
deprivation and lack of a clear development perspective. The
impossible model of the present day globalisation is hitting a brick
wall. Still, the core is defining propositions, demands, suggestions; it is
changing classifications of who and why, and why not, is becoming a
member of a core, or privileged community, it is manipulating the

50
position of states and situations within the states through direct
influence of donors, funds, and development policies. But, all that is in
fact just increasing simulacra. Theory is almost always, and in a
globalized world even more so, created in the center. The perspective
of the semiperiphery is simply incorporated into the already defined
theoretical framework, thus silenced even when officially present. The
counter epistemic strategy would be to define the standpoint of the
semiperiphery, by incorporating experiences of people living there
into the knowledge about the semiperiphery, and then, based on that
knowledge, to encourage critical thinking, adequate theorizing on
globalisation and practical policies and political actions.

The Semiperiphery as the

Relevant Standpoint Location
Since there are obvious limitations of the knowledge created in the
core and by the core12 to relate to the semiperiphery, a different
epistemic strategy should be developed. A creation of knowledge from
and about the semiperiphery is necessary for effective and efficient
gender policies. But, this strategy is more than simple advocacy for
contextualized knowledge, which recently got widely accepted by both
international and multilateral organizations. In practice, what is
considered as “contextualized” knowledge is often again a kind of
“knowledge import” only with the added flavor of local contexts. This
is largely due to the fact that much of the international consultancy
related to gender policies at the semiperiphery is mainly delivered by
experts coming from the core countries. Therefore, they are at risk of
emphasizing core-semiperiphery differences, and employing
oversimplification and overgeneralization to stay within the binary
12 It is not really important whether in some cases, or even in many cases, the actual
knowers are by their origin from the semiperiphery of periphery. The important thing
is that the institutions belong to the core.

51
logic of either/or, while at the same time using “taxonomic approach of
showcasing difference” (Cerwonka, 2008). However, canceling those
differences too early, premature in historical terms, while they are still
very much operating, would be even more problematic. Reducing them
to “show-casing” would be equally detrimental. As recently suggested
by Cerwonka, an alternative strategy of “transculturation” could be a
way out. However, it seems that at this point that strategy would
contribute even more to the acceptance of power misbalances in
knowledge production which get translated into social realities and the
way that those realities are engendered via policies. Cerwonka claims:
“Transculturation as an approach to feminist knowledge
production gives us a means for understanding feminism as a set of
ideas and practices that have developed through contact and
negotiation. It directs our attention to complex circuits of influence
without losing sight of the way contact is always structured by uneven
power relations (…) Thus, understanding feminist knowledge and
scholarly institutions as an outcome of “contact” and “copresence”
allows us to more fully appreciate how feminist ideas travel and
change; and it helps us recognize that feminist ideas/theories are the
means through which multiple desires and histories have been, and
continue to be, negotiated” (Cerwonka, 2008: 830)
However, it could be argued that the very concept of
“transculturation”, its quality and meaning, in fact is defined by the
context. And the context of present globalized knowledge production is
clearly favoring the core, even within feminism. So, this approach
bears the risk of blurring power differences which can not be
exhausted by simple “showcasing” that different influences were
coming from different sides and that ideas are circulating and getting
translated into different contexts often with inscriptions of different
meanings. “Transculturation” to be really effective strategy would
necessarily need to emerge from critical thinking on power

52
misbalances in knowledge production, and negative consequences
translated into inadequate gender and development policies world
wide. “Transculturation” should not simply dismiss the serious
criticism of feminist knowledge and gender policies, on the basis of
some ideal “inclusion”, or “new balance”, or critique of
“essentialization” of the West and the East. Instead, it needs itself to be
contextualized as an intellectual strategy within the network of power
relations and fully open to the self/reflection of the knowers. However,
power equality should not be mistaken for professional career issues,
but as an essential epistemological issue. Power balance between the
knowers is necessary for understanding in depth the
interconnectedness between the different parts of the world.
It is relatively easy to look at the names of the authors, examples,
interpretations which exist in different knowledge products coming
from multilateral organizations, for example, to see and document the
vast misbalance of how the world is perceived, as “North” or “South”,
leaving out the huge territory of the semiperiphery. When policy
recommendations which have been defined by the “North” to fit the
“South” get applied into the semiperipery, it becomes obvious that this
can not be done, or that “implementation is difficult”. For example, it
is very different to approach the problem of rural poverty, as an
international expert, for example, in a country or a region where there
is high illiteracy rates for both women and men, than in some
postcommunist country, where even in the most remote and
undeveloped region, women and men normally get secondary
education, where there is regular public transportation, total health
coverage, although basic, or where women habitually give birth in
hospitals regardless of how poor they are. It is also very different to
work on development projects in contexts where there still exists a
vivid memory of being employed, working in organizations, or
enjoying health insurance and social security. It is different to design
gender policies in a setting which still has a live memory of the “good

53
times” when everybody was employed, including all women, and when
communities and communal life were strong.13
Therefore, the only adequate epistemic strategy is to acknowledge
the difference of the semiperiphery, to reveal how that difference is
related to the core (i.e. cheap labour, migrations, sex trafficking, cheap
caring work, strengthening of the patriarchal values etc.) on the one
hand, and to establish standpoints for knowledge creation relying
exactly on that difference, on the other hand. Difference based on
location and division of labour connected to that location is a necessary
condition for the knowledge making about gender and globalisation.
Only secondary to this effort, another strategy, the one of exchange,
circulation and “transculturation” could become possible. In other
words “transculturation” can not substitute for the real need for
authentic, well grounded knowledge stemming from the semiperiphery,
itself. Moreover, the knowledge production is a necessary strategy for
those who do not have power, or who have lesser power, because
through knowledge making they empower themselves and also
accumulate political and activist power to change the power
misbalances. Through and by the knowledge production, the agency of
the powerless can increase, and contribute to a better balanced world.
This is not in contradiction with the “traveling theory”, seductive idea of
the free flow, but it reaffirms the right to the knowledge articulation as a
part of the process of empowerment, from “below”, which is also a
fundamental feminist strategy.14 Empowerment “from below” is
necessary to counterbalance “globalisation from above”.

13 The author derives these claims based on her international gender expert experience in
postcommunist countries, such as: Ukraine, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bosnia, etc.
14 At the conference in Vienna, in 2006 devoted to the discussion of canons in feminist

theory, one well known British feminist stated that there is “no need to discover the
hole in the pot”, meaning that feminists from Eastern Europe can rely on the
knowledge which already exists and simply continue in this direction. This is
problematic statement for at least three reasons. The first is that everybody has the
right to articulate the knowledge the way s/he considers that is how it should be done,

54
 An epistemic strategy which would acknowledge the semiperiphery
as a specific epistemic standpoint would need to deconstruct not only
the theoretical universalism of the core, but also the universalism of
post-colonial theory. The semiperiphery stayed invisible also because of
post-colonial universalism, which in many ways is a “negative” of the
colonial universalism and is equally blind to the existence and difference
of the semiperiphery, of “white” postcommunist non/Europe (and other
semiperipheral parts of the world). This binarism, moreover, is
perpetuating wider blindness for the way globalisation actually works.
And it largely works in the sphere of the absence of knowledge and lack
of awareness. The semiperipery is a relevant standpoint because it is in
fact becoming increasingly relevant for the positioning of individuals
and groups within the global hierarchies. Citizenship related to
semiperiphery is a major attribute for individual positioning on the
international labour market (Lutz, 2002; Sassen, 2003).
Critiques of the different theories could be made starting with the tangible
realities of the semiperiphery and the collection and analysis of the different
experiences related to the transition. It is important to document the
destructive effects of “development”, for which there are such high human
and environmental costs. This has been done only in fragments, so far, and
mainly interpreted as some kind of deviation, and not really a fundamental
de-development direction, in civilisational terms15. In the process of becoming
the semiperiphery, former communist countries in Europe, paid
unreasonably high costs for what is considered “development”. Since the
knowledge on the semiperiphery as an integrated system which could reveal
structural forces behind neoliberal globalisation (but not reduced only to

and that everybody has the right to search for justification and legitimization of that
knowledge within the epistemic community s/he chooses to. And secondly, the
knowledge making itself is the process of empowerment. Thirdly, who is to tell, to
make the final judgment, of what is adequate knowledge for someone else?
15 Part of the problem lies in a fact that material aspects of the development have been

overemphasized in development indicators, while general well being of the population

has been largely underestimated as a relevant issue.

55
economic dimension) is missing, more profound understanding of the
functioning of the gender regimes at the semiperiphery is also missing. The
epistemic consequences of this “invisibility” are simple and clear. First, there is
a dramatic absence of research and literature on the connection between the
core and the semiperiphery, and even more so, on the semiperiphery and the
periphery, or within the semiperiphery itself. Secondly, there is a largely under
researched field of the de-development of the former industrialized
semiperiphery. De-development is under the veil of “democratization” and
“marketization”, of “necessary sacrifices” for the benefit of “development”, and
of false “progressiveness”, which only recently has been shaken by
environmental and energy concerns. Thirdly, collective memory and even
institutional memory at the semiperiphery has been steadily deconstructed
(coincidentally or not, this took place parallel to the wave of deconstructivism
in the social sciences), and it was fragmentized by “identity politics”, including
“gender politics”. Knowledge production in the 90s in social sciences was very
instrumental for this memory destruction. Finally, when it comes to gender,
more specifically, there was considerable blindness in relation to men in the
postcommunist condition, until the moment when there was a dramatic
“discovery” about men’s mortality in Russia, in the 90s. Gender issues at the
semiperiphery were widely constructed as “women’s issues”, in the
framework of individualistic “human right” and “labor market” approach.
Losses experienced by men were not deemed a legitimate field for research or
intervention. What was largely missing from the picture were issues, such as:
heterosexual sexuality, family, cooperation between genders, gender
integration, or even “gender reconciliation”, or research into how different
genders experience love and connectedness.

56
 Whiteness? Europeaness?
Citizenship? Gender?
“…No one should be permitted to occupy the Universalist centre,
to “own” universalism. This continues to be the case even (alas)
within feminist discources”.(Gunew, 2007: 146)
One of the possible claims could be that the epistemic standpoint is
missing since it is fundamentally impossible to speak from white/nonwhite,
European/noneuropean postcolonial/nonpostcolonial, citizen/noncitizen,
and gender/nongender position, which is in fact a location of a discoursive
void. If concepts are deconstructed, and the “in-betweness” is invisible and
pushed into the extremes, what are possible epistemic strategies? Whiteness,
Europeaness, citizenship and gender are all being defined and shaped,
practiced and discoursively constructed within a specific process of neoliberal
globalisation, with all its negative effects. It is a combination of those
oppositions, better to say space between them, that creates the condition of
the semiperipherality, as core/noncore, periphery/nonperiphery, and
development/de-development. “In-betweness” is a condition of
semiperipherality, and it needs to be constituted as a new, legitimate
standpoint, to allow voice and visibility to those who are part of the
semiperiphery. The semiperiphery thinks about itself through the concepts
which are being imported, and it observes itself through the eyes of others. It
is defined through “they-ness”, not “we-ness” (Ringer and Lawless, 1989), by
its difference from the core as the model, in a very similar manner as women
are in the androcentric discourse defined by their difference from men.
Difference of the semiperiphery is itself not a problem unless it is used against
the semiperiphery, to prove that it is “lagging behind”.
The empirical fact is that there are many people living their everyday
lives at the semiperiphery and experiencing their exclusions on daily
basis exactly because of the semiperipheral location, of their states or

57
settlements. So, it is very important to acknowledge structural, legal, and
epistemic orders which constantly re-construct a void at the place of a
very real human experience of painful exclusions. The real issue is how
to create an epistemic standpoint out of the void to be able to include
that experience? Or the other way around, how to eliminate the void by
constructing the standpoint, one which will enable alliances across the
binary oppositions and hierarchical exclusions?
The epistemic void is also the void of an epistemic standpoint, and the
void of the presently indefinable position of a reflective “subject” who is
lost in unidentified and undefined space of binaries: white-nonwhite,
European/noneuropean, male/female, postcolonial/neocolonial, state-
citizenship/global-citizenship. That subject, a living woman subject at the
semiperiphery, can not locate herself within any of the present discourses.
What she does on the level of the everyday life is that she shifts, she floats
between and within the categories, she lands herself down to her everyday
surviving existence, where theoretical notions lose any relevance. The
self/reflective subject tries to “wear”, even to embody, all the concepts,
paradigms, theoretical fashions applied on her. However, the very real
discrepancy between her everyday life and “Theories” or “The Gender
Policies”, either leave her indifferent, or feeling objectified. Is this her
problem, or a problem of Theory, feminist theory that finally became so
detached from the great majority of concrete female subjects living at the
semiperiphery? (Stanley and Wise, 2000)
Another approach, coming from experiential reality, from the very
ontology of the everyday life, would be to acknowledge that all those
binary categories in fact relate to different continuums, and that they
create multidimensional space for social existence for each and every
individual living at the semiperiphery. The discursive void related to
the semiperiphery could be addressed by reflecting on experiences.
Central to the standpoint epistemologies is that woman’s embodied
experience is a privileged site of knowledge about both power and

58
domination forms. But that standpoint, following Jaggar (1989)
should not be identified with women’s viewpoints or actual
experiences. Rather “standpoint” refers to the way of conceptualizing
reality which reflects women’s interests and values and draws on
women’s own interpretation of their own experience.
Still, experiences of women from the semiperiphery should not be
reduced to the standpoint advantage. A step further would be to
actually reaffirm conceptualization of gender as ontology, as
advocated by Wickramasinghe (2006). This author argues that
gender epistemology (or a way of knowing) is also ontology (or a
sense of being). She tries to bridge the two different traditions of
analysis: one focusing on ontology (or the conceptualizations of
forms, nature or aspects of reality), and the other on epistemology
(as to what constitutes knowledge and how much confidence we can
have in it) in feminist research and writing.
The experiences of gender are at the crux of conceptualising
realities in knowledge. These, however, are notoriously slippery
conceptions at the best of times. In particular, the concepts of
ontology and epistemology require one to distance oneself from the
regular, familiar, experiences of life and positivist processes of
knowledge-making in order to reconsider how reality is
conceptualized instinctively and normatively by an individual. In
doing so, I have become aware that the gender as ontology as
epistemology argument is a circular explanation of gender; and that
gender as epistemology is also ontology. (Wickramasinghe, 2006:28)
So, a possible feminist epistemic strategy applied from the
semiperiphery could be a double strategy: reaffirmation of the
semiperiphery as an epistemic standpoint, on one hand, and
reaffirmation of gender as “ontology as epistemology”, which means
that “gender as epistemology is also ontology”. Only this kind of a

59
double strategy can link actual gendered experiences and the
location, such as the semiperiphery.
Within this double strategy, the epistemic advantage of the
semiperiphery could become exactly this discursive void, which would
affirm the relevance of the specific experiences of the
semiperipherality, and encourage theoretization upon them. For the
standpoint to exist it is essential to have community where through
active conversations and dialogue among women in marginal social
position, standpoint is articulated. The important possibility for this
epistemic endeavor comes from the fact that the position of an
individual at the semiperiphery is increasingly being shaped by factors
which are not recognized by classical social theory. According to
Sprague (1997), theory in sociology is constructed as a canon, and
social theory is organized exactly as it should be if one would “think
like a White male capitalist”. The conceptual frameworks with
hierarchy, logical dichotomies, decontextualized abstraction, and a
strong individualist approach – are in accordance with the “hegemonic
masculine consciousness”. The author claims that there should be the
development of an “epistemology of connection” which will enable
theory to create bridges between different standpoints, disciplines and
between knowing and being. Maybe even faster than at the core, the
limitations of sociological theory become visible in the void of the
transition, and at the semiperiphery (Blagojević, 1995). Individual
social positions are influenced with increasing set of the contingencies
as a consequence of global restructuring. In the present moment of
global crises, a growing void is taking place at the core, as well.
Paradoxically, it is exactly from the semiperiphery where the paradigm
of de-development could best be developed, since the semiperiphery
has already gone through the reversal of development.
Another important aspect of the structurless void is that it is
intrinsically connected to the power/lessness of the agency of

60
individual and group actors. Dismantling social, economic, political
structures in reality, increases the power of some individuals,
especially the leaders (Blagojević, 1996). On the other hand, the role
of the agency could be understood only within a context, and this is
why a contextual analysis is becoming vital, as opposed to abstract,
detached, or “universal” theories. So, a theory coming from the
semiperiphery should be able to theorize upon living experiences of
gendered subjects at the semiperiphery, organized around axes of
similarities (i.e.: age, gender, state, nation, religion…), within the
context, which is understood in its full interconnectedness with the
core, and which is also historicized. Starting with experience, does
not mean that experience should be essentilized, but on the contrary,
situated within the complex web of dynamic relations working from
an individual to the global level.
“Strategic silence” about the semiperiphery is creating ideal
conditions for the full exploitation of human resources on the global
market: the “whiteness” of the people living at the semiperiphery, is
not only undertheorized, but largely ignored. What is very much
needed, is theorizing about whiteness by focusing on the
semiperiphery, and the experiences of the “whites” coming from the
semiperiphery. However, the paradox is that, because of the
integrative and promising project of the EU, there are no knowledge
agents who would be really motivated to explore the differences
between the witnesses of the core and the one from the semiperiphery.
The only legitimate, “politically correct difference” at the moment, is
the North-South difference, which is dominating development
discourse. However, the Eastern European “whites” are “whites” who
neither share privileges based on the colonial past nor discrimination
based on the former colonial status of their countries, nor their race.
But they undeniably make new minorities, in many core countries.

61
 Whiteness, Europeaness, citizenship, gender, are categories of
experience, they are not only categories of a theory. Theoretization is
grounded on experiences, thoughts are embodied. These are
ontological givens. It would be useful, as suggested by Ahmed, in
relation to whiteness, to use phenomenology to see “how whiteness is
an effect of racialization, which in turn shapes what it is that our
bodies “can do”” (Ahmed, 2007:150). Similarly, phenomenology can
be used to show what the semiperipheral bodies do, or are expected
to do, to re-create the condition of their own semiperipherality. A
complex phenomenological research which would move along the
lines of location/race/Europeaness/gender/citizenship would show
how semiperipheral bodies are coping with a void, which create
immanently unstable, fragmented and contradictory identities.
An epistemic advantage of creating a standpoint from the void at the
semiperiphery can be very rewarding. Within coordinates of the “in-
betweness”, different imported concepts, theories and paradigms are
tested on a daily basis. When inhabited by a self/reflective woman
subject from the semiperiphery, this space allows the creation of an open
and unbiased intellectual environment through which she glides runs, or
walks and fly, almost with no outdated and dysfunctional intellectual
restrictions. She can contribute largely to the type of knowledge which
will emphasize interconnectedness and interdependences between
individuals, groups, structures, nations, regions. That is the space where
the truth is multilayered and contradictory, and where there is a
cacophony/harmony of voices coming from different layers of history,
because everything exists at the same time. But, this is also, below the
surface of “eventfulness”, a place of historical stillness, where everything
is equally possible. By its nature, the knowledge about the semiperiphery
has to be very open and dynamic. It can not be knowledge based on
some “meta-theory” coming from “above”, but at the same time that
knowledge can not be just a sum of disconnected fragments of micro-
perspectives. It would be more a kind of theoretical grid, new type of

62
knowledge, which will go beyond the limitations of contemporary social
theory. The very concept of social theory needs to be changed and
become inclusive for different standpoints. Knowledge would also need
to go through profound change, and to become some kind of interactive
knowledge which would allow ongoing communication, empowerment,
transnationalisation, and social inclusion. The grid should allow
different concepts, ideas and paradigms, as well as facts and figures to
interplay, but within clear humanistic value orientation.

Conclusion:
The Standpoint and Ontology
The visibility of gender at the semiperiphery can be achieved
through a double-folded epistemic strategy, stemming from the
feminist tradition. That strategy should on one hand re-affirm the
standpoint, with the semiperiphery being a strategic standpoint for
knowledge articulation; on the other hand it should re-affirm the
connection between the ontology and epistemology of gender
(Wickramasinghe, 2006). However, when applied, this strategy will
necessarily lead to a deep change of the knowledge project itself.
Instead of focusing on “Theory” production, the knowledge project
should constitute itself as an interactive knowledge matrix. It should
become a grid which would allow endless communication of ideas,
concepts, and paradigms, facts and figures, heavily relying on and
reaffirming the value of contextual knowledges. That kind of
knowledge could enable better understandings of the global
interconnectedness and interdependence between the core and the
semiperiphery, through gender lenses. It could encourage the
empowerment of the weaker side, transnationalisation on equal terms,
and consequently, social inclusion on the global scale. This project, in
fact, is already on its way.

63
Chapter 2

Creators, Transmitters and Users:

Women’s Scientific Excellence at the
Semiperiphery of Europe16

“...epistemology and philosophy of science would always be

recognized to have political dimensions. They have political origins,
processes and consequences since who does and who does not gain
the access to defining, making, legitimating, and deploying a culture’s
knowledge systems is a political matter. Power including gender
advantages, is accumulated, deployed, and distributed through
epistemological and philosophic processes.” (Harding, 1998: 120)
“An excellent student of mine from Central European University,
Budapest, who obtained an award for her MA thesis, as the best MA
thesis in Hungary in 2002, wanted to publish an article in one
Western scientific journal based on her thesis. Her paper was
returned with clear demands to supply her research findings with
some Western theoretical framework. She decided to comply, but the
research findings, of course stayed the same, demonstrating that
Western theories simply were irrelevant. She sent the article again,
and this time they refused to publish it with the explanation that if it
does not confirm or reject Western theories, it is simply not important
enough to be published”. (Source: personal testimony MB)

16 Shorter version of this text has been published under the same title in: Gender and

Excellence in the Making, European Commission, Directorate-General for Research,

Luxemburg, 2004

65
 Four Theoretical Assumptions
This paper will explore the field of interconnectedness between
knowledge production, the semiperiphery17, gender and “scientific
excellence”, which is largely an under-theorized and under-
researched field of “absence of knowledge”. It will be tackled with a
combination of theoretical ideas, research findings, personal
observations and concrete examples, including valuable insights
gained from the work process that I developed through my
participation in the ENWISE18 Expert Group set up in October 2002
by the European Commission to report on the situation facing
women scientists in the Central and Eastern European countries and
in the Baltic States. The focus of this paper is on social sciences and
especially gender studies at the semiperiphery19 for two reasons. The
first is theoretical: social sciences are extremely context sensitive
sciences, and gender studies development, specifically, at the
semiperiphery encompasses many of the problems which reveal the
tensions between gender, creation of new knowledge and
“excellence”. The second reason is practical: my personal experiences
relate to those fields.

Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery

The starting assumption is that the concept of “the semiperiphery”
is exceptionally useful for the understanding of the dynamism of
knowledge production, rewards and dissemination of knowledge,

17 Semiperiphery in this paper refers to postcommunist European societies, in different

stages of Enlargement process.

18 ENWISE: Enlarge Women In Science to East
19 Therefore, in this paper when reference it made to the scientists from the

semiperiphery, it is taken to mean scientists from social sciences.

66
within the larger context of globalisation.20 What makes the concept of
“the semiperiphery” a useful epistemological tool is that it reveals the
dynamics quite specific to both core and periphery. Transitional
countries at the semiperiphery of Europe, former communist countries
which are in different stages of the process of Enlargement, although
in many ways different between themselves, are also very deeply
embedded in their semiperipheral position of the global market and
global knowledge production. New global developments re-define the
contradictory position of the semiperiphery in the world system, and
relevant distinction as Arrighi (1985) suggests is not the one between
the production of industrial versus primary goods, but between
“intellectual” activities (i.e. those that involve strategic decision-
making, control and administration, R&D, etc.) and executive
activities. Accordingly, knowledge production at the core is
accompanied by supplementary activities at the semiperiphery.
The major characteristics of semiperipheral societies in regard to
the global knowledge market are the following: 1. they intensively
export the “knowers”, those who are already established or potential
“knowers” (brain-drain), which constantly weaken the position of
those societies in the global knowledge market as well as their capacity
for self-reflection through scientific research and, accordingly, to
effective movement towards the center; 2. they are experiencing
important shifts in scientific developments (ENWISE report, 2003)
which largely re-shape local knowledge hierarchies and the position of
local knowledge institutions in respective social contexts, often

20It is important to note that the concept of semiperiphery in this text plays a different
starting point to the one it would have in the case of Joseph Ben-David”s conception
(Ben-David, 1971) of the science centre and the science periphery. The emphasis
here is on distinctive features of semiperiphery which present a different
epistemological challenge, invisible from the dichotomy centre-periphery, and which
could be very relevant especially for social sciences. However, on another level, this
theory is very well applicable to the countries in the semiperiphery of Europe, as
shown in ENWISE report (2003), second chapter.

67
marginalizing them; and 3. their knowledge production is often, at the
centre, interpreted in terms of a “cold war” paradigm, meaning that it
has inscribed inferiority, irrelevance, or simply low value, or even
validity, limited to local communities.
In other words, knowledge which is being made at the
semiperiphery is in the global knowledge market something like
“semi-knowledge” never “quite there”, as the semi- periphery itself.
That knowledge is seen per defintionem as partial, limited, and often
as not “objective” enough, it is mainly reduced to “evidence without
theory”, to some register of “exemplary” or “extreme” cases.
Knowledge produced at the semiperiphery about the semiperiphery
usually functions only as “background” or “back up” for
generalizations produced by the center and for the sake of the centre
which retains an ambition to create “universally valid” knowledge.
That kind of knowledge, “universally valid” knowledge, is a necessary
condition, more political than cognitive, for the socio-economic-
political engineering of the contemporary globalisation process, and
for the re-production of the semiperiphery itself.
Social, economic and political engineering to which the
semiperiphery is exposed is performed on two levels: on the
structural level and on the discoursive level, where symbolic capital
of the core dominates. This is also happening in science and social
science in particular. One of the major consequences of this parallel
intervention is that between the structural realities of the
semiperiphery and their discoursive realities, especially scientific
discourses addressing those realities, exists a gap.
Imported and often imposed concepts, such as
“multiculturalism”, “human rights”, “identity politics” and other key
concepts for the political process of globalisation, exercised through a
number of different international institutions and translated into the
realities of semiperipheral societies by local NGOs heavily dependent

68
on exterior funds, create quite unique discoursive environment for
scientific production of social sciences. A new kind of “political
correctness”, instead of communist political correctness, in tune with
the process of economic globalisation, establishes the discoursive
framework for social sciences of transitional societies. (Salecel: 1994)
Semiperipheral societies are very diachronic societies, often
perceived as societies with slowed down, or an impeded process of
“modernisation”. However, they are often assumed to be “slow” but
immanently similar, not different, which is not the case with the Third
world countries. Both core and the semiperiphery represented by
scientific elites have interests in retaining meta-narrative on
modernisation and different speeds of modernisation, without really
investigating the dynamics of the relationship between core and the
semiperiphery. With the collapse of communism, the process of
European Enlargement and increasing ambitions of semiperipheral
societies to become part of the “promised land”, discourse on
modernisation, or lack of it, perfectly corresponds to the prospects of
European integration, being a kind of “moving target”. So where ever
the process of Enlargement is slowed down, it is due to the lack of
“modernisation”.
The prevailing absence of the scientific discourse on the
relationship between centre and the semiperiphery including the role
of “transition” in the overall globalisation process, nevertheless, has its
negative consequences: transitional countries have paid extraordinary
high human costs for social change. Many ill-designed measures with
disastrous effects could have been prevented or diminished, if the
knowledge which already existed at the semiperiphery and the
“knowers” had been taken seriously. As only recently, after a decade of
“transition”, observed by Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner:
“Some of our problems abroad were caused by how we
interacted with other countries, especially weaker developing

69
nations. Acting as if we had come up with a unique, guaranteed
formula for prosperity, we - sometimes with the assistance of other
advanced industrial countries - bullied other nations into doing
things our way. Both through our own economic diplomacy and
through the influence of the American dominated International
Monetary Fund, Uncle Sam became Dr. Sam, dispensing
prescriptions to the rest of the world: cut the budget, lower that
trade barrier, and privatize that utility. Like some physicians we
were too busy, and too sure of ourselves - to listen to our patients
with their ideas. Too busy sometimes even to look at the individual
countries and their circumstances. The economists and development
experts of the Third World, many of them brilliant and highly
educated, were sometimes treated like children”. (Stiglitz, 2003: 23)
Arrogant “prescriptive” behavior of core institutions, imposed speed
of change, counterproductive policy measures, or even
counterproductive political and military interventions, which is most
evident in the most drastic cases of ethnic conflicts, but also in much of
the policy making in general, increased the costs of “transition”, contrary
to political and economic interests of the majority of the population at
the semiperiphery. At the same time, “transitology”, as a scientific field
dealing with the process of “transition” from communism to
postcommunism, became one of the fastest growing fields of social
sciences, without really affecting social change in positive terms. So, this
paradox is the framework for investigating the phenomena of “scientific
excellence” in social sciences at the semiperiphery as well as the validity
of imported paradigms from the scientific centre.
Another paradox of knowledge production at the semiperiphery is
questioning the problem of “excellence” as well. In Third world
countries the discrepancy between scientific discourses and social
realities of those countries was exposed to much of the criticism of
post-colonial theories. However, there are few efforts of a similar

70
kind related to the semiperiphery (Todorova:1997; Goldsworthy:
1998; Bijelić, Savić: 2002) The process of critical examination of the
centre’s theoretical paradigms dealing with the semiperiphery is
impeded for two reasons: political and epistemological.
The political reason could be described as “desire for the West”
together with strong anti-communism, phenomena which shape much
of the political atmosphere in most of the semiperipheral countries,
and create a discoursive environment which is too unfavorable to allow
for a critical stand on “transition”. Epistemological reason, on the
other hand, is related to the lack of possibility to make research on
peripheral societies independent of the centre’s agenda, expressed in
dependency for funding in conditions of limited local resources, or,
further, impossibility to create epistemic communities at the
semiperiphery independent from the centre’s mediation which is often
a knowledge distortion as well.
The paradox could be expressed in the following way: societies at
the semiperiphery are not different enough, to be recognized as
different (being former industrialized societies). Moreover, there is
no genuine political interest, neither in the center nor at the
semiperiphery for these differences to be acknowledged and
researched. Instead, a shortcut is advocated: promotion of policy
measures which should help those societies to “adjust” to the center.
The result is often, formalized and formal adjustment, full of traps of
counterproductive effects. While on the formal level, these societies
comply with the demands of the center, on the societal level there are
evident processes of de-development, resistance, chaos, entropy or
anomy (Heinrich, 1999). What concept will be used to describe this
condition is a matter of theoretical approach, but the fact is that
“transition” being part of globalisation process is producing very
different effects for different segments of semiperipheral societies,
often enlarging differences between semiperipheral societies

71
themselves, and increasing an overall uncertainty about the future
direction of societal change, on the sate level, as well as on the global
level. The cost of “globalized” ignorance is global uncertainty.
How does all of this affect “scientific excellence” at the
semiperiphery? If scientific excellence in its abstract meaning is
related to originality, innovativeness, creativity, but also to ethical
principal of value for humanity, then it seems that these qualities
could hardly be attributed to social scientists of the semiperiphery to
a large extent. They do not formulate new paradigms, nor do they
have possibilities to communicate them to wider epistemic
communities at the semi –periphery, neither have they profoundly
contributed to the critique of high costs of “transition”, in fact
“globalisation” of their societies.
In other words, “excellence” in the conditions of the 1990s and even
today, could be seen as a highly contradictory individual project, which
demands a clear choice which a scientist at the semiperiphery needs to
make between “being excellent” as regards the standards of the centre
- which often implies acceptance of the dominant paradigms,
accompanied with “political correctness” and often withdrawal from
the critical thinking, - or to make a choice in favor of critical thinking,
possibly useful and usable for the local epistemic community, driven
by personal ethical standards, but to remain isolated and to function in
small marginal networks incapable of creating new paradigms, lacking
resources and power. Another possibility is also open, which in reality
is often combined by one of the two previously mentioned, and which
in fact enables economic survival for the scientists at the
semiperiphery: to produce a kind of supplementary knowledge about
the semiperiphery, but within the theoretical framework provided by
the center. Social scientists from the semiperiphery are often perceived
and used as suppliers of the more or less “raw” material which needs to
be theorized from the centre, to be generalised, neutralised,

72
objectified, through the mediation of core institutions, and thus to
become – “scientific”. This knowledge is produced within the
coordinates determined by the knowledge institutions of the centre,
often accompanied with many distortions.
“Big Science is where the big money is in the West these days,
particularly for studies in comparative social and political research
where identical surveys are carried out in each of a number of
countries to enable cross-country comparisons of public attitudes using
the same models regardless of the specificities of the country. Western
researchers, often not able to function in the languages of the countries
that they are studying and often trying to study a half dozen or more
countries at once, must rely on “local” researchers to ensure that the
research is being carried out according to Western standards and with
Western research methods by people who know what the main
researcher wants. The local researcher, then, becomes a research
assistant – managing only a part of the project without the access to
the whole. It is more important that she or he be fluent in English and
can act as bridge between two worlds than that she or he is capable of
carrying out the research as principal investigator. In other words, the
Western researcher needs someone who can bring back data as if it
never originated in another culture and another language, and in a
system with different sorts of research obstacles. If the local researcher
does it well, the Western researcher can ignore that there have ever
been problems of cultural translation. (...) And since the problems of
cultural translation are no longer apparent in the data, it seems that
the local researcher is not really necessary to understanding the data
collected by the project by the time the major analysis is done.” (Kim
Lane Scheppele, in Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele,1996: 117)

73
 Standpoint Epistemology at the Semiperiphery
What is essential from the epistemological point of view is that
the semiperiphery is not some unimportant residual category, but
that semiperipheral position creates deep needs for very different
knowledge paradigms.
“Figuratively speaking Central Europe had been almost Western
ever since the middle Ages and became almost Eastern after the
second war. Squeezed in between two threatening and socio-
politically very different regions, it has always been forced to
understand both in order to survive.”(Wessely, 1996: 17)
The essence of the semiperiphery is its instability because it is open
to two different possibilities at the same time: to catch up with the
centre, or to be pushed further into the periphery. The major
characteristics of the semiperiphery, which is caught up in a vicious
circle of “being different, but not being different enough” reflects in fact
structural dispositions of the semiperiphery, which is “transiting”
between structures, in the condition which is more often structurless
than structured, more often in dynamism than in stability.
Ambivalences, paradoxes, discontinuities, unintended detrimental
consequences, chaos, entropy, are only some of the records of such “in-
betweness”. In other words, change at the semiperiphery is as much
structural, as structure itself. Economic and political forces in
semiperipheral societies have in many ways different dynamism than is
the case with core countries. The lack of structurally based determinism
which comes out as a consequence of structural void is reflected in
“epistemic void” (Iveković, 1993). So, the epistemic consequences are
simply large. This is what is certainly validating a need for specific
paradigms, coming from the semiperiphery itself. In other words, it
would be unreasonable to claim that knowledge created at the centre

74
could “cover” the realities at the semiperiphery. This starting point
challenges the issue of “excellence” from another perspective: namely,
what could be recognised as “excellence” by the centre and from the
centre, could be more or less irrelevant, even distorting knowledge for
the semiperiphery, and vice versa. Many of the structural changes in the
globalisation process could not be understood from the semiperiphery
itself, which inclines to overemphasize “small differences” and overlook
wider, more general global trends of social change. In a way, standpoint
epistemology should be advocated both for the core and for the
semiperiphery, or periphery. However, the precondition for the
cognitive leap is not in summarizing different “standpoints”, but in
creating deeper understanding of why and how different ways of
knowing and different knowledges are shaped by those standpoints.
Or to go one step further, as it is useful for understanding the
globalisation of production and its implications by the use of the
concept of “commodity chains,” which refers to the network of labor
and production processes necessary to produce a finished
commodity, a parallel concept could be constructed such as
“knowledge chains”, which would imply different, but interconnected
roles of knowledge institutions and knowledge networks along the
continuum core - the semiperiphery - periphery. At present,
damagingly for the essence of scientific excellence, different locations
on this continuum largely determine what could possibly be given the
attribute of “excellence”, what could be possibly recognized as
“excellent”, and by whom. “Excellence” in science thus appears to be
very context dependent, but within the powerful configuration of the
continuum core - the semiperiphery – periphery, which is clearly
counterproductive for the real “scientific excellence” and which is
decreasing the overall possibility of humanity to govern itself in a
productive and efficient way.

