Today there are several research centers in the Arab world and many university departments and institutes in addition to thousands of graduates and a multitude of electronic websites that carry out research and library functions. This takes place as some Arab countries have been made the choice to give due regard and consideration to social sciences and knowledge, despite disparities from the far Maghreb to the Gulf.

This is the first half of the truth. The second half is less glamorous and has to be described from a purely clinical perspective. This is that a number of institutions in the region – without generalization – are still hesitant or refuse to play the role expected of them as mature and long-standing institutions.  Some Arab universities and sociology departments are more than half a century old but they still live through childhood, or an extended period of frivolous adolescence. This has reflected on social sciences and made them outsiders to the concerns, pre-occupations, interests and future paths of their societies as they preferred to stay at square one of mental obliviousness and rejection of social responsibility. In other words, even if social sciences have made some improvements, they have not been entirely rescued from what is known in psychology as the Peter Pan syndrome-  a pathological state in which the old man (let us say the researcher) refuses to live through his old age for fear of the consequences and insists on returning to a previous stage of life. We may wish to say that social sciences in the Arab world suffer from these symptoms, that maturity is near to impossible and that return to childhood or to the past (depending on intellectual sensitivities) has become the only substitute for thinking about the future and the responsibilities of researchers towards their societies.

For the above reasons, as we prepared to issue Awrak al Awsat as a series for prospective studies to be published by CERES, our main concern was to develop the social responsibility of research within two main rubrics:

First: encouraging writing and dissemination of research findings on the present and the future. The notion here is that if the local researcher does not have a prospective view of the present of his/her society, these societies with all their sciences, expertise and capacities will never be anything but the last square in the “future” of others.

Second: Disseminating research findings using the research studies funded by MERC. This was one of the main recommendations passed by MERC annual meeting held in Tunis in 2006. Participants in the meeting recommended that MERC issues a specialized publication to make known the results of research undertaken by its grantees.

The accumulation of diverse projects funded by MERC is one of the factors that encouraged the secretariat to venture into this experiment. It is an open invitation for everyone to work and write, and an acknowledgment that products are louder than words.

ARTICLES