I would like to start with a sentence from Edward Said, which is one of the key figures in post-colonial studies. And actually, Said, who was a scholar in exile himself, said that exile is compelling to think about, but hard to experience. So starting with this idea, I really want to point out that exile is not just an intellectual exercise for all of us. There are always people who change their countries, and this change is really painful and people are struggling with many issues in their everyday life and are solving many problems. But at the same time, these people are doing great things. They create new organizations, new academic institutions. So my first point is: it's really important to remember that there are always people staying behind these processes. So the next thing that I really want us to take into consideration is that we are talking about an academy in exile. It's easy to think that we are the first ones and to start inventing a wheel. But there were many ways of emigration, and schools for intellectuals in exiles has been moving to new countries before us. Maybe the most recent one, starting in the mid 2010s, was a Syrian forced migration, then proceeding with Turkish ones, and then Belarusian, and Ukrainian and Russian. So understanding these processes as temporal is really important for intellectuals and for us as panelists. And the last but not least thing I also would like to stress is that being just regular people, being scholars, we sometimes face institutions as if they were always there, but it's really important to remember that institutions are created by people. And I am happy that today you have people who actually create new structures, new organizations and new institutions. For me as a scholar it's a kind of mystery that these institutions are produced and we have a rare opportunity to look at them in this process, which I very much appreciate. When I moved to Germany in March myself, I really wanted to have a magic map or a magic guidance which would explain to me everything: what to do, where to apply to, or how to solve my problems. But I didn't have this magic map. However I did have my colleagues who helped me a lot and who provided me this necessary guidance, and I'm really grateful for that. And I think people we have here are not magicians; they will not provide us with magic maps. But I think these people have been working really hard for many other people to have the institutions needed, and have worked to give us some guidance in our quite stormy path to new countries. I thank you for listening to this introduction and I'm really happy to give you a floor.

Okay, so before I start talking about Belarus , I would like to position myself. I haven't grown up in Belarus. I grew up in the city of Mariupol, Ukraine, and most of my extended family lived there till the beginning of this year. After Ukraine, I studied in Russia and then in Germany. But the country of my citizenship is Belarus, because I'm from mixed families, so my origin allowed me to choose and I chose kind of a neutral passport, which used to remain till this year. But now I'm teaching at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania, which is a Belarusian university in exile since 2003 (https://en.ehu.lt/).

I think the Belarusian case is really different from Russian and Turkish education in exile, and any other cases. Not in terms of a degree or quantity of repressions against scholars, but because in the Belarusian case it's not Belarusian domestic education that is competing with Belarusian education in exile. In the case of Belarus it is Belarusian (language) education in exile competing with Russian education on a territory of Belarus. Because now Belarus is not only a country with an authoritarian regime, but also its sovereignty is endangered. Since 2020 Alexander Lukashenko has been seizing power illegally and he's Kremlin backed. It is acknowledged by all analysts, and it is a consensus both within Belarusian society and among scholars. But the dominance of Russian language actually has been characteristic for the Belarusian regime long before 2020. And if we look at the figures [refers to slides], then we can see a strong disproportion between how often something is taught in Belarusian language and how often people would indicate Belarusian as their mother tongue. If you look at surveys where people would disclose their preferences, you would also see a discrepancy between how often people speak Belarusian and how often would they want to speak it. Usually they would want to speak it much more often.

Belarusian language was stigmatized and marginalized in two ways. One has its roots in Soviet rule yet, it is an image of Belarusian as a language of the countryside and political opposition. If you are speaking in Belarusian, you are often considered to be an illiterate village inhabitant. And this situation is reproduced within the education system – people are not educated in Belarusian language. Second thing; Alexander Lukashenko first came to power in 1994, and since that time Belarusian language started to be associated with political opposition. And there is still a strong association of Belarusian-speaking people with pro-European, democratic values. This language is also often used by different oppressed communities and marginalized groups, like queer feminist groups, NGOs, civil society and ecological activists, intelligencia. People teaching humanities and social sciences would much more often use Belarusian language. But then they would be at risk on the territory of Belarus.

