The Fourth International Congress of Belarusian Studies: selected results

On October 3-5, 2014, the Fourth International Congress of Belarusian Studies took place in Kaunas (Lithuania).

This year the Congress was attended by 422 people, including scholars, experts, journalists, public and cultural figures from 23 countries (Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the United States, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, France, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Japan).

Approximately 200 people had participated in the Congress before, while more than half of the participants and guests attended it for the first time.

About two thirds of the attendees came from Belarus and represented more than 40 different state and non-state Belarusian institutions: 20 universities and other educational institutions, 5 research institutions, 5 analytical centers, 3 museums, one library, and one archive.

This year the Congress was attended by such prominent cultural and scholarly figures as Ihar Babkou, Mykola Riabchuk, Arnold McMillin, Curt Woolhiser, Iryna Dubianetskaya, Valiantsin Akudovich, Kerry Brown, Uladzimir Matskevich, and others.

The work proceeded in parallel in 15 sections covering economic disciplines (the economics section), social and political disciplines (sections on political institutions, international relations, civil society, gender studies, and religious studies), historical disciplines (sections on the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, nineteenth-century history and Jewish studies, the twentieth century, and borderland studies), and humanities disciplines (cultural studies, literary studies, linguistics, biblical studies, theology, etc.).

Each of the sections worked with varying degrees of success, depending on the goals set; the results of the sections’ work were presented on the last day of the Congress, at the plenary session on October 5, 2014.

The most acute topics around which discussions developed during the Congress were issues related to Ukraine and China’s relations with Eastern European countries.

On the second day of the Congress, the results were announced and the Congress Award was presented in history (monographs and articles), the humanities (monographs and articles), and social and political sciences (articles).

More details about the Congress Award can be read here (http://nn.by/?c=ar&i=136472).

The work of the Fourth Congress as a whole can be considered successful, which is also confirmed by the results of a recently conducted survey.

Video from the opening http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVYJuHZs4-8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVYJuHZs4-8)