Prague, May 10 (CTK) – Charles University’s Faculty of Arts will open a new research centre focusing on Russia, it announced today, adding that the centre, named after Boris Nemtsov, a murdered Russian opposition politician, will draft analyses and stage conferences involving Russian and European independent experts.
The centre will become another in the series of the faculty’s research centres specialising in strategic regions such as the Far East, Central Asia and Latin America.
In the centres, teams of experts analyse the respective regions from the point of view of political sciences, philosophy, demography and economy. They also deal with local conflicts, security, migration and inter-cultural relations.
The new centre wants to present the results of its research in a comprehensible form in the media, the faculty wrote in a press release.
Marek Prihoda, who heads the faculty’s Institute of Eastern Studies, said the Czech experts together with their Russian colleagues have set six main fields for the new centres to explore.
They are the civic protests in Russia, Russian emigration in the 20th and 21st centuries, Russian people’s idea of future, the influence of European values on people’s identity in the post-Soviet region, models of Russian collective memory and the picture of Russian society in contemporary culture.
The faculty will establish the centre in cooperation with the Boris Nemtsov Freedom Fund, whose representatives turned to the Charles University experts late last year.
The two institutions’ common denominator is their defence of human rights, democratic values and the principles of open society in the present world, Prihoda said.
Nemtsov, an opposition politician and critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, was shot dead in February 2015.
rtj/dr/kva