Here are just some numbers about the scale of repression [refers to slides]. So if we look at the periods of time since the start of 2020, there are two countries in Europe that outnumber all other European countries by number and percentage of departures of the citizens of these countries to European countries: these are Belarus and Ukraine. In Belarus, within to last year, more than 6% of the population has left the country and some people say, it's even higher. We can also see that only a smaller part of people who left Belarus chose to move to Russia in 2020 and later. Now in Ukraine the rate of emigration or refugees is even higher. And you have to add the IDPS (Internally displaced people). But these two countries are at the top of the list. I'm associating myself with both countries to an equal extent.

In comparison to any neighboring country, including Russia, in Belarus, there are many specific forms of repressions that are absent in other countries that border to Belarus. First of all, it is a death penalty. You also can be deprived of citizenship. And I was impressed by details that you [Tuba] shared, that there is some kind of similar practice [in Turkey] as well. One thing that I already mentioned is persecution of Belarusian speaking population. Since 2020 belarusia-fones are losing their jobs systematically. And also, during the protests, arrested people when speaking Belarusian would be dyed with a color, so that a policeman would bit them harsher, more severe. They would usually dye them with the yellow color. We don't know why yellow. Another specific feature of mass repressions in Belarus is that they are targeting certain professional communities quite often. Professors and students are just two from a longer list of professional communities that are squeezed out of the country. Especially medical workers, for instance, are victims of this process, so by now, it's very hard to find qualified surgical help through, traumotologists, for instance, as their communities have been squeezed out of the country. So ideally, you go to look for high quality medical help outside the country, which you can not do easily holding a Belarusian passport. Now, because of visa restrictions, it is much more difficult for Belarusians to obtain a visa than for Russian citizens. Not because of European regulations, but because of the fact that Belarus is much smaller country. It's a country of less than 9 million people, and there are less workers at consulates and embassies. So people, for instance, have to travel to Moscow in order to apply for EU visa; which means four nights at a bus. <...>

What happens to Belarusian education in these circumstances? Actually the story of Belarusian education in exile started much earlier, because Belarus has never been a democratic country in this century. Several activities have been concentrated in Lithuania, where I live now, and this is interesting why there is such a tradition of Belarus and education in Lithuania and not in other neighboring countries. All other neighboring countries, except Latvia, are much larger than Belarus. So usually when Belarusians move there, they are expected to assimilate completely, which they quite often did. Thus Belarusian diasporas are very recent phenomena. Most of them appeared two years ago due to the protests. And in most EU countries Belarusian communities emerged during the 2020s. Lithuania is a different case because Vilnius is an ethnically mixed region and it used to be predominantly Belarusian speaking 100 years ago. Now it's part of Lithuania and Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania. But still there is a Belarusian minority which is free to use their language of education and can choose Belarusian if they want. This is a policy also at European Humanities University that has been expelled from Minsk in 2001.

Belarusian education is displaced from the country itself. It has to be developed elsewhere. And Lithuania is quite often the country of choice for those relocants or refugees, emigrants who don't want to break their relation to Belarus. People say quite often: "Leaving to Vilnius is a way to leave without leaving [Belarus]". At EHU we have 415 students from Belarus this year, but we are also now accepting increasing amount of students from Ukraine and from Russia. The website of EHU is very easy to find: https://en.ehu.lt/. It's a private university in Lithuania by now. We are facing some challenges this year; this there are new challenges, I think I will mention them during the second round. Thank you.

Maybe I'll just start by saying that I think I'm coming from a very different perspective. I'm a willing immigrant from the United States. And I came to Germany for my studies. And so I just want to say I very much admire the initiatives that you all are taking. And so now I'm working at the University of Bonn for a vice rector for International affairs. And in the summer of this year, the universities of Cologne and Bonn came together to create the Cologne -Bonn Academy in Exile (https://www.cologne-bonn-academy-in-exile.de/en ). It was Professor Martin Aust and Professor Angelika Nußberger who were already working together on a book on Eastern Europe between the Fall of the Wall and the war in Ukraine (in German). Then the war broke out and they came together and said, okay, what can we do? So they came to meet the rectorates of both universities and asked if they could create this academy, and it was eventually approved. And so the official starting date was on June 13^th , 2022. The idea was to support researchers who had to flee Ukraine due to the war. But also, what has been kind of controversial from a German perspective … We also want to help researchers from Russia and Belarus who've had to flee due to their opposition to the war and to the regimes in their countries. And so the idea of the academy in exile is, of course, to obviously preserve national ties, you know, while in exile. But also that they bring kind of their expertise on regional topics and can come to our universities to continue to explore these regional specific topics and to contribute to the current and future European integration. And this is in the fields of the humanities, law, Slavic studies, cultural studies, political and social sciences, history, etc. And the whole idea behind this was that through the acceptance of these researchers and an integration of them into the German academic community, through these research fields looking to the past and the present – we could understand how we got to this point, and what we need to do in order to create perspective for the future. And of course, we can't even begin to talk about the reconciliation at this point, but kind of too, perhaps, in the future. We wanted to understand the situation and to create perspectives.


So we have places for 20 junior or senior researchers and professors. And these researchers will be supported by mentors that have expertise in their relative fields. And unfortunately, funding is, of course, a big issue. We have no direct funding as of right now. But the goal is to give support in applications for funding from our universities. I don't know if anyone has ever had to do an application for a third party funding in Germany, but it is not easy, it's very complicated. And so we planned to support them in that process. And of course, the researchers are not required to come with their own funding. We seek to help them in finding it. Although some have been accepted into the academy, who already do have funding. And the goal is also to provide office space as well, as I said, administrative and integrative support. And I think a big goal that we haven't achieved yet, but we are keeping it in the back of our mind, is to cooperate in on-line and off-line projects with Ukrainian researchers abroad and with Ukrainian universities.

I can say, this project is obviously very new and we're learning by doing, learning as we go. So we had our first call for applications on the June 15th of this year, and we received 116 inquiries by the 15th of August. We received 72 applications for acceptance into the Academy, of which 34 were formally valid, so only 34 could actually be considered. And we had two selection rounds. The first had 22 candidates: 13 from Ukraine, 5 from Russia and 4 from the Belarus. And then we had a second selection round. And now the final decision is that we will accept 11 candidates: 6 from Ukraine, 3 from Russia, 2 from Belarus. They're in the fields of history, one in sociology, one in Slavic studies, two in law, one in economy, one in political science, and one in cultural studies. And as I said, funding has been a big issue and maybe I can get into that in the second round. But as of right now, some of the candidates who have already been accepted are coming in with the funding from the Alfred Landecker Stiftung. Its foundation concentrated on the understanding of Holocaust and its impacts today and particularly in Eastern Europe, and on work against anti-Semitism and racism. We've also applied for funding from the DAAD, the funding like OSt-West Dialog. It used to include Russia and Belarus. Obviously that's not the case as of right now. So now it focuses on funding conferences, exchange, travels between... particularly Ukraine, but also the countries in the Caucasus, like Georgia. And we hope to get a positive response to that application, we have yet to hear. And then there's also the initiative from the European Union, which is the Marie Curie Actions. And they already exist for international funding for research projects, but they just added a funding model that is just for Ukraine. And the University of Cologne has applied for funding to allow these researchers to be able to live and do their work with the financial backing. Because it's very easy for us to say, okay, come and we can support you. But without the money, it's very difficult to get very far.

Thank you so much. So the idea is to switch to discussion about challenges. But before that, I would like to just say thanks to all speakers. And I think the question that was brought into discussion is also very important, that in creating your organization and new institution, it's not only about the intention of a group of people, it's always about negotiations, about alliances, about finding partner institutions or looking for funding. So it's a very complex process. And thank you, dear colleagues, for bringing it onto the table. These are really important issues, licensing, fund-raising and stuff like that. So it's our life and this is the environment we actually live in. And now not back to challenges. Tuba, would you start?

Is there statistics available: which percentage of students and users of the Off University are situated in Turkey?

I can continue, and tell you about the new additional challenges that Belarusian students and scholars are facing. Since the beginning of this year, one thing I mentioned already is about visas. I can just give an example. In October 2022 the Congress of Belarusian Studies took place in Lithuania. It has always been held out of Belarus. So most of the scholars residing in Belarus could not come because they did not obtain the visas. So at the Congress of Belarusian research in a neighboring country, almost no people residing in Belarus participated. Even those who applied for visas, and this is risky actually, to apply for such a visa in Belarus [and they took that risk - OP], but they did not obtain visa in term. So this is one group of challenges connected to visas.

Another thing is that Belarusian economics is still very much impacted by sanctions, much more than Russian one. And we now are at the point where education in Lithuania will be unfordable for most of our target audience, for most Belarusian families where children want to study at Lithuanian university.

And then there is a specific challenge. Actually, this is a situation of worsening conditions for liberal education in Russia. It actually us... Each year, for instance, we now get more applications from Russia. And HEU does not discriminate on nationality basis. Which means we are accepting those students. But from a practical position, as I'm teaching in a group of 30 people, if there was one Russian speaking, that would mean I have to teach in Russian or in English [as Russians do not speak neither Belarusian nor Ukrainian – OP], even though all other people would be fine both with Ukrainian or Belarusian which are interchangeable. So with Ukrainian students we don't have any language barrier if I was teaching Belarusian to them. I can do both. And Belarusians also have no problem understanding Ukrainian. So this situation means for many students losing the feeling of a safe space, the only safe space inside the university, where you can speak Belarusian and do education in this language.

And this is a part of a larger problem, so to say, as most funding opportunities inscribe Russians and Belarusians in one group, which is exactly the opposite of what most Belarusian students would want. And in Belarusian science or... Belarusian scholars quite often work together with activists. Most of us are combining several positions. So these are problems which we face both at university but also at NGO. Wherever you now see some call for applications... Earlier it would be Eastern Partnership countries, which was used as a space for decolonization and where talks about decolonization were possible. Now it's usually either Belarus and Russia or it's an Eastern Partnership plus Russia, which is quite contradicting to the very idea of Eastern Partnership and to its values. So we are now at the point where we have not found solutions yet. Quite often Belarusian participants have to reject offers with the project because they are treated on an equal basis with those who they consider a colonizer. And that's a tricky moment because here we see that consensus within Belarus is very different from the image projected from outside. And even my Ukrainian colleagues are very often struggling with the same. When European institutions involves the trilateral format of collaboration, for instance, for three countries of which every two have a right to collaborate with other countries independently from each other. Otherwise, the decolonization project will not succeed in the region. So now everyone is saying this word, it turned into a buzzword, "decolonization". But this is something very practically connected to the situation of both institutions where I am acting, for instance.

To a great extent , I would say so. Inside each of them there is an understanding that this is a project for smaller countries, for those who want to somehow decolonize their cultures and preserve their smaller cultural spaces. But then quite often we would receive an offer from some institution or some foundation to make our workshop, for instance, for independent Russian journalists. And then we would answer: OK, we are a Belarusian institution in exile, we can not only do it for Russian journalists! Also, we are in Lithuania, where it is a very sensitive issue to organize something for Russian citizens exclusively. And then they would say, OK, you can also invite someone from Belarus and Ukraine... who would not come, especially now. So there is a lack of understanding among the supporting institutions, that Eastern Partnership as a cultural idea... is quite difficult to be combined with larger formats.

I'm not only thinking about the Russian Federation in this regard. Sometimes we're just balancing between two large countries, which in Belarusian case is an eternal cycle: between Poland and Russia, Poland and Russia all the time. But now the configuration is very different. Political configuration. Poland is a part of the EU, although not sticking to some of its principles, but it's a very different story too. For now, these two stories are different and are perceived differently. But the damage done to Belarusian journalism, I think one of its effects is that the image of how Belarusians see themselves now and how Europe or the world see them – are too completely different images.

