Skilled labour shortage

["Michael Keaney" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

We need more expertise on Afghanistan

The atrocity in New York should be a wake-up call to British
universities, says Professor Anoush Ehteshami

The Independent, 20 September 2001

It takes a tragedy of this magnitude to bring home how little we know
about societies beyond our trading borders. For all the increases in air
travel and international tourism, the average Western traveller has
understood little about the forces that shape their favourite holiday
destinations.

But while the average traveller can be excused for that, the same cannot
be said of Western decision-makers. They need a more developed
understanding of the world. They should be foresighted enough to ensure
that expertise about non-Western societies is nurtured in British
universities.

Alas, that is not the case. Where Afghanistan is concerned, it is
difficult to identify one, let alone a group of experts, to guide policy
in the United Kingdom. Before last week little was known about Osama bin
Laden and his supporters. There is no one who follows the country
closely in British higher education.

The Foreign Office has its own experts, but there is no community of
experts to take a differing view from the official government one. The
Higher Education Funding Council (Hefce) has not invested in the
subject.

Just as we convinced ourselves that the world changed on 11 September,
we need now to ask exactly how that change is to be manifested? If the
world has changed, it is time we learned how poorly equipped we are to
deal with the challenges ahead.

For all the talk of our special relationship with the United States,
Britain also has a special relationship with the Muslim world. It has
either created many of its modern states, ruled over large parts of
them, or developed close trade relationships with its key countries. The
relationship is even more intimate in the Middle East, where until
recently, Britain was one of two main outside influences.

Yet there has been a real withering away of the well-grounded expertise
in the key areas and countries of the Muslim world that had existed in
Britain. Sadly, also, support for such trendy notions as the "End of
History", which was closely associated with the work of Francis Fukuyama
after the Cold War, did not help. Some Western policy-makers came to
believe his thesis - that the West's victory over the Soviet bloc had
made the world a more uniform place, in which the "rest" have to follow
the West - and began acting upon on it. In these circumstances, what
need for studying the intricacies of such distant places as the Middle
East?

Tragically, the ghost of such armchair ideas was put to rest by the
attacks in the United States. In future, there must be dialogue, in
which all parties show an understanding of one another's culture.
Britain has a unique role to play. While Middle Eastern and Islamic
studies flourish in a handful of British universities, we don't have the
expertise we should in the core issues and key Middle Eastern countries
shaping today's agenda. Now is the time to revisit area studies, and ask
the Government, the research councils, and Hefce to take more seriously
the contribution that area-studies scholars and regional experts make.
If the world has really changed, so should our response to it.

The writer is director of the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic
Studies at the University of Durham

Full article at:
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/education/story.jsp?story=94924


Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx