The history of ADLIGA is a story of resilience.

For more than fifteen years, ADLIGA has worked at the intersection of democracy, human rights, gender equality, and civic participation. Throughout political repression, shrinking civic space, forced displacement, and social transformation, the organisation has continued to create spaces for learning, solidarity, feminist thought, and democratic engagement.

What began as a feminist civic initiative in 2009 has evolved into an international foundation supporting women at risk and strengthening democratic participation across borders.

2009: Foundation

«Adliga: Women for Full Citizenship» was founded in Belarus in early spring 2009 by Olga Karach and Eugenia Ivanova and was officially registered in Prague on 13 August 2009.

From the very beginning, the organisation operated in an international context. This was not a matter of ambition but a response to political reality. Under the Lukashenka regime, independent organisations faced severe restrictions, making it virtually impossible to register and develop educational and civic initiatives within Belarus. As a result, Adliga relied on international partnerships and implemented its activities through cooperation with organisations and networks in the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Poland, and Sweden. In this way, Adliga evolved into a network of solidarity and cooperation that brought together activists from different countries across Eastern Europe.

«Adliga: Women for Full Citizenship» maintained close ties with Belarusian independent civic initiatives, including the civil campaign Our House, the human rights movement, democratic opposition groups, and women’s civic organisations.

Unfortunately, «Adliga» activists encountered political repression from the very beginning.

In March 2009, human rights defender Yana Poliakova committed suicide after being subjected to police violence and sustained psychological pressure. She was an activist of the Civil Campaign «Our House» and a volunteer of the Centre for Gender Initiatives “ADLIGA: Women for Full Citizenship.” In an attempt to stop her civic activities, both physical and psychological violence were used against her.

Yana sought justice through the courts despite the fact that her abusers were representatives of the law enforcement system. Instead of receiving protection, she was prosecuted and sentenced to two and a half years of “restriction of liberty.” On 4 March 2009, the Salihorsk Court found her guilty under Article 400, Part 2 of the Criminal Code (“knowingly false accusation”) and ordered her to compensate a police officer whom she had accused of abuse.

According to human rights defender Valery Shchukin, who attended the trial, the verdict came as a devastating shock to Yana. The following day, a state-controlled newspaper published an article portraying her as a dishonest person attacking respected police officers. Having lost all hope of obtaining justice from the Belarusian authorities, Yana took her own life shortly thereafter.

Her story remains a tragic example of the consequences of political persecution and gender-based injustice. Adliga has continued to honour her memory and her commitment to human rights and civic dignity.

Adliga’s educational activities began almost simultaneously with the establishment of the organisation. On 22–24 May 2009, its representatives participated in an international gender seminar in Lviv, Ukraine, which brought together leading experts and activists, including representatives of Swedish feminist organisations.

At that time, such international feminist educational events were still relatively rare in the post-Soviet region. They provided a unique space for open discussions on gender equality, women’s rights, and democratic values—issues that remained largely absent from official public discourse in Belarus. These international forums became important platforms for professional networking, exchange of experience, and the development of ideas that would later shape the future work of Adliga.

2010: Working Under Pressure on Civil Society

Following its attempt to institutionalise its activities in Belarus in 2010, the organisation faced the same restrictions experienced by most independent civic initiatives in the country. After the presidential election of December 2010, pressure on civil society intensified even further.

During this period, the organisation increasingly positioned itself not only as a human rights initiative but also as an educational and research centre operating at the intersection of feminism, civic participation, and democratic theory.

It was in 2010 that preparations began for what would later become Adliga’s most influential and widely recognised project: the publication series “Women in Politics: New Approaches to the Political.”

Work on the almanac brought together researchers, activists, political analysts, and representatives of civil society from Belarus and other countries of Eastern Europe.

In the Belarusian context, this was a highly unusual undertaking. There were virtually no stable independent platforms where the interconnections between politics, gender and сulture could be openly discussed and critically examined.

Addressing this gap was precisely what Adliga set out to do.

2011: Entering the International Human Rights Advocacy Arena

In 2011, the organisation’s activities increasingly moved into the international sphere.

One of the most important developments was its involvement in processes related to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). In January 2011, the CEDAW Committee reviewed Belarus’s state report on the implementation of its international obligations concerning women’s rights.

Against this backdrop, Adliga, together with the International Centre for Civic Initiatives “Our House”, began working on an independent civil society assessment of the situation of women in Belarus. This work later developed into a series of joint shadow reports submitted to United Nations bodies.