75
 Because of the major epistemological consequences emerging
from the very location of the semiperiphery, the second starting
assumption in this paper is that standpoint epistemology is actually
the only heuristically fruitful position for the social scientist at the
semiperiphery. Being a social scientist at the semiperiphery during
the transitional period offers the opportunity to be in a unique social
laboratory. Observation, political commitment for change, creative
thinking, all can be intertwined in extremely new and creative
approaches. Social change itself is creating the possibilities for the
change of paradigms.
However, from the level of individual insights and valuable
contributions, to the level of well accepted paradigms and, accordingly,
recognized “excellence” there is a gap, which can be bridged up only by
communication in epistemic communities. No challenge of dominant
theoretical and conceptual frameworks is possible as a purely
individual act. But, also, every individual insight is deeply embedded in
the shared cultural, contextual understanding of the social change.
Problem of the recognition of “excellence” here comes both from the
inside, local epistemic communities, as well from the outside, larger
globalized epistemic communities. From the inside excellence may not
be recognized because it operates within a well established cultural
consensus (Nobody is prophet in his/her village.), therefore, the
specific creative contribution may not be visible, because it is not
estranged enough. On the other hand, excellence may not be
recognised from the outside because it can easily fail to adequately
translate contextual, cultural background into the dominant
paradigms. The complexity of the local context often demands
sophisticated multidimensional analysis which from the perspective of
the centre usually seems to be irrelevant or too complicated.
There is a recurring tendency of the centre to repeatedly see and
interpret local, contextual configurations as “déjà vu” phenomena, in the

76
“normal” process of “modernisation”. Thus the essence is obscured: the
semiperiphery is being produced and reproduced by the centre, which is
an immanently different situation. Standpoint epistemology, although
the only heuristically fruitful position of the social scientists at the
semiperiphery, bears a high risk of producing both marginal knowledge
and marginality of scientists, especially in the conditions of the absence
of wider epistemic communities at the semiperiphery, capable of
creating an adequate context for scientific evaluation.

Mechanisms of Exclusions
The third assumption is that between globalized knowledge
production mainly shaped by the centre, which creates coordinates
for both “scientific knowledge” and “scientific excellence” at the
semiperiphery, which in fact influences conditions of the knowledge
production at the semiperiphery, on one hand, and the individual
women scientists from that very the semiperiphery, on the other
hand, there exists a system of “translations”, mechanisms through
which and by which her position, her way of knowing, her production
of knowledge, and possible recognition of her “excellence” are
connected. The link global - individual, which cuts through the
semiperiphery, different statehoods, different local knowledge
institutions, local gender regimes, cultural traditions, symbolic
orders, and group experiences, even different histories of resistance,
at the end largely shapes her possibilities to produce “excellent”
knowledge, or the knowledge which will be recognized as such,
regardless of her personal talents, capacities even productivity. In
other words, there are many structural barriers to the recognition of
scientific excellence for an individual woman scientist.
Gender bias in measuring scientific excellence is in many ways only
secondary to the hierarchy in the evaluation of the knowledge coming

77
from the location of the scientists on core-the semiperiphery – periphery
continuum of knowledge production. As succinctly stated by one woman
scientist in Serbia during research conducted in 1989: “It is much more
important where you are born, than whether you are male or female”
(Blagojević 1991). As explained by Andre Gudner Frank:
“The observation that the absolute and relative welfare of people,
'societies', 'economies', countries, etc. is derived NOT only, or even not
primarily, from what they [can] do, nor even less from any
'characteristics' or 'things' that would permit them TO DO. Rather
welfare and the benefits and DISbenefits derived from participation in a
wider global whole is determined primarily by RELATIONS among
people and within and among 'societies' and their PLACE or LOCATION,
LOCATION, LOCATION in the whole system. THAT is what we need to
study in the SYSTEM AS A WHOLE, which is greater than the sum of its
parts and which shapes the relations among the parts and the parts
themselves. And it is changes in location, more than in any innate or
even acquired capacities, that determines the welfare or lack of it of any
part.” (Andre Gudner Frank, Source:
http://rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/research.html

Gender Regimes at the Semiperiphery

Finally, the fourth assumption for this paper, which connects the
concept of the semiperiphery and the concept of gender, relates to the
specificity of gender regimes at the semiperiphery. Because the
semiperiphery is continuously shaped by an on- going effort to “catch
up” with the centre, women’s human resources are often additionally
mobilised and exploited for the gap between the centre and the
semiperiphery to be bridged. The semiperiphery regularly produces a
paradoxical combination of strong patriarchies which exhaust
woman’s resources in the private domain, together with ideological

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“fog” of gender equality. The result is, from a Western point of view, a
strange amalgam of “super woman”, and a strong, sacrificial woman,
who is “more than equal”. This is very similar, but not identical, to the
“development” of the Third world countries, where intensive
exploitation of women’s resources has been the precondition for the
“modernisation” of those societies (Harding, 1998:105-23). In
comparison to the Third world countries, in semiperipheral societies
the use of women’s resources does not differ so much by the extent but
by the quality: former industrialized societies with a strong egalitarian
ideology created educated woman power with a high inclination for
employment. Women’s relatively high inclusion in science, and fast
feminisation of academic posts (ENWISE report, 2003), therefore is
the consequence of the set of two very opposing sets of conditions:
those favorable to women as part of a communist legacy (education,
employment, egalitarian ideology) as well those unfavorable for
women (“normalised” high level of exploitation of women’s resources
as a precondition for the “development”, or “transition”, and very
unfavorable position of science in general) (Blagojević: 1991; ENWISE
report, 2003). In other words, without the wider context of the
habitually high exploitation of women’s resources and cultural
patterns which support this, it is impossible to understand women’s
self/sacrificial behavior, both in private and in the public domain.
Scientific excellence of women in this kind of environment, of
prescribed women’s sacrifice, where women’s individual ambition is
treated as ultimately negative, an “unwomanly” feature, something
which is an excess, more than desirable quality. However, in that same
environment women’s valuable resources could be quite efficiently
used without adequate recognition, often even without any
expectations for recognition coming even from women themselves.
These four assumptions underlie the major ideas of this text. They
also shape the focus: women scientists in social sciences and
especially in gender studies. It seems that in the position of those

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women scientists multiple paradoxes of their scientific existence at
the semiperiphery accumulate and combine, and therefore they
represent a kind of ideal “sample” for investigating the connection
between knowledge production at the semiperiphery, gender and
recognition of excellence21.

Doing Social Science at the Semiperiphery:

Laboratory without Roof
Social scientists at the European semiperiphery where the process
of “transition” took off in the late 1980s and is still continuing for
some countries, at a different speed and in a different manner, have
been faced with very many new challenges: extremely changed
conditions and environment for their work. Here some of the
problems will be discussed which underlie the difference in “doing
social science” East and West, and which more or less directly
influence both the “scientific excellence” and what could be
eventually recognized as such.
NGO scenes in post communist societies is yet another interesting
phenomena, affecting research in social sciences in semiperipheral
societies, in many ways incomparable to core countries. One of the
major differences is the fact that many of the NGOs are heavily
dependent on external funding. As they were targeted by different
international and foreign agents as the major “enzyme” for fostering
social change in postcommunist societies, towards “democratization
and market economy”, they also encompassed much of the actual on-

21Throughout this paper a difference is being made between “scientific excellence” and
recognition of “scientific excellence”. This is an important theoretical and
methodological distinction, because there is always a kind of discrepancy between the
two, and the major effort should be made to bring the two as close as possible.
However, the conditions at the semiperiphery and the position of semiperiphery in
fact widens the gap between the two.

80
going research in semiperipheral societies, but with the clear agenda
coming from the core. In more concrete terms, this means that
throughout the 1990s and also today, social scientists from the
semiperipheral countries of Europe were surviving and working in
many ways under the regime of NGO scenes, not an academic
regime. The implications are numerous: hyper production of low
quality so called “policy researches”, ad hoc creation of “expertise” on
different issues without any academic recognition, further
marginalisation of academia in the public life of semiperipheral
societies, unhealthy competition between academia and NGOs,
creation of parallel educational programmes with much more
resources then in academia. Here is a concrete example:
“Women’s study Center in Belgrade was established in 1992, as one
of the first of its t kind in the postcommunist world. In 1993, at the peak
of the economic crisis in Serbia, a salary of university professor was
between 5-10 DM monthly. At the same time one lecture (1.5 hour) in
the Center was paid 50 DM. My undergraduate students working in
NGOs, or even better, in international donor organizations had 10-20
times higher salaries then university professors. Nowadays the ratio is
1:5. (Source: personal testimony of M.B.)”
The NGO sector in many cases was also much better connected in
different international networks and better equipped technologically.
So, the attraction of the NGO sector, where people could be decently
paid, have good conditions for their work, connect to networks and
travel, was very high in comparison to academia. The NGO sector in
fact pulled much of the academic resources and re-directed them in
the direction of agendas formulated by the donor organizations.
What are the consequences for “scientific excellence?” The research
problems, theoretical and methodological approaches, have not been
formulated by the epistemic communities of semiperipheral
societies, but by the core agendas mediated by donor organizations,

81
so they were in a way external to scientific interests of semiperipheral
societies. The effect is the production of knowledge which is
compatible to the knowledge produced by the centre about
semiperipheral societies. Weakening of the local epistemic
communities led to the decrease of the possibility to articulate
alternative conceptual frameworks and scientific paradigms, which
would reflect the position of the semiperiphery and which would be
based on standpoint epistemology. “Scientific excellence” in these
terms has quite a dubious meaning.
With the beginning of the 1990s “transition” became one of the
most popular, fastest growing topics in social sciences. To denote this
explosion of “scientific research” in this field, one Hungarian
sociologist, Anna Wessely, coined the term ”transitology” with
inscribed irony. However, the term, ironically again, was very quickly
accepted in social science circles, so “transitology” really became one of
the “new sciences”. It had tremendous attraction for many of the
scientists in the core countries, especially where they originated from
one of the “transitional” countries, and spoke “one of the local
languages”. The existent void in knowledge about former communist
societies, together with spectacular social movements throughout the
region, or even ethnic conflicts, created high interest in “transitional
countries” by the core countries. That situation produced enormous
possibilities for career advancement with somewhat exciting and
“exotic” research on postcommunism. However, many of the scientists
coming from the centre were well-equipped with many prejudices on
what to expect to find about communism and postcommunism, using
the “cold-war” paradigm explicitly or implicitly.
Complicated matters, such as, for example, war in former
Yugoslavia were overnight turned into hundreds of books with
simplistic explanations. While many of the so called “local scientists”
were too responsible and too sensitive to oversimplify, that usually

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was not the problem for the “native outsiders”. While funds were
almost impossible to obtain for the “locals”, they could have been
easily provided for the “native outsiders”. The race in knowledge
making was in fact very political, and new knowledge was often
functioning to legitimize the political decisions of the core towards
the semiperiphery.
One of the very popular and fast ways of “collecting” knowledge
from the “local knowers”, but to reduce it to the “information”, was
done by international projects, or even more often, by international
conferences. Although international projects were very rewarding for
the local scientists because they enabled some decent payments,
contacts and exchange, often even the continuous networking, they
were at the same time major channels for imposing the hierarchy
between the “knowers”: those from the semiperiphery being in a role
of suppliers of “raw” material, while those from the core having the
authority to “theorize”. The imposition of Western theories was
strong and undisputable. Whatever has been produced by Eastern
scientists would immediately be located in the framework of
“Western theoretical debates”, following “déjà vu” logic. Knowledge
was continuously distorted by false “theorizing” on semiperipheral
realities, often “pushing” them into the alien theoretical constructs,
which were reinforcing the myth of modernisation. In return, these
conceptual frameworks were also reshaping semiperipheral realities
by the force of imported symbolic capital (Buadrillard, 1996, 2000).
As observed by Cahalen:
“The so-called “end of the Cold War” has made possible more
academic interaction between the “East” (East-Central Europe and
the former Soviet Union) and “West” (Western Europe and North
America) since 1989. For Western scholars, it has brought about the
opportunity for us to reexamine our conceptions about life in the
Eastern Bloc in the light of newly available information, see

83
connections between peoples, cultures, states and economies where
we previously did not, find out what our Eastern European
colleagues have been publishing about all these years, integrate
their knowledge, construct joint research projects, and in general
expand our notion of the anthropological subject to include Eastern
and Central Europe. Despite these great opportunities, the
treatment of studying the Eastern Bloc has not changed
significantly in the past six years. Instead there is a widespread
exclusion of Eastern Europe from mainstream anthropological
discussions. The East/West division can be seen in the distribution
of papers and panels at conferences, publication of articles in
journals, training of graduate students, and the ideology behind
research funding in the U.S.” (Catalan, 21).
The very idea, deeply embedded in the Western world, that the
“transition” from communism to postcommunism will be fast and not
so difficult, (Heinrich, 1999) together with the idea that the
semiperiphery is “not all that different” produced an emphasis on fast
policy solutions instead of research based policies. That created a
much better environment for so called “expertise” than for
“knowledge”. Assumed similarities, and assumed inevitability of the
“modernisation” road, encouraged fast policy making without
profound research on social structures of the transitional countries.
The result was that policy making was faster than knowledge
making. This is a situation very different from the situation of the core
countries where knowledge making usually precedes policy making.
But, because it was assumed that knowledge from the core was
applicable to the semiperiphery, policies were designed without
substantial knowledge about semiperipheral societies and their
capacity for change. The costs were often simply disastrous. Policy
orientation of social sciences in semiperipheral societies deteriorated
additionally the prestige of research based, scientific knowledge.

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 ”Scientists from the semiperiphery were overnight exposed to
academic cultures very different from their own, but, unfortunately,
also too much arrogance, even “aggressive ignorance about the
particulars of European history, politics and culture.” (Cahalen: 24)
The specific communicational problem was related to very
different intellectual traditions East and West. Analyzing the
intellectual heritage of Wittgenstein, Freud and Mannheim, Wessely
concludes that social inquiry represented in their works links to the
specific intellectual tradition of Central Europe, which among other
things uses specific language:
“It offers a literary and therefore highly flexible language suited to
the description of non-Western type societies and social attitudes. This
language moves freely between different stylistic registers and allows
the combination of personal tone and interpretive approach with an
effort to produce possibly objective analytical description of social
phenomena. It suggests itself as a language of mediation between
conceptual frameworks and lived experiences as well as between
structurally different types of social experience.” (Wessely, 17)
The problem obviously could not be simply reduced to a question of
linguistics, which was a large problem in East-West communication by
itself, with the aggressive dominance of the English language, but more
deeply, it touches upon the problem of communication emerging from
the lack of adequate conceptual frameworks and academic traditions
shared jointly by both Western and Eastern scientists.
“On a deep level, the roots of misunderstanding and the inability
to communicate are due to different social representations and
constructions of the world. Figurative and metaphorical terms
characterized by a peculiar sort of obscurity and vagueness full of
historical and cultural associations which are so rampant in
Eastern social science writings, make Eastern scholarship about
society impenetrable to Western scholars who would be eager to

85
listen and understand. Moreover, intellectuals in the East are proud
of being confusing and obscure, and tend to despise clarity and
rationality of composition.” (Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele, 1996:119).
The roots of misunderstandings were/are deep, structural, and
deserve recognition and serious intercultural scientific communication.
These differences per se, deserve to be treated as par excellence scientific
research problem. Instead, they are ignored, and misinterpreted:
“If East European social scientists claimed original ideas in the
research processes, particularly if the ideas emphasized the
differences or historical peculiarities of particular countries in the
region, Westerners assumed that the Easterners did not understand
Western models that require generalizing about all these “small
countries”. If Easterners revealed their generally superior knowledge
of the history of social and political thought, the history of the region
or the markers of contemporary culture, Westerners wondered
where their hypotheses were”.(Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele, 1996: 117)”
The lack of appreciation of intellectual difference of Eastern scientists,
which was originating not from any kind of “intellectual inferiority”, but
from very different intellectual traditions and different roles of
intellectuals in semiperipheral societies, and arrogance expressed towards
this difference in West-East scientific communication was structurally in
many ways parallel to arrogance of androcentric knowledge in the history
of Western science. “Theoretical fence” (Cathleen, 1996) simply made the
scientific communication very difficult, let alone quality scientific
communication. Instead, what was assumed was the superiority of the
Western model, to which Eastern scientists should adjust, regardless of
whether that really makes sense. The “burden” in formulating new
cognitive, conceptual, epistemological approaches which would “cover”
semiperipheral realities in their connection to core realities, was simply
not shared equally by scientists East and West.

86
 The most dangerous consequence of this theoretical blindness and
arrogance is the fact that it was assumed over and over again that
Eastern scientists do not have much to say which is not already known,
or else it is trivial, or irrelevant, while at the same time, in reality, some
of them were trying to fill up the “epistemic void”, under the very
unfavorable conditions of the collapse of the state funded scientific
institutions. Others, on the other hand, accepted the “colonization of
East European Social Science”, (Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele, 1996)
complying with the role of “evidence suppliers”, or “data collectors”. In
very asymmetrical power relations Eastern scientists were not in a
position to influence funding which was predominantly, or almost
exclusively, coming from the West, since the “transition” started. That
was also framing the problems and methodologies:
“The new research being funded in the region now demanded
comparisons across as many countries as possible both in the
region and outside of it, to analyze the presumed differences still
there between East and West. This resulted in massive quantitative
data, producing statistics that could be analyzed in the computer-
driven social science research facilities of the West” (Scheppele, in:
Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele: 1996: 113)
Finally, different technical demands and standards continuously
produce barriers for Eastern scientists in their efforts to
communicate with West. The set of very concrete limitations, often
far too humiliating to be expressed openly by Eastern scientists has
been described by Kim Lane Scheppele, an American scientist who
spent years in Eastern Europe:
“Had the Westerners understood the conditions of research in the
region, they might have drawn the more sensible conclusion that
Eastern library budgets could not permit the purchase of the huge
range of journals at Western prices and it would be hard without
such library facilities to keep up with literatures in the West. And if

87
the Easterners had managed to reinvent from scratch a technique
available in the West, such research accomplishments were looked
down upon for failing to be original. If East European social
scientist could not run fancy models of their personal computers at
home to keep up with their Western counterparts, the Westerners
assumed that the Easterners could not do the work, instead of
concluding that perhaps computers with such power and software
were not widely available to cash strapped researchers of the East.”
(Scheppele, in: Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele: 1996: 117)
To summarize, social scientists were faced with many quite new
and in many ways irresolvable problems with the beginning of the
“transition”. What mostly influenced their position was a very
asymmetrical position in West-East scientific projects, and their high
dependency on funding from the West. The consequences were
detrimental for the social science itself: it became disconnected from
its traditional contexts of local societies, it became non responsive to
the needs have local communities, and finally it become incapable of
producing valuable concepts and paradigms to adequately theorize
the tremendous social change occurring during the “transition”. The
“scientific excellence” was not only denied to the social scientists of
the semiperiphery, simply for the matter of “arrogant ignorance” and
power misbalance, but, which is even worse, became almost
impossible to achieve under the new conditions of the new division of
labor along the continuum of core – the semiperiphery – periphery
of globalized knowledge production, which was largely trivializing
their scientific capacities. Mechanisms employed for the new
marginalisation of social scientists were numerous: distribution of
funds through NGOs; setting up of research agendas by donor
organizations; inadequate treatment of the “local” scientists in
journals, conferences, international projects; prioritizing the
command of the English language over scientific knowledge;
prioritizing skills over knowledge; the imposition of methodology,

88
paradigms and simplistic explanations. The “epistemic void” thus
persisted, while the “excellence” of the Western scientists being
specialized in “transition” most probably has been rewarded and
recognized. New conditions made it even clearer that “creators” of
the knowledge come from the core, that the semiperiphery is
complied to “translation” of that knowledge, or even simpler, to
“transmission”, and that the final users, “local societies” will be
further objectified through exercise of policies based on that kind of
distorted knowledge.

Doing Gender Studies at the Semiperiphery:

Debates and Alliances
Gender Studies in semiperipheral countries of Europe have been a
very dynamic field with high attraction for women social scientists.
One of the important explanations for the relatively fast growth of
the field could be found in the fact that much of gender studies
development was connected to NGOs, where they were often
organized as “parallel educational organizations”. Funds were
available, and often very stimulating in comparison to funds in
academia (Blagojević, 1988; Milic, 2002). Being often “fast track” for
postgraduate studies abroad, gender studies attracted many young
scholars from social sciences and humanities, which are usually
highly feminized disciplines. However, after a relatively good start, a
new phase of the development of gender studies is inevitable:
“In Romania and in general in CEE region, it looks like the
success story in terms of promoting gender equality in higher
education is to be found at the level of gendering the content of
higher education mainly by institutionalizing gender/women
studies. In many of our countries, taking advantage of the
university autonomy and the chaotic reforms of higher education,

89
women/gender studies programmes and departments flourished.”
(Grunberg, 2003:2).
Although women’s/gender studies at the semiperiphery have
rather a short history (they were established mostly after the 1990s)
they are facing the same challenges as women’s/gender studies in the
West, which only proves that there are some structural constraints
connected to the conservativism of androcentric academia and self
positioning in relation to the movement, which exist regardless of the
location, transculturally.
“Being in various stages of development they (gender studies,
M.B.) Confront the same types of dilemmas that challenged Western
academic feminism in the past:
• mainstreaming vs. curriculum transformation;
• autonomy vs. integration;
• naming the programmes (women/gender/feminist studies);
• level of introducing gender studies;
• relations between academia and activism (validation of gender
studies as mainstreaming theories or mainly as practically
oriented, as research with a purpose) (Grunberg, 2003:2).”
In any case, these dilemmas connect to both production of
“excellence”, as well as to recognition of it. For example,
establishment of gender studies outside academia highly relativized
their academic contribution. And although in some cases this could
be attributed to the conservativism of academia, in other cases the
problem was the real absence of academic criteria behind knowledge
production and dissemination in the field of gender studies. The
rapid expansion of courses, seminars, trainings related to women
and to women’s/gender studies, included very many “new comers”,
and among them some who would not, under the normal academic

90
quality competition, be able to stay in the field. In other words, while
the positioning outside academia eased up some developments, it
also inhibited quality control.
Although at first sight, rapid quantity development of gender
studies at the semiperiphery seems to be a “success” story, many more
facts should be factored into the picture, to understand the complexity
of their developments. For example, at the semiperiphery, gender
studies are not recognised as a scientific field, and they mainly
function as highly ghettoized intellectual endeavor, without any
substantial academic dialogue with non-gender scientists. Even when
“scientific excellence” exists it simply can not be validated by local
epistemic communities, because they are very small, and additionally,
in the case of gender studies, fragmented across discipline boundaries
(social sciences versus humanities). The true “interdiscplinarity” of
gender studies is not yet reached because they are still basically
structured around the disciplines. However, sometimes
“interdiscplinarity” covers the lack of quality, and sometimes it is
stretching over too many disciplines to be adequately appreciated.
Additionally, the lack of clear rules and academic criteria together
with funding possibilities created very high competition in the field,
which gave rise to the influence of network based selections (or
better to say, clans), while meritocracy, quality and originality have
been marginalized. In many instances, gender studies, usually
organized by one or several “women leaders” in the highly
unregulated setting of NGO scenes, tended to repeat all of the
weaknesses of male hierarchies, exclusions, and “old boy’s clubs”.
Scientific promotion of individual women scientists from the
semiperiphery, because of the high dependency on foreign donations,
became extremely dependent, not so much on their actual scientific
contribution, although it would be difficult to evaluate it anyhow, for
the reasons already described, but on their connections with the

91
donors. “Scientific excellence” thus became not the precondition, but
the consequence of research funding. “Scientific excellence” in the
filed of gender studies grew to be heavily dependent on power
networks connected to the funds, but also on the successful
accomplishment of “transmission” work for “feminism for export”
(Eisenstein, 1998). This was usually achieved by tremendous
translation activity, which also enabled direct contacts with Western
authors eager to have their works published abroad. Transmission as
a more mechanical and less creative way of communication
knowledge from the core to the semiperiphery was, nevertheless, a
very rewarding activity for semiperipheral gender scientists. Core -
the semiperiphery relations in fact determined that it was more
rewarding to be “transmitter” than to try to be “creator” of
knowledge. Owing to American based funds, the “transmission” of
American feminisms was prevailing at the semiperiphery in last
decade, and was the most rewarding for individual gender scientists
from the semiperiphery.
Gender studies in semiperipheral societies were mainly
“imported” as part of the knowledge from the West which largely
corresponded to Western postmodern realities. This fact in return
determined much of the focus and present content of gender studies
at the semiperiphery. While some fields “exploded”, such as “women
and media” issues, others, such as “rural women” were simply
marginalized. Donor organizations dictate the focus and shifts of foci
together with decreasing funds create very fragmented and
superficial “knowledge” which can not easily be accumulated and
integrated into wider conceptual frameworks. And without this
accumulation of knowledge it is not possible to create new
conceptual frameworks, so much needed at the semiperiphery, in fact
it is not very likely that “excellent” knowledge could be produced.

92
 However, although very exposed to the Western knowledge
paradigms, in a very similar way and mainly through the same
mechanisms, gender studies at the semiperiphery expressed a much
more critical stand and resistance, than was the case with other
social science disciplines. Following Mohanti, Slavova suggests that:
“Emerging East European feminisms seem to be engaged in a similar
double-sided project: on the one hand, critically appropriating and
subverting established Western feminist models, on the other -
striving to construct their own feminist identity and politics (Slavova,
2001:5)”. This was vividly expressed in the so-called East-West
Feminist Debate, which started already at the beginning of the 1990s
and still is on-going.22 The explanation for this more autonomous
and more critical stand of gender studies at the semiperiphery could
be traced to two facts: that they relied heavily on postcolonial
feminist critique, and secondly, that their criticism was encountered
with much more openness and benevolence than it was the case with
other social science disciplines. In a way, marginality of gender
studies, both in the core and at the semiperiphery contributed to the
more balanced exchange of ideas, to alliances which have the
potential to become epistemic communities along the continuum
core - the semiperiphery – periphery.

26 East-West feminist debate started at the beginning of the 1990s when Slavenka
Drakulic, a feminist from Croatia and Nanette Funk, an American feminist exchanged
views. Later it included almost all major feminist scholars from Eastern Europe. The
focus of the debate was how and why Western feminisms are not simply applicable to
Eastern realities. However, it should be noted that focusing on these differences and
explanations, took a lot of intellectual efforts and resources from the already small and
weak feminist communities at the semiperiphery. So, in a way, this debate, although
precious for the delineating the field for feminist theory and research at the
semiperiphery was often imposing “wrong questions”, thus drawing attention from
many of the burning issues during the “transition”. Eastern feminists were caught up
in a vicious circle of explaining “their difference” using Western conceptual
frameworks, without being able to first do the research and/or communicate the
problems in their local, or semiperipheral epistemic communities.

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 Excellent Woman Scientist at the Semiperiphery:
Living in Limbo
For an excellent woman scientist (in social sciences, possibly
doing gender studies) living at the semiperiphery during “transition”,
“scientific excellence” is a highly ambivalent issue. Contrary to the
models of “normal” career development in the West, her position is
full of contradictions and high costs of possible choices. Even more,
her “choices” are often not really choices, but the result of accidents
and circumstances, which in the highly chaotic environment of
semiperipheral societies create sudden possibilities, or marginalize
her further. There is not much regularity in career development at
semiperipheral societies.
Different strategies, which are at least theoretically at her
disposal, include: “brain drain” with more or less fixed alternate
location in the core; endless mobility (going back and forth from
native country) in fact “scientific nomadism”; stable employment in
the scientific institution at home country; or giving up a scientific
career all together. If she decides to “brain drain” she can hardly
expect to be evaluated according to her quality in the core countries.
Lacking the important cultural, symbolic and social capital, she will
most probably remain marginal, pushed into the role of a “specialist”
for her native country. However, in most of the cases, the triviality of
her professional tasks will exclude any possibility of working on
really challenging issues, doing the “excellent” work and obtaining
recognition for “scientific excellence”. If she chooses to become
endlessly mobile she will need to give up family life, stable
relationships and support networks. Instead she would need to
develop professional networks, possibly to connect to “influential
people” and become close to them. She will gain a lot of knowledge

94
from the careful observations of different settings; she will develop
her adaptability and skills of intercultural communication. However,
her nomadism might not materialize into “excellent knowledge” for
the very reason that too much effort is put into nomadism itself. A
stable environment with good working conditions might be
constantly out of reach. If she stays at a home institution, she might
be integrated into the local community, but be confined to the
fringes, and the more original and creative her work is, the smaller
the audience will she have. In other words, choosing to produce “real
excellence” is either impossible or unrewarding.
The position of transmitter is much more comfortable. In fact this
is the ideal position for the social scientist at the semiperiphery,
which means that she simply disseminates knowledge from the West.
The Western colleagues are generally very generous and supportive
to those who assume the role of transmitter. They are invited to
conferences, supported with scholarships, and even become friends.
From the point of view of pure rationality, being a transmitter is the
most rational strategy for the individual woman scientist at the
semiperiphery. She can succeed in improving her quality of life, even
her references. Her “scientific excellence” might be recognised even
without “excellent” work.
In other words, an excellent woman social scientists at the
semiperiphery can hardly be the creator of “excellent” knowledge
while staying at the semiperiphery, even if she succeeds to do such
impossible work, mostly because there will be no one to take notice
of it. Measuring invisibility is difficult, indeed.
“The invisibility of Eastern women knower is shocking to me,
over and over again. I consider that to be in fact the same kind of
blindness which has been widely known as the phenomena of
'invisible women', when what a woman says at a meeting with
many more men is neither heard nor recorded. Here is an example:

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I was mentoring one American student at CEU, Budapest, who was
there for her MA thesis making an analysis of women’s NGOs in the
post communist region. I gave her contacts to interview Eastern
women scientists, who have done research on these issues. She was
supposed to interview them, not as local activists, but women who
have knowledge and expertise on those issues. The result was that,
although using extensively the ideas of those women scientists,
including myself, although those ideas were making the large part
of the body of the text of the thesis, she at the end referred mainly to
the sources which were of Western origin, treating them as
’theoretical framework’ while equally theoretical ideas of Eastern
scientists were treated as ’evidence’, or simply appropriated. There
was a clear discrepancy in the amount of knowledge she got from
the Eastern women scientists and her treatment of those sources.
Eastern Women scientists were simply degraded to ’informants’,
while at the same time quite trivial ideas of American scientists
were given full authority and have been cited. But this is very
common thing. The above mentioned student of mine obtained a
very good grade. She was not punished for the incorrectness. I
decided that she simply suffered from the same type of blindness as
many other people I meet regularly, and that there is no point in
making her pay. This is an interesting case because it reveals that
even when in a position of authority, and I was a mentor in this
concrete case, woman ’the knower’ from the East is not basically
perceived as such”.(Source: Personal testimony M.B).

