By institutional reconstruction I refer not simply to the continuation of individual scholarly careers but to the re-establishment of the institutional functions of historical scholarship, i.e. research, teaching, publication, scholarly communication and professional cooperation outside Belarus. The paper examines how Belarusian historical scholarship reconstituted itself after the wave of forced displacement that followed 2020 and analyses the factors that made institutional reconstruction possible. 

This paper argues that the institutional reconstruction of Belarusian historical scholarship after 2020 was possible because, during the preceding three decades, Belarusian historians had accumulated transnational scholarly capital through the gradual institutionalisation of international academic cooperation, including international networks, archival experience, and methodological exchanges. This capital had been forming since the mid-1990s through several overlapping processes of internationalisation: support from international foundations, including the Open Society Foundation, academic mobility programmes such as DAAD, bilateral cooperation agreements between Belarusian and European universities and academies, collaborative archival and source-editing projects, and, later, European mobility schemes such as Erasmus+. When the post-2020 wave of displacement arrived, this pre-existing infrastructure provided the relational and institutional scaffolding necessary for reconstruction. However, this capital was unevenly distributed across generations, institutions, and regions, which explains the structural fragmentation and asymmetries observable in the exile scholarly community today. The paper therefore examines how earlier international scholarly networks influenced the reconstruction of Belarusian historical scholarship in exile after 2020.

International scholarly networks before 2020

The internationalisation of Belarusian historical scholarship was not inaugurated by the political crisis of 2020. It was built incrementally over three decades, and its unevenness is best understood by tracing the successive waves of politically motivated academic migration that preceded the most recent displacement. The preconditions of that unevenness, however, reach further back: The systematic ideologisation of Belarusian historical scholarship after 1995, combined with the gradual isolation from Western scholarly contacts, created a professional environment in which independent scholarly development became increasingly constrained.[1] A survey of practising historians in Belarus, conducted in 2010, documented the same dynamics from the inside: the reluctance of scholars to speak openly about professional conditions, the erosion of disciplinary norms, and the absence of an integrated scholarly community.[2] The displacement waves that followed were thus not ruptures in an otherwise healthy professional order. They were moments of acceleration in a long process of cumulative institutional erosion.

The first major wave of politically motivated displacement can be dated to the closure of the European Humanities University (EHU) in Minsk in 2004 and the dismissals that accompanied and followed it. Several historians who had been active in maintaining international scholarly contacts left Belarus and entered the European academic space. Their displacement was not merely a humanitarian crisis but, in retrospect, a structural event: it forced the development of new institutional arrangements, including EHU’s relocation to Vilnius, and accelerated the formation of the transnational networks on which later cohorts would depend.

A second wave, less visible in public accounts, occurred between 2013 and 2014, when a significant group of historians associated with one of the main regional scholarly centres was displaced and received support from Polish academic institutions. This wave established lasting links between Belarusian historians and Polish academic institutions, which later became important during the post-2020 displacement. The involvement of Polish institutions demonstrated that they were capable of absorbing displaced Belarusian scholars in a structured way, creating precedents that subsequent support programmes, notably the NAWA Solidarni z Białorusią scheme, could build on.

The 2020 wave was qualitatively larger and structurally more disruptive. At the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences, a significant number of researchers signed a collective statement of protest, and several were detained. In the months that followed, contracts were not renewed for a group of employees, and further colleagues resigned in solidarity. The institutional consequences were immediate and severe: several specialist departments and research groups ceased to function effectively as operational units, and concentrations of expertise that had taken decades to build were destroyed. This was not only a loss of personnel. It was the elimination of disciplinary competencies that emergency fellowships alone cannot restore.

Those scholars who were best positioned to navigate displacement were generally those who had already developed international scholarly networks before 2020. Historians based at EHU, at certain departments of Belarusian State University, and in the stronger regional scholarly centres had accumulated what may be described as transnational scholarly capital: internationally legible credentials, ongoing research collaborations, language competencies, and familiarity with foreign institutional cultures. Scholars at more peripheral institutions, or those whose research had been concentrated on topics with limited international circulation, were significantly less equipped to deploy such capital. 

