Lecture format: on site
Venue: Alte Kapelle
Street address: Spitalgasse 2, Hof 2, Eingang 2.8, 1090 Wien
The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Belarus presents a thorough introduction and overview of the country's history, politics, and international relations. Belarus is as a country that has attracted increased attention since the mass anti-authoritarian protests of 2020 and the ensuing dramatic changes, including the rise of a digital dictatorship and the use of Belarus’ territory for launching Russia’s attack against Ukraine in 2022. The book will be presented by its editor Aliaksei Kazharski, commentators: Sofie Bedford, Maria Katarzyna Prenner, moderator: Wolfgang Mueller.
Interdisciplinary in focus, the handbook's chapters are written by experts in their field and offer a nuanced understanding of the country. The handbook is structured into four thematic clusters:
- International and regional relations;
- Political regime dynamics and the democratic protest;
- Governance, (absent) reform, and the state–society relations; and
- History, identity, and language
A key comprehensive reference work on Belarus offering new and updated research on the country, this handbook will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including those studying Central and Eastern Europe, politics and international relations, comparative politics and authoritarianism, social movements and political protest and history and identity.
Aliaksei Kazharski received his PhD from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2015. He has worked at Charles University in Prague and has been a guest researcher at the universities of Oslo, Tartu, Vienna, Malmö, and Uppsala, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM), and the Polish Academy of Sciences. He published two monographs: Eurasian Integration and the Russian World: Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise (2019) and Central Europe Thirty Years after the Fall of Communism: A Return to the Margin? (2022, winner of the International Studies Association, Global International Relations Section 2022-2023 Book Award).
Sofie Bedford is Associate professor (docent) in Political Science and researcher at Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University and Associated Researcher at RECET. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stockholm University and MA in Peace and Conflict Research from Uppsala University.
Maria Katarzyna Prenner is a linguist specializing in Slavic languages, with a particular focus on Belarusian in its broader East and Central European context. She received her PhD from the University of Cologne with a dissertation on agentivity in human impersonal constructions in Polish and Russian. After positions at the Universities of Cologne and Giessen, she has worked since 2023 as a postdoc resarcher at the Institute of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz. Her research combines formal linguistics with contact and conflict linguistics to examine how grammatical structure, language contact, and sociopolitical conditions interact., integrating linguistic and cultural-historical perspectives on language development in situations of contact and conflict.
Wolfgang Mueller is Professor of Russian History at the University of Vienna.
