Nelly Bekus

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at University of Exeter

This volume explores the overlooked role of state socialist intellectuals, experts, and governments from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia in developing international law in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The chapters in this book examine both contributions to current international law and competing ideas and initiatives that, although th...

This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on space programmes developed by nations across global semi-peripheries, and it uncovers the major factors and challenges shaping the outer space agenda both domestically and internationally. Drawing on the case of Kazakhstan, the article discusses how the development of the space industry has be...

Understanding the scale and nature of changes that have occurred in Belarus since the 2020 protests, not only at the political but also at the societal level, is crucial to our ability to interpret the role that Belarus has played in the current crisis in the region and to understand the potential for, and possible directions of, long-term change....

The article examines the political and cultural processes of nation-building over thirty years of independence in Belarus. It argues that in becoming a nation-state Belarus has faced challenges similar to the other post-Soviet nations but has proved an exception in the choice of strategies it used to address them. The paper examines how, on the eve...

В данной статье рассматривается роль космической технополитики в постсовет- ском Казахстане. Используя концепцию постколониального фетиша модерности, статья иссле- дует каким образом космические технологии как артефакт глобального значения работают на создание имиджа Казахстана как технологически развитой нации. В статье показывается, что в своем с...

On 29 October 2020, the Kule Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Alberta sponsored a Zoom webinar organized by David R. Marples and featuring Veranika Tsapkala, one of three female members of the opposition campaign in the Belarusian presidential election of 2020. Their campaign replaced that of three candidates who were denied regist...

This chapter discusses strategies of reckoning with the communist past that were adopted in Belarus by the Orthodox Church, the country’s largest religious denomination. It examines major factors that shaped the process of coming to terms with legacy of communist oppression and the human rights abuses within the BOC, such as dependence on the offic...

The revolution of 2020 in Belarus has often been described as a new 1989 and there is no doubt that the emancipatory appeal of the Belarusian protests is similar to the one that sustained the 1989 revolutions. But will building the democratic system—the major aspiration of the Belarusian protesters—follow the scripts of liberalization and westerniz...

This article examines the role of outer space technopolitics in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It explores how outer space, the technological artefact of global relevance, works as a postcolonial fetish of modernity that is called upon to produce what it represents, that is, the reality of a technologically advanced Kazakh nation. The article shows that i...

The article contributes to the theorisation of collective memory involved in building the international representations of a nation, and examines how strategic responses to the legacy of the totalitarian past have been deployed to shape the image of the nations’ remembering agency via the connections with other actors within the global memory field...

The international histories of cultural heritage protection have been commonly focussed on the Eurocentric trajectories of heritage evolution in the twentieth century and trace the Western roots of cultural globalisation in the field of conservation and preservation of monuments. The current theme section offers the first examination of the contrib...

Some of the state's recent initiatives have sought to reappropriate ethno-cultural and pre-Soviet history and tradition, shaping a new politics of identity.

The article analyses the evolution of the Soviet heritage-making policy in late socialism. Based on archival sources and interviews with former key experts from the Soviet ICOMOS committee, as well as other activists in conservation and heritage protection in former Soviet republics, the article explores the multi-faceted nature of the construction...

This article analyses the way in which the Soviet legacy has been combined with practices of public representation of national ideology in the space of the new capital city of Kazakhstan, Astana. It examines how cultural and political elites exploit various archaic elements of the traditional imagery of the nation in the context of modern state-bui...

This article addresses the ways in which the systemic transformation of the former Soviet republics has been reflected in urban development in two capital cities, Minsk (Belarus) and Astana (Kazakhstan). Changes taking place in these capitals have been analysed through the prism of an ideological recycling of the socialist legacy, a concept that pe...

The rise of Belarus to political independence has required it to delineate its cultural boundaries in-between two ‘Others’—Poland and Russia. This essay explores a range of portrayals of Poland in Belarusian cultural artefacts, including television programmes, film, novels, and theatre performances—from the image of an ‘Other’ that threatens Belaru...

The paper will discuss the dynamics of the Soviet heritage policy as a reflection complex interplay between cultural elites of national republics, Soviet state and heritage international agencies. Based on the interviews with former key experts from the Soviet ICOMOS committee as well as other activists in conservation and heritage protection in th...

This article discusses the Belarusian case of post-communist development and the role and status of Belarusian ethnicity in Belarus' nation-formation process. ‘Nationalizing nationalism’ (Brubaker), as realised by the Belarusian state through various social and cultural practices, is aimed at the creation of a Belarusian national entity without ref...

The issue of Belarusian language politics can be analysed across two different dimensions: as an element of nation-building strategy in post-Soviet Belarus; and as part of a linguistic human rights discourse, which refers to legal, moral as well as emotional aspects of current Belarusian language legislation and practice. These two aspects of the B...

Rejecting the cliché about “weak identity and underdeveloped nationalism,” Bekus argues for the co-existence of two parallel concepts of Belarusianness—the official and the alternative one—which mirrors the current state of the Belarusian people more accurately and allows for a different interpretation of the interconnection between the democratiza...

Public space of the post-communist Belarus can be viewed as a public and cultural space, where the "struggle over identity" between the official and the oppositional political discourses takes place and where both discourses claim their right to be the only voice of genuine Belarusianness. Articles presents the study of the definitions of the polit...

Public space of the post-communist Belarus can be viewed as a public and cultural space, where the "struggle over identity" between the official and the oppositional political discourses takes place and where both discourses claim their right to be the only voice of genuine Belarusianness. Articles presents the study of the definitions of the polit...