The problem is that what began as a temporary adaptation has gradually become the dominant way in which the academic community operates. As a long-term model for sustaining a scholarly field, however, it is fundamentally insufficient. This paper focuses on one consequence of that condition: the reactive nature of Belarusian academia in exile is shaped less by individual funding decisions than by the broader realities of dispersal and displacement. Exile creates conditions in which scholars are constantly responding to external developments instead of defining their own long-term agenda. Over time, this weakens the very conditions that allow an academic community to reproduce itself: preserving intellectual continuity, transmitting knowledge between generations, maintaining research priorities, and developing institutions capable of functioning beyond successive emergencies.

This distinction is important. The central question is not simply how financial resources are distributed, but what prolonged exile does to an academic field. The problem is therefore structural rather than managerial.

The term reactive logic is used here in this broader sense.[1] It does not refer simply to producing policy analysis or responding to current political events, activities that are both legitimate and often necessary. Rather, it describes a condition in which the temporal horizon of an academic community is largely determined from outside: by political crises, donor priorities, and the agendas of international organisations supporting Belarus-related research. When this condition persists over time, it ceases to be a temporary mode of operation and becomes the defining characteristic of the field itself.

Structural consequences of exile

Exile does not simply relocate a scholarly community; it fragments the institutional infrastructure that once gave it coherence. Before 2020, Belarusian academic and cultural life operated through shared physical spaces, common institutional frameworks, and intergenerational networks built over decades. These were imperfect and constrained by the political environment, but they existed. Dispersion across Warsaw, Vilnius, Berlin, Prague, and dozens of other cities did not simply move that community, which broke it into separate institutional and intellectual spaces. What replaced shared institutions was something more fragile: personal connections, online spaces, and a common sense of urgency about the political situation back home.[2]

That urgency is real, but it generates a particular kind of pressure. A community whose members are scattered, whose institutional base is improvised, and whose collective attention is fixed on an ongoing political crisis is structurally oriented toward the short-term. Not because its members lack the desire or capacity for sustained intellectual work, but because the conditions of exile leave little room for the protected time, stable institutional positions, and long-term planning on which such work depends. This is the central argument: the reactive condition is produced first by exile itself, while funding arrangements reinforce it.

Funding arrangements reinforce and institutionalise tendencies that exile has already set in motion. Emergency grants, short-cycle fellowships, and project-based support designed to respond to the post-2020 crisis were built around the assumption of temporariness: the community needs support now, while the crisis lasts.[3] Five years on, there is still no transition from emergency support to a sustainable model. The structures created to respond to the immediate crisis have simply become permanent, without changing the principles on which they operate. Researchers respond to these conditions in entirely rational ways. They propose projects with deliverables suited to twelve-to-twenty-four-month funding cycles, prioritise outputs that donors consider relevant, and concentrate on topics where international demand is strongest. None of these are bad choices individually. Cumulatively, they produce a field whose rhythm and focus are set by external demand rather than by internal intellectual development.

What gets displaced in this process is not activity itself. Belarusian scholars have continued to produce a substantial body of research. What becomes increasingly difficult is the kind of work that cannot be compressed into short project cycles. Long archival research, extended theoretical development, the sustained engagement with a body of material that gradually changes how one thinks about it: these are not simply slower versions of what gets done in reactive mode. They are qualitatively different forms of intellectual work that require conditions reactive mode cannot provide. The monograph is the obvious example, but it stands for a broader category: work whose value is not legible until it is complete, and which therefore cannot be structured around predetermined deliverables and accountability timelines.[4]

Another consequence is less obvious but equally important. When the research agenda is consistently set by external demand, the field tends to migrate toward what external audiences find interesting about it.[5] For Belarusian scholarship in exile, this has meant a growing focus on authoritarianism, democratic backsliding, and the geopolitics of the region. These are topics that attract considerable international attention and where Belarusian scholars can make a valuable contribution. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. But it represents a significant narrowing relative to the full range of questions that Belarusian history, culture, and society generate on their own terms. The risk is not that scholars stop working on Belarus, but that Belarus increasingly becomes a case through which broader phenomena are studied: as a case of Eastern European authoritarianism or a data point in comparative democratisation rather than as a subject worthy of sustained study in its own right.

This narrowing also affects what is passed on to the next generation. A scholarly community transmits more than research findings. It also passes on ways of thinking, intellectual traditions, and a shared understanding of which questions matter and why they matter. That transmission happens through mentorship, through extended collaboration, through long-term collaboration. In an environment structured around rapid output and short-cycle projects, this transmission is not impossible, but it is considerably harder. The informal, cumulative, and time-intensive process by which a scholarly tradition reproduces itself does not fit easily within a model organised around short-term projects.[6]

Implications for the sustainability of Belarusian academia in exile

The implications of this condition for the sustainability of Belarusian academia in exile are concentrated around three specific vulnerabilities. The first is the weakening of the discipline’s capacity to reproduce itself. A scholarly field sustains itself not only by producing knowledge but also by training new scholars who, in turn, train the next generation. This requires stable mentorship structures, degree programmes, and the kind of long-term institutional commitment that neither emergency grants nor visiting fellowships are designed to provide. Without it, the current generation of exiled Belarusian scholars risks becoming the last generation trained within a coherent Belarusian scholarly tradition, rather than the first of a sustained exile scholarly community.

The second vulnerability concerns the preservation of Belarusian intellectual focus as a distinct category. If the community’s research agenda continues to be shaped primarily by international demand, the gradual result is the absorption of Belarusian studies into adjacent fields such as Eastern European studies, authoritarian politics, and post-Soviet cultural studies, where Belarus figures as one case among many. This is already partly visible in the way Belarusian scholars are positioned within European academic institutions: as regional experts rather than as scholars working within a distinct Belarusian intellectual tradition. That positioning is not inherently problematic, but if it becomes the dominant mode, the questions that require deep engagement with Belarusian sources, language, and historical context become progressively less likely to be asked.

The third vulnerability is perhaps the most fundamental. A scholarly community depends on an ongoing intellectual conversation in which scholars build on, respond to, and challenge each other’s work. That conversation requires continuity across time.9 In reactive mode, that conversation is repeatedly interrupted: by funding gaps, by the demands of the next crisis, by the geographic dispersal that makes sustained exchange difficult to maintain. What replaces it is a set of parallel individual contributions that address the same general subject but do not constitute a cumulative intellectual project. The distinction between a community of scholars and a collection of individual experts working on related topics is not merely organisational. It is the difference between a tradition that can renew itself and one that cannot.

None of this is inevitable. Recognising this as a structural condition of exile, rather than a temporary inconvenience that will disappear once the political situation changes, is a precondition for addressing it. The reactive mode was not chosen. Rather, it emerged from circumstances beyond the community’s control. Acknowledging that does not diminish what has been built under these conditions, which is considerable. It does, however, clarify what is at stake in the longer term: not the survival of individual scholars or individual projects, but the survival of Belarusian academia as a self-sustaining, self-directing intellectual community with its own questions, its own tradition, and its own future.

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.