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Chapter 3

Gender and Knowledge at the

Balkan Semiperiphery:
Women in Science23

“The general dilemma of the Balkan region seems to be the

following: Balkan countries aim to establish modern states
approaching the issue from postmodern point of view. It is a real
dilemma and a deep philosophical question, i.e. Could we, from
Balkan countries, jump over modernity and enter directly in
postmodernity? My point is that nobody knows the answer to this
question.”(Dr. Nikolina Sretenova, ENWISE expert)

Setting the scene:

Multiple Transitions of the Semiperiphery
The Balkan area is not just a simple geographical region; it is an
area striving to become a self-defined and self-determined political,
cultural and economic entity. It is the region of Europe in which
boundaries are in flux, inside and outside; where populations are
intensively migrating, mixing and dividing; where symbolic
geographies, geo-political strategies, ethnic conflicts and wars, as
well as external interventions, constantly reshape, deconstruct and

23This is a slightly changed version of the text which has been published in: "Science
Policy and Human Resources Development in South-Eastern Europe in the Context of
European Integration" ASO, Vienna, 006 pp. 163-177. Text largely builds on results of
the ENWISE Workshop: Starting a Debate With Women cientists from the Balkan
Region, Brussels, 11-12 November, 2003, Brussels.

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reconstruct the very definition of “the Balkans” (Bijelić and Savić,
2002; Todorova, 1997; Blagojević, 2003). “Balkan” is a construct that
bears both the resonance of derogatory opinion, and an affective
positive self-definition which aims to protect distinctive life styles,
cultural heritage and Balkan-type cultural hybrids. Collective beliefs
related to the Balkans play an active role in the political design of the
Balkans, internally and externally.
Moreover, social changes in the Balkans are still very intense, deep
and frequently ambiguous. Various forms of resistance and backlashes
accompany them, often blocking further changes or leading them in
unpredictable directions. Different processes (such as globalisation,
the transition from communism to postcommunism, wars and ethnic
conflicts, peace building, the continuous process of nation- and state-
building, the implementation of international assistance, the EU
Enlargement process, etc.) interfere with more stable societal,
economic, political and cultural structures in Balkan societies,
expanding “structurelessness”, “chaos”, and “anomie”. The different
directions of different processes often add to the lack of stability and
security, and inhibit the creation of strong and credible institutions. In
fact, Balkan countries are simultaneously going through multiple and
multidimensional transitions much more complex than those usually
seen when one speaks of the “transition” from communism to
postcommunism.
Theoretically, much of the complexity of the Balkans” multiple
transitions could be clarified by employment of the two concepts “the
semiperiphery” and “modernisation”; however it cannot be fully
understood through them. The semiperipheral position of Balkan
societies is deeply connected to “slowed dawn” or “impeded”
modernisation, and the extreme diachronic character of those societies
(an amalgamation of pre-modern, modern and postmodern elements).
Modernity cuts across different social entities and creates discourse

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and real opposition among people in areas such as: non-modern-
modern, rural-urban, non-educated-educated, traditional-modern,
non-European-European, Western-anti-Western, Westernised elite
and non-Westernised parts of the population. etc. These and similar
opposites shape basic discourse constructions within and about the
Balkans, often dangerously reducing ambivalence and the complexity
of social realities. One of the consequences of the semiperipheral
position of Balkan societies is their “semi-otherness” in relation to the
West. It comes from the specific position of being in-between, meaning
neither here, nor there, but always in the middle. Semi-otherness
creates ambivalent relations towards the West from the inside as well,
through simultaneous opposition and acceptance, imitation and
rejection. The Balkans constantly and simultaneously reinvents and
negates their differences in relation to the West.
While the concept of “modernisation” is useful because it can be easily
applied and easily operationalised, it also bears a great risk for
misinterpretation. Balkan societies are often assumed to be “slow” but
immanently similar to the “core” of other European societies, not “really”
different, (contrary to third-world countries), while “modernisation” itself
is implicitly treated as a uniliniear process. The paradox could be
expressed in the following way: societies at the semiperiphery are not
different enough to be recognised as different (being former industrialised
societies). Moreover, there is no genuine political interest, either in the
centre nor at the semiperiphery, for these differences to be acknowledged
and researched. Instead, a shortcut is advocated: promotion of policy
measures to help those societies to “adjust” to the centre and to speed up
their “modernisation”. The result is often formalised and formal
adjustment, full of counterproductive traps. While at the formal,
institutional level, these societies mostly comply with the demands of the
centre, at the societal level there are evident processes of de-development,
resistance, chaos, entropy or anomie (Heinrich, 1999). Much of the
“modernisation” of the present day Balkans in the form of European

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integration is, paradoxically, happening under conditions of de-
industrialisation and alongside retraditionalisation. Although similar
processes also exist in Eastern and Central Europe, this paradox is even
more pronounced in the Balkans due to ethnic conflicts and wars, which
have actually led to the “barbarisation” of previously medium-developed
industrialised societies.
The connection between “the core” and the semiperiphery is not
at all theoretically elaborated upon (as it is in the case of periphery
and post-colonial countries), and the way the core creates the
semiperiphery and vice versa remains mostly unclear and under-
researched. The assumption of immanent similarity in the process of
modernisation between the core and the semi -periphery and the
immanent inevitability of modernisation creates a distortion which
hinders in-depth, contextual analyses of those societies, and blocks
the emergence of new theoretical paradigms, and accordingly, the
implementation of efficient policies towards those societies.
While modern and postmodern elements of Balkan societies could
be misunderstood by an outside observer supporting the “evidence”
of assumed similarity, much of the social reality, both structural and
discourse-wise, is being shaped by pre-modern elements of these
societies. These elements, while latent in periods of economic growth
and fast development, can, and indeed do, become dominant in
periods of regression, crisis, or most drastically, when there are
ethnic conflicts and wars.
The concept used to describe this condition is theoretical, but the fact
is that multiple transitions which are part of the globalisation process
are producing very different effects for different segments of
semiperipheral Balkan societies, often enlarging differences between
semiperipheral societies and increasing an overall uncertainty about the
future direction of societal change at both the state and global levels.

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 The essence of the semiperiphery is its instability because it is
open to two different possibilities at the same time: both the
potential to catch up with the centre, and the chance that it might be
pushed further into the periphery. The major characteristic of the
semiperiphery, which is caught up in a vicious circle of “being
different, but not different enough” reflects the structural
dispositions of the semiperiphery, which is “transiting” between
structures in a way which is more often unstructured than
structured, more often dynamic than stable (Blagojević, 2004a).
Ambivalence, paradoxes, discontinuity, detrimental unintended
consequences, chaos, and entropy are only a few of the results of
being “in-between”. In other words, change at the semiperiphery is as
much structural as structure itself (Blagojević, 2004a). This fact
creates a situation in which much social change depends on human
agents, while at the same time a lack of “structure” disables the
synergies of social actors. So, paradoxically again, on one hand there
is a large “open space” for political and policy intervention because
structural constraints are weak, while at the same time a lack of
“structure” severely limits the scope of their effectiveness. Lack of the
rule of law, weak institutions, and a low level of social trust all reflect
the condition of “structurlessness” in the semiperiphery.

Countries within the Region:

Similar and/or different?
Although the Balkans have some relevant distinctive features as a
whole, the ever-present, epistemological challenge, which is often
charged with political interests, is related to the so-called similarities
and differences between countries in the region. All these countries
are different from each other, and it is difficult to draw general
conclusions about their similarities without running the risk of

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creating yet another set of constructions. The countries are different
in their political and economic developments, cultural traditions and
relations with Europe; some are member states, some are
enlargement countries, and some are still waiting at the back door.
However, there are some important “equalisers” (levellers)
(Blagojević, 2003), both positive and negative, working against the
differences, such as:
• The semiperipheral position in relation to Europe and semi-
otherness influence internal and external identities and
politics
• Shared pasts and cultural heritages
• For some countries, shared experiences as part of the former
Yugoslav state
• For some countries, experiences with wars and ethnic
conflicts, as well as social trauma and suffering
• Similar experiences of de-development, de-industrialisation and
de-modernisation
• For some countries, the experience of “transition” from
communism to postcommunism
• Discursive constructions from “outside” of the Balkans,
making them distinct from the “outside”, and consequently
supporting policies working in the same direction
• The paradoxical effects of “identity politics” throughout the
region producing chains of majority/minority relations, and in
the end leading to very fragmented entities
• Many countries in the region still experience a high level of
societal chaos, featured by weak institutions and strong
criminal networks

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 • The European policy of Enlargement, which is setting new
standards, is bringing Balkan countries closer to the “ideal”
through a “harmonisation process”
• And finally, forces of globalisation beyond Europe are also
shaping the economy, politics and cultures of countries in the
Balkans.
The complex web of these “equalisers” creates general social
conditions that shape gender regimes in the Balkans. These gender
regimes are more often similar than different, mostly because they
are shaped by everyday life practices and patriarchal practices and
discourses that change at a much slower pace then the political or
economic spheres in Balkan societies.

Gender Regimes in the Balkans:

Translating Macro into Micro
“Too much history” in the Balkans is shaping individual micro
realities and gender regimes too much. Very real social problems, such
as a high level of poverty, high unemployment, low social cohesion,
weak institutions, low trust in existing institutions, unclear borders,
weak economies, black market economies, corruption, organised
crime, depletion of human capital (brain drain), growing foreign
indebtedness, the counter-effects of the “aid industry” in post-conflict
areas, lack of security and fear of potential conflicts, shape the
framework of individual expectations, behaviour and decisions.
Gender regimes are contextual, and within such intense and
complex social forces, are often simply a matter of responding to the
survival needs of women, men and children in the region. Social
macro changes are often experienced by a majority of social actors in
a manner similar to natural disasters, encouraging development of

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survival and coping strategies and safety networks habitually based
on pre-modern elements, including family, kinship or even tribal ties.
The very characteristics of the semiperiphery largely shape gender
regimes, but gender regimes also perpetuate, or even add to, the re-
adoption of traditional values and often the anti-modernisation of
countries in the Balkan the semiperiphery.
Communist-style modernisation was mostly reduced to
modernisation in the public sphere, while the private sphere
depended heavily on the exploitation of women’s resources through
unpaid domestic labour, which was supported by patriarchal values.
In this period of multiple transitions, the use of female human
resources is shaped by both intense survival pressures, as well as the
on-going effort to “catch up” with the centre. Therefore, female
human resources are often additionally mobilised and exploited in an
attempt to bridge the gap between the centre and the semiperiphery.
(Blagojević, 2004a).
In comparison to Third World countries, semiperipheral societies
uses of women’s resources does not differ so much in extent, but in
quality: former industrialised societies with strong egalitarian
ideologies created educated women power with a high inclination
toward employment. Women’s relatively high inclusion into
professions, including science and the fast feminisation of academic
posts (ENWISE Report, 2003) are the consequence of this set of two
very opposing conditions: there are those favourable to women which
are part of the communist legacy (education, employment,
egalitarian ideology) as well as those unfavourable to women (the
“normalised” high level of exploitation of women’s resources as a
precondition for “development” or “transition”, and the unfavourable
position of many professions in egalitarian, communist societies)
(Blagojević,1991a; Blagojević, 1991b; ENWISE Report, 2003).

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 In other words, without the wider context of the habitual high
exploitation of women’s resources and cultural patterns which
support this, it is impossible to understand women’s self-sacrificial
behaviour, both in the private and public domains. The essence of
self-sacrifice is that women are both subjects and objects of sacrifice,
and that they strongly rely on this pattern in their identity-building.
“Gender blindness” is one of the dominant features of women’s state
of consciousness in former communist societies (ENWISE Report,
2003); in the Balkans it is additionally encouraged by women’s
internalisation of patriarchal ideologies including undisputed female
sacrifice (Blagojević, 2000a; Blagojević, 2004b). In the case of
Balkan societies there are two additional sets of factors which create
an important difference in relation to other former communist
societies in Eastern and Central Europe. Those factors are connected
to the poverty level before transition (Albania, Macedonia, Romania
and Bosnia and Herzegovina were the poorest states in Europe at the
end of 80s), and the deterioration of life quality due to different
factors during “multiple transitions” (including the traumatic and
destructive dissolution of former Yugoslavia), as well as specific
Balkan macho cultures based heavily on militant and religious
traditions and the prescribed self-sacrifice of women for the “higher
goal” of national survival.
These traditions have been revitalised during this period of
“multiple transition”. The combination of survival pressures and the
pressure to sacrifice “for the nation” has added a specific flavour to
Balkan patriarchies, creating more exploitative and more humiliating
relationships with women then is the case in other “transitional”
countries. Although it is important to resist stereotyping Balkan
patriarchies, as is often done in the West and in Balkan countries
themselves, the severity and stability of gender hierarchies in Balkan
societies deserves clear delineating and the full exploration of
cultural factors, such as misogyny based on military tradition, which

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is widely spread and which has been renewed throughout the region
(Blagojević, 2000a; Blagojević, 2004b).
The importance of contextualising patriarchal ideologies can be
seen in the fact that the famous Western metaphysical ideal in which
maleness is identified with culture and femaleness with nature, and
which serves as the basic ideological explanation of gender hierarchy,
is simply not functioning; this ideal does not exists for example in
Serbian tradition, as well as in dominant public discourses on gender
relations. In Serbia, men’s supposed superiority is based on their
“natural strength”, a state which has not been “corrupted” or
weakened by culture (usually meaning Western culture) (Blagojević,
2000b). Consequently, women’s education and professional
successes are not really contributing to the possibility of ideological
disruption of the dominant patriarchal narrative.

Individual Woman:
Coping with Multiple Constraints
“During the long and painful period of transition in Albania, it can
be considered as “luxury” to be a scientist in general and woman
scientist in particular. In this situation all individuals are trying to
find ways so that they can benefit more, bring more incomes for their
families in order to make a normal life. ” (M.Sci. Eglantina Gjermeni,
participant of the ENWISE Balkan Workshop from Albania)
For individual woman living in contemporary Balkans, multiple
transitions usually translate into multiple constraints and only a few
possibilities. Constraints are numerous, originating from well-
established gender hierarchies in private and in public, but also from
many new unfavourable social conditions. Women have to cope not
only with economic constraints and within “economies of survival”,

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but they also exhaust their energy and time serving as emotional
managers within families.
Multiple transitions in many ways abolished the patterns of
gender relations in former communist industrialised societies, which
were gradually leading towards egalitarianism as an ideal. This has
created a situation in which younger generations of women have had
to invent their own models of coping with unfavourable conditions.
Due to deep social changes, the disconnection between generations
of women is deep and structural. And due to the structural
weaknesses of scattered women’s NGOs organised around “projects”
(“NGO-isation of the women’s movement”, Lang, 1997,) attempting
to create a women’s movement, it seems that each and every woman
has to invent her own coping strategy.

Multiple Transitions, Multiple Burdens

As observed by Inga Tomić-Koludrović, there has been a major
shift from the “double burden” which existed under communism
towards the “triple burden” that has developed in postcommunism,
which includes housework, paid work and part-time work. But even
the term “triple burden” seems to be a simplification of the
multiplicity of roles women are asked to perform in their daily lives
in Balkan societies, whether they are professional women or not.
In fact, one of the major differences between East (including the
Balkans) and West is the fact that women professionals are not
nearly as well-rewarded in the East, and thus they cannot accumulate
resources which would eventually make their everyday life easier.
Bad organisation of everyday life in poor and additionally
impoverished societies during the 90s has put heavy burden on the
shoulders of women, additionally increasing their role in care-giving
(due to the collapse of the social security system), emotional

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management (due to social trauma, negative societal change, high
individual costs), the need to adapt to fast-changing conditions of the
labour market, etc.
Women scientists in Balkan societies share the daily problems of
non-professional women, especially if they have families and
children. The scientific profession, being very demanding, usually
assumes there is a lot of support from the immediate surroundings.
One research finding from Serbia shows that on average women get
much less support than men (Blagojević, 1992b). In fact, women are
both more exposed to demands, they suffer lower self-esteem, and at
the same time they do not get enough support for what they do.
It means that the psychological rewards both for the work and for
the eventual success of these professionals are very gender
imbalanced. The double, or triple, or multiple burdens carried by
female scientists are not counterbalanced by adequate support, and
the result is the undermining of both their major roles: professional
and familial.

Cultural Barriers:
Stereotypes, Prejudices, Misogyny
Balkan cultures constitute a crucial part of women’s exclusion in
contemporary Balkan societies. Exclusion through culture and by
culture is reproduced on a daily basis through discourse and practice
and through ideas, cultural products and identity formation. Many
elements of traditional cultures have been renewed and recycled, and
then combined with the elements of globalized misogyny in mass
culture (Blagojević, 2000a; Blagojević, 2004b).
Postmodern misogynous cultural hybrids justify, explain, celebrate
and produce women’s marginalisation on a daily basis. They are being

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revitalised through nationalistic discourse in the region, under new
conditions of war and “transition”, all producing “new” arguments to
support the heavy exploitation and humiliation of women.

Being a Woman Scientist in the Balkans:

Multiple Transitions, Multiple Problems

Conditions: Science in the Balkans

Unfavourable conditions for science regardless of gender at the

Balkan the semiperiphery can be classified into the following
categories:
• Unfavourable material conditions for performing scientific
activity (outdated research equipment, and lack of facilities
and infrastructure)
• Low payment and low prestige for scientific professionals
• Limited access to the international professional community,
including limited publishing possibilities
• Lack of epistemic communities because of the small critical mass
of scientists and insufficient regional scientific communication
• Internal inhibitions of scientific systems related to ineffective
and outdated systems for scientific promotion (too slow and
too long)
All of these factors affect women as well as men. However, within
already unfavourable conditions, women are more afflicted by negative
influences than men. Katarina Prpić in her research on young
scientists in Croatia has found that the “scientific productivity of

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women is more strongly influenced by their position in the social
organisation of science than is the case with their male colleagues”
(Prpić, 2004: 301). It could be assumed that women indirectly suffer
more than men from unfavourable working conditions, even if they are
not directly exposed to discrimination, because of vertical segregation
and their limited presence in decision-making positions in science.
Also, although gender may be a less-important factor in relation to the
use of research equipment, it can be more important in connection to
international scientific communication and collaboration.
Most female scientists in the Balkans still are not “gender-
sensitised” and could therefore have inadequate, even distorted
perceptions of the real situation. It is often much easier for them to
speak about “general” bad conditions in which scientific institutions
find themselves during the transition, than to have a “gender-
sensitive” understanding of their own marginalisation and exclusion.
There are important psychological barriers and discourse taboos in
the articulation of these problems.
Low prestige for scientific professionals is a widespread condition in
postcommunist countries (ENWISE Report 2003), as well as in the
Balkans. Feminisation of lower-level, scientific professions and the
lowering of prestige could be linked: the more women that exist in a
certain profession, the general lowering of the prestige of that profession.
It could also be supposed that in very patriarchal Balkan societies,
where due to the transition women’s bodies became commodities
overnight, and where wars rehabilitated military values and
traditional “maleness”, the prestige of the women’s gender itself has
been lowered in the extreme. In younger generations this may be
even more visible than in older generations, within the general
backward trend of “re-traditional thinking”.
Scientists from the Balkans are still not properly included within the
international professional community, and neither is their work very

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visible outside their (usually very small) local scientific communities. This
has detrimental consequences for the development of science in those
countries, as well as for the career development of individual scientists.
The problem is largely exacerbated by a lack of possibility to
publish and by language barriers. Small local scientific communities,
which with the dissolution of former Yugoslavia became even
smaller, do not have the critical mass necessary for the development
of science and creation of local epistemic communities. An absence of
epistemic communities in the Balkans, especially in the field of social
sciences, directly influences the quality of knowledge created in the
Balkans and about the Balkans (Blagojević, 2004a).
Although female scientists in the Balkans are mainly not
sensitised to the different mechanisms of inhibitions and exclusions
within science, they are nevertheless exposed to them. Even if direct
“proof” generally does not exist because of the widespread absence of
research-based knowledge on the topic, indirect evidence tells the
tale of horizontal and especially vertical segregation in science. The
fact that the higher the level within the scientific/academic hierarchy
the less women are represented is in itself proof of the existence of
exclusionary or inhibitory mechanisms in science.
Due to existing horizontal segregation, expressed in the
feminisation of some sciences and much smaller representation of
women in other sciences (such as, for example, computer sciences) it
could be assumed that different sciences are “open” to women to
different extents. Further, if women build a career in those sciences
which are “more open” they generally face fewer obstacles than in the
opposite case. In other words, different scientific fields have different
levels of “social inhibition” (Blagojević, 1991b) in relation to women.
Social inhibition can be proven by the fact that to enter and move
up in fields more “closed” to women scientists, they need to have
more extra resources, and a higher level of “social capital” and

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support to compensate for their (“unfavorable”) gender. The stronger
the “social inhibition”, the higher the level of “positive dispositions”
needed in “compensation”. Research of women scientists at Belgrade
University (1992) found a firm connection between low
representation of women in a certain scientific field (measured by the
representation of women in academic positions) and “positive
dispositions” of women in that field (such as higher-income parents,
more were urban than rural in comparison to male colleagues or to
other women in more “women-friendly fields”, smaller number of
siblings, higher level of parental support, higher level of partner
support, better education of parents, better education of mothers,
higher employment of mothers, etc.) (Blagojević, 1991b).
This means that in comparison to their male colleagues, women
scientists were exposed to much more severe social selection before
entering into the science, and they needed a higher level of “social
capital” and family support, especially if they wanted to enter into
fields “atypical” for women. But also to stay “in the game” they need
to make additional sacrifices: they are much more often unmarried,
divorced, without children, or with fewer children then their male
counterparts. This also means that the whole set of emotional
rewards for “success” is very much different for women than for men
(Blagojević, 1992b).
Research has also revealed that women were much more aware of
gender-based discrimination in the sciences where the percentage of
women was low then where it was high. However, they had personally
encountered discrimination much more rarely than their
acknowledgement of its existence as social phenomena. When women
were asked about the specific inhibitions and obstacles they met they
gave the following answers: “they steal the idea”, “they are reluctant to
include me into projects”, “men appropriate my results”, “ sometimes I
am simply excluded, I have a feeling that nobody is really counting on

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me”, “I was stuck with administrative work”. When asked about their
advantages, one of the rare answers was that “sometimes it is good not
to be taken seriously immediately”. (Blagojević, 1992a).
The same research also uncovered important differences in career
patterns between men and women scientists. Women, although
equally successful at the beginning of their careers, start to “lag
behind” their male counterparts once they have families, and their
careers have interruptions clearly connected to child-bearing and
child-raising. While men had continuous career models, women’s
were discontinuous, and the institutional set-up of academia clearly
rewards the continuous model (with, for example, contests for
positions based on years of experience, regardless of whether women
had maternity leave or not). “Lagging behind” men has generally
created a belief in academia that women are less capable, reinforcing
negative stereotypes. Although women and men graduated at the
same age, women on average were getting their M.S. a year later than
men and their Ph.D. as much as four years later. But the gender
differences in the rhythm of academic promotion after this phase of
parallel establishment of career and family have been decreasing,
meaning that women have been compensating for the “loss” of time
due to family obligations. In other words, the burden of “proof” was
always on their shoulders, which is why many respondents in the
survey simply said that: “Woman has to be twice as good as man to
be treated equally” (Blagojević, 1992b).
Comparisons of concrete favorable conditions for the
development of scientific careers revealed that men more often than
women (62.5% of men compared to 51.7% of women) have been on
stipends and scholarships abroad. There were also statistically
relevant differences between men and women when it comes to
emigration: 64.3% of men and 25.0% of women thought about
leaving the country. It was found that men were more productive

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then women, that they published more abroad, and they spoke more
foreign languages then women. Women were more often members of
local scientific associations then men, and men more often members
of international associations then women (Blagojević, 1992b).
Female and male scientists established communication patterns
in their working environment according to gender stereotypes and
regardless of gender ratio of the environment: if they have
professional problems they more often turn to men, and if they have
private problems, they talk to female colleagues. This implies that
women scientists in their surroundings, regardless of their actual
representation and presence, still perform the role of caregivers and
emotional managers, while men have the role of authority.
Interesting differences were found in relation to team work, which
was preferred by women scientists, while men preferred individual
work. This most probably could be connected to the traditional
gender roles, but also to the lower self-esteem of women.
The major motive for work for both male and female scientists
was creativity. However men placed a higher value than women on
money, power and prestige, while women found usefulness to the
community to be more important. They also valued different “ideal
characteristics” for a scientist; for men they were openness to new
ideas, curiosity, intuition, creativity, non-conformity, etc. For women
they were precision, honesty and personal engagement (Blagojević,
1992a). Interestingly enough, no gender differences were found in
estimates of gender-based discrimination. When asked whether there
were equal opportunities for women and men in science, both
women and men gave similar answers, mainly “yes” 64% of men and
63% of women (Blagojević, 1992a).

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 The Gender Brain Drain from the Balkans:
Nomadic Women Scientists
“The social and cultural capital coming from higher education is
one of the most precious institutional treasures of each civil society.
Brain Drain and Brain Gain may be calculated also by judging
whether it reduces or increases these capitals, - which means, of
course, by qualitative considerations.”(Dr. Michael Daxner,
participant of the ENWISE Balkan Workshop)
One of the most serious obstacles for further development of R&D
sectors in Balkan countries is a very intense and continuing brain-
drain. This brain-drain is in fact enlarging the gap between the core
and the semiperiphery.
However, there are some undoubted positive consequences of
brain drain. The most important one is related to the scientists
themselves, who by moving to another country, if they succeed at
staying in their scientific profession, have a chance and often succeed
at improving their knowledge and expertise and eventually make
important contributions to science which would otherwise be
impossible. In other words, staying “at home” under unfavourable
conditions for scientific work creates a high risk of getting “frozen
brain” (Sretenova, 2003). Mobility, thus, might increase a scientist’s
chances of staying in the scientific system.
On another level, brain drain is always also “brain gain” for some
other scientific community. But, even more, “brain drain” can be
approached as “brain circulation”, (Daxner, 2002) meaning that
scientific professions are often performed in a condition of high
geographical mobility, making less relevant the very concept of the
“country of origin” of a single scientist. Globalised knowledge
production blurred even more the boundaries between “temporal”
and “permanent” emigration of scientists. In reality, many scientists

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from the region are becoming “nomadic”, in the sense that they have
various institutional arrangements in different countries, high
inclusion in international projects and networks, various “territorial”
connections, and flexible and multiple careers, often accompanied by
different administrative statuses (Blagojević, 2006).
Although brain-drain as a concept is often connected to external
migration, internal brain drain of scientists in the Balkans is yet
another problem, even less acknowledged and analysed. Scientists in
the Balkans, faced with degrading life and work conditions, are often
pushed into the fast-developing and well-funded sphere of
international organisations and NGOs. In many instances they are
engaged to work on projects largely disconnected from their primary
expertise, and they are performing activities below their qualifications.
The phenomena of internal brain drain is very pronounced in the
Balkans due to wars and the international community’s efforts at
peace-building and reconstruction. The internal brain drain seems to
be more “brain waste”, meaning “loss of intellectual human capital”
than actual brain drain (Sretenova, 2003). Another form of internal
brain drain is related to the migration of scientists to private
business, mostly outside the R&D sector, but there is also a drain
between disciplines.

Gender Aspects of Brain Drain

Although gender aspects of brain drain and especially brain drain
from the Balkan countries have not been properly researched yet, it is
important to note several aspects of the problem which require
further investigation and elaboration. There is almost no research-
based knowledge on whether there is any substantial difference
between men and women in the scope of brain-drain, or on their
strategies and experiences of brain drain.

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 Women tend to be more “flexible” on the labour market in
general, especially in ENWISE countries, and even more so in Balkan
countries severely hit by wars and/or poverty. In reality this means
that women more readily accept working conditions below their
qualifications, often outside the scientific field, or that they perform
some auxiliary work in science without having the possibility to make
a fundamental contribution. Brain-drainers generally lack important
cultural, symbolic and social capital in the countries they move into,
which in science and other professions is necessary for upward
mobility. Scientific nomadism can in fact work, and often does work,
against scientific excellence.
Because women are more likely than men to be “flexible”, they are
also more likely to be “lost for science”; due to both external and
internal brain drain. It could be assumed that women actually adapt
much more to their families” needs, especially their children’s needs
then male scientists, and that the urge to leave the country is often
driven by a motivation coming “outside of science”. This could
particularly be the case for middle-aged women. Younger women
scientists most probably have behaviour patterns similar to their
male colleagues, based more on individual strategies.
In the case of the Balkans, where predominant patriarchal
cultures still exist, an important “pull factor” for younger women
could be the attraction to Western societies based on their
understanding of the values of individual freedom and gender
equality. Young women from the Balkans, once exposed to different
experiences living abroad (during their studies), might choose not to
go back to the typical Balkan surrounding which is profoundly not
woman-friendly.

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 Conclusion
Multiple transitions in Balkan societies define the complexities of
women and science in many ways differently then is the case with
other transitional countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Effective
and efficient policies require contextual knowledge, the type of
knowledge which can creatively deal with the multiple stratum
(local/regional/global layers) coexisting in Balkan societies, as well
with their diachronistic (premodern/modern/postmodern) character.
Concrete actions and measures in favour of female scientists in the
Balkans should not instrumentalise women even further for the sake of
“catching-up” with the centre, but should be rewarding for women
themselves. The economy of women’s sacrifice, which has done much
to shape societal and scientific developments in the Balkans, should be
replaced by the economy of pleasure and rewards, and the joy of
creativity and discovery. Women are entitled as much as men to
experiment, discover, invent, create and finally, be rewarded socially,
economically and emotionally for what they do and who they are.

