Discussion “Research on International Relations and Foreign Policy in Contemporary Belarus”

15 June 2022, 15:00, ZOOM.

Participants: Siarhei Bohdan, Viktar Shadurski, Katsiaryna Shmatsina.

Moderators: Andrei Kazakevich, Aliaksei Lastouski.

The discussion is being held as part of preparations for the jubilee 10th International Congress of Belarusian Studies and is included in a series of discussions on the state of the social sciences and humanities amid the political crisis in Belarus in 2020 and the war in Ukraine.

This is the third discussion in the series.

The first took place on 10 May and focused on the state of historical scholarship, and the second, on 1 June, on sociology.

In recent years, Belarus and Central and Eastern Europe have experienced revolutionary changes that have significantly increased interest in the study of Belarus and, at the same time, created new challenges.

Large-scale political protests, repression, the destruction of public and political institutions, sanctions against Belarus, Russia’s war in Ukraine — the pace of change is astonishing and requires reflection and a new level of responsibility.

This has also led to profound changes in the study of foreign policy and international relations in Belarus.

Changes have taken place not only in research issues, but also in the organization of the research community.

The discussion proposes to address the following issues:
– How have the events of recent years affected the issues and topics of research on international relations (IR) and foreign policy (FP) in Belarus?

What changes have taken place in the expert and academic community?
– Even before autumn 2020, cooperation between different segments of the expert community in the field of IR and FP was possible, as was communication between researchers with very different political views.

What is happening now? Is impartiality possible today, or have experts and researchers irreversibly diverged into warring camps?

And, more generally, is communication and the exchange of ideas possible; if so, in what format?
– In connection with the growing interest in Belarus, have new people and studies appeared that reinterpret Belarus on international platforms?

Do Belarusian scholars still remain confined within national frameworks?

Have there been any conceptual changes in methods and approaches?
– Could Russian aggression in Ukraine lead to the complete “erasure” of Belarusian issues?

How much demand is there now for research on Belarus’s foreign policy and international relations?

To register for the discussion, please fill out the following form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RC-zzRSZRHBk9O3gwtM70550VmQWGDRKr8OZESYGn9U/edit)