February 1, 2021

The BEARR Trust is most grateful to Nigel Gould-Davies for agreeing to give a lecture on Thursday, 18 February at 5pm UK time, on the subject of

“Belarus: what happened and what next?”

You can watch a full recording of the lecture on BEARR’s YouTube channel here and read the report by BEARR trustee, Ross Gill here.

One of the hitherto quietest of the post-Soviet states, Belarus woke up last summer when rigged presidential elections triggered huge nation-wide protests that have continued since. Alexander Lukashenka, Belarus’s authoritarian president for the past 26 years, has sought to suppress the protests and appealed to Russia’s President Putin for help. These unprecedented developments have far-reaching implications for Russia, Europe and Belarus itself.

About the speaker

Nigel Gould-Davies is Editor of Strategic Survey, and Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He is widely published on International Relations and Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, and is the author of Tectonic Politics: Global Political Risk in an Age of Transformation (Brookings/Chatham House, 2019).

Nigel’s expertise on the region has been built on a long and varied career. He received an MPhil. from St Antony’s College, Oxford University and a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he was awarded the Sumner prize for the best dissertation in International Relations. He then taught Politics and International Relations at Oxford. From 2000-10 Nigel served as an expert on the region in the British Foreign Office, where his roles included Head of the Economic Section in Moscow and Ambassador to Belarus. From 2010-14 he worked in senior government relations roles in the energy industry in Central and Southeast Asia. From 2014-20 he taught and conducted research in Asia.