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Chapter 4

Hungarian Women Scientists Returnees:

Becoming a Cultural Minority or
Being Integrated into the Elite?24

Introduction
This chapter is based on a mapping exercise, performed as a small
qualitative exploratory research, which was a part of a wider project
(NEWS – Network on Ethnicity and Women Scientists) aiming to
establish the network of minority women scientists in different EU
countries. It served as one of the elements of the knowledge base for
the formulation of policy measures to improve the integration of
minority women scientists in EU. The most concrete contribution of
this text is an effort to strengthen the networking of minority women
scientists throughout Europe, by expanding the very notion of
“minority women scientists,” through the inclusion of those women
who might feel and identify themselves as “minority” due to:
• their specific mobility patterns;
• specific factors of exclusion (i.e. locationality or country of origin).
While belonging to a “minority” group is often taken as self-evident
in the core countries (EU 15), because of their colonial and migratory
history, the issue is much more complex in countries at the
semiperiphery, such as Hungary, where the self-evident minority status,
except in the case of the Roma, or recently, the Chinese, is more difficult
to determine. Minorities in East and Central European countries are

24 This research has been done and text has been written as part of the NEWS project.

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often not racially distinctive because they are “historical minorities.”
They become minorities because of the shifting border lines, due to large
migrations, or due to different religious denominations.
Furthermore, because of the enlargement process, different
countries “at the border of Europe” are being included into the EU to
a different degree, thus creating a new source of inequality between
different European (continental!) Populations and, consequently,
intensifying migration flows. Inclusion of some countries is at the
same time exclusion of others. One of the most dramatic
consequences of exclusion due to the level of “Europeaness” (the
stage of EU accession) is related to visa regimes that different
countries “at the border” are exposed to. However, beyond the
administratively created differences between the countries at the
semiperiphery of Europe (those which have become EU members
and those which have not), they share real and multiple similarities
on the level of societal, economic, political and cultural organization.1
Moreover, semiperipheral societies of Europe (East and Central
Europe and the Balkans) today have similar historical legacies of
former communist regimes that make them distinctively different in
respect to both gender power relations and position of science and
scientists in those countries. The ENWISE Report of the European
Commission (2003) convincingly demonstrated that the position of
women scientists in the countries of Enlargement (“New Europe”) is
determined by the unfavorable status of the science sector and the
scientific profession in those countries, rather than by their
patriarchal structures. Although there are many similarities between
East and West in the patterns of exclusion of women from the
highest posts in decision making in the field of science, the fact is
that their life chances are more determined by the country of origin
and the location they belong to in the global hierarchies, than by the
denial of their merits in local contexts. For example, if salaries are

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compared between university professors in the East and the West,
differences between countries are much more pronounced then
differences between female and male university professors” salaries
in the respective countries. The main inequalities emerge from
locationality. Location is the root cause of inequality, especially from
a global perspective, while gender is only secondary. Brain-drain
patterns are convincingly demonstrating that while the differences in
mobility between men and women have decreased, the effort to
emigrate from unfavorable locations is actually very similar. This
brain-drain migration, consisting of those who are “whites,” but
“whites” who share neither the privileges of former colonial powers
(which are now mainly the core countries), nor the discrimination
based on former colonial status of their countries, creates new
minorities, those of Eastern European women and men. “Whiteness”
of the Eastern Europeans has a very different meaning than the
“whiteness” of “old” Europe that had a colonial past.
However, exactly because these migrants, women and men, are
“white” and “European” (belonging to the European continent),
because they do not belong and cannot be connected either to the
“Global South,” or to the “Global North,” they stay invisible. Another
reason for their invisibility is the fact that many of the semiperipheral
countries of Europe which are strongly attracted by the EU project
simply deny their difference from “Old Europe.” The whole effort to
“become Europe” within those countries is ideologically and politically
constructed as a denial of the difference between “East” and “West.” So
the current situation is highly paradoxical on both the theoretical and
the conceptual level. Generally speaking, within gender studies,
neither “North” nor “South,” neither “West” nor “East,” wants to
acknowledge the existence of the difference of semiperiphery based on
location. At the moment the only legitimate, politically correct
difference is the North-South difference. Still, another perspective is
emerging in the development and policy-making literature related to

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postcommunist societies. However, there are relatively few efforts to
make the connection between these theoretical insights and gender
studies (Gal, Kligman, 2000).
Hierarchies between different locations enhance the migration
flows of scientists. Still, these migrations are not simply one-way;
instead they are increasingly becoming complex, circular, nomadic,
and unsystematic. More and more scientists from the East live in
constant flux. Moreover, the migratory experience could actually
increase the division between those who are the “majority” and those
who, owing to their transnational experience, become the “new”
minority. Although these processes might look very marginal,
individual and inconsistent, the scope of scientific transnational
migration in the form of “brain circulation” has grown to an
unprecedented level (Daxner, 2002). This is especially the case with
educational and scientific migrations from Eastern Europe. Cultural,
professional, epistemic and gender consequences of such migrations
simply cannot be ignored in future policy-making, nor in future
deconstruction of knowledge produced by nomadic scientists.
The patterns of “simple” exclusions, existing in the core countries,
with their specific history of colonialism, cannot easily be translated into
the complex interactions emerging between the new majorities and the
new minorities created by contemporary scientific migrations. Thus, this
research challenges the major assumption on which the NEWS project
was based: that there are some “obvious” minorities in the EU countries,
which enable gender, race and ethnicity to reinforce each other in the
processes of exclusion. Contrary to that assumption, this research was
trying to explore whether the very experience of migration in fact creates
a specific “minority” experience, and whether that experience works in
favor of alienation and marginalization, even creating a new minority
status, or in favor of re-integration into the scientific elite in the home
country. Rather than offer any concrete answers to the numerous issues

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tackled in this mapping exercise, this research actually opens the space
for further investigation of the problems in question. It problematizes
the notion of “minority” by emphasizing cultural aspects of mobility
experiences of women scientists, those related to gender and
organizational cultures of host and home country. In short, the objective
of this text is to turn attention to the complex dynamics of the processes
of integration (into the scientific “elite”), on one hand, and
“minoritization” (acquiring a “minority” status within that “elite”), on
the other hand, both of which are taking place in contemporary
transnational migrations of women scientists throughout Europe. This
approach has very tangible implications for policy-making in the field of
scientific mobility schemes in the EU today.

Theoretical Framework
The starting assumption for this mapping exercise is that women
scientists from the semiperiphery of Europe experience their
mobility differently than is the case with women scientists from the
core countries (Blagojević, 2004; Blagojević, 2006). The location
they come from, the semiperiphery influences both the quality of
work culture and the quality of gender culture in their scientific
organizations. In comparison to the core countries, the organization
of scientific work might be more traditional, less competitive, and
more hierarchical. Gender relations in the work place, on the other
hand, could be more sexually charged because the concept of sexual
harassment is newly introduced in those countries, and generally
relations can be more patriarchal, hierarchical and undermining
women’s authority. Women scientists who are returnees into the
countries of the semiperiphery are faced with challenge of becoming
a “cultural minority” upon their return, because they embrace other
values and standards in both scientific work and gender relations.

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They could, and often do, experience alienation, non-belonging,
rejection, underestimation, marginalization, discrimination.
The mobility of women scientists does not simply and
automatically translate into a career advantage, but it can, and often
does, become a new source of gender discrimination. Mobility is just
one of the strategies for women scientists to advance their knowledge,
and consequently, career. However, these two things do not
necessarily go hand in hand. Career advancement in the home country
could be prevented exactly because of their newly obtained difference
(more knowledge, higher expectations). Their temporary absence,
furthermore, could jeopardize their position in the institutions. They
could stay out of the power networks, which are usually “old boy’s
networks,” and thus stay in a marginalized position. Their higher level
of knowledge, upon their return, could turn against them, if they are
not institutionally supported, because they could be seen as a “threat”
to the “old ways.” As opposed to mobility as a possible strategy for
career advancement, another strategy could turn out to be much more
rewarding – the institutional strategy, i.e., staying in one place and
advancing owing to networks and clans. However, that strategy might
also be a better fit for men than for women, who are disadvantaged
initially within the institution, as well as after their return. In other
words, it is an open question whether migration of women scientists,
on a larger scale, actually contributes to their “elite integration” or not.
Further on, women’s choices and experiences are formed under a set
of specific characteristics and circumstances, among which their
generation and family situation play the most important roles.
Individual career, mobility pattern and family cycle are more
interlinked in the case of women scientists than in the case of their
male counterparts.
For the purpose of this exploratory research, it was supposed that,
upon their return, women scientists-returnees to their home

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countries can have two different sets of experiences, based on a
comparison with the host country, which turn them into the “cultural
minority” in their home country:
• Different scientific organization at home institution (more
patriarchal, more hierarchical, more clannish) (SO)
• Different organization of gender relations (in the work and in
general, more patriarchal) (GO)
These experiences are possible exactly because of the experiences
of mobility, which enabled the comparison of settings. In other
words, what could have been taken for granted before the migration,
can become a source of discomfort, problem, alienation, even
conflict, after the migration. The influence of migration is seen as
complex: on one hand, it creates conditions for personal upward
mobility, but on the other, it can inhibit mobility, due to a lack of
adequate epistemic communities and institutional support.
The major assumption in this mapping exercise was that scientific
organization (SO) and organization of gender relations (GO) together
create the organizational culture of scientific institutions/organizations.
This means that the organizational culture of scientific organizations is
two-dimensional. Furthermore, three fields were explored:
• Experiences in other countries, organizational culture (SO and
GO and interconnectedness),
• Experiences after the return, organizational culture (SO and GO)
• Plans for new migrations (in connection with SO and GO as
push and pull factors of migration).
• Major research questions were:
• What role does organizational culture, consisting both of
scientific culture and gender culture, play in push/pull factors
of the migrations of women scientists from the semiperiphery?

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 • Does the mobility of women scientists contribute to their
career promotion in the home countries, enabling them to
become part of the “scientific elite,” or does it work “against
them” after the return, by turning them into a specific “cultural
minority” within their institutions and society at large?
• Finally, how do they experience gender relations in their
working environments in the host and home countries, and
what role does the different organization of gender relations
play in their feelings of “belonging” as opposed to “alienation”?
Hungary, like other new members of EU, is faced with intense
brain-drain. So, it is important to understand core rationales behind
migrations in both directions, as well as factors that influence them
and what strategies individual women scientists apply. The gender
dimension of migrations cannot be reduced to family matters, but
also needs to include specific gender aspects of organization of both
the everyday and professional life.
Another aspect related to the brain drain of women scientists
from the semiperiphery is the fact that the processes of EU
integration and globalisation have created very different conditions
for mobility and “brain circulation” of scientists from those countries.
This creates a fundamentally different situation from twenty years
ago, when the decision to “go back” or “to stay” had different
implications, and was related to long-term life decisions. Making
mobility of scientists easier, by lifting barriers for mobility and
providing many more opportunities for it, creates a different type of
migration, which could be described as “circulation.” Moreover, as
migration patterns of scientists throughout Europe change, as
creation of the “European Research Area” is taking place, and as
work patterns change from steady into more flexible and temporary,
the very decision “to stay” or “to go” becomes more dependent on
circumstances than on life strategies. This situation can especially be

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observed if different generations of women scientists from the
semiperiphery are compared. In a paradoxical way, “openness” of a
country and increased opportunities for migration could in turn
create a higher inclination to stay in the home country, because
shorter visits can enable a better work-life balance. Additionally,
increased competition in the labor market, including the scientific
labor market, can increase the motivation for return, as safety
networks or some care provisions might be better developed in the
home country.
While individual decisions seem to be, at the first glance, highly
individualized, certain patterns still emerge, revealing more stable
social structures. In other words, even when an individual decision is
experienced as individual, based on individual preferences, it reflects
deeper social patterns of exclusions, inclusions and interrelated life
chances. Scientists being, by the nature of their profession, analytical
and systematic, they are also most probably capable of making rational
choices, by maximizing benefits and minimizing risks. However,
“rationality” is here taken in a much wider sense than simple
materialistic cost-benefit analysis, and includes different aspects of
quality of life and work, which govern a scientist’s decisions to stay or
to move. These decisions might be gendered, as experiences of
mobility are also gendered.
Migrations have great policy relevance for the scientific
organizational, and a profound effect on women scientists. Scientific
migrations in general increase competitiveness and innovation, but
they also contribute to structural change of organizational cultures of
research and academic institutions. Mobility could strongly influence
the very character of knowledge making, including epistemic stand
points. Merging of different traditions deeply changes the very
understanding of “knowledge production.” The impact is two-
dimensional: on the host organization, and on the home organization.

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While scientists often need to “assimilate” in a host organization, it is
still very probable that if represented in large numbers they change a
host organization as well. Another direction of influence also takes
place – returnees change their home institution. When women
scientists migrate, when they circulate, they create a “transnational
migratory space” which could contain both characteristics of local
academic and research cultures, as well as characteristics of emerging
global, or EU, scientific culture, with its set of written and unwritten
rules that can bring new inclusions and exclusions and different
hierarchies. Transnational migrations of scientists have a high
potential to cancel the core-semiperiphery hierarchies, but they can
also reproduce them if competitiveness prevails over cooperation.
From a policy perspective, it is important to understand how
different contexts with their specific scientific and gender cultures
influence women scientists” decisions to migrate or to stay. This is
relevant from the perspective of “brain-drain” policies, but also from
the perspective of the creation of scientific cultures open to diversity.
As diversity is an important aspect of the science-society
relationship, and migrations clearly contribute to diversity, the full
impact of migrations cannot be reduced to individual perceptions of
costs and benefits, although these perceptions are at the core of
individual decision-making about migrations. Policies aiming at
mobility increase diversity, and they should also, consequently,
promote a transformation of working environments of scientists
towards inclusion, diversity, equality and meritocracy.
However, the question which remains open is whether there really is
increased diversity in “more advanced” scientific contexts, or, is instead
the process of “globalized hierarchical unification” taking place? The
other possibility would mean that in the mode of “globalisation as
neocolonization,” hierarchies are becoming inevitable, but less visible (in
the sense of race, male/female, even age). If the latter is the case, then

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the starting position of scientists eventually determines their final
position in the global knowledge hierarchies.
The starting assumption in this mapping exercise was that science
culture and gender culture are two dimensions of organizational
culture which have strong push and pull effects for the migration of
women scientists; and that migrations of women scientists can lead to
promotion and marginalization. Which direction their career will take
depends on a set of contextual and individual circumstances (including
scientific discipline, life cycle in connection to development of science;
status of the country in relation to EU; family cycle; system of
professional and personal support networks, etc.). However, it was
important for the purpose of this mapping exercise to emphasize that
there is no automatic positive consequence of migration as such, in
relation to institutional and professional promotion. Although one
could assume that individual gains from mobility, in terms of
knowledge and experience, are always rewarding, it can not be
presupposed that institutional responses of the home countries are
always positive. From the perspective of concrete aims of this project,
that would also mean that problems encountered by “nomadic women
scientists” in terms of their career should be addressed through
networking, especially since the number of those belonging to the
“transnational cultural minority” might very well continue to grow
under the present conditions of globalisation.
A number of more concrete hypotheses were formulated as a
framework for the questionnaire and consequent analysis:
• Women scientists returnees represent a “cultural minority” in
the science and gender culture of their societal and working
environments, because they identify differences in SO and GO,
and they feel alienated, dissatisfied and frustrated by them.
• Experiences of “science culture” and “gender culture” and
comparisons of host country and home country shape the

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 decisions to move or stay. The more the organizational culture
is exclusionary and hierarchical towards women (in fact, more
patriarchal), the stronger will be the motivation of women
scientists to leave the country.
• Once they recognize their marginalization and/or alienation,
become aware of it, they develop either “escape strategies” or
“adaptive strategies” (if they decided to stay).
• A more democratic scientific culture is connected to a more
gender-sensitive working environment, more successful
teamwork and higher motivation. It connects better with society’s
needs and therefore increases the motivation of scientists.

Country Profile
Both the brain-drain and women’s position in science in Hungary
are shaped by a set of specific historical developments that the
country has gone through from the Second World War until today. In
Hungary, as in other former communist countries, women’s
participation in the labour force was considerable, due to the
communist project of fast industrialization. The mass employment of
women in Hungary started in the 1950s, based on both economic and
ideological pressures. The prevailing family model was one of “two
earners,” with two low incomes. Besides being employed, women had
to bear a high burden of unpaid housework, although there were
some important social services at the family’s disposal as well
(workers canteens, a well developed network of kindergartens, etc).
Men dominated political life, but there were quotas to secure the
representation of women. However, this participation was formal,
since in the one-party system there was no real political
representation. Since 1945, women’s participation in higher
education has been increasing constantly.

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 Table 1
University and college students, Hungary %
year women men
1970 44,7 55,3
1980 49,9 50,1
1990 48,8 51,2
2000 53,6 46,4
2001 53,4 46,6

Source: Papp E., Groo D, 2003 (original source: Hungarian

Central Statistical Office)
As in other communist societies, science was under strict control
of the Communist Party. After 1949, the research system was
transformed and the role of universities was restricted only to
education, while research was placed in several research institutions.
The status of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) was shaped
according to the Soviet model. However, things started to change
from the mid “60s:
“The number of research institutes was multiplied between 1951
and 1972. During the second half of the 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s,
as the political environment became a bit looser, the Hungarian
research centres started to take part in the activities of international
(Western) scientific associations. The so called civil scientists (who
were not members of the party) could get back to work in the 1960s –
not to the universities, which had educational roles, but to the
academic research centres. This phenomenon enhanced the scientific
capacity of these institutes and sometimes it became the engine of
the international relationships.” (Papp E., Groo D, 2003)

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 The number and proportion of women researchers has been
continuously increasing from 1970s on, but it still didn not reach 30%
by 1990, despite the high proportion of women among the active
population (more than 40%) with a higher education degree. The
entrance of women into science was enabled by a strong ideological
push (“women are equal to men”), as well as by some everyday life
organizational aspects (i.e. nursery and kindergartens offered at a low
price by the workplace) and family support (grandparents caring for
children). Still, it was rare to find women in positions of decision
making in science.
In 1989 the political system in Hungary changed, from one-party
communist regime to multiparty democracy. The first democratic
elections were held in 1990. Parallel with the political transition, the
transition towards market economy took place. One of the most
direct consequences of the transition was change in the labour
market. Between 1990 and 1998, the number of employed decreased
dramatically (by one third) and unemployment spread quickly. The
changes in the labour market affected women considerably. In 1989,
78% of the women of working age were active, but by 1995, this
number had decreased to 61% (Papp E., Groo D, 2003).
As in other countries in transition, democratic change was,
paradoxically, followed by very low women’s participation on all
levels of political decision making. The proportion of women
candidates in the Parliament has been between 8.5 and 12.5% in the
first four democratic elections (Papp E., Groo D, 2003).
In 2004 Hungary became a member of the EU. This has had some
effect on the establishment of institutional gender mechanisms in the
country, but in reality there are indicators that inequalities even
increased. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2006,
Hungary had the lowest rank among East and Central European
countries when it comes to gender equality. Hungarian women

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receive only 52% of the salary of men for similar work (according to
the survey results); their labour force participation is 42%; they make
34% of legislators, senior officials and managers; 61% of professional
and technical workers; only 10% of members of the Parliament and
12% of ministers (Global Gender Gap Report, 2006).
Transition to market economy and democracy also brought a
change of values and attitudes. Although it was previously considered
“normal” for a woman to be employed, shifts of public opinion on
this issue occurred. In a nation-wide survey conducted in 1991, 33%
of the women and 43% of the men had the opinion that it can be
equally satisfactory to be a housewife as to have a job. In 2000 the
figures were different: 62% of women and 65% of men considered
having a job and being a housewife equally satisfactory (Papp E.,
Groo D, 2003). Employment is becoming an option, not a necessity,
at least for those who can afford it, and it is certainly not an ideal. At
the same time, the public perception of gender inequalities is
changing. “Gender blindness” is much more common among those
who have lower education, as could be seen from the following table:

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 Table 2
The proportion of people who agree with the sentence "Being a
man or a woman influences career opportunities strongly in
Hungary" by educational level, 2000 N=1500, %
women men
primary school 32 29
skilled worker 37 30
secondary school graduate 40 30
higher education degree 50 22

Source: Papp E., Groo D, 2003 (original source: Hungarian

Central Statistical Office)
Like in other countries in transition (ENWISE Report), the
prestige of the scientific profession has been declining steadily in
Hungary since the beginning of the “changes.” There are intense
internal and external migrations of scientists (from research
institutions and academia to NGOs and the private sector, and to
other countries, respectively), but statistics are not available. In
general, scientists face the huge problem of funding their research
and following their own research interests if staying at “home.”
Although the situation concerning infrastructure is slowly improving,
the general situation is still much worse than in the Western
countries. However,
“Male scientists, usually being in a higher position, secure better
conditions much more effectively (laboratory access, equipment, co-
workers, financial support) than women. Men are better in building
networks for fostering their own interests than women; therefore
they find and exploit the opportunities (e.g. grants, other means of
support).” (Papp, Groo, 2003).

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 Women Scientists in Hungary
The situation of women scientists in Hungary has been analysed
in the ENWISE Report, issued by the EU Commission in 2004. The
ENWISE (Enlarge the Women and Science to East) expert group was
established to examine the situation in the Central and Eastern
European countries and the Baltic States. The report was published
in September 2004 with the title “Waste of talents: Turning private
struggles into a public issue – Women and Science in the ENWISE
countries.” Major findings of this Report are the following:
• There are big differences between scientific disciplines (the
proportion of women is high in the social sciences but very low
in engineering)
• Women scientists are concentrated in those fields where
salaries are the lowest and working conditions the worst
• Very few women scientists work in industry, where financial
conditions are the best
• More than 40% of PhD degrees are acquired by women, but
their representation is much lower in the upper levels of the
hierarchy (ENWISE Report, 2003).
Women scientists in the ENWISE countries are exposed both to
horizontal and vertical segregation. However, one of the important
findings was also that, contrary to prejudice, women in the CEE
countries had much higher probability to be employed, to be
researchers, and to be university professors, in comparison to EU-15.

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 Graph 1

Proportion of women on the labour market, 2001

70,0 62,9
60,0
46,7 46,5
50,0 43,1
39,5 employment
40,0
27,2 professionals
%

30,0
researchers
20,0
10,0
0,0
EU-CEE EU-15

Source: Papp, 2006.

However, these “positive statistics” were resulting from two sets
of unfavorable social facts: 1. women were concentrated in the fields
where expenditures were the lowest and 2. Intense feminization of
scientific professions is connected to the lowering of social status and
financial rewards for scientific professions. According to the
Hungarian researcher Eszter Papp:
“The prestige of the scientific career has been decreasing for the
past 15 years, many talented researchers have left the field or gone
abroad and the governmental commitment to support R&D has not
been very explicit. These factors of course had big impact on human
resources and – just like in any other occupations where salaries are
low – the proportion of women has been growing among people
working in science. Remarkably – but not uncommonly - though this
change has not appeared in decision-making bodies and positions,
which can be seen through the following example: among the leaders
of higher education institutions the proportion of women was 12,9%

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in 2000 and 12,3% in 2001, while women constitute the majority of
graduates (53,8% in 2001 and 48,8% in 1990).” (Papp E., 2006)
In Hungary, according to Papp, “33.7% of researchers, 62.4% of
technical staff and 66.2% of other staff in research are women. The
proportion of women among researchers in governmental institutes
increased from 31.1% to 38.2%, and in higher education from 29.1%
to 35.3% between 1990 and 2002, but in the private sector it
decreased from 24.7% to 23.7%.”
Graph 2

Proportion of women among researchers in Hungary % , inner

circle: 1990, outer circle: 2002

natural sciences
26,9 technical sciences and
47,4
23,9 engineering
43,5 20,6 m edical sciences

21,7 agricultural sciences

33,9 social sciences

23,8 46,0
32,4
hum anities
32,8

Source: Papp, 2006

The scissors diagram is showing that the situation in Hungary, as
well as in other countries, may be described as follows: the higher the
scientific level, the lower the percentage of women.

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 Graph 3

T y pi ca l ca r eer of wom en a n d m en in a ca dem i a

90
86,3

80

70 71,3

64,8
2001 women
60 60,2
2001 men
56,5
2003 women
53,7
2003 men
50
%

46,3
43,5
40 39,8
35,2
30 28,7

20
14
10
student PhD student assistant assistant associate professor
professor professor /
senior lecturer

Source: Papp, 2006

A recent survey aiming to explore how ENWISE recommendations
are being carried out in countries such as Hungary has shown that a
considerable amount of gender blindness prevails in the majority of
science and academic institutions. A good indicator of such gender
blindness is the fact that the majority of the respondents (N=36)
thought that women and men have equal chances for promotion
(Papp, 2006). Many of them justified their opinion by saying that

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promotion depends exclusively on professional performance – and a
large majority of female respondents also shared this opinion. Many
respondents stated that there is “no need to change anything,” since
there is “no discrimination” and since “performance counts, not
gender” (Papp, 2006).
This survey revealed, similar to other surveys in Slovakia, Check
Republic, and Slovenia, that “gender blindness” in postcommunist
societies is blocking a deeper understanding of the problems of
gender inequality and preventing adequate social mobilization to
deal with it. There are many different sources for “gender blindness”
which cannot be discussed here. However, it is worth noting that
“gender blindness” distorts the perceptions of gender inequality and
minimizes the effects of possible policy measures. Also, it is shared
by both women and men.

Methodology
For the purpose of this research a questionnaire was construed for
a semi-structured interview. Women researchers were approached
based on an initial list of potential respondents provided by Ester
Papp, a researcher on women scientists in Hungary (6). Additionally,
an e-mail was sent to the list of Hungarian researchers provided by
CEC WYS database (15)25. Only two respondents replied by e-mail,
and one was interviewed (3), while another two respondents were
interested, but did not reply in time. The low response rate could be
explained by several factors:
• Women researchers are very busy,

25 CEC WYS is Central European Centre for Women and Youth in Science.

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 • Often, they do not have a clear idea about the next steps in
their professional career, and that is especially the case with
younger researchers,
• Possibly, the questionnaire was too demanding,
• There were time limitations which prevented some researchers
to take part, and
• There is no systematic database in Hungary which could be
used for sampling of scientific “returnees.”
However, the high quality of responses, together with the
following three distinct cases enable a rich qualitative analysis and
offer inspiration for further research. The presentation of the three
cases is based on narratives, while a more analytical approach will be
used on a larger sample in further research.All three respondents
agreed for their names to be used in the analysis.

Three cases

Interview no. 1:

Edith – The difficulties of “getting ahead” in Hungary

Edit Nada’s is a young scholar and researcher with an already
considerable record of academic career movements abroad. Although
only 35, she is already an Assistant Professor at the University of
Pecs, Hungary, and has spent three academic years abroad in three
different countries with diverse scientific environments.
After earning her BA in Medicine at the University of Pecs at the age
of 25, she spent nine months on a scholarship at the Necker-Enfants

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Malades Hospital in France. After this experience, she continued
working and studying at the University of Pecs, and in 2002, when she
was 31 years old, she had another important scientific experience abroad
– she spent a year as a visiting researcher at the Regina Elena Cancer
Institute in Italy. After Italy, she again returned to the University of Pecs,
where she was awarded a PhD in Public Health and Preventive Medicine
in 2005, at the age of 34. That same year she went for a nine-month-
long research fellowship in the United States.
Being a single child in a family that lived in a small town, with a
highly educated mother (tertiary degree), might have influenced her
choice of a scientific career path. She also constantly emphasises that
the fact that she is single and does not have children might have made
it easier for her to pursue highly mobile and demanding career choices.
Her main motivation for engaging in international scientific
exchanges was to “broaden (her) scientific knowledge.” She finds it
difficult to analyse in detail the differences between the organizational
culture (scientific and gender culture) of her host institutions since she
“wasn”t really part of it as a visiting researcher.” On the other hand,
she describes her home University as a relatively undiscriminating
environment, with the only difference being the disproportionately
high number of men employed in science in comparison to women.
However, she expresses considerable frustration with the overall
organizational culture of her present institution, which is
“hierarchical,” and makes it “hard to get ahead.”
As a consequence of the atmosphere created by such an
organizational culture, she wishes to find a new job “which is more
dynamic, with more focus on (my) research and less focus on
administrative tasks.” Thus, in her case, the hierarchical and overly
bureaucratic organizational culture of her home institution clearly
makes for a push factor influencing her future career choices. However,
when asked about her plans for future migrations, she does not name

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any “special plan, yet.” What should be taken into consideration is that
Ms. Nadasi is a “fresh” returnee – her nine months as a visiting
researcher at the UAMS in the USA have ended in 2005, and this might
explain why she does not talk about precisely formulated “escape
strategies”, “yet,” though she clearly expresses a sense of frustration with
the situation to which she had to adapt after returning.
The strategies she uses in order to adapt to the climate to which
she has returned as well as to plan her future career/migration
moves are mostly focused on networking with other researchers and
academics, but she is also considering a change of field.
She has returned to Hungary from her three academic stays
abroad because she had to – “that was one of the conditions of (my)
contract”. As the most important resource gained at the institutions
abroad she names “scientific experience”, while the most important
gain after returning to Hungary was “resuming (my) family and
personal life.” After returning, she regrets loosing the friendships
made during her stay abroad, similarly as she had regretted leaving
her friends behind upon leaving Hungary, and also missed the
mobility provided by owning a car in Hungary.
She thinks that academic migration has a very important and
positive influence on the careers of women scientists since it makes it
easier for them “to get ahead” and on the other hand, “with no
migration, people think that one is not good enough for her work.”
She notes that the recent accession of Hungary to the EU makes
academic mobility of Hungarian women scientists easier, while for
her personally, the alleviating conditions consist of her belonging to
the younger generation as well as her being single and being involved
in research work.
Her recommendations for improving the gender organization and
scientific organization of Hungarian institutions for women scientists
are to make working hours more flexible and family-friendly.

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According to her, women scientists would benefit from an
organizational culture which takes into account women scientists”
needs for balancing family and work – in contrast to the present
situation in which working hours are “too restricted,” and there is no
time “to pick the kids up from school, to prepare dinner etc.” Also,
scientific migrations policies for women scientists should take into
consideration how important it is for women scientists to be able to
“take the whole family” with them when undertaking scientific
migrations.

Interview no. 2:
Maria - “I could buy more books (abroad)!”
Feminist philosopher Maria Joo hesitates before saying that she is
57 years old, and later on she eloquently explains her awareness of
ageism in academia exemplified by the scarcity of scholarships
available to women scientists over 40 years of age. She has a tenured
professorship position at the Department of Philosophy at the ELTE
University in Budapest, Hungary, where she has been teaching for the
last 27 years. During this time, she has had an opportunity for two
considerably long scholarship periods in Germany: from 1982 to 1984,
she was at the University of Tuebingen on the DAAD Scholarship,
while from 1991 to 1993 she was at the University of Wupertal. Also,
she was awarded the Soros scholarship on the RRS-research support
scheme by the Open Society Institute, but this research period of 2
years she spent at her home institution in Budapest.
Professor Joo was born and grew up in Budapest, with one
another sibling in her family of origin. Her mother originally came
from Transylvania and had 8 years of primary education. She is
divorced and has one daughter.

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 The core motivation behind her academic migrations is explicit:
“for the scientific career it is essential to spend years or as much as
possible studying in the universities abroad.” She has embarked
upon the philosophical career studying Greek philosophy, and
focusing especially on Plato, but had soon encountered the
limitations of the lack of opportunities in this field in her own
country. As she puts it: “Since Hungary is a small country – there
were no Plato scholars!”
During her first 2 years on a scholarship in Germany, she was not
very much aware of the differences in organizational culture between the
University of Tuebingen and her home university. The difference she did
perceive, on a more personal level and based on her observations from
everyday life and interactions with students and colleagues, was an
interesting insight that “German women were more self-assured than
Hungarian women…more confident and self-assertive.”
She also reflects upon the differences between the scientific
organization and gender culture of German and Hungarian
universities, which she could easily read from, for example, typical
behaviour of the students. The University of Tuebingen is one of the
best universities in Germany, more advanced on a scientific level
than her home university, and a richer environment for a Plato
scholar such as herself. However, the students were also different,
and this difference impressed her and affected her future teaching
techniques greatly. The German students were more active than their
Hungarian counterparts; they spoke more in class, and regularly
disagreed with the professor. She remembers how in a Hungarian
classroom there would be a silence after the professor poses a
question, how “nobody was willing to answer immediately,” and how
“it was quite rare that the students did not agree with the accepted
meaning of a philosophical question.” After returning to Hungary,
she would often compare the two educational systems in front of her

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students, and also ask them for the reasons of their comparative
“shyness.” They, as well as she, explain it through the effects of the
20 something years spent within the Hungarian educational system
– which is “more hierarchical, more old-style, teacher is always right;
you have to repeat what the teacher said.” The German system, in
comparison, was “much more active, effective, the students were
more engaged.”
This experience also affected her personally since she realized that
not only her students but also she was “more shy in speaking and
asking questions than German students or colleagues.” During her
fellowships in Germany, she started to realize that in contrast to
Hungarian universities, in Germany university courses are perceived
as a sort of a competition, and that she as well had to “make an effort
to speak more and be more active than I was used to be in Hungary,
in order to show what I know and that I am good enough and as good
as the others… (since) whoever is the most active, asks most
questions, speaks the most – is considered the best student!”
It is significant, however, that even in such a competitive
academic framework, in which the most visible/active students are
considered the best, she noticed the disparity between the genders:
female students in Hungary were even less active than male students,
while in Germany, there was a “difference in the level of initiative
between men and women, but not as much as in Hungary.”
During her second stay in Germany, in the 1990s, she had an
interesting insight into the organizational culture of her host
institution, since she succeeded, together with other two women
philosophy professors, to start a new course in women’s philosophy
at the University of Wupertal. Initially, they did not either receive
support or face resistance from their male colleagues: “they were not
very happy about the idea, but they tolerated it, they did not have
anything against it.” But when they wanted to continue teaching the

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same course the following semester, male philosophy professors were
indignant. “They were more scared about it, they asked: is it really so
important? Why do you want to continue? You should better stop!”
They did continue, and for Maria Joo these two years have been an
“inspiring experience” – she taught, worked on her feminist positions
on Plato scholarship, published papers, attended conferences etc.
Her reasons for returning to Hungary after the end of the scholarship
period changed in time. During her first fellowship in Germany, she had
an “unquestionable intention to return.” She was married, and her
husband had stayed behind in Hungary. Also, she explains how in the
“1980s, there was an exciting oppositional climate” in Hungary,
especially in the universities, so that “it was not so bad for us, it was not
intolerable.” She stresses that she felt very well in Tuebingen, had no
language problems whatsoever, had friends and thoroughly enjoyed her
time there. However, in Hungary, she had a husband, family and
friends, as well as a university position waiting for her.
Her return from her second academic period in Germany was
more troubled. She was divorced “already” at that time, and her
daughter was two years old. Although she still felt the same
emotional pull for returning to her home country – to friends, family
and her stable job at the ELTE University, she was also seriously
considering the available opportunities in Germany. However, she
realized that there was a major “practical reason” for her return: she
could not get a suitable position in a German university – “there were
masses of unemployed philosophers in Germany in the “1990s… I
didn’t see any chance to get a position as a philosopher in Germany.”
She is acutely aware of comparative advantages of academic
migration for a woman scientist from Hungary. She describes the
resources gained during her 2 stays in Germany as “important
opportunities – I could become a member of different scientific
organizations and philosophic associations. During that time, I could

146
afford to take part in conferences more often.” She describes in
painstaking detail several examples of important scholarly
conferences that she has had to miss while in Hungary, due to the
unavailability of travel funds. This makes for a very strong
observation about the resources lost to women scientists from
Hungary upon returning to their home country:
“Being without financial resources after returning to the home
country is a serious obstacle for us. It is my personal experience that
colleagues coming from Germany or Netherlands can afford to take
part in conferences from their salaries, because a university
position in Europe means that you can afford to take part in
conferences. And to have this position in CEE means that you
cannot afford it, because our salaries are so small in comparison.”
The resources that remained after returning to Hungary consist of
intellectual and scientific contacts, as well as friendships. However,
even these important resources depend on the possibilities for
mobility that help to keep them alive:
“If you cannot go and stay for some days abroad, taking part in
conferences, these contacts become less active or they vanish…
Every scholar needs regular visits and stays for working in libraries
or for having access to richer scientific libraries than those in
Hungary. It is a permanent problem to organize scientific visits to
the nearest good scientific library, for example the library in
Vienna, for feminism.”
Her analysis of the push factors for academic migration is quite
straightforward: “It is so simple – living in a Western country means
that you have more resources for scientific work.” She also explains
how the biggest loss after returning was in the standard of living,
which was much higher in Germany. As a very telling example, for an
academic, she could “buy more books” there.

