Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Minsk and surrounding cities in the former Soviet state to call for the resignation of President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994. This unprecedented unrest has been growing since Mr Lukashenko announced his victory on 9 August, with allegations of poll-rigging levelled against the president.

On Thursday (20 August), Dr Sam Greene, director of the Russia Institute at King’s, will chair a roundtable discussion, Belarus Rising: The Roots and Routes of Revolution, which will share insight on protest and contested politics in the post-Soviet era.

The discussions will feature Mark Beissinger (Princeton University), Volha Charnysh (MIT), Sasha de Vogel (University of Michigan), Aliaksandr Herasimenka (University of Oxford), Tatsiana Kulakevich (University of South Florida), Olga Onuch (University of Manchester), Graeme Robertson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Maryia Rohava (University of Oslo). and many others, including researchers on the ground in Minsk.

The online event will run from 14.30-16.00 BST and is co-sponsored by the Comparative Authoritarian Protest Research Network (CAPRN, at the University of Manchester), the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS, Berlin), and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina.

Admission to the event is free. You can sign up here.