Security Studies in Belarus: Main Stages of Evolution

On 4 November 2009, at 18:00, a meeting of the regular research seminar of the Political Sphere Institute will take place in the courtyard of CSI.

Presentation topic: “Security Studies in Belarus: Main Stages of Evolution”.

Speaker: Dzianis Meliantsou; discussant: Andrei Valodzkin.

All interested participants are invited.

For additional information, please contact [email protected]
Presentation theses:
The aims of the presentation are to outline the disciplinary character of security studies in the Western tradition and in Belarus, to review the evolution of security studies in Belarus, and to identify promising research directions.
1.

Security Studies: the context of development
Security Studies in Western Europe and the United States emerged from the study of International Relations (IR) after the Second World War, appealed to the state as the main actor, and developed until the 1970s mainly as Strategic Studies.

Rand Corporation as the main think tank.
The 1980s and 1990s: a move away from the state-centered paradigm, the emergence of the concepts of commonsecurity, comprehensive security, human security
The 1990s and 2000s: the development of new theoretical directions: gender security, securitization, cooperativesecurity, etc., as a result of the convergence of traditional directions in IR: neorealism, neoliberalism, and neo-Marxism.

In the USSR, security studies were conducted mainly in closed military institutions and were classified.

There was no separate discipline of the theory of international relations.

The main reason was Marxism’s ambiguous attitude toward IR.
2.

Security Studies in independent Belarus
In independent Belarus, security studies did not acquire a separate disciplinary status and are developing in different fields of knowledge and within different institutions: BSU, the Military Academy, and the Institute of National Security (INS).

Security studies in Belarus may be divided into several stages:
– from 1990(91) to the mid-1990s.

The emergence of IR as a separate discipline (a department at BSU), the appearance of “geopolitics”, the first “open” texts on security;
– the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.

The introduction of separate courses for students, the creation of the Faculty of International Relations (FIR), the journal ZHMPMA, the INS; security studies develop inseparably from IR, analysis of foreign policy issues;
– from the early 2000s.

The main corpus of Western texts becomes available; the first attempts to adapt Western experience.

Security studies in Belarus are a mixture of history, political science, and international law.

The main characteristics of texts by FIR staff: a limited set of topics (conflicts, international organizations, terrorism), descriptive writing and case studies, the absence of theoretical works and adaptation of Western experience.

Security researchers mainly have a background in history, unlike their Western colleagues (IR, diplomats, political scientists, military specialists)
The closed nature of research at the INS and the Military Academy despite the concentration of specialists there: the omission of Strategic Studies and national security studies
3.

Strategy and a possible research agenda in Belarus
A possible research agenda: the national interests of Belarus; the concept of neutrality in the contemporary world; the gains and losses from neutrality in Belarus; the balance of power under globalization; security communities; a system of cooperative security and Belarus; strategic culture and its transformation; the formation of the European defense component and the place of Belarus; the security strategy of Belarus; energy security; regional security.