May I ask a short question and probably, Kirill , you also can answer: are there students who are coming from Russia but from ethnic minorities?

We had three monthly courses and we realized that the audience is basically the Russian speaking one, and mostly from Russia, although we have some applicants from Ukraine and from Belarus, not many, though. And it should be noted: we do not track people, it is just a motivation letter that was a background for attributing that these people are in Ukraine/Russia/Belarus, or in other countries. In any case the group is very diverse. We got three courses and from 140 to 270 applicants for one course with 25+ places. So we were very glad there was a strong interest. So those three courses were devoted to the issues related with the current war. It was an offer from the faculty members. In the Spring semester we will have fully fledged semester credit bearing courses and English will be a primary language of instruction with few exceptions - for example, a course on trauma narrative in Russian literature - this is in Russian, obviously. But the principle as such is English as a primary language. Well, OK, we're trying to be sensitive.

I wanted to also add, I think, that it has already turned out to be controversial, that the idea of this academy to take Russian and Belarusian scholars as well. There were a lot of... There was kind of push back in the higher levels of the universities, and also from the student organizations. Of... if this is right, when we consider that the war is in Ukraine. But it was really important that we wanted to kind of... I mean, it's not necessarily about bringing people together for reconciliation, but it's about bringing people together to understand and to create perspectives for the future. The question is, how do you ... how will the cooperation and collaboration between these three nationalities in reality look like? Of course, they haven't been together yet. We're having our first conference in January. But what would that look like? For example, we had an applicant for a position to support at the academy, and she came to the interview, but then she made it very clear that she would not work with Russians, which is understandable. But we cannot hire someone when that's the part of a job [to work with Russians - OP]. And so it's just a kind of thing like that.


And to maybe come back to a point that I forgot. I think it's also interesting, the topic of language. Because especially in a German context and a German academic university context, there's no way that these scholars are really going to be able to do work in their native languages per se. And that was actually a criteria in the selection process that the candidates have to be able to speak English or German well enough to integrate and assimilate into the academic landscape. And I'll try, just wrap up quickly. But another big knock for me is... the idea was also to create a network with Ukrainian civil society institutions and with Ukrainian universities. And I think that's really important because I don't know if anyone is maybe aware, but the Falling Walls conference that took place two weeks ago kind of addressed this issue. It's also important that we support research institutions and researchers in Ukraine, as, for example, the men can't leave [Ukraine]. And that the academic system is also loose in Ukraine, is also losing a lot of its researchers to the private sector, because that's where the money is. And I just think that that's also an element that for the academy would be important. And that was also a part of the original idea. The question is, how do we even... We don't even know where to start in creating those contacts and finding that network. So yeah, that was a lot. But I'd be really interested to hear what everyone might think.

Thank you everyone! And all the questions you have – its just time to ask them!

At OFF University we started with providing all information in three languages, Turkish, English and German. And then we were quite open to both the Turkish and Arabic language, of course. But then the problem comes with who is going to host the course. Because we want our courses to be accredited by Germany university. And then to teach the course [in Turkish] for locals would be a problem. But we have some Turkish... I don't remember the name of the departments... Linguistic Departments, generally, were very open to host our courses, so we had Turkish courses. And also now two courses are taught in Lithuanian and Russian. So we are quite open. But then the challenge comes with the host university, so we need to find a solution. So far Humboldt University was ready to host Russian and Ukrainian language courses, but we still have to find out...

I have a question for Tuba. I wonder if you could talk about the experience with getting courses accredited by German universities, specifically... I have two questions. I mean, first is how the process goes, you know, in German universities... it can take years till you provide [all documents] according to what they perceive as their standards. And the second question, it really might be silly, but you said that the students at Off University are anonymous, so I wonder how do those students get credits to confirm their qualification?

Do the students then get a certificate for the courses or can they do a full study, like a bachelor?

Is there something like a semester abroad or like when you take courses abroad?

Dear colleagues, I'm really sorry to intervene, but even the coolest things in the world have their ends. It was a pleasure!