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 She has no definite plans for future migrations, also due to
discrimination that scientists over 40 face in respect to availability of
fellowships and financial assistance (which she sees as an issue that
specifically affects women scientists, due to the demands of family and
child-rearing). However, her ideal would be an academic career full of
temporary scientific migrations, which is unfortunately difficult for
women scientists from CEE to realize, due to limited opportunities.
Also due to having problems with finding resources for “escape”
strategies,” she has given considerable energy to developing
“adaptive” strategies: being involved in women’s NGOs in Budapest,
using her university courses to attract at times as many as 100 or
more students to her lectures on feminist philosophy, holding
monthly discussion meetings of an informal study group on feminist
philosophy for the last 10 years etc. She interestingly describes the
needs that led to the development of one of those adaptive strategies:
“That was my problem – that if I had written something in feminist
philosophy, in order to have a discussion of my ideas, I had to travel to
Vienna, to the University of Vienna, to discuss my ideas. It was the
reason I founded this (study) circle, to discuss my ideas in Budapest.
This is a kind of a strategy to develop the structure we need.”
She also explains the problems for scientists created by the
particular situation in the region:
“In our universities, the salaries are so bad that everybody has a
second job, and you are working very hard to make a living, and
you cannot afford to make the time… Perhaps all of us have a
second job, and additional money-making strategies, and that takes
time which my Western scientific colleagues have for their work.
During the meeting of the Women’s Philosophers Association, I met
old friends from Netherlands and Germany. For them it is difficult
to understand about our second jobs! It is difficult for me to take
part in the symposiums because of it!”

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 She describes the effects of migration on the career of women
scientists as always positive: experience abroad in one’s CV always
leaves a good impression, as well as having a lasting influence on
one’s career and helping in career mobility. She also recognises the
importance of academic mobility in the “real scientific sense of
learning, making contacts, talking to colleagues and spending time at
good universities.”
She repeats that the obstacles to migration of women scientists
are mostly of financial nature, at least in this region. According to
her, “a woman scientist does not have a same career that a male
scientist has,” and this should be remedied through special positive
discrimination scholarships established to aid academic migration of
women scientists. She is not aware of any particular migration
policies directed at women scientists, but if so, they should definitely
involve a “possibility that if a woman scientist has a child she could
take the child with her,” as she herself did on her second stay in
Germany, as a young 34-year-old recently divorced woman scientist
with a two-year-old daughter.

Interview no. 3:
Beata - Staying abroad as “living in parentheses,” but “if
you lack this experience you cannot really trust yourself”
As a 45 year old woman scientist awarded the title of the Doctor of
Science and Research Adviser by the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences, which is the highest honour in the field, who already has 6
years of experience as the Head of Laboratory at the Institute of
Enzymology in Budapest, Hungary, Beata Vertessy provides both an
exemplary and an insightful look into the advantages and problems
of academic migration for women scientists from Hungary.

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 Beata grew up in Budapest as a single child of highly educated
parents – her mother had a tertiary university degree in Economics.
She is married and has two children, aged 16 and 18. She earned her
BA in Chemical Engineering at the Budapest Technical University
when she was 23 years old, the same year she got married. Afterwards,
she spent one year at the University of Chicago, where she got her MA
in Biology, at the age of 26. She returned to Hungary, where she
studied for a PhD at the Eotvos University in Budapest. She was
awarded the PhD at the age of 30, and simultaneously worked at the
Institute for Enzymology. At the same time, she also pursued her wish
to have children – when she was 27, she had her first child, and soon
after, when she was 29, she had her second child. In 1993 and 1994,
she spent two years on a post-doctorate in Germany – she was
awarded the Alexander von Humboldt scholarship at the University of
Saarland. Her 3rd important international academic experience came 5
years later in 1999, when she spent 6 months at the University of
Chicago as a visiting researcher. When she was 40, in 2000, she
became the Head of Laboratory at the Institute for Enzymology, and
was also awarded the international scholarship of the Howard Hughes
Institute from the USA, which was the 1st international grant given to
her home institution, and signified the start of her independent career.
That same year, she was awarded the Doctor of Science degree from
the Hungarian Academy of Science, and named the Research Advisor,
the highest honour in her field.
She describes a series of pull factors that motivated her to engage in
academic experiences abroad. First of all, it was “a great challenge.”
Also, it made it possible for her to “learn new techniques and look
around in other fields of investigation.” Additional interest factor was
the appeal of the USA as a “place of democracy” during her first stay
abroad in 1986, when Hungary was still a communist country. She felt
the pull factors even more intensively later on, at the time when she
went to Germany for her postdoctoral degree, since she had:

150
 “already realized that without having experience in different
labs you cannot really succeed in science… that after finishing your
PhD, you have to go abroad, to learn about other supervisors, other
techniques – it is essential! You have to be able to fit in different
groups and still do good research.”
She had returned from her first stay in the USA because she “felt
homesick” and, equally important, she “wanted to have children” and
didn”t want to “lose contact with (my) family, friends and with (my)
supervisor (in Hungary).” However, when explaining in depth the
reasons that motivated her return to Hungary, and also from her
other academic moves abroad, she tentatively names a kind of
“patriotism” as the major pull factor for her. She explains that she
“feels strongly about my country and my family,” and that when it
became apparent that she would have a chance to build a research
group in Budapest, she felt that she wanted to do what she could “to
show everybody that doing research in Hungary is possible, and that
it can be as good quality research as anywhere.” She mentions “some
difficulties” associated with realizing this ambitious project, but
brushes them aside as manageable.
Interestingly, and in contrast to the previous two interviewees,
she describes the scientific culture of her home institution as
democratic, equal, gender-sensitive and highly motivating, though at
times presenting some difficulties. She describes the Institute of
Enzymology as a small but extremely efficient institute which
provides a privileged position for its employees to do “excellent
science… and excellent work in terms of publishing papers and
getting grants.” For her, and for her colleagues, the Institute provides
a “framework for successful scientific work,” and she emphasises that
she has never experienced or noticed gender discrimination during
her career in this institution.

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 She gives a thorough comparison of the organizational cultures in
the host institutions in the USA, Germany and in Sweden. According
to her, women and men in the US, at research level positions, are
equal “in the lab, as well as outside of the lab.” However, when it
comes to professor positions, she noticed the discrimination of
women scientists, especially if they choose to have a family. In the
US, this precludes following the tenure track, at least in her field of
Biological Sciences. In Germany, she perceived the gender
organization within the scientific community as much more
problematic:
“In Germany, I don’t know how to put it nice enough; there is a
great amount of discrimination. Even within the University, I felt
that if I asked something from the technician, my request is
regarded differently than from a male postdoctoral student. Women
were treated differently even at the postdoctoral level.”
Another big problem affecting women scientists in Germany,
which she experienced first-hand, is the lack of childcare. It was
impossible to find childcare facilities, and she could only “survive”
with the help of a good friend who took care of her children in the
afternoons. The same problem affects women scientists in the USA
and other Western countries, though it is better taken care of in
Sweden, but her personal experience made her more familiar with
the situation in Germany. In addition, she did not perceive the
positive discrimination measures established in Sweden as helpful to
women, since she thinks that “only the quality of the research you are
capable of should count, and not your gender.”
She is acutely aware of the difference between herself (and scientists
with international academic/research experience) and other scientists
who have not studied abroad. She explains that her Hungarian
colleagues who haven”t studied abroad and have been supervised by
only one or two supervisors throughout their scientific career:

152
 “Lack the experience of studying abroad; they are less self-
confident because they were never really evaluated in an
independent way… [They] have only one person who judges how
good you are and I think that is not good, because you need to be
judged by several labs in order to really be able to evaluate yourself.
If you lack this experience you cannot really trust yourself.”
As the most important resources gained abroad she mentions
language skills, as well as the intensive focus on work in the US,
which she sometimes misses in Hungary. According to her, the US
labs and research teams are characterized by the “highest work
ethics” she has ever seen. This is something she also mentions as a
loss upon returning to Hungary, since it is hard to keep up “the very
sharp focus on work” in her home culture, though this might also be
caused by the fact that in Hungary she also has “a private life,” while
during her stay in the US she was primarily focused on “achieving a
specific goal.”
As a specific resource gained through her academic experience in
the US, she explains that in Biological Sciences
“Most of the researchers have spent some time in the States or
are doing research in the States, and if you want to be a partner in
these research investigations, you have to understand how they
think – when it comes to conferences, talks, publishing papers etc.
And to have an appreciation for all that, you really have to spend
some time there.”
As a resource gained during her academic experience in Germany
she mentions the know-how she obtained there: “When it comes to
grants, Germany is the main player in Europe, so getting to know
about European grants was important for me.”
As costs of migration she mentions the loss of family contacts and
goes on to explain that for her staying abroad means that she is

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 “Always living in parenthesis. If I am there, I am there for a
particular reason – to learn, to achieve something, but it is a suspended
state, and it is only here (in Hungary) that I can really live.”
Her future migration plans are well defined – she would like to
continue leading her research group at the Institute, and “may
consider” a sabbatical year in 2 or 4 years, as well as shorter
academic visits of several months. Her main career, as well as
migration, strategy consists of “doing good research.” She avoids
planned networking, since she feels that “if you are doing good
research work, and if you publish in good journals, the contacts will
follow. And these will be the contacts worth maintaining.”
Her strategy for managing private life during academic
migrations has always been the same – she has always taken her
family with her. Her husband is a mathematician, who usually holds
a position at the same foreign university as she does during that
period, and he has also always been a supportive presence in
managing the strategies of private life in migration situations. Her
children, now 16 and 18, have always accompanied them, and she
hopes they will also in the future.
She thinks that, unfortunately, women scientists are faced with a
difficult choice of choosing between a family and a scientific career,
unless they have a supportive partner who actively helps with the family
arrangements. She insists that for creating an advantageous situation for
women in science, a great deal of practical encouragement of women is
necessary, since women students often experience difficulties with
feelings of self-worth. Also, she comes back to the needs for good child-
care services, as well as transparent public policies that will aid women
and make known to a greater number of them that it is possible to have
both a family and a successful scientific career.
As an obstacle, she mentions the existence of male chauvinist
professors in the universities, and though she has not had personal

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experience of this kind, she hears from others of such cases of
discouragement of female students. Other possible improvements in
Hungary that could aid women scientists could be a greater presence
of positive female role models for women in science, a higher number
of women professors at the universities, as well as greater availability
of part-time jobs for pregnant women scientists or women scientists
with small children. She mentions positive practices of her home
Institute where they actively collaborate and keep women colleagues
staying at home with children involved, by sending them work they
can do from home, and communicating via email regularly.
Beata evaluates her specific experience as a woman scientist as an
enriching factor aiding her research efforts:
“Personally, I feel that it is an advantage to be a woman in
science. I see this difference in my male colleagues: their thinking is
much more simplistic. My experience of becoming a mother and of
organizing my time around small children forced me to be focused
and efficient, and it helps.”

Comparisons and Conclusions

These three cases reveal many differences in individual paths of
women scientists in Hungary. The three women belong to different
scientific fields, different generations, and have different family
patterns. However, they all share a positive attitude towards scientific
mobility, considering it as an absolutely necessary condition for
professional advancement. Mobility is seen as a key factor contributing
to the quality of research and knowledge, in three ways:
• By enabling better material conditions for work.
• By increasing the knowledge - active participation in
knowledge production in the host country.

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• From a gender perspective, mobility could be encouraging,
especially for women, because it increases their competence,
gender awareness and professional assertiveness.
There are a number of conclusions which can be made:
• Private life is a strong factor influencing mobility and
“return.” Private life also includes: safety networks, which
enable bringing up children; family support; friends; and
husband’s/partner’s support. If the family is together, mobility
is easier, and in rare cases where a partner is also a
scientist/academic it could be beneficial for the whole family.
• If the local scientific community is open to “Western”
influence, than the movement could be beneficial for the
career. (The opposite case would be, for example, in Serbia,
where an anti-Western atmosphere still dominates in certain
scientific disciplines, especially social sciences).
• Small epistemic communities put limits on individual
interests of scientists, who lack the opportunities for exchange
and team work. The alternative strategy is to build one’s own
circle or to build an institution where one would proceed with
a new research area.
• Choices of whether to “go or to stay” also depend on
discipline. If the market is saturated by a certain type of
professionals, it could be difficult to find an adequate place in
an academic or research institution.
• Ageism is an even more serious problem for women scientists,
exactly because it exacerbates the problems of their “double burden.”
Middle-aged women with families have smaller chances of mobility,
anyhow, and when the children are grown up, women are exposed to

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 discrimination based on age. So, there is an accumulation of
discrimination and exclusions.
• Unfavourable working conditions in Hungary and low salaries,
together with additional work engagements, exhaust the
time and energy of women academics. “Triple burden”
(work, family, and additional work for financial reasons) puts
not only additional pressure on them, but also makes them
“different” in comparison to model research and academic
careers of “Western colleagues.”
• Gender organization and scientific organization differ
between host countries and the home country. Often, the
lessons learned could be “imported”, but there are limits to
change. Mobility works in a direction of “getting closer” to the
future, and then return is seen as “pulling forward” in a
direction of progressive change. This can enhance the sense of
mission and satisfaction.
• Younger women researchers are generally more likely not to
follow the family pattern of the older generation of women
researchers, which allows them to have higher mobility, but
higher mobility, in turn, influences family patterns.
• Resources gained through mobility are those related to the
increase of knowledge, know-how (fundraising, for example,
or scientific standards for publishing), consciousness raising
and assertiveness, friendships and networks.
• Resources lost through mobility are not “lost,” but mainly
“suspended,” meaning that “privacy” is in “brackets,” while
mobility is on.

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• There is an increased awareness of gender-based
hierarchies due to mobility and comparisons which can be
made on the basis of lived experiences.
• The home country has advantages related to privacy and
safety networks, as well as those related to feelings of
“usefulness,” “pioneering work” or “patriotism.” In a way, non-
individualistic values could play an important role in deciding
in favor of return.
• The dominant model emerging is the one of “brain
circulation”, not the one of permanent migration. The
perspective would have been different if the researchers of
foreign origin had been interviewed, for example in the USA.
This sample was obviously favoring researchers who came back.
• It is difficult to maintain long distance friendships, once
the migration stops, if there are no regular contacts. The
frustration is evident in relation to much more limited travel
grants if living in Hungary, than in other more developed
countries. Networks are maintained for rational reasons and
through normal professional channels.

Policy recommendations
This research inspired a number of policy recommendations:
• There should be a database (gender sensitive) of scientists in
EU, which will relate to mobility specifically and enable better
knowledge about the phenomenon.
• Nomadic scientists, those who spend a large part of their career in
nomadic patterns of movements, should create a network.

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• Scientific nomadism, as a form of mobility should be researched
and adequate policy measures should be defined based on this
research. There should be more research on different effects
(social, epistemic, organizational, gender, political) of increased
researchers” mobility throughout Europe.
• There should be increased awareness in science policy circles
that intensified mobility of researchers is not “neutral,” that it
brings new challenges related to different aspects of individual
life, research organizations, and social settings in which it is
taking place.
• There should be special mobility schemes for women researchers,
preferably for different generations of women researchers.
Ageism should be addressed with positive action measures.

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Chapter 5

Women Professionals from the

Semiperiphery26 of Europe:
New European Proletariat?27

“Today’s economic and social conditions are naturalised (...) and

reality is an inevitable jungle. In a period of scarcity, the feeble die
out and the stronger survive. Today, aptitude to survival depends
on individual adaptability, flexibility and mobility: be innovative,
autonomous, polyvalent, multifunctional and never stop learning in
order to seduce your successive employers. Employability.” (Puig de
la Bellacasa, 2002: 98)
“Coming back home after three years leave, my self-perception
was as if I came back home from the military service, as if I had
been soldier for 3 years. In England, in each moment of my stay I
used to mobilize all of my energy and sense in order to respond to
different expectations of my surroundings. Source: Romanian
young female scientist.” (ENWISE Report, 2003:135)

26 Semiperiphery in this text refers to former communist countries which are in

different degrees integrated into the EU. Geographically it refers to East, Central,
South East European countries as well as the Baltics. However, this term is in no way
strictly defined. On the contrary, the boundaries are shifting depending on the
researched phenomena, share feelings of marginality based on location, or simple
political declaration. The value of this term as an analytical category has been
discussed in Blagojevic, M. Creators, Transmitters and Users (2004).
27 This chapter has been published in Germany: Blagojevic M. (2005): Akademikerinnen

von der Semi-Peripherie Europas: Das neue europaische Proleteriat? In: Watraud Ernst
(ed.) Leben und Wirtshchaften-Geschlechterkonstruktionen durch Arbeit, Izdavač: Lit
Verlag Munster

161
 “There is a double-criterion for appreciation of women scientists
in Albania. From one side there exists a moral appreciation, respect
and recognition from the institutions and common people towards
them, for example, a woman teaching at university is seen as a
respectful person. From the other side, the financial support for
them, including the salaries of the professors at the universities or
researchers at the research institutions is very low. The paradoxical
reality of Albania is that people selling cigarettes or other small
things on the streets earn more than a professor at university.”
(Gjermeni, BW, paper)

Introduction
The aim of this text is to offer a more complex understanding of
the dynamism between women’s high level of inclusion into the
professions, their actual positioning in societal hierarchies and the
quality of their lives in semiperipheral countries of Europe. This
issue will be discussed through a combination of theoretical ideas,
different research findings from postcommunist countries, and
personal observations including valuable insights gained from the
participation in the ENWISE28 Expert Group set up in October 2002
by the European Commission to report on the situation facing
women scientists in the Central and Eastern European countries and
in the Baltic States. The undisputable “truth” about the high
relevance of women’s education on the road to gender equality here
is discussed in a non-ideological, post-feminist manner, with the
understanding that gender studies have the “mission” of
“transformative analysis” (Griffin, 2002).

28 ENWISE is an acronym for “Enlarge Women In Science to the East”. The countries

included are the following: Bulgaria, Chzek Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,
Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia.

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 The major argument in this text is that because of the specific
developments in former communist countries specific gender
regimes29 have been developed which in many ways are opposite to the
situation in the “core” countries. But, under the present conditions of
globalisation differences are being narrowed dawn. This situation, if
understood correctly, offers many possibilities for the exploration of
the limits of existing universalized and globalized gender policies
embodied in a number of international organizations, programs and
projects. The view from the semiperiphery is epistemologically
rewarding because it goes beyond simple advocacy for well
contextualized gender policies in different societal settings30, creating
a space for actual East-West “mirroring”. Comparison of the situation
in the core countries and semiperipheral countries could be beneficial
for de-ideologization of actual gender policies East and West, thus
enhancing deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of gender
regimes on both sides of the boundary, in fact in the new context of
globalisation. New threats coming from the negative sides of the
globalisation in the neo/liberal mode are too strong to be neutralized
by an ideology of gender equality. Instead, interconnectedness which
could be discovered not only in obvious similarities, but also through
interdependence of core and semiperiphery, could reinforce
international alliances in favor of better balanced and more righteous
arrangements of human affairs, beyond gender.

29 Gender regime is a theoretical concept which implies relatively stable structural

arrangements of gender relations in a given context. They include: gender roles,
gendered hiearchies, gendered division of labor, gender identities, gendered
discourses and subcultures, as well as gendered performancies.
30 See for example, Blagojevic, M.: Women’s situation in the Balkan countries. Report

for the EU Parliament (No. IV/2002/16/03). Presented at the EU Parliament,

Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities, Brussels: 10-6-2003

163
 Facts and Figures
Women in Eastern Europe are very educated. This is a simple truth
which reveals long lasting trends of women’s inclusion into high level
educational institutions, in the pre communist era, during communism
and in postcommunism. The first women’s university graduates from
Eastern Europe studied in Zurich in the 1870s. Official
institutionalization of women’s enrolment at universities at state level
took place from 1883 in Romania and from 1922 in Lithuania.
Clandestine women’s college were founded in Poland 1885 (the “Flying
University”) and in 1911 at the University of Tartu (Estonia). There was
compulsory attendance at grammar schools by boys and girls in the
Hapsburg monarchy from 1774 and in Bulgaria since 1878 (ENWISE
Report, 2003:22). In Eastern and Central Europe women’s movements
also started relatively early31. In some countries at the semiperiphery,
contrary to the general misconceptions and prejudices about the
“backward women from the East who need feminist enlightenment from
the West”, voting rights were granted quite early: in Estonia, Hungary,
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland in 1918, in Czechoslovakia in 1920, Romania-
1929, Bulgaria – 1937 (ENWISE Report, 2003:23). During communism
official ideology and politics of equality strongly encouraged women to
get a good education. Education, besides Communist Party membership
was the most important personal asset for upward mobility. There are
some indications, although not full scope researches, that women were
more inclined to choose education than party membership to fulfill their

31 The League of Romanian Women was founded in 1866. The Association for women’s

Education “Zivena” was founded in Slovakia in 1869; the Central Association of Czech
Women was set up in 1897. The Bulgarian Union of Women was founded in 1901, and
the Baltic Women Union in 1909. In Poland, the Women’s League, founded in 1916,
comprised as many as 12 000 members. (ENWISE Report, 2003: 21).

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ambitions. Women’s reluctance32 to get involved in institutional politics
seems to be, so far, trans-historical and trans-cultural, although with
strong variations from country to country.
Table 1:
Proportion of women from the ENWISE countries among
Professionals, Employment and Researchers in 2002
(in percentages)
Women Professionals Employment Researchers
Country
Bulgaria 64.9 % 47.5 % 45.6 %
Czech Republic 52.7 % 43.7 % 26.8 %
Estonia 64.3 % 49.2 % 43.1 %
Hungary 57.9 % 45.0 % 33.0 %
Latvia 68.4 % 49,5 % 52.1 %
Lithuania 71.4 % 49.1 % 47.0 %
Poland 62.7 % 45.6 % 38.1 %
Romania 48.3 % 46.3 % 42.8 %
Slovak Republic 63.6 % 45.8 % 39.8 %
Slovenia 61.8 % 45.9 % 35.9 %
ENWISE-10 59.2 % 45.9 % 37.8 %
EU-15 46.5 % 43.1 % 27.2 %

Sources: Professionals (ISCO-2) & Employment data: Eurostat -

Community Labor Force Survey - RSEs data: European Commission, 2003b.
Notes: Professionals (ISCO-2) & Employment ENWISE-10
averages: DG RTD estimate RSEs: Reference year is 2001 except for
BG, EE, LV (HES+GOV), PL, SI: 2000 Data are in head count, except
for SK (full-time equivalent) ENWISE-10 average: DG RTD estimate
Private Non-Profit sector not included
Source: ENWISE Report, 2003:71
32Here the quality and the sources of that “reluctance” could not be discussed,
however, it should be noted that much of it socially constructed.

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 Different positive legacies have resulted in very high figures in
terms of women’s inclusion into professions. In Eastern and Central
Europe women comprise more then half of the professionals, with
the exception of Romania. In most of those countries they actually
make more then 60%, and on average more than is the case with EU-
15 (Table 1). High inclusion into professions is accompanied by a
high percentage among employed, again above EU-15 average, and is
also reflected in their relatively high representation in the profession
of researcher, which is, again, much higher then in the case of EU-15.
In Central and Eastern Europe, but also in most of the Balkan
countries (Blagojević, 2003), women are more likely than their male
counterparts to remain in education after the age of 18. The
differences in favor of women are increasing. The same trend exists
in EU-15. Women are, with the exception of two Baltic countries, still
not over 50%, but these remaining differences are decreasing.
Although quantitative differences in women’s and men’s
education are almost eliminated, or are in favor of women, the
segregation of educational profiles still remains. In Associated
countries in 2001 women comprise 43.4% of graduates in science,
mathematics and computing and 22.8% in engineering,
manufacturing and construction. However, in EU-15 segregation was
even more pronounced (35.7% and 20.6% respectively. Source: She
figures 2003:43-44).

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 Table 2:
Higher Education and PhD graduates in the
ENWISE countries in 2001
Total HE Of which Of which Total PhD Of witch of which
Women Women Women
Country graduates Women in % graduates
HC HC in %
Bulgaria 47 500 29 700 62.5 % 376 158 42.0 %
Czech
43 600 24 100 55.3 % 1 066 370 34.7 %
Republic
Estonia 7 600 5 000 65.8 % 149 77 51.7 %
Hungary 57 900 35 600 61.5 % 793 301 38.0 %
Latvia 20 300 11 300 55.7 % 37 18 48.6 %
Lithuania 27 500 17 500 63.6 % 261 137 52.5 %
Poland 431 100 284 100 65.9 % 4 400 1 832 41.6 %
Romania 76 200 41 800 54.9 % : : :
Slovak
26 300 14 200 54.0 % 532 212 39.8 %
Republic
Slovenia 12 000 7 100 59.2 % 298 146 49.0 %
ENWISE-10 750 000 470 400 62.7 % 7 912 3 251 41.1 %

Source: Eurostat, Education statistics.

Notes: Unit: head count (HC) and “: “ = not available Romania
not included in ENWISE-10 estimate Higher Education is equivalent
to ISCED 5+6; PhD is equivalent to ISCED 6 (Unesco, 1997)
Source: ENWISE Report, 2003: 78
As analyzed in the ENWISE Report, the high number of women
among professionals and in higher educational levels has a “spill
over” effect in decreasing professional gender segregation. In other
words, quantitative gains turn into qualitative gains, measured by the
level of participation. Equality is being obtained gradually: first as
quantitative equality (participation at higher levels), and then
through qualitative equality (decrease of horizontal segregation, in

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fact increasing women’s participation in previously “closed” fields)33.
Qualitative changes in favor of women are being made through
increase of their inclusion at all levels.
However, at the semiperiphery, similarly as in the core countries,
the exclusion of women is more pronounced at higher levels of
decision making, regardless of the profession. In scientific
professions, the shape of the “leaky pipeline” which indicates “the
loss” of women at higher levels is the same throughout Europe, West
and East (ENWISE Report, 2003).
Nevertheless, on the basis of given facts and figures one could still
conclude that gender equality is in some way more advanced at the
semiperiphery, on average, then at the core, on average. So, is there a
problem?
There are several open questions in regard to these favorable
statistical facts. One is related to the similarities between the core
and the semiperiphery: If women are starting to form the majority in
higher education in an increasing number of countries and fields,
where are men? Statistical trends do not show that men will
eventually begin to enter into the professions previously occupied by
women, but rather that they are, for different reasons, “withdrawing”
from higher levels of education. Does it mean that women are
investing their energies properly by getting more education in each
generation and even more then men? Or maybe, instead, that they
are “running the wrong race”? This question is more relevant for the
semiperiphery at the moment then for the core countries, but it
remains relevant for both. The second question relates to differences
between the core and semiperiphery: Do any important differences
or similarities prevail disclosing the “universal patriarchal order”?
Further, there is the question which relates to professions

33This was also the case in former Yugoslavia in the 70s and 80-s, as analyzed by
Blagojevic (1991).

168
themselves: What are the consequence of women’s inclusion for the
social status of the professions? Finally, how does women’s inclusion
into the professions in greater numbers relate to the quality of
women’s lives?
Answering all these questions in a detailed, elaborated manner is
beyond the scope of this paper. Here only some additional insights
and ideas will be offered which will make an attempt to disclose some
of the complexity of the issues in question.

Behind the scene

The situation of women professionals at the semiperiphery could
be described as a paradox: “better is worse”. Empirically this paradox
could be supported by the fact that women are highly represented in
professions during communism and in postcommunism exactly
because most of the professions have been severely underpaid and
lacking social prestige. This is most visible for example in HE itself.
Fast feminization of the lower level university posts correlates
noticeably with serious funding problems of the sector. Already at the
beginning of the 90s this situation was analyzed as “Ianus head”,
double sided phenomena, which is much more the consequence of
devaluation of HE in a certain country than increased gender
equality. (Blagojević, 1991a). In other words, in communist countries
professions never had such elitist and exclusionary character as they
did in the West, as they have never been rewarded to such an extent.
This fact was the basis of high women’s professional inclusion. In
addition to the traditionally unfavorable position of many
professions in communism, together with all the “normal”
patriarchal exclusions, in postcommunism women’s professional
attainment is burdened with some other new paradoxes. Here, only a
few research based phenomena will be shortly mentioned.

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 In postcommunism new professions in new professional
environments are prescribing rules that are in no way gender neutral
and in many ways incomparable with previous times. In research of
women professionals working in multinationals in Budapest, it has
been clearly demonstrated that much of women’s income needs to be
used for the required type of dressing at the work place. In fact, many
additional resources need to be mobilized to satisfy these demands
(relying on networks of cousins and friends to “make clothes”, using
extra time to find cheap clothes etc., or learning how to sew...) (Tallos,
2001). Advancing in an organizational hierarchy is also something
which became quite dubious in postcommunist settings, in a sense of
quality of life. Research conducted in Lithuania has shown that women
middle level managers in fact had to face much more work and much
more pressure with decreased real value of their work, although they
have been promoted in organizational hierarchy. The quality of their
life has decreased; they became tired and felt taken advantage of.
Computer technology made things even worse, because they buy
computers to be able to finish their work at home, outside regular
hours (Motiejunaite, 2001). Research on violence against women in
Serbia has shown that women who are at the highest risk to be violated
by their partners are two demographical extremes: women who are
economically dependent, uneducated “housewives” on one hand, and
on the other, those who are women professionals, making more money
then their partners (Nikolic-Ristanović, 2002). Qualitative research on
Bulgarian women scientists who live abroad has disclosed negative
impact on their families: firstly, it is difficult for the two partners to
find positions in their fields in one and the same town or even in one
and the same country, which frequently results in separation;
secondly, the situation negatively affects children as well – living in
many different countries with different cultural milieu and traditions,
some of them even miss the chance to learn their mother language
(Pentcheva, according to Sretenova, 2003). According to Morokvasic,

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university educated or highly skilled women from Eastern and Central
Europe represent 12-25% of those who take part in “suitcase trading”.
Trading can also involve occasional prostitution. “However, badly paid
civil servants, school-girls and students resort to it in order to increase
their own travel gains and likelihood of a successful trade transaction”
(Morokvasic, 2004:17). On the side of “positive facts” is research which
shows that education of women is closely connected with enhancing
their agency and increasing the capacity of their coping strategies, and
even life satisfaction (Blagojević, 2000; Kovacs and Varady,2000;
Marody, M. Giza Poleszczuk, 2000; Morokvasic 2004.). Researches
mentioned here show that the gains for women professionals at the
semiperiphery are in no way simple and non-ambivalent.
However, the trap of misinterpretation of the real background of
women’s inclusion into the professions could often be encountered,
especially in international forums when different countries are
supposed to give an overview of “gender equality situation”.
Women’s inclusion into the profession is, in fact, a much better
indicator of the real market evaluation of that profession and of its
social prestige than of the position of women in a given society. As
shown by Šporer who has compared USA, former Soviet Union and
former Yugoslavia in legal and medical profession in the 80-ies, there
was a clear connection between prestige of the profession expressed
in material rewards and the inclusion of women. This patriarchal
mode of devaluation of women’s contribution functions regardless of
the type political system (Šporer, 1983). Also, there was a double
link, meaning that more women in the professions lower the prestige
of the profession, and that, in reverse; this enables even more women
to enter. Historically many other examples could be found. The
negative spiral, once it starts, can result into the proleterization of
the professions, which actually means working more for less and
which is already happening, East and West. Proleterization of
professions is closely connected to their feminization, and vice versa.