The institutional support that enabled many Belarusian historians to continue their academic careers after 2020 did not emerge suddenly. It was rooted in more than two decades of relative academic openness, during which both Belarusian institutions and their European partners actively invested in developing long-term scholarly cooperation. During the two decades preceding 2020, Belarusian historical scholarship became increasingly integrated into institutionalised forms of European academic cooperation[3] which would later become the principal centres of support for Belarusian scholars in exile. Poland played a particularly important role in this process. Long-term cooperation with the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences developed through bilateral research programmes, source-publication projects and joint conferences.[4] 

Comparable institutional partnerships developed with academic centres in Lithuania[5], the Czech Republic[6] and Germany.[7] Academic mobility supported by DAAD, the Open Society Foundation and, later, Erasmus and Erasmus Mundus[8], COST[9], Horizont Europe[10] enabled a new generation of Belarusian historians to study, conduct research abroad and establish durable professional relationships with European colleagues.

During the 2010s these connections increasingly evolved into institutional partnerships. The Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus expanded collaborative projects with partner institutions in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and Germany. Cooperation with the Lithuanian Institute of History gradually developed from joint conferences, researcher exchanges and collaborative projects into a formal cooperation agreement signed in 2017[11], while cooperation with the Czech Academy of Sciences was strengthened through a bilateral Memorandum of Understanding supporting competitive mobility projects across all academic disciplines.[12] By the eve of the 2020 political crisis, Belarusian historians had become embedded in a dense network of institutional partnerships, collaborative research and academic mobility. Consequently, the support they received after 2020 did not arise from entirely new initiatives but largely relied on professional relationships, institutional trust and collaborative experience accumulated over the previous two decades. 

The distribution of this transnational scholarly capital was uneven not only across institutions and generations, but also across historical subfields. Historians of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the early modern period had, by the 1990s and 2000s, become deeply embedded in transnational research networks. This was particularly visible in source-editing projects and collaborative research initiatives devoted to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where Belarusian historians had long participated in international scholarly networks connecting archives and research institutions in Vilnius, Warsaw, Kraków, Prague, and Rome. Their research agendas were intrinsically international, relying on archives located in several countries and on long-standing scholarly cooperation. As a result, many of these historians entered exile with pre-existing professional networks that could be activated relatively quickly.

The situation was markedly different for many historians working on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although international cooperation had also expanded in these fields through bilateral research projects, academic mobility programmes and initiatives such as the German–Belarusian Commission of Historians,[13] their research agendas often remained more closely tied to Belarusian archives, universities and nationally framed historiographical debates than was the case for specialists in earlier periods. Consequently, displacement frequently required not only institutional relocation but also the reorientation of research agendas and the construction of new professional networks and forms of international visibility. The ability to convert displacement into institutional reconstruction therefore varied significantly across the discipline itself.

International support after 2020

The international response to the displacement of Belarusian academics after 2020 was, by any measure, substantial.[14] Early-stage support came from established programmes: Scholars at Risk (SAR), the Scholar Rescue Fund, EHU institutional support, the NAWA Solidarni z Białorusią programme, stipends from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IH PAN), Czech university initiatives, notably the MUNI Award Junior Belarus programme at Masaryk University, and German institutions including the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and Prague, the Researchers in Exile programme in Hamburg, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung.[15] Later, further mechanisms emerged: the EU4Belarus Scholarship Programme operating across the SALT programme series, EHU’s SAFE initiative, Science at Risk, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, the University of New Europe (UNE), H-net SAFE, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde (DGO).[16] The breadth of this support architecture was remarkable, far exceeding what had been available during the earlier waves of displacement.

