This article belongs to the special cluster, “Think Tanks in Central and Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Katarzyna Jezierska and Serena Giusti.

The article looks at think tanks through the prism of a specific social space whose emergence is ascribable to both transnational processes and local social structures. Four processes are identified as shaping the institutionalization of the first think tanks in Belarus, founded as a tool for the “desovietization” of science and “democratization” of politics in the early 1990s: (1) the destabilization of relations between science and politics spurred by the Soviet perestroika beginning in 1986; (2) the autonomization of national elites and a political field in Belarus following the collapse of the Soviet Union; (3) the transformation of the labor market, including the crisis of state-supported research and academia, which ejected a large number of well-educated professionals; and (4) the intensification of transnational exchanges and the legitimization of references to Western practices. To systematically analyze these processes, a model consisting of the following four dimensions is proposed: configuration of relations between science and politics, position of the think tank space in the field of power, professional logics of career or competition, and transnational diffusion of resources and their local appropriation.

本文属于由Katarzyna Jezierska和Serena Giusti特邀编辑的特殊集群“中欧和东欧的智囊团”。

本文通过一个特定的社会空间的角度来考察智库，这些社会空间的出现既可以归因于跨国进程，也可以归因于当地的社会结构。确定了四个过程来塑造白俄罗斯第一个智囊团的制度化，这是在1990年代初为科学“去势化”和政治“民主化”建立的工具：（1）刺激了科学与政治之间关系的不稳定由苏联始于1986年的改革。（2）苏联解体后，民族精英的自治和白俄罗斯的政治领域；（3）劳动力市场的转变，包括国家支持的研究和学术界的危机，这驱逐了大批受过良好教育的专业人员；（4）跨国交流的加强和对西方习俗的引用合法化。为了系统地分析这些过程，提出了一个由以下四个维度组成的模型：科学与政治之间的关系配置，智库空间在权力领域中的位置，职业或竞争的专业逻辑以及资源和技术的跨国扩散他们在当地的拨款。