Featured Scholar, Spring 2009
Dr. Oleg Manaev of Belarus
Dr. Manaev has given SRF permission to use his name and all identifying information.
Dr. Oleg Manaev is the founding professor of the Department of Social Communication at Belarus State University where he has taught for over fifteen years. He has held visiting professorships at universities in the US, Canada, Brazil and Europe and received numerous international fellowship awards for work around the world.
With over 170 scholarly articles to his name, Dr. Manaev has authored and edited an additional seventeen books on civil society, democracy and the media, including three in the past three years: Emerging Civil Society in Independent Belarus. Sociological Experiences: 2001-2005, Presidential Elections in Belarus: from Limited Democracy to Unlimited Authoritarianism (1994-2006), and his most recent, Belarus and Wider Europe: Quest for Geo-Political Self Identification. While teaching in Belarus, Dr. Manaev established the Independent Institute of Socio-Economic and Political Studies (IISEPS) and the Belarusian Association of Think Tanks (BATT) to examine democratic movements, media, market economies, rule of law and civil society. His public visibility made him a target of consistent pressure from Belarusian authorities, who in recent years have severely restricted the activities of NGOs, independent media and academic institutions. Under increasing threat, including shutting down both IISEPS and BATT by the Supreme Court, as well as threats of formal charges from the General Prosecutor Office for “discrediting the Republic of Belarus,” Dr. Manaev appealed to the Scholar Rescue Fund through his colleague Dr. Peter Gross of the University of Tennessee (UT) at Knoxville, to bring him to university’s School of Journalism and Electronic Media.
Now on the SRF fellowship as an assistant professor at UT, Dr. Manaev teaches several media courses on campus and at various other academic institutes in the US. In addition to his work on campus, he continues to pursue independent research, publishing numerous works in US and international journals. He recently served as a corresponding editor of Political Communication, an international quarterly journal, as he maintains close ties with his colleagues in Belarus.
To read the Freedom House country report on Belarus please click here