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This connection is transpolitical, transhistorical, transcultural and
rather stable. How the divide between “feminine” and “masculine”
professions will be construed is a matter of concrete social setting
and historical momentum. But the divide itself with its prescribed
meanings of what is less and what is more “valuable” is along the
gender lines and following the same logic of gender hierarchy.
In science, for example, division between “hard” and “soft”
sciences is closely connected with prestige and investments. As
shown in ENWISE Report, there is a “triangular relationship
between gold, glory and gender, in which high-expenditure areas
dominate and social and low-cost sciences are under-valued. The
gender bias in the hard-soft divide compounds the negative
perceptions of the soft sciences and they risk as a consequence
becoming further under-resourced” (ENWISE Report, 2003:79). For
the purpose of more subtle analysis, the “Honeypot indicator”34 was
constructed revealing that the highest proportions of women are to
be found in the countries and sectors with the lowest R&D
expenditure and the lowest proportions of women are in the sectors
with the highest R&D expenditure. “This fits with the suggestion that
men are leaving these areas because they are no longer sufficiently
attractive” (ENWISE Report, 2003:79).
However, although this connection between gender and professions
is beyond core-semiperiphery division, it still does not mean that some
specific factors related to semiperiphery itself and its own positioning
in the global market and global geostrategic stratification does not play
the role. In fact, quite the opposite. As education is often seen as the
most valuable human resource, in the past, or in the present, women’s

34It can be calculated from available and official R&D statistics and is comparable
between countries and over time. The score itself is the difference between the
expected R&D expenditure per capita pro rata for women and the observed R&D
expenditure per capita pro rata for women expressed as a percentage of the expected
R&D expenditure per capita pro rata for women (ENWISE Report, 2004:82).

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resources of the semiperiphery have been mobilized to “speed-up” the
development and “catch-up”. Whether this effort was framed as
“national struggle” or “industrialization”, or “Europeanization” is not
so relevant as much as the pattern itself. Because the semiperiphery is
continuously shaped by the on-going effort to “catch up” with the
center, women’s human resources are often additionally mobilized and
exploited for the gap between center and semiperiphery to be bridged.
Women were obtaining/given rights which could in an efficient way
enhance their resources, as part of “national resources”, and improve
the position of their countries in relation to the core. In addition to
this, the semiperiphery regularly produces a paradoxical combination
of strong patriarchies which exhaust woman’s resources in the private
domain, together with ideological “fog” of gender equality. The result
is, from the western point of view, a strange amalgam of “super
woman”, strong, often educated woman, ready to sacrifice, who is
“more than equal”. Women’s relatively high inclusion into the
professions, therefore, is the consequence of the set of two very
opposing sets of conditions: those favorable to women as part of
communist legacy (education, employment, egalitarian ideology), as
well those unfavorable for women (“normalized” high level of
exploitation of women’s resources as precondition for the
“development”, or “transition”, and very unfavorable position in
professions in general). In other words, without the wider context of
the habitual high exploitation of women’s resources and cultural
patterns which support this, it is impossible to understand women’s
self/sacrificial behavior, both in private and in the public domain at
the semiperiphery. (Blagojević, 2004)
Under the new conditions of globalisation in the countries at the
semiperiphery women are changing their life strategies. As observed
by Marody and Giza-Poleszczuk younger women in Poland are
turning from “self-sacrifice to self-investment” (Marody and Giza-
Poleszczuk, 2000). This means that education is increasingly being

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perceived by women as an individual strategy for “survival” in ever
changing conditions. All over East and Central Europe there is boom
of new private universities. At the same time, there is an obvious,
stronger or weaker, trend of “withdrawal” of men from the education.
This issue is very complex and needs further serious research.
However, several things could be underlined. First, the quality of
education is decreasing in many ways. This means that getting “more
education” does not really mean to get “better” education. This also
does not mean to get “marketable” education. This leads to the
conclusion that connection between employability and education in
East and Central Europe is not necessarily getting higher, but maybe
even the opposite, especially if more stable and well paid
employment is in question.
While women are at the universities, where are men? It is not really
known much about male life strategies, especially young men’s life
strategies at the semiperiphery. While major effort has been made to
understand that “women were the major victims of the transition”,
very little has been done to analyze men’s situation in those countries.
In fact, who is “more” and who is “less” of a victim somehow becomes
distasteful question when human costs of transition are as high as they
were/are, especially for the countries which had wars as a mode of
transition. “Implosion of patriarchy” (Blagojević, 1999), or “the end of
patriarchalism” (Castells, 1997) are the concepts denoting deep
structural change of gender regimes, both at the semiperiphery and at
the core. The simultaneity and similarity of those two processes is due
to globalisation. However, again, the situation at the semiperiphery is
both similar and different, owing to the functional relationship
between center and the semiperiphery.
The question of “victimhood” reveals another aspect of the
problem. Exactly because women from the semiperiphery live the
pattern of “self/sacrifice they are very flexible. So, in times of “survival

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economy” they manage to cope, often more efficiently then men, who
are not socialized for “the new game in town” (Blagojević, 1999). One
of the preferred coping strategies is mobility. Mobility of women
professionals is defined both by gender and by their origin. They are
often exposed to “double discrimination”, but, paradoxically, that still
can be the better choice than the one of “staying at home”. If mobility
of professional women is approached not as “brain drain” issue, but as
survival strategy, then it reveals the basic similarity with general new
mobility patterns of women from the semiperiphery, which
Morokvasic graphically named as “settled within mobility”
(Morokvasic, 2004). In new mobility patterns mobility itself becomes
the resource which contributes to better individual social positioning,
higher quality of life and eventually stronger individual agency.
This is where the full circle is being made. Constant mobility is a
pattern embraced by some East European women as a survival strategy or
even strategy for social promotion. For many other women from the core
countries pressure to be mobile is not really rewarding in tangible terms,
but simply a new necessity created by the new economic developments.
This difference comes out from the fact that East Europeans are trying to
turn disadvantages into advantages by and through mobility. The fact that
women at the semiperiphery are severely underpaid in their home
countries, and that they can profit from the developmental differences “at
home” and “across the border” increases their flexibility and leads to
acceptance of the working conditions which are much worse than what
women from the core countries would normally accept. The surplus labor
force under new economic conditions obviously is deeply changing both
the work arrangements and organizational practices world-wide. De-
elitization of the professions, together with gender based exploitation of
women’s resources, creates a pool of labor force which is “perfect” for the
“jungle” mentioned at the beginning of this text. Regardless of whether
resources of educated women are used “at home” cheaply and in
combination with unpaid reproductive work; “abroad” as professional

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work; in a mode of intellectual, academic or scientific nomadism; in the
mode of “settled in mobility”, or as paid reproductive work performed
instead of women professionals from the core countries, they are in any
case used in a code of the relationship of core-semiperiphery. Educated
women, professional women, from the core countries are in many ways
driven into the same spiral, in which, because they are women, they
become the “semiperiphery” of their own countries. This situation
profoundly changes not only the labor markets of the core countries, but
gender relations in those countries, as well. Again, similarities between
core and the semiperiphery do not exclude deep interconnectedness
between the two.

Conclusion: Limits?
The negative spiral has its limits. Those are the limits of human
mobility and human flexibility. Even when glorified, even when paid
well, mobility and flexibility are subjected to limits. Although in East
and Central European countries “survival values” dominate over
“self-realization values” (Inglehart, 2000), this could be seen simply
as historical momentum. The erosion of the rights to social benefits
and social protection after communism has paved the way for
“normalization” of the individual struggle for survival, as a new ethos
of the post communist era. However, although at first glance this
may look like a problem of postcommunist societies solely, it is
something which is spreading towards the core countries as well. The
new generator of this “jungle game” is the neo-liberal model which
represents itself, professionally, politically and publicly, as the only
possible solution to progress, development and freedom. Once some
basic needs are met, maybe those different values will emerge. And
with them, also, maybe, the limits of mobility and flexibility will be
reconstructed, narrowed down.

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 Flexibility and mobility, expressed in “nomadic life style” in reality
often become a set of deprivations, which could be summarized under
the title of a popular song “Life for Rent” (Dido). Much more than an
romantic adventure of discovery, nomadic life in reality is made from
the set of the “lack of choices”: lack of choice to have stable relationships,
to have rewarding career with logical and predictable upward mobility,
choice to have a family, choice to have children, or stable partners, or
close friends, choice to live in a community and be an active part of that
community. On a larger scale, accumulation of such negative choices
results not only in destruction of one”s own life, but in the destruction of
human community. People, women and men from the semiperiphery,
who are by the chance of their capabilities and talents, with outstanding
education or achievements, caught up in the net of high expectations,
are, paradoxically, prone to be victimized more than others, for the
simple reason that they seek self-realization. They could become the
prisoners of their own overachievement.
Self-preservation, instead of accepting deceiving competition,
might be an alternative strategy of resistance. Women are caught up
in a vicious circle to prove that they are equal to men, by being even
“better”, and exhausting their resources and devastating their
personal lives to “run the race”. The “difference” seems to be
forgotten in a new globalized market conditions. The personal is not
political any more. After several decades of intense inclusion of
women into the professions both East and West, one could claim that
there is a high level disproportion between the efforts and rewards.
Feminist theoretical legacy could be quite constructive at this point.
If critical thinking and “transformative analysis” are a vital part of that
legacy, then necessary re-evaluation of traditional feminist strategies
need to be made to enable better suited practices of transformation
and/or resistance. However, the bottom line still is: survival.

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Chapter 6

Nomadic Scientists in a Transnational

Landscape:
Practicing Intersectionality35

Introduction:
Voicing the Gaze from the Semiperiphery
This chapter is aiming to voice the gaze of nomadic scientists from
the semiperiphery of Europe, part of the world which is between the
core and periphery, between developed and developing countries.
Semiperiphery consists of “countries in transition”, former socialist
countries, which are in different stages of Accession or
“Europeanization”. Their commonalities and the region with its
specificities often stay invisible. However, semiperiphery is itself
intersectionality on societal level, comprising of premodern, modern
and postmodern elements. While intersectionality as a concept was
mainly developed to address exclusions within one specific society, in
this chapter I argue that it is the location of society within the
continuum of core-semiperiphery-periphery which translates into
the individual position of the scholar, including nomadic gender
scholars. Even more precise, it is the “coreness”36, of society which

35 This chapter is based on the keynote speech at the conference in Sweden:

Intersectionality, Identity and Power – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on

Intersectionality Studies, Vadstena, Sweden, 11.10.2006 - 15.10.2006, under the title:
Nomadic Scientist in a Transnational Landscape: Social, Institutional, Epistemic and
Personal Consequences of Practicing Intersectionality.
36 This term was suggested by Nina Lykke during a discussion at the conference:

Intersectionality, Identity and Power – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on

Intersectionality Studies, Vadstena Sweden, 11-15.10.2006.

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plays an important role both in the social stratification of Enlarged
Europe, including professional stratification, as well as in the project
of the European Research Area. The location of a scholar, defined by
the coreness of her/his setting (the one of origin, education, present
institutional setting, or present living setting), creates a set of
opportunities or obstacles which are far beyond individual influence
and often deeply in contrast with the concept of meritocracy, as an
ideal of modern scientific career (ENWISE Report, 2003).
Also, scholars from the semiperiphery increase their intersectionality
by accepting mobility as their dominant career and life strategy. That, in
turn, creates many consequences, deeply changing not only individual
lives, but knowledge institutions and even the very nature of knowledge.
Mobility and movement (geographical, institutional, social, personal,
cross disciplinary, cross sectoral and identity shifting, etc.) could also
promote epistemic advantages, through the specific qualities of
nonbelonging, detachment, dislocation, transnationalisation and even
“de-temporalisation” (disconnection from prevailing historical times in a
certain setting).
The gaze in this analysis belongs to the nomadic gender scholar
from the semiperiphery and the chapter is exploring her way of
knowing and of knowledge production through and by physical,
intellectual and emotional movements. Intersectionality of a scholar
from the semiperiphery is an attribute obtained through mobility
and/or movement, something which is both prescribed and self-
chosen, and also a quality which often empirically emerges from
belonging to the semiperiphery, which is itself a kind of
intersectionality, a meeting point of coreness and peripherally. It is
this multiplicity of intersectionalities which cuts through individual
lives of gender scholars from the semiperiphery that creates specific
qualities of being and of knowing.

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 Intersectionalities, some of which I will only briefly touch upon in
this chapter, without the possibility to explore them deeper, include:
the semiperiphery, which has characteristics of both core and
periphery; gender studies which is intersection between disciplines;
citizenship and transnationalism; intersections between theory,
research and policy which get reflected into the specific career
models of gender scholars from the semiperiphery; intersectionality
between activism and academism through and by personal
involvement into the movements and institutions; intersectionalities
which emerge from exposure to historical movements forward and
backward (such as re-traditionalisation, as opposed to
modernisation); as well as intersectionality related to “uncrystalized
social status” which is connected often to life styles atypical for a
setting of origin; or even intersectionality which is created by
inclusionary or exclusionary process of the EU integration.
Intersectionality is thus seen not only as specific quality obtained by
intersections of a set of group characteristics within the relatively stable
structure on one society, but instead, a concept which could expand to
include all different forms of multiple exclusions coming from
estrangement, alienation, from the prevailing societal and political
structures, and/or from the very processes which exist in transition from
one societal form to another. So, it is not only the position within the
structure, but the position between the structures, which creates
exclusion. The major emphasis of intersectionality theory on gender,
ethnicity, sexuality, race etc. in this light seems to be too narrow, leaving
aside and excluded vast categories of “neither-nor” in many domains of
societal life. Further on, the approach advocated here could be justified
both by empirical evidence, as well as by the need for theoretical
development closely connected to overall transnationalisation and the
growing number of “residual cases”. It is becoming increasingly evident
that identity politics is faced with limits and counter effects and that
there is an emergence of transidentity politics which could establish

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renewed solidarity based on common understanding of social justice
and closely connected social inclusion. While, exclusions which are still
being made on the basis of prescribed biological characteristics are not
necessarily decreasing, theorizing about them needs to go beyond
segmented reality, towards the establishment of inclusive concepts.
Intersectionality is thus seen here as an overall, overarching, concept
which allows inclusion of all residual categories, regardless of the basis
of underlying exclusions, or the level of the exclusion (from underclass
to elite, i.e. scientific elite). However, what is common to all those cases
and categories is that there is no moral, ethical ground for the exclusion,
neither there is rational justification. In the world where human
resources are essential for both economic and social development,
intersectionality as a concept could be paired with transectionality,
turning the disadvantage of multiple exclusions to the advantage of
multiple inclusions. In a network society (Castells, 1996) that is what is
actually already happening, and one can assume that it is exactly the
explosion of intersectionalities on a global scale, which is finding its way
to global integration and global networking through ICTs. So, the
concept of intersectionality will necessarily change and expand to fit to
the new global realities, where although much of the “sectionality” is
related to the existing structures, much of the “inter” is in fact created by
mobility (physical, social, institutional, personal...) from one structure,
group or institution to another.
In this particular case, I take lives of gender scholars from the
semiperiphery to show how these new processes have been
intensified by transition, and how they become the sites of multiple
intersectionalities, and consequently, multiple exclusions and
inclusions. While similar processes are also happening elsewhere,
including the core countries which have their own cores and the
semiperipheries, in this analysis the emphasis is exactly on the
semiperiphery mainly for two reasons. The first is that focus on it
makes it easier to argue that locationality per se is a relevant

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dimension of intersectionality which needs to be included, and
secondly, this chapter aims to theorize upon the lived experience of
concrete gender scholars from the semiperiphery. The lives,
practices, discourses, identities and scholarship of many of the
scientists in Eastern and South Eastern Europe today contain
“intersectionality”, and they are being shaped by it (Bidwell-Steiner
and Wozonig, 2006). As this intersectionality is taking place in
increasingly transnational setting of scientific and academic
institutions, projects and networks, it certainly has many different
consequences worth exploring. This chapter is a modest attempt to
discipline, conceptualize and communicate some of the relevant
aspects of “intersectionality” of nomadic scientists from the
semiperiphery.
The chapter derives from numerous examples, some of which will
be presented here in a manner of simple illustrations, and from
personal, intimate exchanges among friends, mostly women from the
semiperiphery, gender scholars, who find themselves often stuck
within the different exclusions, hierarchies, contradictory and
confusing demands related to knowledge making and policy making in
the domain of gender studies (Slavova, 2001). My approach is based
on observation, self-observation, research and active participation in
the women’s movement and policy making at the semiperiphery.37 It is
based on a “thick experience” (Harding, 1987) of researching,
networking, lecturing, and more or less successful communication
with many gender scientists within the transnational community of
gender scholars. But, equally important, if not even more, are the
experiences of failed communication, of misunderstandings, often
painful, sometimes humiliating, which disclosed problematic spots
emerging from different underlying paradigms. This

37 This experience so far includes research; teaching and expert work in more than 10

countries in transition.

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miscommunication became for me a powerful inspiration to explore
knowledge/power hierarchies and their mechanisms of exclusions,
while at the same time investigating the possible epistemic and
political consequences of such exclusions. But, the main idea behind
this text is not a critique of the existing exclusionary practices, as much
as it is an effort to think about new epistemic inclusionary practices,
through creation of inclusionary concepts, or expanding the meaning
of the existing ones, such as intersectionality.
So, to put it simply, this text is a voice given to the feelings of
discomfort among many of the gender scholars from the
semiperiphery, related both to theory and public policy, with the
purpose to argue in favor of inclusion of locationality as an essential
dimension of intersectionality. Although there have been many efforts
to silence these voices within the international feminist scholar
community, these voices exist, but often in a ghetto of scholars from
the semiperiphery, in their intimate exchanges far away from official
conference or project discourses. At the semiperiphery, more than
anywhere else, the emancipatory project of feminism was highly
instrumentalized for the project of globalisation in neoliberal code. In
the moment when this text is being finalized, the obvious collapse of
that particular model in the core countries is threatening again to
obscure all the previously made mistakes, such as “shock therapy”,
related to the countries in transition. Losers of the neoliberal model of
globalisation at this very moment are too many everywhere. However,
what is now so obvious even in the core was very much visible from
semiperiphery from the beginning of the 90s, because of the extremely
high, and unnecessary (!!!), human costs for the transition.

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 The Semiperiphery as a Setting for
Knowledge Production
The concept of the semiperiphery originates from the world
system theory, and it is based on a critique of the simplified
dichotomy of center-periphery (Roncevic, 2002). I use this concept
as „strategic” concept, following Harding’s idea that some categories
are not meant to “name reality”, but “rather as ways of gaining a
fresh perspective” (Harding 1998:21). I use the concept to address
the issues of power differentials between societies, but also between
scientific and academic institutions and epistemic communities. I
recognize, however, that there are other semiperipheral societies, as
well as that there are semiperipheral epistemic communities in the
core societies. Semiperipherality as a specific condition of
semiperipheral countries is both multilayered and gradual, and also
often consisting of contrasting elements. One of the key
characteristics of semiperipherality is diachronicity: coexistence of
premodern, modern, and postmodern historical times.
This theoretical concept of the semiperiphery is absolutely
essential for addressing the special quality of development in former
socialist countries which emerges from the fact that those were
industrialized countries, to a different degree, in the moment when
transitions started. Previous industrialization adds a special quality
to their development, and also enables us to understand why in so
many domains transition was actually experienced as de-
development, on structural and individual level. However, this key
difference between the semiperiphery and developing nations is
simply ignored over and over again by all the major global players
who actually prescribe “development recipes” for the countries at the
semiperiphery (Stiglitz, 2003:23).

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 In international scientific communication, no less, the origin of
the author created and still creates the credibility framework:
“Western researchers will not give full credence to knowledge
and theories of Eastern researchers” (Cahalen, 1996:24).
The very positionality, the location where the scholars came from,
shaped their authority, gave or denied recognition to their words.
Many of the knowledge paradigms created during the cold-war
are still persisting today, often embodied in the scholars who were
raised and educated to be “suspicious” both to the quality and
intentions of the scholars from the East. Not only is it expected that
scholars from the East should be able to speak and write in excellent
English, but it is also accepted that they should be familiar with the
current “academic debates” in Western Academia and to add a bit of
their “aboriginal flavor” to those debates. This is all regardless to any
real relevance of those debates for their own contexts. However, the
problem is often even deeper. Different underlying paradigms West
and East create often conditions in which simple “translation” of
knowledge is impossible (Weiner, 2004). For example, as shown by
Funk, the feminist critique of Anglo-American liberalism is difficult
to apply to the contexts of Eastern and Central Europe which had
different development of liberal thought (Funk, 2004).
Additionally, the semiperipheral condition, which is per se
intersectionality, is ideologically and politically reinforced, although
by other names, in the very process of Enlargement. What is
happening is differentiation between „more or less” semi-
peripheries, depending on the Enlargement process. Gradual
exclusions and inclusions create even higher fragmentation of the
semiperiphery.38 The semiperiphery is exposed to unprecedented

38 An example is the access to scholarships of different levels for different countries

from the semiperiphery. For example, Serbia has been excluded from Fulbright
scholarships since 1992 due to the UN sanctions, for 10 years. Serbian citizens still can

186
engineering which is fundamentally changing life chances and
everyday life conditions of the citizens, on a daily basis, without their
possibility to react or intervene. In a paradoxical way, being object to
core intervention, the semiperiphery is also more vulnerable and
more sensitive to all changes at the core. Similarly, gender
differences and gendered strategies of survival are being reinforced
by ongoing inclusions/exclusions.
In the global knowledge system and in the global knowledge market
the semiperiphery has a distinctive position. According to Arrighi
(1985) relevant distinction is not the one between the productions of
industrial versus primary goods, but between „intellectual” activities
(i.e. those that involve strategic decision-making, control and
administration, R&D, etc.) and „executive” activities. Accordingly,
knowledge production at the center is accompanied with the
supplementary activities at the semiperiphery (Blagojević, 2004). This
position of the semiperiphery on the global knowledge market
determines also the scope of possibilities of the “knowers” coming
from the semiperiphery in the transnational landscape.
However, as shown by Roncevic, some of the differences between
different countries of the semiperiphery are consequences of
different capacities for development related to their different levels of
„cognitive mobilization“, meaning that they attribute different
relevance to „knowledge“ as such (Roncevic, 2002; Adam,
Makarovic, Roncevic, Tomsic, 2005). “Cognitive mobilization” is an
essential part of transition, or “Europeanization”, “modernisation” of
those societies. In fact, countries such as Slovenia, which value
knowledge and meritocracy high, also develop high potential for
development and modernisation. On the other hand, countries, such
as Serbia, where knowledge is valued low, both in terms of prestige

not apply for some of the postdoctoral scholarships, or can not work as international
experts for some UN agencies (IFAD, for example).

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and material rewards, also keep themselves tied up to inferior status
within the European semiperiphery.
Finally, not all disciplines are equally context sensitive. So, the
semiperiphery while very restrictive for some natural sciences which
demand quite huge investments into laboratories and experiments
can be quite heuristically rewarding location for research in social
sciences, and gender studies, specifically. In fact, much of the effort
of different Western scholars to come to former Yugoslavia and
explore dissolution, or to come and visit countries in transition and
explore gender issues in former “Soviet block” were driven not only
by curiosity but also by the fact that those societies were in many
ways “terra incognita”, and that they were also offering a possibility
for testing different theoretical paradigms on a new ground.
However, what was often not taken into account is that those
societies, even regions within the societies, had profound differences,
and that also there was previous accumulation of knowledge and self-
understanding which needed to be taken into account. There were
many approaches which were largely misleading, or oversimplified.
By becoming the object of knowledge making for the outsiders and
also an object for policy intervention from the outside, the
semiperiphery necessarily had to pay higher costs for development
than would have been the case with some other scenario.
Gender studies belong to the field that is much more dependent
on contextualized knowledges, and it is exactly through
contextualized knowledges that the critique of globalisation is
possible. I make a difference between contextual knowledge, which is
the knowledge created within a certain context, and contextualized
knowledge which is a knowledge created about the context through a
complex process of external and internal flows of ideas, theories,
concepts (both through acceptance and rejection, but mainly through
some kind or translation, adaptation). Contextual knowledge in

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stricto sensu does not exist almost anywhere any more, but one or
the other can prevail in certain academic communities and certain
academic disciplines. But, in any case, to reflect segmented social
reality with many of the intersectionalities at work, knowledge
should be integrative and plural; there should be “knowledges”. In
the best tradition of the feminist epistemic project is respect for
plural perspectives and deep understanding of the empowering effect
of knowledge production per se. Knowledge hierarchies between the
core and semiperiphery undermine the relevance of feminism as
authentic political project (Stanley and Wise, 2000).

Personal Positioning:
Trauma of Depleting Citizenship
Being a citizen of former Yugoslavia, and now Serbia, I have
experienced change of my citizenship status as the one of profoundly
“shrinking rights” of movement, throughout the space of former
Yugoslavia and Europe. My citizenship status produced for me, and
for many other former Yugoslavs unbearable weight of “belonging”,
which also severely demarcated our life chances. Without physically
moving I was changing my citizenship, and the status connected to
that citizenship. What I experienced in my young age as unlimited
space of movement throughout former Yugoslavia and Europe
became simply impossible in the last 15 years. Our citizenship was
“depleting”, the rights of movement were shrinking both internally
and externally, the very territoriality of our lives has profoundly
changed. Our memories, loyalties and belongings became dislocated.
It was this sharp contrast with previous freedom of movement that
created a sense of loss and dislocation, which comes with it. The
theoretical implication of this “depleted citizenship” situation for the
issue of intersectionality is that transition and change of citizenship

189
coming from the changes of the states definition and redefinition and
the very process of European integration, create new boundaries of
exclusions and inclusions. Intersectionality in this case is imposed, it
is not individual choice, and neither is it necessarily related to the
physical movement. As much as citizenship is a privilege, or gain for
some categories, it could be the “punishment” or loss for the others.
Depleted citizenship is producing a specific paradox for nomadic
scientists whom I describe as: “Migrating without moving and
moving without migrating”. It means that the real content of
citizenship could be changed while a scholar does not move physically
(i.e. I have had the citizenship of four countries already, without ever
changing even the city I was born!), while at the same time practicing
transnational migrations and moving from one country to another
(institution, organization, project) a scholar can stay in the same type
of context (i.e. academic context), same organizational culture (or very
similar). The first change could be traumatic and alienating, while the
second could be integrating and empowering.

Overcoming Tripled Impossibility:

Void, Muteness and Numbness
For the purpose of the discussion of the epistemic consequences
of intersectionality originating from mobility and/or movement,
another aspect of my positionality could be even more important.
That is the one related to the lack of paradigms and hardships of
knowledge communication. The absence of adequate knowledge and
the high costs for that absence could best be illustrated by what was
happening with the violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia. For
example, domination of conflict paradigm pushed away cooperation
paradigm, thus creating an illusion that wars were “natural” and

190
“expected”, while “living together” was imposed.39 Very real
institutional arrangements were created based on those assumptions,
only reinforcing divided realities. (Campbell, 1998). Since adequate
knowledge is essential for constructive policy making and rational
political decision making, contextual and contextualized knowledges
necessarily need to be integrated.40
Living in former Yugoslavia, although a hard experience, from the
epistemic point of view had an enlightening effect. I have built up my
sensitivity to „knowledge“ because in my own intellectual development I
could actually see how the social reality of former Yugoslav society
(which was previously decently developed European industrial society)
was „distancing“ from „theory“, and how „Western“ knowledge was
becoming misleading and even counterproductive for the adequate
comprehension of the disastrous wars (Blagojević,1997). Putting too
much emphasis on identity politics, instead of on basics, such as severe
economic crises from the beginning of the 80s, or contingences (such as
a sudden surplus of arms in Eastern Europe, after the collapse of
communism, which was to be imported in former Yugoslavia), simply
led to too many simplified and unsustainable assumptions. During the
wars it was increasingly becoming obvious that the local knowers were
faced with the „epistemic void“(Iveković 1993) and that it was
impossible to rely on any dominant paradigm to understand what was
going on. Normally acceptable paradigms in the 80s, when former
Yugoslavia was a medium developed industrial European society, with
strong welfare state, open to the West, with some elements of market
economy, became inappropriate in the 90s.

39 For the critique of that approach see: Charles Ingrao and Thomas Emmert, (eds.)

(2009) Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: a Scholars” Initiative. West

Lafayette, IN and Washington, DC: Purdue University Press and U.S. Institute of
Peace Press, 2009
40 “Contextual knowledge” is becoming new “mantra” of international organizations

only in the last several years.

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 Example: In the 80s, Yugoslav society had social structure
similar to any other industrialized nation. I have done research on
professionally successful women and it was appropriate to use the
notions such as “glass ceiling”, vertical and horizontal segregation,
and role conflict. In the 90s, with the impoverishment and the
collapse of social structure with the urban middle class being the
“main loser” of the transition, professions lost their privileged
positions and their intense feminization denoted the fact that they
were being marginalized. Very similar findings are in the ENWISE
Report on women scientists in the Enlargement countries. 41
“Epistemic void“ here implies widely shared feeling of inadequacy
of theories coming from the core to actually deal with many of the
problems of postcommunist societies, including the ones related to
the violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia, or de-development
through the destruction of the welfare state. „Epistemic void” means
an absence of canons and paradigms, fragility of theories and
concepts faced with lived reality. Epistemic void could be felt by
those who share previous contextual knowledge, previous self-
understanding and understanding of their contexts. But, the collapse
of former Yugoslav society also meant, in many ways, collapse of
epistemic communities, and accordingly the collapse of shared
understanding of new social reality, the lack of ground for
formulating new contextualized knowledge, integrating new
contextual knowledges and new local traumas.
Not only those paradigms did not exist, but also it was extremely
difficult, suddenly, after the 90s, to communicate scientifically based

41 When invited to be a member of ENWISE expert group by the EU Commission in

2002 I commented that for me that was a “return into the future” since I have been
dealing with those issues at the end of the 80s.

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knowledge to a Western audience42. The overall feeling shared by
many of my colleagues was a feeling of „isolation-by-
communication“. The statements made by semiperipheral scholars
were too often simply misinterpreted, oversimplified or taken as
simple examples of theories which were not functioning, or at least
which were functioning only partially.
Contextual and contextualized knowledges are necessarily very
complex, since they try to communicate knowledge which is not simply
related to the one dominant theoretical paradigm. They are
theoretically impure and based on facts and generalizations, tacit
knowledge and shared beliefs. In other words, while moving within the
paradigm is enabling an educated Western scholar to easily “follow”
the results, contextualized knowledge appears as much more complex
since it is moving beyond one particular paradigm. It situates the
context into the center, and not the theory. Contextualized knowledge
theorizes upon the context, and it does not simply contextualize the
theory. This is how it is keeping critical distance towards knowledge,
especially the one which originates from the core and which in many
cases reflects power misbalances. The effort to communicate the
„contextual knowledge“ is in fact very different from the one of
communicating „local examples“ through the dominant theories,
concepts and approaches. Also, intersectionality of “the knower”, the
one who crosses the lines of canons, paradigms, disciplines (in a case
of gender studies), or different academic cultures, creates very real
problems for communication. At the semiperiphery, in gender studies,
as recent research has shown, theory coming from a core was often
simply coverage for following up personal, group and contextual tacit
knowledge (Petric, 2005).

42Before the wars I was, for example teaching in the USA where everybody thought
that I got my Ph.D. there, since there were no relevant differences in educational
background.

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 While “muteness” is a concept which I use to denote
communication with the “outsiders”, those who are unfamiliar with
the context I come from and to whom I was failing to communicate
contextualized knowledge, I use the concept of “numbness” to explain
the problem of communication towards “inside”, towards “the
context”. With gender studies that problem is very pronounced since it
is not yet an adequately academically established discipline at the
semiperiphery, so pioneering work is rarely rewarded in terms of
academic prestige. Both “muteness” and “numbness” create very
isolated positions for a gender scholar at the semiperiphery, especially
since the epistemic communities are very weak and small. Outside the
epistemic community it is almost impossible to create knowledge,
because knowledge is communication, it is a discoursive practice.
On a larger scale “muteness” of gender studies at the
semiperiphery is a result of the exclusion based on center -
semi/periphery relationship, while “numbness” is a result of
nonexistence or weakness or powerlessness of the epistemic
communities at the semiperiphery itself, which reflects the marginal
position of both gender studies and women scientists in male
dominated and androcentric knowledge hierarchies.
Intersectionality is closely connected to all three above mentioned
aspects of epistemic positionality of nomadic scientists, such as me.
“Epistemic void”, from which a scientist from the semiperiphery tries
to think about her/his context, together with “muteness” and
“numbness” that s/he is faced with in communication very often
creates a burden of isolation and self/isolation. Losing the ground,
both in terms of physical space, institutional belonging, and in terms
of epistemic boundaries created by the dominant paradigms and
widely accepted cannons, puts limits on all individual efforts of
nomadic scientists to create the knowledge without the epistemic
community. On the other hand, creation of epistemic community is

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often beyond the power of the individual scholar and largely
dependent on the power of the context within the international
division of labor.