Some of these initiatives emerged directly after 2020, while others built upon institutional and scholarly networks established during previous decades. The post-2020 period therefore accelerated processes of institutional consolidation that, in some cases, had deeper roots in earlier forms of international scholarly cooperation. Beyond their mere existence, these institutions have generated a substantial volume of scholarly activity. They have organised regular academic seminars and conferences, launched educational programmes, coordinated international research projects, supported source-editing initiatives, and maintained publication activities in Belarusian and other languages. In several cases, they have also provided frameworks for cooperation between historians working in exile and colleagues who remain in Belarus. The significance of these achievements lies not only in the preservation of individual careers but also in the continued reproduction of scholarly practices and professional communication.

Despite the broad range of support programmes available after 2020, their ability to ensure long-term institutional sustainability remained limited.Emergency support framed as “temporary” creates a fundamental tension with the long-term timelines that scholarly integration requires: displaced scholars are positioned as guests, as exceptions to be accommodated, rather than as permanent participants in host academic communities. For Belarusian historians in exile, this condition is compounded by the relative smallness and peripherality of their field: unlike Ukrainian history, which gained substantial European institutional attention after February 2022, Belarusian history occupies a niche that does not map easily onto existing European academic structures. 

The institutions created in exile between 2020 and 2025 reflect both the possibilities and the constraints of this support architecture. The Belarusian Academy (2020), the Belarusian Institute in Prague (2022), the Seminar on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (2022, from 2025 in cooperation with IH PAN), the opening of the MA in History at EHU (2023), the Belarusian Institute of Public History (2024), the Astafiej Vałovič Belarusian Research University (2024), and Science-Nerat (2025) represent genuine institutional achievements — the creation, under conditions of displacement, of structures capable of hosting research, graduate education, and public scholarship. But each of these institutions rests, to a significant degree, on a base of time-limited fellowships and project-based funding. Their continued existence depends on the renewal of conditions that are, by structural design, temporary.

At the same time, the experience of several Belarusian institutions suggests that institutional sustainability cannot be reduced solely to funding structures. In some cases, organisations that emerged or were reconfigured after 2020 were able to build upon pre-existing scholarly networks and long-term research agendas. The Belarusian Institute in Prague provides one such example. Beyond its participation in emergency support and mobility programmes, it has developed durable scholarly initiatives, including the Seminar on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, organised in cooperation with partner institutions in Poland and other European countries. It has also coordinated collaborative research and source-publication projects involving Belarusian historians working both inside Belarus and abroad. Such initiatives demonstrate that institution-building in exile can evolve beyond temporary support mechanisms when it is anchored in pre-existing scholarly networks and long-term research agendas.

Despite the emergence of multiple institutions, no exile organisation has yet acquired the capacity to reproduce the full range of functions previously performed by the major academic institutions in Belarus. Research, teaching, publishing, doctoral supervision, archival access, and professional certification remain distributed across different organisations and countries. Institutional reconstruction has therefore been real, but partial.

Fragmentation of the Exile Scholarly Community

The institutional landscape of Belarusian historical scholarship in exile is characterised not only by fragility but by fragmentation. There is no shared institutional space that unifies the exile scholarly community: no single institution with the authority, resources, or recognition to function as a coordinating hub. The institutions that exist operate in parallel, with overlapping but not integrated functions, spread across multiple European countries. This fragmentation is, in part, an inheritance of the home scholarly community’s own institutional geography — the regional dispersal of Belarusian historical scholarship across several centres, and the longstanding absence of a unified disciplinary infrastructure, already diagnosed in detail before 2020. Displacement did not produce fragmentation; it reproduced and intensified a pre-existing condition.

Research on Belarusian civic organisations in exile points to a recurring pattern: strong capacity for resource mobilisation combined with weak coordination among organisations.[17] The exile scholarly community displays analogous dynamics: individual institutions have demonstrated the capacity to secure funding and operate programmes, but cross-institutional coordination remains limited. The result is a community that is, in aggregate, more institutionally present in European scholarly life than it has ever been, but whose collective capacity falls short of the sum of its parts.

The fragmentation of the exile scholarly community is not only an institutional problem. It also affects individual researchers, many of whom have had to reconsider their place within the academic profession. Some adapted their research interests to new institutional environments, while others continued to work on Belarusian topics despite the limited opportunities available for such research abroad. For many historians, displacement has therefore involved not only geographical relocation but also an ongoing search for a professional and intellectual place within a new academic landscape.

Conclusion 

The analysis presented in this article demonstrates that the institutional support received by Belarusian historians after 2020 did not emerge ex nihilo as a purely emergency response to political repression. Rather, it became possible because, over the preceding two decades, Belarusian historical scholarship had gradually become integrated into European academic structures through multiple, mutually reinforcing forms of cooperation. Bilateral university agreements, partnerships between academies and research institutes, academic mobility programmes, participation in European research networks, and permanent collaborative structures such as bilateral historical commissions together created the institutional infrastructure within which transnational scholarly capital accumulated. The support programmes introduced after 2020 were therefore not the beginning of the internationalisation of Belarusian historical scholarship. Rather, they relied upon and further developed international academic infrastructures and professional networks that had been established during the preceding decades. At the same time, access to this accumulated transnational scholarly capital remained highly uneven, shaping both the opportunities available to individual historians and the long-term trajectory of the exile scholarly community.

One long-term consequence of these developments is the growing asymmetry between scholars who entered exile with substantial international networks and those who did not. This asymmetry is not a transient feature of an early adjustment phase; it is a structural condition that tends to compound over time. Scholars with strong international networks are better positioned to publish in international venues, to access grant schemes, and to build the reputational capital necessary for stable positions — and to transmit these advantages to doctoral students and junior colleagues in their networks. Scholars without such capital face the opposite dynamic: limited access to the mechanisms through which scholarly reputations are built in Western European academic markets means that even high-quality work may remain unrecognised and uncirculated. The differential is thus not merely current but generative of further inequality.

Another challenge concerns the mismatch between the temporary nature of emergency support programmes and the long-term requirements of academic careers. Emergency programmes are designed for rapid deployment and limited duration. But scholarly careers unfold over decades: the value of a fellowship depends on what it enables over the long term, not what it provides in the short term. For a mid-career historian displaced in their forties, a two-year fellowship may be insufficient to establish the publications record, language proficiencies, and institutional relationships needed to compete for a permanent position in European academia. This temporal mismatch is specific to the academic context in a way that does not apply with equal force to civic activism or journalism: while all forms of exile work are subject to uncertainty, scholarly production has particularly long time horizons and depends heavily on institutional continuity. The vulnerability created by this situation stems not only from individual circumstances but also from the mismatch between short-term support programmes and the long-term requirements of academic careers. 

The uneven distribution of transnational scholarly capital also helps explain the continuing fragmentation of the exile scholarly community. Although multiple institutions now contribute to the development of Belarusian historical scholarship abroad, no single organisation performs the coordinating functions once associated with major academic institutions in Belarus. How such forms of representation may evolve remains an open question. The institutional reconstruction of Belarusian historical scholarship in exile therefore built upon both new forms of international solidarity and older networks of academic cooperation established long before the political crisis of 2020. Beyond preserving individual scholarly careers, Belarusian historians after 2020 succeeded in creating new institutional frameworks that allowed historical research, teaching and scholarly communication to continue outside Belarus.  

Whether this intermediate position will eventually develop into a durable institutional ecosystem or remain dependent upon external support represents one of the central questions for the future of Belarusian historical scholarship in exile.

About this publication

This analytical paper was prepared within the project Belarusian Historical Scholarship in Exile: Current State and Challenges, implemented with the financial support of the EU4Belarus: Support to Advanced Learning and Training (SALT II) programme, funded by the European Union.

The paper forms part of a series of analytical publications examining the current state, key challenges and future perspectives of Belarusian historical scholarship in exile. While informed by discussions held during a closed expert seminar, it reflects the analysis and conclusions of the author(s).

The views and opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Union, the EU4Belarus: Support to Advanced Learning and Training (SALT II) programme, the International Centre for Ethnic and Linguistic Diversity Studies (ICELDS), or the Belarusian Institute in Prague.