| Abstract: | This research was funded by the U.S.-Ukraine Research Partnership project, which began in November of 1999 when an agreement
was signed between the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the Ukrainian Academy of Law Sciences (UALS). This partnership
program was an integral part of the Gore-Kuchma Binational Commission, established in September 1996 to solidify the close
ties between Ukraine and the United States. The increasingly global character of crime has created a mutual incentive for
cooperation between the United States and Ukraine.
In June of 1999, requests for proposals in the United States and Ukraine were concurrently announced by both NIJ and UALS.
The proposals were to address the following crime areas: organized crime, corruption, drug trafficking, human trafficking,
and economic crimes. The proposals were competitively reviewed by an expert working-group made up of both U.S. and Ukrainian
representatives. The result was five U.S.-Ukrainian research teams, composed of twenty-two Ukrainian and five U.S. members.
The size of each individual U.S.-Ukrainian team ranged from ten to three researchers. These teams met for the first time in
November 1999 at a “kick-off” conference in Kiev, Ukraine. The greatest accomplishment of the conference was that researchers
began the process of overcoming communication barriers and divergent methodological approaches to formulate a joint plan for
their research.
For this research, Layne worked with two Ukrainian research partners to jointly develop this paper. Khruppa was responsible
for collecting Ukrainian data for the report and Muzyka supplied legislative expertise and background. Layne traveled to Ukraine
(Kyiv and Kharkiv) four times over the course of two years and her Ukrainian counterparts came to the United States once.
It was a challenge to collaborate across distance and language barriers, but a warm, collegial relationship developed and
was maintained despite these obstacles. |