Institutional Consequences of Global Scientific

Nomadism: Competition, Exclusion and Hierarchy
The Semiperiphery is a very relevant concept for the exploration
of the working and living conditions of scientists, including gender
scientists. The recent ENWISE Report is offering comprehensive
analysis of the situation, showing how much knowledge making is
dependant on the location of the institution and of the individual
scientists. In many regards, differences between core and
semiperiphery are larger than differences between the genders. On
the other hand, gender differences have very similar patterns of
exclusions and inclusions world wide (Palomba, 2002; ENWISE
Report 2003; Brouns, 2004).
Global scientific nomadism is largely changing from brain drain
into the “brain circulation” (Daxner, 2002), creating a transnational
scientific elite world wide. However, it largely reflects the general type
of the conditions on the labor market: there is too much flexibility and
competition on one hand and too little security on the other hand.
“Today’s economic and social conditions are naturalised (...) and
reality is an inevitable jungle. In a period of scarcity, the feeble die
out and the stronger survive. Today, aptitude to survival depends
on individual adaptability, flexibility and mobility: be innovative,
autonomous, polyvalent, and multifunctional and never stop
learning in order to seduce your successive employers.
Employability”. (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2002: 98)

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 New academic and research institutions mostly serve as
frameworks for different projects. While this allows certain
advantages, the fact is that the knowledge production has become too
market oriented and too much dependent on uncertain funding. This
has consequences for the type of knowledge which is being produced.
Production and distribution of knowledge have strengthened global
hierarchies and vice versa. The fact that individual scientists migrate
does not diminish, but increases these global hierarchies. Within the
core countries scientists who are migrants and especially women
minorities are exposed to additional discrimination and possible
exploitation.43 Scientists from the semiperiphery are quite often
squeezed between two “impossibilities”: impossibility to do creative
scientific work, and the impossibility to have a decent life, which will
allow them to do the science in the first place. As the romantic idea of
being a creative individual artist is fading away, so is the romantic
idea of being a creative individual scientist. It is the hierarchies of the
strong who successfully manipulate the intellectual machineries that
govern the worlds of knowledge.
Not only that both the local and other institutions (in different
settings or international) have a tendency to marginalize nomadic
scientists from the semiperiphery, but so do networks as well.
Networks are not deprived of power differentials, women’s or men’s
networks, local or international. The very idea that “networking” and
“lobbying” would bring more equality to women is naive, and
ethically problematic, since women suffer from “time-poverty” which
is the sole most relevant resource for networking. Institutional
strategies are in fact more protective for women (Prpić, 2004).

43See: Network of Ethnicity and Women in Science – NEWS,

http://newscientist.ulb.ac.be/index_en.htm.

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 Personal (is political) Consequences of
Global Scientific Nomadism
As already stated, one of the preferred copying strategies of many
Eastern European scholars is mobility, as part of the “feminization of
survival” (Sassen, 2003). Mobility of women scientists and
professionals, in general, is defined both by gender and by their
origin. They are often exposed to “double discrimination”, but,
paradoxically, that still can be the better choice than the one of
“staying at home”. If mobility of professional women is approached
not as “brain drain” issue, but as survival strategy, then it reveals the
basic similarity with generally new mobility patterns of women from
the semiperiphery, which Morokvasic graphically named as “settled
within mobility” (Morokvasic, 2003). In new mobility patterns
mobility itself becomes the resource which contributes to better
individual social positioning, higher quality of life and eventually
stronger individual agency. However, the “surplus of labor force”
under the new economic conditions obviously is deeply changing
both the work arrangements and organizational practices world-
wide. De-elitization of the professions, weakening and proleterization
of the middle class, together with gender based exploitation of
women’s resources, creates the pool of labor which in the long run
increases the competition and decreases the payments.
Flexibility and mobility expressed in “nomadic life style” of many
women scientists in reality often turns into the set of deprivations.
Quite often nomadic life in reality is made from the set of the lack of
choices, especially in a domain of private life : lack of choice to have
stable relationships, lack of choice to have rewarding career with
logical and predictable upward mobility, lack of choice to have family,
lack of choice to have children, or stable partners, or close friends, lack
of choice to live in a community and to be an active part of that

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community. For women scholars from the semiperiphery, lack of
choices can turn easily into a set of deprivations. They can be caught
up in the net of high expectations, and even victimized by their own
overachievements. In increasingly nomadic world of brain circulation,
scientists, women and men, could discover another value of
territoriality, as a contrast. In the world where endless mobility,
flexibility and “employability” are preconditions for success,
territoriality can become the real luxury.

Conclusion – Intersectionality on the Move

Intersectionality is a concept, or even a paradigm, with a growing
theoretical potential which addresses endless multiplicities of roles,
identities, practices, discourses which create increasingly nomadic
societies. Individuals are loci of different intersectionalities, and
multiple trajectories of mobility create more or less materialized
social entities, from groups and institutions to projects and networks.
In such a setting, “normal” one dimensional notions, of class, race,
gender, citizenship, migration, religion etc. are simply becoming too
narrow and simplified, or even, worse, could be misleading,
disguising new emerging hierarchies.
The main question is whether scientific nomadism, in social
sciences and in gender scholarship, particularly, brings some new
quality to knowledge, does it increase the cognitive agency of
nomadic scientists and nomadic scholarly communities, and if yes, in
what way? Does scientific nomadism in gender studies create some
kind of “transnational knowledge” and what would be the
characteristics of such knowledge?
My answer to this question is – yes, necessarily. If we go back to
the standpoint theory, it is beyond any doubt that the
intersectionality of the knower is being reflected into the knowledge

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that s/he is making. Intersectionality is, secondly, affecting also the
conditions of knowledge creation, exactly because new collective
agents of knowledge production are built on intersectionality.
Intersectionality is affecting the very character of knowledge in a
direction towards interdiscplinarity and flexibility, even practicality.
At the end, intersectionality is becoming deeply integrated in public
policy planning with the demand on inclusion of all vulnerable
groups (for example desegregation of data for monitoring
Millennium Development Goals).
It seems that the most relevant aspect of possible epistemic gain
based on the intersectionality approach could be the advancement of
knowledge itself. The quality of knowledge created by endless
intersectionalities of different knowledge agents lies in its endless
capacity for connection of different pieces. In other words, the process of
making sense, of giving meanings in the process of critical thinking
about various settings, interconnects all those settings. The result is the
possibility of a holistic approach. Living intersectionality which
nourishes thinking intersectionality, leads to the holistic understanding
of interconnectedness. If intersectionality of the knowers is reflected and
accepted by the knowers themselves, if reflective positionality is
integrated into their understanding of the process of knowledge
production, it necessarily leads to holistic knowledge.
Holistic knowledge relies on discovery and understanding of
interconnectedness: between core, semiperiphery and periphery; between
different spheres of social life; different social groups, including genders;
different ways of knowing; different disciplines. Contextualized
knowledges could become integral parts of holistic knowledge
corresponding to globalized, but also fragmented, reality and its different
localized expressions. This type of knowing, through and by the way of
intersectionality, challenges the very understanding of scientific
conceptualization: towards understanding concepts as multidimensional,

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contextual, and relational, while in a constant flux. What holds this
complex structure of truly transnational knowledge together is not the
credibility based on facts, not even on social trust, as much as shared
understanding of the transnationalisation of our own lives by the forces
of globalisation, of our destiny to become sites of multiple
intersectionalities, knots in the networks of our own trajectories.
It is our will to communicate and to respect each other, the
knowers, which at the end constructs the validity and credibility of
such knowledge. By abolishing illegitimate hierarchies based on
location, gender, class, race, even scientific record, etc. we commit
ourselves to something deeper and more relevant, which is an
understanding of the whole and undertaking the responsibility for
our own practices of knowledge production.

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Chapter 7

Shifting the Paradigm:

Arguing for the Positive History Approach

“Patriarchal society provides the context, the material/data and

the norms of social science and science, including indeed studies on
men. This is the mainstream, the male stream (O”Brien, 1981). A
society in which men are privileged and dominant produces (social)
science in which men are privileged and dominant. Science has
historically developed in society in which men are privileged and
dominant, and simultaneously has reproduced that privileging and
dominance of men.” (Hearn, 2004:62)

“Sciences and their societies, it turned out, co-constructed each

other.”(Harding, 1998:2)

Introduction:
An Epistemic Shift
This chapter discusses possible epistemic and policy gains of
introducing a gender perspective into the knowledge base of policies
aiming at reconciliation. From the semiperiphery, which is often de
facto faced with wars, instability and consequently, issues of
reconciliation, a gender perspective could be introduced in a way
which is both similar and different than what was usually the case with
countries at the periphery. Distinctive characteristics of the
semiperiphery, such as that it has developed to a certain point and that
the wars actually took place in a period of de-development and largely

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because of it, is also shedding a different light on women as social
agents who were not only passive objects of war events, before, during
or after the war. Women’s agency is very tangible at the semiperiphery
and needs to be dealt with beyond “women as victims” paradigm. On
the other hand, men’s agency in comparison to women’s agency is not
that much different in regard to war, since both genders in the
communist set up were largely deprived of the possibility of political
influence and citizen’s agency. Both the gender and the semiperiphery
perspective add up to better understanding of the mechanisms of war
conflicts, from their inception to reconciliation.
The concrete question which emerges is: why and how does the
gender perspective contribute to reconciliation? Because women
were the victims of the wars in a gender-specific way, or because
women were the major peace activists during the wars? Because they
experience the wars differently than men, and/or because the
reconciliation process usually does not include them adequately or
sufficiently? The gender perspective includes all of that, but it also
transcends these more common approaches, as it will be argued in
this chapter. The main thesis here is that engendering reconciliation,
theoretically and practically, means reshaping dominant discourses
on both reconciliation, and women’s issues connected to the war.
Engendering reconciliation is not seen here as “mainstreaming
gender” into peace making and reconciliation efforts, but as a
profound change of the epistemic and theoretical perspective, which
will necessarily also influence concrete activities in the process of
reconciliation. The prevailing reduction of the issue of “gender and
reconciliation” to the above mentioned matters, is in fact damaging
and it narrows down much more profound possibilities of an
insightful feminist epistemological approach, which, if accepted and
disseminated, could have wide theoretical, research and political
implications. Too much effort, so far, has been put in collecting the
evidence on women’s victimhood and different discriminatory

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practices, and too little in changing the perspective which would give
ground to epistemic and theoretical innovation, and which would
empower reconciliation efforts in turn.
Reconciliation is closely connected to knowledges: legitimate,
official, tacit, or subversive knowledges. The underlying assumption
in this text is that “we see” what “we already know,” and that it is
essential to clean up our ideologized lenses to be able to “see”
differently. It is necessary to create different knowledge, to be able to
shape different discourses and paradigms, to be able to promote
constructive social change in the direction of reconciliation. This is a
kind of recognition of the relevance of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”
approach (Blagojević, 2002).
So, this text is arguing for the need for a fresh start, in line with the
feminist epistemological intervention into androcentric knowledge,
which will go beyond ideologized axioms, or micro research findings
which “prove,” with the evidence from the ground, that women are
“major victims” of the wars, or “major peacemakers.” Instead, a new
approach is offered here, the positive history approach. There is a
profound need for new research to support that approach, which could
eventually lead to the creation of a different body of knowledge, related
to both the war conflicts and to reconciliation. This approach, as it will
be shown, puts emphasis on everyday life and social history, and not
on political history. It includes a deconstruction of gendered practices
and discourses on the level of everyday life, and it is enabling a
perspective from bellow, coming from those who were/are powerless,
or who had/have very limited agency to influence major war events,
being either women or men.

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 Framing the problem
Until the last decade women stayed largely invisible, both as
specific victims of the wars, as well as peace makers. Feminist based
scholarship has contributed to change, and the evidence of specific
gender-related aspects of conflicts and reconciliation is growing. There
is, also, an obvious movement from an essentialized perception of a
woman as a “natural peacemaker,” to a more critical examination of
the different positioning of women and men in different locations
related to the war. Both women and men could be victims, warriors, or
peace activists (Bijelić, 2000; Popov, 2000). Numbers or percentages
cannot be really indicative of the “real nature” of women or men. In
fact, they can only be the starting point in an analysis of how society
has conditioned and constructed both genders, so that in times of
conflict they continue to perform in a manner which has been already
defined by society. This kind of acknowledgment, that goes beyond an
essentialized understanding of gender, is very well connected to the
general movement away from women’s focus to gender focus in
academia, as well as with the general shift from WID (women in
development) approach to GAD (gender and development) approach
in gender and development studies.
Deconstruction of essentialism, however, is still mainly
accompanied by discourses on “women, major victims of wars”, which
have been heavily supported by international organizations” and
donors” agendas in conflict-ridden areas. On the other hand, while the
discourse of gender is taking root, it is largely shaped within the
dominant paradigm of “gender mainstreaming,” meaning that the
analysis of each particular element of war, peacebuilding or
reconciliation should be gendered, thus revealing mainly differences,
and few similarities between women and men. Gender mainstreaming
too often emphasizes differences and not similarities, since it builds,

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theoretically and empirically, on acknowledged differences. It
reproduces itself through and by the differences. The accumulation of
research findings so far has proven that indeed there are many
relevant differences, and that they should not be ignored, especially by
policy makers. However, what stays invisible and under-researched is
the relationship between the differences and the sameness.
But, the question here is not whether we know about these
differences, or whether we think that they are relevant. Present
accumulation of “facts and figures” about gender differences and
inequalities is coming to the point where it is proving the obvious. It
seems that the cycle of simple collecting of evidence is over. The new
challenge is to formulate an adequate epistemic and theoretical
approach, and, consequently, a constructive policy approach, to deal
with those facts. Once the facts are known, but the power to change
remains limited, it is obvious that there is a need for a change of
paradigm, for a different approach.
The typical dominant approach connecting gender and reconciliation
at present could best be illustrated by the following citation:
“Reconciliation is a long-term process that includes the search for
truth, justice, healing and forgiveness. It should be a broad and
inclusive process that involves each member of a conflict-affected
society. In addition, the reconciliation process should be engendered
because men and women experience war differently. In this regard,
before we examine the nature of reconciliation, we must acknowledge
how conflict involves and affects women and men in different ways.”
(Simić, http://www.globalizacija.com/doc_en/e0065sim.htm).
The reconciliation process, thus, should be engendered because
“women and men experience war differently.” This paragraph reveals
the paradox: on the one hand, reconciliation is seen as a process of
“accepting otherness,” the other side in the conflict, through healing
and forgiving, and on the other hand, there should be an

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“engendering” of the process to acknowledge the differences between
women and men. In other words, one “otherness,” the other side in
the conflict, could be accepted through the process of reconciliation,
while the difference based on gender is even emphasized. It seems,
from this paragraph, that the disclosure of one type of difference is
almost a precondition for annulling or diminishing the other type of
difference, which is a paradox.
It could be argued, instead, that this gender difference itself needs
to be contextualized, not only within the context of a certain society
and the prevailing gender regime within that society, but also within
historical time and within the process of war development and war
resolution. Moreover, facts of difference should be contextualized on
different analytical levels (individual, everyday life, state/nation).
And this, in summary, means that if a different theoretical approach
is applied - gender-sensitive, but also gender-integrative - for
understanding the wars, the result could be a set of very different
conclusions and recommendations.
There is also an obvious disconnection at present between
different disciplinary approaches related to war and reconciliation:
different disciplines deliver different explanations. But, they have
one thing in common: prevailing androcentric knowledge (Hearn,
2004). On the other hand, feminist intervention is self-limiting itself
within the boundaries of finding the facts to support the efforts
towards gender mainstreaming of reconciliation. Still, the problem
lies elsewhere. It lies in the fact that there is an absence of a
paradigm – and not of the facts as such – which will counterbalance
the dominant approaches in dealing with the war conflicts, and
consequently, with the reconciliation process.
The dominant approach is in fact starting with several hidden or
open assumptions: that the war is both a process itself, as well as an
interruption of other societal processes; that reconciliation is also a

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process which goes “in reverse,” and that the gender approach means to
address a set of differences between women and men. In this kind of
prevailing practice and discourse, individual experiences accumulate
and acquire the quality of group differences. This kind of methodological
individualism is taken as normal and self-justifiable. Moreover, war is
mainly interpreted as a deliberate political and economic activity,
connected to the political elites and their responsibility. This approach,
very present in history and political sciences, emphasizes the role of
agency and underestimates the role of structures. The effect of this
interpretation, especially when it is disseminated by media, is that other
social actors almost do not have any agency, or that their agency is very
limited. From a semiperipheral perspective, however, the dynamics
between the agencies of elites and “masses” is very complex issue, since
it is closely connected to the societal chaos and collapse of institutions
during the transition. In a transition period, some structures collapse,
other emerge, and there is an enormous shift of agency, both in private
and in public. This all needs research and contextualized analysis.
However, the dominant social science discourse on war and gender,
especially in the case of wars taking place in the era of intense
globalisation, from 90s on, has been oversimplifying all those issues.
From a perspective of the semiperiphery, it could be argued that the war
is emerging from structural collapse, in many instances is also provoked
by global shifts, and that it itself is a new structure and maintained
through a set of new structures; that reconciliation is also structure
related, and in fact, only successful if structured; and that a focus on
individuals and agents is overestimating their free choices, and
underestimating the relevance of “real life” which is taking place on
everyday life level, within the set of structural or lack-of-structural and
gendered constraints.

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 Starting from the Above:
Lessons from Feminist Epistemology
To get out of this circle of “proving the obvious”, at least within
the community of feminist scholars, a brave step backward should be
made. It is necessary to go to the sources, to the core, to the most
revolutionary and fruitful feminist intervention into androcentric
knowledge making, which is: feminist epistemology and standpoint
theory. From that perspective, a quite different understanding of
what is the problem and how it could be resolved could emerge. So,
what are the key feminist epistemological lessons, which can be taken
as a starting point for intervention into the body of knowledge
related to reconciliation?
The first one is that knowledge is embodied and embedded. This
would mean that the knowledge about wars, and consequently about
reconciliation, is produced by individuals who occupy certain
positions and have certain characteristics. If sociological analysis
were applied, it would become obvious that those individuals who
produce knowledge about wars are mostly men, working in the
institutions which have patriarchal hierarchies, and relying on
androcentric disciplinary knowledge traditions. Wars are the major
topic for historians and political scientists, and they, together with
the politicians and media, are the ones who shape our dominant
understanding of what wars are about. Feminist intervention in this
regard is usually limited to turning the attention to some aspects of
social history, by introducing gender, ethnic and religious dimension.
But, this is also where political scientists take over, creating a
representation of the world as an internally hostile and competitive
place, where domination is unavoidable. Media is only adding up to
that simplified and distorted picture.

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 Feminist approach at this level, however, could go beyond these
limitations. It could deconstruct the whole picture of the war conflict
by deconstructing immanent power relations which are behind the
picture, from each side of the conflict. It could deconstruct the
collectives, from one side of the conflict and another side, and show
that they actually consist of very many different parts. It could go
beyond simple identity politics, which is often in the very core of the
conflict, and deconstruct the very mechanisms of creation of
identities. It could, also, provide evidence that knowledge itself is a
social and cultural construct, deeply embedded in interest networks,
dominant discourses and prevailing practices. If this deconstruction
is not taking place, or not to the adequate degree, but just here and
there, then social actors are simply bound to repeat “historical
lessons,” over and over again. The feminist approach in fact reaffirms
the idea that history is “wo/man made,” in a sense that it is a result of
human agency, and consequently, gendered human agency (or
ethnicized, “generationized”, localized etc. agency). Human agency
produces the social structures at the first place, human agency
changes them, and human agency allows for choice. Mere
understanding of the relevance of human agency reinforces that
agency, but also the responsibility of social agents.
An immanent feminist knowledge project would need to deal with
the mission of “decolonizing” knowledge, from the theoretical
assumptions, often supported by empirical research, which create
and maintain social hierarchies, based on whatever criteria (gender,
class, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, location, age, ability…) and
justify social exclusions. It would seek to abolish simplified black and
white oppositions and deconstruct interests which create them.
Postcolonialism and feminism are constructing critical discourses by
affirming standpoints of the marginalized “outsiders” to those who
have the power to create dominant knowledge paradigms. This
approach eventually increases objectivity: “[s]tarting thought from

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“marginalized lives” as standpoint epistemologies recommend thus
provides more rigorous, more competent standards for maximizing
objectivity” (Harding, 1987: 18). So, it is “stronger objectivity” which
is the result of standpoint theories, not “weaker.”
The feminist approach also aims at deconstructing “the knower”
him/herself. To be able to do that, the knower, the one who produces
knowledge, needs to position him/herself in relation to the topic of
his/her investigation and to enable this position to be exposed and
transparent in the process of knowledge production and knowledge
communication. Moreover, the “knower,” one who is authorized to
make knowledge, should reflect on his/her own interests and practices
in knowledge production. In addition, s/he should be aware of the very
influence that knowledge production is exercising upon reality. The
ideal position would be one of a “critique: in which the authors
critically and reflexively engage with both themselves and the topic,
within the emancipatory context” (Hearn, 2004:60), but also clear and
transparent responsibility towards (global) society. Therefore,
especially in social sciences, it is not simply exploring the “causes” of
events, following the tradition of hard sciences, especially physics, as
much as it is exploring the connection between the knowledge and
reality in a manner of “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Knowledge is creating
preconditions for certain outcomes in social reality. Social reality is
shaped by knowledge and its application. The one who produces
knowledge needs to reflect on the process of knowledge making, as
well as on possible consequences produced by knowledge. This
reflection is a necessary precondition not only for the quality of
knowledge, but also for enhancing responsibility of the “knowledge
maker,” the one who has the power to declare “the truth,” or “one of
the truths,” or even the one who declares that “all truths are equal,” or
that “there is no truth” at all.

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 The feminist approach is not simply about “adding up women,” it
is not even about the “gender perspective”. It is about changing the
theoretical perspective by critical examination of the limitations
imposed on knowledge production due to power hierarchies,
including gender hierarchies. The absence or marginalization of
women in knowledge production is distorting the knowledge, since it
excludes a large scope of experience of realities. The way out is not in
simple acceptance of all the “truths” in the name of “pluralism,” but
in understanding the structural background for different “truths”
coming from different positioning of the knowers/social-actors. In
the feminist tradition, discovering “blind spots,” or “gray areas,” is as
important as exposing dominant knowledge paradigms to critique.
Identification of the invisible, unknown, and unnamed problems
experienced by women, especially marginalized women, is in the core
of women’s and gender studies. But, also exploring and reflecting on
men and masculinities in relation to war is essential for the
deconstruction of dominant scientific and public discourses on wars.
In the feminist epistemic project, ignorance - or better to say,
“systematic ignorance” (Harding, 1998), the absence of knowledge
about the things which are relevant for the lives of those who are
powerless - is perceived as a result of systematic structural
inequalities, not as a fact of coincidence. Without deconstruction of
male hierarchies related to the losses and gains from wars, in the
mode of Critical Studies on Men, as suggested by Hearn (2004), it is
impossible to deconstruct wars as social phenomena.
Finally, another question is also very important for the issue of
reconciliation. That question is: how can we judge between
competing interpretations of social reality? What criteria do we use?
Since feminism is all about empowerment of the “weaker side,” the
interpretation which is empowering that side, and which also brings
in the quality of authentic voice, is usually taken as stronger.
However, there is an increasing awareness of the existence of the

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multiplicity of “truths” connected to the multiplicity of social
locations. Still, the analysis of power relations in structural terms is
what produces, at the end, a favorable interpretation from the
feminist perspective. Interpretation of the wars would, therefore,
become focused on those who neither had the power to produce the
wars, nor to interpret the wars, or their causes, in fact. From that
point of view, reconciliation would also favor the viewpoint in which
those who were lacking the power to produce wars would be
connected, to reflect on their position and to make solidarity
networks across gender, ethnic, racial, or religious lines. So, the
dominant interpretation would be the one which favors the
perspective of the powerless, those who did not have the power to
produce the wars, to oppose them, or to stop them, and especially
those who were major “losers” of the wars. However, this would also
mean that the reconciliation effort should provide the interpretation
which would diminish the possibility for creating a hierarchy of
victimhood, since that hierarchy would create tensions and endanger
solidarity between the powerless, across the lines of conflicting sides.
Feminist epistemological starting points, in other words, allow for
much deeper intervention into knowledge, in comparison to what has
been usually done within the efforts of “adding up women” or
“gender mainstreaming.” They allow - in fact, they call for, the
creation of a different paradigm, which would deeply challenge the
dominant interpretation of war conflicts. That paradigm would also
reframe the issue of “gender and reconciliation” and deeply influence
reconciliation efforts in practice. It would connect “objectivity,” in
fact “stronger objectivity,” to responsibility of “the knowers,” and it
would also disclose the connection between “knowledge” and the
very process of war making, or peacemaking. It would be critical
towards “objectivity” which constructs sides in conflict as blocks, as
supra-identities of “nations,” “states”, or religious or ethnic groups.

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Instead, it would offer subtle and disaggregated picture of the
“blocks,” demystifying and deconstructing the collectives in conflict.
Scientific objectivity is closely connected to responsibility in this
matter. Because, neither wars nor peace, neither conflict nor
reconciliation, happen in the absence of knowledge. Rather, they
build on a specific, distorted and “dangerous” knowledge, although
that knowledge is most often legitimized through academia. That is
most often the knowledge which empowers elites and disempowers
those who are already powerless even more. It is a well known fact
that gains and losses in wars actually increase social inequalities to
the extreme, although they often also lead to emergence of new elites
- but destruction is still unevenly distributed.
To summarize, major lessons for the knowledge project which
could reframe the reconciliation project, are the following:
• going beyond essentialism (“women are peace lovers,” “men
are aggressive”);
• arguing for gender-sensitive and gender -integrative approach
in a manner of “critical studies on men” (Hearn);
• deconstructing and positioning of the “knowers”;
• deconstructing of the practitioners of reconciliation;
• deconstructing structural power relations related to the war
making, but also for peacemaking and reconciliation;
• understanding that knowledge is a construct, gendered
construct, and empowering the powerless to deconstruct it;
• discovering the “blind spots” closely connected to
powerlessness in relation to war; bringing powerlessness from
all sides and social locations into the light;

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 • reaffirming the perspective “from bellow,” from everyday life
(using personal narratives);
• understanding that individual agency is closely connected to
social hierarchies and power;
• connecting guilt and responsibility with limits of the agency of
individuals and collectives;
• integrating different knowledges articulated in different social
locations into the body of knowledge about the war and the
reconciliation;
• creating inclusive meta-narratives which will encompass those
different knowledges and micro narratives coming from
different social locations;
• advocating for knowledge which will have healing and not
disruptive power.
For a feminist scholar, one who wants to build on feminist
epistemic innovations, the true challenge is how to create knowledge
which will itself be a part of the reconciliation process, instead of a new
confrontation. So, it is much more than “just” disclosing women’s
suffering and victimization, or women’s discrimination and
exploitation during and after the wars. It is about making knowledge-
as-reconciliation, creating knowledge which will have a healing power
by disclosing powerlessness on many different levels, from many
different sides in a conflict, on micro and macro level. “Positive
history” could be a feminist healing knowledge project.

The Positive History Approach

“Positive history” is here used as a “strategic concept” (Harding,
1997), which means that there is no claim to universality and that it

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does not mean that this concept could be applied everywhere, in any
situation. However, its relevance is obvious in the case of former
Yugoslavia, for example, where commonalities played an important
role before the outbreak of wars. The essence of positive history is its
emphasis on commonalities, shared experiences, common practices
and discourses, intercultural exchanges. It is an affirmation of social
history as opposed to political history. Positive history explores the
realities of everyday life, of actual “living together”. It starts with the
assumption that history has two sides: one of cooperation,
communication, adaptation, exchange, building commonalities, and
the other, of separation, confrontation, war conflicts.
In the case of former Yugoslavia, the history of “living together”
lasted longer then the history of conflicts. The picture of reality
would be seriously distorted if only conflicts would be taken as
“history,” and not the part related to “living together.” Moreover, if
the prevailing interpretation is the one which only emphasizes the
history of conflicts, then it actually reinforces them. There is a close
and circular connection between the interpretation and the concrete
outcomes in reality. If history is interpreted as a history of eternal
conflicts, and regularly repeated, unavoidable, conflicts, with only
small or irrelevant “peace breaks” between conflicts, then social
agents are faced with a lack of a real choice, then “negative history”
becomes their destiny.
Furthermore, positive history includes two different, but
interrelated research areas: one related to “living together”, and the
other related to opposition to the wars. The first issue deals with
practices, everyday life experiences, supranational identities (such as
Yugoslav), multiculturalism, inter-group mixing in everyday life,
exchange, shared discourses and meta-narratives of “togetherness”
(“brotherhood and unity”), attitudes reflecting small ethnic distance,
interethnic marriages; memories on commonalities, Yugo-nostalgia;

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spatial mobility throughout common territory and emotional
appropriation of that territory (emotional maps); cultural hybrids
consisting of different cultural traditions; shared cultural space;
kinship and friendship networks throughout the common space;
professional former Yugoslav communities and business contacts;
shared media space etc.
The second research field, related to the opposition to the wars,
would include the following: institutional resistance to the
dissolution; civilian resistance (mutual help, solidarity with victims,
solidarity between the victims); resistance of soldiers and warriors
(subversive behavior, help to the other side in the conflict, refusal of
mobilization); active resistance to the war in the form of peace
movements, solidarity of NGOs across borders, creative resistance
(resistance of artists, scientists, prominent public personalities), and
media resistance of independent media (Blagojević, 1998; Susak,
2000; Popov, 2000).
The important feature of shared commonalities as an essential
part of positive history is that they were lived experienced,
memorized. They cannot be reduced to simple “communist
propaganda” since they were exercised daily, they were generally
acknowledged, intelligible to the majority of people, practiced on a
daily basis, and part of public discourses, and they were generally
believed in (Golubović, Kuzmanović, Vasović, 1995). Wars did not
“prove” the opposite, and they simply could not, logically. The causes
of wars belong to a very different deterministic network of social
vectors, so those things simply do not relate on the same level.
While the prevailing explanation of the wars deals with the public
sphere, the prevailing explanation related to positive history should
deal with the private sphere. These two perspectives do not exclude
each other, but rather complement each other. Adding positive
history also means introducing the gender perspective, by disclosing

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the private, the invisible, the individual and the day-to-day. Change
of the perspective, to the one from bellow, from the level of everyday
life, is essentially a feminist epistemic strategy which is necessary for
“stronger objectivity.” However, this is not to say that the everyday
life perspective is useful only for the positive history approach. On
the contrary, to understand increased animosities it is equally
relevant to understand how economic crises, media influence, and
political constellations were mediated through everyday life to the
level of the individual. Everyday life is the level on which people
experience social reality, collapse of structures, wars and peace. The
experience on the level of everyday life is so important that, as
research has shown, the violence in war could best be described as a
“violent disruption of everyday life practices” (Blagojević, 2000).
However, since different disciplines deal with different theoretical
approaches, and different methodological tools, it is quite a challenge
to connect the positive history approach with the dominant political
history approach. One of the major methodological problems is how
to detect the change of interpretations under the influence of
historical momentum and changing meta-narratives. There is a
danger of tempocentrism – interpretation from a different time
perspective. In other words, micro narratives, those of individuals,
are almost always situated within the larger meta-narrative which is
prevailing in a certain social setting. The facts do not change, but the
interpretation of those facts might change. Research needs to
deconstruct this variability by disclosing the role of the meta-
narrative and by deconstructing the power relations behind it.
Individual narratives also reflect individual differences in position,
generation, gender, personalities etc. Some other challenges might
be: forgetting, reinterpretation to conform to the majority opinion,
victim status benefits, or thorough acceptance of new-order-
nationalism (globalisation has been favoring fragmentation!). The
power of meta-narratives lies in the fact that “ordinary people” often,

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especially in times of crises and wars, perceive reality as very
confusing and chaotic and they use “meta-narratives” to order the
chaos, to be able to survive and function. On the other hand, wars
and ethnic conflicts create conditions in which ethnic identity
becomes instrumental for survival, which in turn reinforces
nationalistic conformism.
Contrary to the position of “the knower,” who, embodied as an
expert, scholar or politician, inhabited and appropriated the space of
interpretation, the positive history approach is calling for another,
feminist, strategy of “knowing.” Not only the one which deconstructs
scholarly or political texts related to the wars in former Yugoslavia, or
some other context, but the one which insists on the validity of
knowledge produced in the concrete contexts of former Yugoslav society,
and again, not solely scholarly knowledge, but everyday life knowledge,
common knowledge of “ordinary” people. “Stronger objectivity” is
created by giving credentials to the knowledge and self-understanding of
ordinary people and their often “floating” narratives, those which are not
yet situated into the wider interpretative framework. The issue is not
about “adding” the perspective of “positive history” to counterbalance
the other one, but to offer a different understanding of the very causality
of the wars and the fact that they were produced and reproduced
counter to, and not according to the interests of the majority of the
populations in former Yugoslavia. It is the perspective of the “losers”
which is in fact both more justified and objective.
This perspective of positive history necessarily puts more
emphasis on the very process of war-making and war-imposition,
which resulted from the interactions of different agents/actors. The
perspective, thus, moves us from a cause/consequence analysis to a
deeper understanding of how the wars were actually produced, and
how they reproduced themselves. Media wars as an integral part of
wars in former Yugoslavia are an excellent example of the self-

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fulfilling prophecy of/for war-making. This kind of deeper
understanding of different mechanisms of war production puts limits
to the causal explanation and instead underlines the relevance of
agents. In the chaotic social environment of former Yugoslavia and
the fast changing global scene of the 1990s, where there was a
specific collapse of different structures, and where the process of
deconstruction outpaced the one of reconstruction, the collapse of
structures created a fertile ground for increasing the power of
agents/war-makers.
Positive history allows the “weaker side” on all sides of a conflict,
the side which was opposing the wars actively or passively, to become
visible. This side still remains invisible and powerless. However, the
weakness of that side, in Yugoslavia, for example, did not come from
“objective” factors, such as: small numbers, unwillingness,”eternal
hatred” between nations. Instead, it is a consequence of the
paradoxical fact that wars could not have been prevented exactly
because they were not expected, because no structural factors, internal
or external, were actually favoring them. On another level, they were
produced because powerful agents embodied in local political elites,
arms producers and arms smugglers, bodies of international and
foreign organizations, were making a series of moves which opened up
a negative spiral of destruction. Wars are not “explicable” in the same
way as they were not “predictable” for the majority of the population in
former Yugoslavia. They were expectable and predictable for the very
agents of war-making, those who were actually engineering both the
wars and their “solutions.” As every determinism comes out from
structural dispositions of a certain social system, in the case of former
Yugoslavia, one could claim that there was no “determinism” behind
the wars, although they did actually happen. They happened, rather, in
a vacuum of determinism, which was created by the collapse of
political and economic structures and institutions in the country, and
which profoundly changed the global environment of the 199os.

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 By encouraging knowledge creation which links gendered
individual experiences on everyday life level, before and during the
wars, by creating a meta-narrative which can encompass those
experiences, the positive history approach opens up a space for
reconciliation on a different ground: through articulation of a
narrative which could be widely shared by most of the “ordinary”
people from all the sides who actually perceive themselves as victims.
This could be a ground for new solidarity and healing, beyond the
boundaries of the newly formed states and ethnic affiliations.
In a political sense, it is of outmost relevance to identify the
resistance to the war conflict, sometimes active, sometimes passive,
and to encourage the process of healing by acknowledging the
existence of this “other” perspective. To the process of healing and
reconstruction of what has been broken and destroyed by the wars, it
is essential that a new meta-narrative becomes articulated, that of
powerlessness of ordinary people and alternative political actors to
oppose the madness of the wars, and that it relies on some evidence,
regardless of how scattered. The issue here is that many individual
experiences and historical facts exist that support this meta-narrative
of powerlessness of ordinary people and alternative political
(peaceful) solutions (Broz, 2004). However, these individual stories
have still not been brought together to construct an alternative
framework, as important as political history in interpreting what has
actually happened in former Yugoslavia.
While the process of globalisation in its present form is still highly
favorable for meta-narratives of conflicts, clashes, competition and
opposition, often through identity politics and anti/terrorist politics, the
emphasis on “living together” could counterbalance these dominant
meta-narratives by offering evidence of at least equally (if not more)
important practices and discourse of living together across ethnic,
religious or any other lines of division between human groups. This

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challenge, in the context of growing fragmentation and conflicts in the
contemporary world, is truly the most relevant and very urgent.
Explanations of the wars in former Yugoslavia correspond to the wider
understandings of transformation processes and globalisation. So, for
example, only after the countries in “transition” faced major difficulties
did it become evident that institutional change has been slow and
difficult because previous institutional set ups of former communist
societies were nearly destroyed. Or, only recently did the World Bank
issue a report with a clear conclusion that in recent history, civil wars
have been strongly connected to economic crisis. These “new
discoveries,” however, came too late for former Yugoslavia. Changes of
knowledge will eventually happen, but the consequences of wrong,
superficial and manipulative assumptions which triggered sets of
interventions or non-interventions, leading to the widening of the
vicious spiral of evil, instead of decreasing it, will not be annulled. This is
not an issue of who is right or wrong, but an issue of comprehension of
human agency, linking epistemic, ethical and political in a way which
has been paved by feminist epistemic interventions.

Everyday life resistance to the violent

dissolution of former Yugoslavia
There is much different evidence that multiculturalism in former
Yugoslavia was not mainly or only politically and ideologically
constructed, but lived, practiced and experienced by a great majority of
ordinary people. The fact that the wars actually happened does not
imply that they were “logical,” “determined,” inevitable and therefore
explicable. It is only the “scientific” (with male bias) approach to
reality that constructs and re-constructs “the reason.” For the vast
majority of people living in former Yugoslavia back in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, wars were not expected, not logical and not justified.

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Post factum, it is clear that war promoters were the winners of the
process, if not individually (because some of them will eventually be
punished), then as a political class, and that “nationalism” is still the
major “game in a town.” The winners are, therefore, states and
political elites. The loser is the former Yugoslav society en large, and
mostly so-called “ordinary people.”
Because wars were largely produced by (male) political elites, and
not really coming out of structures, but more through the lack of
structures, the role of media was crucial. The rationales for the wars
had to be invented by media. In fact, the media played an absolutely
key role in preparing the population for war. It would be impossible to
imagine how the wars would happen without media. Media were
feeding the collective consciousness with reasoning, explanations, and
justification of the “necessity” and “inevitability” of war. The weaker
the “real” reasons were, the stronger was the war propaganda.
It would be logical to expect that real reasons for ethnic wars would
be based on religious tensions and/or discrimination. Yet neither of
these existed to any substantial degree in former Yugoslavia, certainly
not in comparison with any western democracy. The population was
primarily atheist (in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s), and
discrimination against minority ethnic groups, in each of the
republics/provinces, was weak (with the exception of Kosovo, where
non-Albanian minorities were exposed to discrimination already in the
1980s). In fact, data from the 1981 census demonstrated convincingly
that almost nowhere in former Yugoslavia did individual upward
mobility depend on ethnic origin (Blagojević, 1996). For the majority
of the population, regardless of ethnic origin, there was a high
probability that an individual born after WWII could live the whole of
his/her life, until the end of the 1980s, without experiencing or feeling
ethnic or religious discrimination. This was especially true in urban
settings, of which Sarajevo was a prime example. Moreover, Yugoslavs

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shared common myths of the state, successful Partisan resistance,
“brotherhood and unity”, leadership in non-alignment movement, and
they perceived themselves as different to their own advantage from
both “East” and “West”.
Being open to Western knowledge, former Yugoslavia did have a
record of empirical research related to different issues of social
stratification and ethnic relations. Ethnic distance was a common
research topic in former Yugoslav society from 1960s on. First
instances of research kept disclosing weak distancing in relation to
other nations, even lower than was the case with other nations in
more developed, so called democratic societies. Until the mid-”80s,
ethnic distance was at a stable low, and even decreasing further. But
at the end of 1980s, as a consequence of deep economic crises,
Communist party dissolution, competition between the republics and
open war propaganda, ethnic distance increased throughout the
former Yugoslavia (Golubović, Kuzmanović, Vasović, 1995)
Exactly because of the weak “causes” for the wars in former
Yugoslavia, the media role was essential. The relevance of media war
serves as indirect evidence of weak causality behind the wars. It is a
negative which could be taken as an indicator of a positive, of the
strength of former Yugoslav commonalities. The media’s key role in self-
justification of the conflict lies in defining it as “necessary,”
“unavoidable,” “normal,” “predetermined,” even “justified” and “moral,”
thus creating broad consensus through a wide range of “pro-war”
arguments. Without this mobilization of propaganda through the media,
ethnic conflict and/or war simply would not make sense for most of the
social actors, who were/are the main losers. There would be no driving
force, no logic, and no inevitability without the media promotion of war,
which exhorted a collective readiness to victimize (Others) and to
sacrifice (themselves). The “Other” was virtually an overnight invention.

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 In everyday life, resistance to war politics was faced with two sets of
limitations: lack of institutional channels to express attitudes against the
wars, with an overwhelming feeling that it was not “us” who want the war,
but “they,” and second, exhaustion of resources due to survival pressures.
Nevertheless, there is much evidence of mutual help across ethnic lines
during the wars. Individual testimonies, collected in a book by Svetlana
Broz, for example, disclosed a whole variety of different situations when
ordinary people were helping each other in life-threatening situations (Broz,
2004). What this book showed is how the war was actually perceived as
some kind of a “natural disaster” over the heads of “normal people,” causing
spontaneous solidarity. What this book also showed is that the war
situations in former Yugoslavia were extremely chaotic on the ground,
exactly because the texture of society was so interwoven, so interconnected.
Nevertheless, in the chaos of the war, many cases could be found that
represent the ultimate confirmation of the power of individual agency which
finds its way through a set of chaotic, dangerous, and fragile situations to
counteract the dominant wave of animosity, hatred and destruction.
Although those are all individual stories, some of which relate to whole
villages, the fact is that we still do not have enough evidence to claim that
more people were willingly (not forcefully) involved in the wars, than in
helping other people across ethnic lines. Moreover, it would be difficult to
do such research, not because it would be methodologically impossible, but
because it would be so fundamentally different from the dominant scholarly
narrative which supports the very logic of the wars as “normal.”
Careful analysis of different cases of interethnic solidarity on a micro
level in Broz’s collection of narratives shows that incidences of help and
solidarity happen “out of a sudden” (contingency), or as cases of small
group solidarities against the dominant war paradigm (i.e. village
against warlords), or on the bases of earlier links. Sometimes, these
incidents happened as simple human solidarity and sometimes because
of a dominant sense of shared victimhood beyond ethnic divisions. But,
whatever the “type” of solidarity and help is in question (if a typology

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could be made at all); they all reveal a thick layer of shared
commonalities. All of those cases, and many more not collected in this
book, actually reveal the social background tragedy of wars “without
reason.” The help and the resistance should not be taken as
disconnected individual cases, but as a widely shared, although largely
inhibited, inclination to help others across ethnic lines. And although
dynamic and situational aspects are extremely important in evaluating
the relevance of those efforts, it is important to understand how the
ethnification of identities, institutions, and everyday life survival
strategies was developed through the wars and by the wars, and not the
other way around.
There is a seeming contradiction between the claim that the
majority of people in former Yugoslavia were actually dragged into
the wars, and the fact that nationalistic leaders were elected before
the wars and that nationalistic rhetoric tends to be the dominant one
after the wars as well. It is important for the purpose of this paper to
note that the support given to the leaders was not “for the wars,” but
for “self-protection,” as it was widely interpreted by media. Also, the
resistance of “ordinary people” was impossible on a large scale for a
number of practical reasons: there were no institutional channels for
this kind of opinions, in fact they were outside of institutions; there
were no wide-spread media to support this kind of opinions; and
there was no material base to support the organization of such
resistance, especially in times of severe economic hardship. In other
words, irrespectively of how much and how many people disagreed
with the violent resolution of former Yugoslavia, they were either
powerless or felt powerless to do anything about it. On another level
were those who actually felt powerful and who had the means to
produce the wars. The weaker side, mostly less visible and less loud,
however, was not lesser in numerical terms.

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 Conclusion
The model of positive history presented in this chapter builds on an
interpretation of feminist epistemic legacies in favor of standpoint
theory, critical gender analysis of knowledge production, empowerment
of the powerless, and research of the “invisible” in the lives of the
powerless. This model represents a theoretical contribution which
emerges exactly from the specific semiperipheral experience of de-
development, reverse development, and inadequacy of dominant
theories to deal with the contextualized and contextual knowledges of
the semiperiphery. The major claim is that this model has a much wider
potential than the current dominant discourse related to “gender and
the reconciliation.” Moreover, reconciliation efforts, as well as the
prevention of future wars, should strive to reinterprete history in favor
of togetherness, exchange and solidarity. The positive history approach
enables such a possibility. It is neither naïve nor utopian, it is a simple
theoretical framework for much research in the future. Only few
examples were provided here, but it is the responsibility of the
“knowers” to collect the evidence and connect it in new, constructive
meta-narratives. The shift in knowledge could empower a shift in reality.
Finally, the gender perspective in this approach is not limited to the
identification of differences between women and men, but rather, it is
taken as a possibility for a dramatic shift to the interpretation “from
below,” from the perspective of gendered everyday life. The positive
history approach contains a possibility for the production of knowledge
which provides a “counter-gendered view of reality” (Hearn, 2004:64),
by deconstructing gendered practices and discourses, both in everyday
life, as well as in knowledge making, which also means that it provides
the possibility for deconstructing the genderness of war and violence.

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 Conclusion:
Towards an Abundance Paradigm
“Shortage is a societal and cultural construction, a negative
consequence of multilayered exclusions. In terms of excellence, the
semiperipheral position of the ENWISE countries and male-
dominated scientific structures are the major constraints for the
manifestation of women’s excellence, preventing it from being
visible and recognized. This is why the individual response of
women is so often withdrawal and self-marginalization. Lack of
excellence measured by the existing numbers does not reflect the
lack of individual capacities, but societal constraints imposed by
both gender and West-East hierarchies. Women can only move
forward if these hierarchies and exclusions connected with them
gradually diminish. The same is true for men. The visibility and
recognition of abundance, abundance of talents and of excellence,
create in fact a powerful win-win logic, rewarding for both women
and men scientists in Europe, and highly beneficial for the very
project of the European Research Area.”
(Epilogue from the ENWISE Report, authored by Marina Blagojević,
2003)
 From Women in Science to Gender and Science
This book is approaching the issues of gender and knowledge
from different perspectives. But, one of the most recurrent topics is
the relationship between scientific excellence, gender and
locationality. Scientific excellence is highly gendered, as well as
strongly connected to the locationality of the scientist or the
institution, or the migratory status of the scientist, which itself
reflects the locationality of their origin. The issue of scientific
excellence also connects best and most clearly with the old feminist
axiom that “the personal is political.” In daily practices, in survival
strategies, in professional rewards and possibilities, over and over
again, the personal and political are interconnected, and both are
increasingly under the influence of globalisation. Women scientists
from the semiperiphery are objects of double-fold exclusion: one
coming from gender hierarchies, and the other coming from the core-
semiperiphery hierarchy.
When this is understood, it becomes obvious that the objectivity
of “excellence” is highly questionable. However, sadly, much of the
evidence is still missing to “prove” the claims that have been made
here. To be more precise: who would invest into a large, comparative
scientific project proving that there are global, and European,
hierarchies which actually exclude and dispense with much of the
talent, creativity and knowledge from the semiperiphery or/and from
different types of outsiders. The lack of evidence is itself a
consequence of the fact that those who are less powerful also have
fewer resources to produce evidence, since they lack the institutions,
funds, human resources, functioning epistemic communities,
recognition and authority for this evidence to be gathered and
articulated, and for new paradigms to be promoted. But, regardless
of the lack of such massive evidence, there is enough fragmented

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evidence gathered thus far to deconstruct the prevailing model and
advocate for a new one. It seems even more difficult to prove such
claims since there is an assumed “openness” of the ERA, while in
reality, many of the obstacles actually shape the results of the highly
competitive race for funds and prestige (Ouali, 2007). Large,
comparative research which would eventually support the claims
about the marginalization of countries, people and projects, and
which would create a more steady and reliable database, is at the
moment – nonexistent. This is the reason why in this book
qualitative research and personal observations, including personal
self-observation, play such an important role. What gives credibility
to generalizations presented here is simply their consistency with an
overall understanding of global hierarchies, which are becoming
more and more evident and transparent, and which have been deeply
instrumental for the reproduction of global inequalities.
Scientific excellence is a concept which is by definition both elitist
and exclusionary. This is why it could be the object of two types of
criticism: one related to its elitism, which would then emphasize the
problem of social inequalities and exclusions behind it, and the other,
related to the criteria on which the exclusions are made, which will
then put an emphasis on meritocracy. The way societal institutions
function, including the scientific ones, clearly supports patriarchal
structures and androcentric knowledge. There is a lot of evidence
showing how women are excluded from higher scientific posts, and
also a lot of evidence showing how women’s studies and lately gender
studies are faced with different obstacles within academia. Knowledge
produced within feminism, although often groundbreaking for social
sciences and humanities, has not been nearly as integrated into the
official curricula as it could have been expected, having in mind its
innovative power in theory, epistemology and research (Griffin, 2002).

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 The major problem with scientific excellence is that it is in fact based
on tautology: excellence is what is recognized as excellent. This means
that those who are already excluded cannot be included because they are
excluded (!). In reality, this kind of tautology is well grounded into the
series of exclusions along the lines of gender, age, race, ethnicity,
locationality (origin, citizenship status), or even discipline. In reality,
what is actually defined as “excellent” is a kind of residuum after all
those previous exclusions have been made. In reality, "scientific
excellence" is not based exclusively on meritocracy, and since science is
by definition the most rational human activity, when it fails to ensure
rational criteria for the recognition of scientific excellence, it also fails to
prove its ultimate rationality. Scientific knowledge is itself instrumental
for the reproduction of power. However, from the other side of
"knowledge" is "ignorance," or even "systematic ignorance," (Harding,
1998) which has its clear political and economic consequences. The
feminist critique of androcentric knowledge has discovered many of the
problems pushed into "ignorance," and it has brought them into light by
feminist research and the use and development of feminist epistemology
and methodology. But, "systematic ignorance" is the home of many
other unknown or ignored phenomena, including the existence of the
semiperiphery and the ignoring of its de-development process. The
phenomenon of systematic ignorance is extremely relevant for any
project of emancipation, progress or development. For the ignorance to
be sustained there is a whole institutional set up needed and different
resources deployed. Sustaining ignorance demands effort, it is not just a
simple consequence of the "lack of knowledge." Systematic ignorance is
often a systematic production of distortions, and one of the prime
examples is the present global financial crisis, which is a result of the
collapse of the whole system of modern rational organization in
developed societies. On the other hand, much of the knowledge which
already does exist is becoming "lost knowledge,” since institutions are
not set up to use it in the most proper way at present, or because it lacks

230
scientific credibility (for example “common sense” knowledge). Also,
much of the existent knowledge which has been accumulated through
history and in different civilizations is lost or invisible (Harding, 1998).
Much of the knowledge has been marginalized together with the
marginalization of certain groups (pagan groups) or different spiritual
practices and discourses. The history of Western medicine, for example,
is a process of marginalization of knowledge related to healing
(Achterberg, 1990). Marginalization of certain types of knowledge also
reinforced exclusions or even physical extinction of different groups and
vice versa, as it was the case with women healers in medieval Europe
(witch-hunting). Similarly, contextualized knowledge, which is the
knowledge of one society about itself, could be pushed away by
"international" knowledge embodied in different global institutional
agents, as was the case during the transition of the 1990s. In the New
Scientific Order, the validation of knowledge and its relevance is being
made "from above" and from the center, which is often in contradiction
with the "truths" from bellow, from the perspective of specific
semiperipheral societies and (gendered) everyday lives and experiences.
Discrimination, open and hidden, vertical and horizontal, which
exists in the academic and research institutions is shaping the very
idea of excellence. If the existence of discrimination is not
acknowledged, then there is a false idea that only excellence which is
visible and fits into institutional criteria is real excellence. However,
there were many scientists, as the history of science has convincingly
shown, who have been denied the recognition of excellence due to
different reasons, many of which were connected to gender,
ethnicity, location or class. Gender discrimination related to
education and science existed both in the core and at the
semiperiphery since the beginning of modern history, and it still
exists. In this regard there are many parallels, even today (ETAN,
ENWISE, HELSINKI, NEWS Reports; Palomba and Menniti, 2002;
Brouns, Addis, 2004; Husu 2004, Rees, 2004, She Fugures, 2006). It

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could be claimed that the basic patterns of gender exclusions are very
similar in fact, because they are the result of the patriarchal set-up of
structures and institutions which transcend a particular type of
society. Before the transition started, an international, comparative
project related to women in science has clearly proven those
similarities in different countries of Europe (Stolte-Heiskanen, 1991).
Gender-based discrimination, exclusions and hierarchies exist in
all scientific institutions worldwide, but to a different extent, and in
some disciplines which are heavily feminized, they might even be
absent. The major characteristics of those exclusionary patterns
based on gender are the following:
• The percentage of women in science is lower than that of men.
• The lower a position in science, the higher the inclusion of women.
• The availability of different fields to women depends on the
position of the sciences: the more prestigious the science, the
more closed it is to women.
• The sciences most open to women are those that men have
already “left,” or those that are most connected with women’s
traditional roles (Blagojević, 1991).
But, to understand the patterns of exclusions of women scientists
from the semiperiphery, it is not enough to stick to the claims of
institutional discrimination. Women scientists from the semiperiphery
are faced not only with the very different survival strategies, conditions
of work and "triple burden," but they are also faced, additionally, with a
highly exclusionary international scientific market, especially since the
beginning of the 1990s. Their societies, with a few exceptions (Slovenia,
for example), have not really supported science, nor invested into
science and education, or if they have, that investment is very limited.
The EU science policies related to the semiperiphery largely depend on
the status of the state (whether it is a new EU member, or in different

232
stages of the accession process). The personal and political are clearly
connected in mobility schemes (who can cross the borders, and how), as
well as in the conditioning of scientific cooperation with the EU. It is
mostly individual women and men scientists who need to resolve many
of the politically created obstacles to be able to function on the
international scientific labor market. Paradoxically, they increasingly
depend on that very same market for their own recognition, even in their
home countries, while at the same time they cannot count on
institutional support from their home countries (ENWISE, 2003; Feller,
2004; Foschi, 2004). This "scissors situation" is affecting women more
than men, since women always have more limited resources and they
suffer from a higher level of "time poverty," regardless of whether they
are uneducated rural women, or highly educated women scientists.
The starting assumption here is that every exclusion and
underestimation of scientific contribution, as well as a lack of
recognition of talents, capabilities and merits, is per se negative. And
it is not only negative for those who have been denied excellence, but
it is negative for science and knowledge in general. It is negative
because it decreases the potential of humanity to face challenges and
constructively respond to them, regardless of whether these
challenges come from nature, the human set up, cosmos, or society.
In the present complex global crises that is becoming more evident
than ever. The message should be clear: there is never too much
excellence, too much talent, too much knowledge, or too much
creativity. However, this simple and constructive logic is still very far
away from the reality of many institutions, including major
multilateral institutions which play a key role in the conceptualizing
of globalisation44, but which are very much incapable and unwilling

44 My personal experience with different UN agencies has shown that so called

“overqualification” is a serious obstacle for engagements. Expert positions are often

defined to require only an MA level, and a Ph.D. is seen as a problem.

233
to include knowledge, talents or even wisdom which has been
accumulated throughout human history in different civilizations.
Seen from this perspective, talents, creativity and capabilities of
women, if not used, recognized and rewarded adequately, are a loss not
only for women, but also for humanity. This is similar with any other
group which is searching for full social inclusion. This kind of discourse,
however, should not be identified as a traditional call for women’s
sacrifice for humanity, but a kind of justification for a full and complete
diversification of science, coming from a need for creative solutions for
humanity as such. This does not exclude the human rights discourse on
equal rights for women in science, but it goes beyond it. From the issue
of women-in-science, the whole field has now moved to gender-and-
science45, which actually shows a move from the discourse on human
rights to the discourse of increased science quality and responsibility,
through and by diversification.
Diversification of science is a very important issue for the
semiperiphery from yet another perspective. Diversification cannot be
reduced to the requirement which will only refer to the internal change of
scientific institutions, nor can it be reduced to numerical representation.
Diversification of science would mean in its essence the representation of
many different interests, views, and ideas. And, in the globalized context
of knowledge production, it would also mean representation of the views
and perspectives of those coming from the semiperiphery. This
requirement is much more relevant for social sciences and humanities,
but it has its relevance for other sciences as well.

45 This is very similar, and in fact interrelated to the movement from “women in
development” (WID) discourse to “gender and science” (GAD) discourse, which has
been articulated on the international development scene, consisting of different
players (UN and other development and donor agencies).

234
 The Abundance Model vs. the Scarcity Model 46
What is being accepted and recognized academically as “scientific
excellence” and “knowledge,” in today’s world, is not beyond the
limitations of social stratification and social exclusions. So, both of those
concepts are often biased social constructs which in reality put strong
limits to the best use of human resources, especially of those who are on
the social margins or exposed to more severe exclusions. Also, in the
globalized scientific community, the stratification of “quality”
knowledge, science and scientists has increasingly come under the
influence of locationality. Cumulative effects of these hierarchies and
exclusions result in biased and often blind “knowledge” and,
consequently, often inefficient public and development policies.
To understand how exclusions actually work, it is important to
analyze things on two levels: as practices of exclusions
(discriminatory mechanisms), and as discourses of exclusions
(ideologies, explanations, justifications). Both of those levels could be
situated within the prevailing paradigm in the global neoliberal
context. So, it is the deconstruction of that very paradigm which
needs to be made to overcome the limitations of the present
counterproductive selectivity. The New Scientific Order is based on a
paradigm which is here called the scarcity model. Opposed to that
model is the abundance model. The major statement in the
conclusion of this book is that the very concept of scientific
excellence is at present defined within the scarcity model, and that it
is in fact necessary to move beyond that model, towards a more
inclusionary, abundance model. The scarcity model puts limitations
on the effective use of human resources and consequently narrows
down the transformatory potential of knowledge production.

46This conclusion is largely based on a presentation at the European workshop on gender

and diversity programme in science, Brussels, 11th October 2007: Gender, Migration and
Globalisation: Situating Science Policies, organized within the NEWS project

235
 The scarcity model is based on an assumption that talents,
capabilities and creativity are limited, and that scientific excellence is an
individual endeavor par excellence. It is very much in line with the logic
of androcentric understanding of knowledge and society, and with the
idea that there is some individual (male) genius who creates knowledge
out of his superb, genius mind. According to this model, only the
exceptional ones can make contributions, and vice versa, only those who
have made visible contributions are exceptional. The fact that there were
only a few people, here and there, throughout history, who were
“geniuses,” is “evidence” that creativity is exceptional. And because it is
so exceptional, the rewards should be high for those who achieve, who
make their genius visible and recognized. There are a number of
scientific policies at the moment which favor exactly this model,
encouraging strong competition between people with similar levels of
qualities ad capabilities. Elitization of science has become even stronger
in the New Scientific Order, although the base of the pyramid, i.e. the
number of those included in science, has widened. Countries in the core
especially favor this idea of exceptionality, of excellence, since once
excellence is recognized in the core it becomes global excellence, and it
contributes to the strengthening of global hierarchies. Even when top
scientists are imported through brain drain; it is the core institutions
which benefit from their excellence. High rewards are closely connected
to high competitiveness and also to the marketization of science and
knowledge in general. There is also an assumption that high
competitiveness is good for the development of science, although it is
becoming almost impossible to imagine contemporary science outside
this competitive context. In other words, there is no proof, for example,
that competitiveness in science is more relevant for productivity and
innovation than cooperation. But, neoliberal values have until recently
been highly ideologized, and they became the “only game in the town.” It
is only now, with the global crisis, that some quite sobering questions
can be posed again. There is no evidence that the more steep the

236
pyramid of scientific hierarchy, the more beneficial it is for the
development of science. There is no evidence that the exclusion of
talents and capabilities is actually beneficial for knowledge production.
On the contrary, quite the opposite can be claimed: that the elitism of
science and the isolation of scientists, especially male scientists, from the
“normal life surroundings” has contributed heavily to the strengthening
of an androcentric conception of social reality and very biased choices
about research priorities in general.
The scarcity model increases both the power and the rewards of
the selected few, and it also rewards continual scientific career
model, which is a male model, dividing professional and family life in
a patriarchal mode. Science is performed in special places which are
to be isolated from the “realities of life,” so that “geniuses” should not
be distracted. However, in the history of science, it is often the case
that “real life” played a very important role, both as an inspiration
and as a source of motivation. So, the scarcity model is playing on a
set of hidden assumptions which in the end lead to the creation of
“ivory towers” for scientists, isolated from the rest of humanity and
very much closed to all, except for the pre-selected few. To
summarize, the scarcity model is close to androcentric knowledge, a
gendered scientific institutional set up, and to the male scientific
career model. At the same time, high competitiveness and elitism
prevent a better inclusion of human potential and more effective
solutions for major problems that humankind faces.
Contrary to the previous model is the abundance model, which is
based on an assumption that there is an abundance of talents, creativity
and capabilities, and that they are distributed regardless of social,
biological and locational characteristics of individual scientists. Talents
and capabilities are distributed gradually, not in sharp divisions.
Creativity often emerges from contacts, communication, exchange,
cooperation, and even transpersonal inspiration. This also means that

237
the shape of the pyramid is very different, implying a very broad
foundation and much less steep sides. This model connects to less elitist
strategies and more democratic and open choices of research topics. It
insists on cooperation, not on competition, and on sharing knowledge
and innovation for the purpose of effective problem-solving. It is not
authorship that is the most relevant, but the responsibility towards
community, or human kind in general. Science is not taken as an
individual endeavor, but as a team effort, as a result of multigenerational
accumulated knowledge, exchange within epistemic communities,
cooperation between those who share responsibility to create knowledge
which will contribute to the betterment of human condition and
reconciliation with nature. Competition is not excluded, but it is
subjected to cooperation, and rationality is not measured solely in
economic terms, but in terms of real benefits for humanity. Hierarchy
within this model is functional and moderate. The major idea is the one
of inclusion of the talents and capabilities of diverse people. So this
model encourages inclusivity and diversity in science. Diversity between
scientists, including their different life experiences, gender, age,
backgrounds, locationalities etc, is seen as beneficial for the production
of ideas and innovations. This kind of science and knowledge production
is transparent and close to "real life," it is focused on finding solutions
for concrete problems, and it is clearly connected to the resolution of
major problems humanity is facing. The very inclusionary feature of this
model presupposes open and flexible careers of scientists which will
allow them to successfully combine private and professional life, and
follow different interests outside science.
Both of these models have clear political implications. The
scarcity model is focused on productivity and competition, and it
tends to instrumentalize science for economic and political goals of
the elites. It encourages severe competition and consequently also
individualism, elitism and sometimes even non-ethical methods. It
situates scientific and knowledge production in the "jungle" of

238
neoliberal global developments. It reinforces all kinds of hierarchies,
including those based on gender. It reinforces the "rat race" in
science, and is highly compatible with the overall atmosphere of the
neoliberal "may the fittest survive" ideology.
The abundance model, on the other hand, puts emphasis on social
responsibility and sustainable development. It insists on cooperation
in science and between science and society. It puts emphasis on
inclusivity and diversity, and consequently on meritocracy. It also
implies transparency of scientific institutions, and that the criteria
for advancement are not based solely on market considerations.
Transparency of institutions enables clear criteria for promotion,
while it minimizes the influence of networks and lobbies. This model
is focused on exchange, synergy and connectedness. Positive
selection, which means that the best and the most creative will be
supported, and that there are fair and transparent rules of the game,
ensures a positive climate and the advancement of science and
knowledge in general. What is emphasized in this model is not so
much the rewards, or the exceptional capabilities of a single genius,
as much as the concept of knowledge as collective transhistorical
endeavor, with high commitment and responsibility of the knowers
to use their own resources to serve humanity.
Development of the abundance model would produce positive
outcomes both in terms of gender equality, and in terms of relevant shifts
in knowledge paradigms. When included, different marginalized and
excluded groups empower themselves through knowledge production
which is relevant for their social positioning, but also for the change of the
overall world view and better understanding of the interconnectedness of
different social agents. By participating, on a larger scale, in the process of
knowledge production, marginalized groups would be able to introduce
their perspectives into the general knowledge fund, and to expose
different sources of social inequality and social injustice. This model

239
would not support networking as an alternative power strategy, often
counter-institutional, but would promote networking as a practice of
knowledge exchange and creation of epistemic communities. In other
words, this model would lead to a gradual change of the “rules of the
game,” and it would be highly compatible with the values of sustainable
development, human rights, social justice and social inclusion.
Consequently, it would lead to better inclusion of women in science, to the
change of the legacies of androcentric knowledge, to the shift of
knowledge paradigms in the direction of peace, stability, justice and
development, and finally, to the change of the scientific career model,
towards one that is focused on work-life balance.

240
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