Details

The round table discussion commemorates the work of Belarusian political scientist and EHU professor Svetlana Naumova, who prematurely passed away in 2011, political communication having been one of the spheres of her professional interest.

In the circumstances of Belarusian non-democratic political regime, any independent civil and political actors do not only face problems while organizing and conducting political campaigns at various levels, but also encounter many obstacles when they try to spread their results and inform the public about their activities. In this way, even in the case of successful (or relatively successful) campaign or event, the public awareness about them remains to be minimal in most cases. On the one hand, it logically correlates with the exclusion from public space and marginalization of any political and civil actors, oppositional or disloyal (or perceived as disloyal) to the current regime. Such situation could be also explained by the high degree of state control over the media (except a few independent Internet resources) and by weak horizontal connections in the Belarusian society.

Simultaneously, there are certain problems with the communication of the results of political campaigns among the independent actors themselves. The reasons for such "communication gap” include: the absence of comprehensive communication strategies, the shortage of various resources, and the focus on the ‘’outside’’ (in particular, international public and external donors) audience rather than on the inside one (the Belarusian citizens).

The round table’s goal is to discuss common problems with communication of the outcomes of activities and results of the campaigns of independent political actors within the non-democratic Belarusian regime. Another goal is to analyze and to evaluate the practices of outcomes’ communication using examples of specific campaigns (in particular, civil electoral observation elect.by, nonpartisan electoral observation). Thus, the event will combine theoretical and practical perspectives.

Participants of the round table discussion: Belarusian and Lithuanian experts, EHU students and faculty, young people from Belarus and other countries, participating in the students' conference "Europe 2012: Prospects and Challenges of Europeanization".