It was during this period that the organisation began to engage systematically with international human rights mechanisms.

Particularly important were its contacts with Eastern and Central European feminist networks, including the community surrounding the KARAT Coalition, one of the largest regional platforms of women’s organisations in Central and Eastern Europe.

Through these networks, Belarusian activists gained access to educational programmes, international conferences, expert networks, and collaborative research initiatives, enabling them to connect local advocacy efforts with broader regional and international feminist movements.

2012-2014: Building a Feminist Intellectual Platform

The flagship project of this period was the publication series “Women in Politics: New Approaches to the Political.”

Through this series, Adliga developed its own educational and analytical school of feminist thought. The almanac was conceived as an educational and analytical platform for discussing politics, culture, and society from a feminist perspective.

The first volume of the series, “Gender of Politics” (Pol Politiki), published in 2012, was devoted to a critical examination of the ways in which gender is embedded in the political sphere of post-Soviet societies and why women remain excluded from the production of power, knowledge, and public policy.

The title itself was based on a wordplay. In Russian, the word pol means both “gender/sex” and “half.” The editors argued that this ambiguity was intentional: politics in post-Soviet countries remained deeply androcentric and effectively excluded women—that is, it excluded half of society. Consequently, the question of the “gender of politics” also became a question of who owns politics and who has the right to be recognised as a political subject.

The second volume, “The Personal as Political,” explored one of the central concepts of second-wave feminism: the relationship between women’s personal experiences and political structures of power. Contributors examined violence, family relations, sexuality, the body, social control, and post-Soviet transformations.

The third volume, “The Public: Politicising the Private,” further developed these themes by investigating the boundaries between public and private space in post-Soviet societies. The volume brought together researchers and activists from Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and other countries of the region.

What made the almanac particularly significant was that it did not limit itself to academic gender studies. The editorial board explicitly stated that the project sought to analyse the real challenges facing Belarusian post-Soviet society and to connect theoretical reflection with the practice of civic participation. The almanac was conceived as an intellectual space for activists, researchers, and representatives of civil society.

For Belarus in the early 2010s, this was unprecedented. At a time when independent public discussion of gender, power, democracy, and social transformation remained extremely limited, Women in Politics created a unique platform where feminist scholarship, civic engagement, and critical political analysis could meet.

2014-2016: International Human Rights Advocacy

After 2016, Adliga’s activities underwent a significant transformation. While in previous years the organisation had been known primarily as a publishing and educational initiative, its work increasingly focused on international human rights advocacy, feminist analysis of authoritarianism, transnational educational projects, and support for Belarusian civic activists in the context of growing political repression. At the same time, Adliga gradually evolved from a Belarusian initiative with international connections into a transnational network operating largely outside Belarus.

By this period, the organisation had accumulated substantial expertise and documentation on issues such as gender discrimination, political pressure on women activists, women’s participation in civic initiatives, and state violence.

A turning point came with the preparation of a shadow report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), jointly authored with the International Centre for Civic Initiatives “Our House.” Submitted in 2016, the report became one of the organisation’s most significant international human rights initiatives. It was signed by Eugenia Ivanova on behalf of Adliga and Olga Karach on behalf of Our House.

What made this document particularly noteworthy was that its authors examined not only traditional issues of gender inequality but also the relationship between women’s status and the authoritarian political system in Belarus.

The report argued that official Belarusian statistics failed to capture many forms of discrimination experienced by politically active women. It was one of the first Belarusian feminist policy documents to explicitly link gender inequality to the country’s authoritarian political system, demonstrating how restrictions on civil society, political repression, and limitations on fundamental freedoms disproportionately affected women activists and human rights defenders.

2016-2020: Transformation into a Transnational Network

Following the increasing pressure on independent civil society in Belarus, the space for independent work within the country continued to shrink.

As a result, Adliga’s activities became increasingly international in scope. The organisation maintained strong connections with international human rights and academic communities, continuing its work on issues of gender equality, women’s rights, and political violence.

During this period, a network of researchers, educators, activists, and human rights defenders associated with the project Women in Politics: New Approaches to the Political continued to develop around Adliga. The European Humanities University continued to preserve, disseminate, and archive the almanac as an important educational resource in the fields of gender studies and political theory.

The international academic and expert engagement of the organisation’s founders, Eugenia Ivanova and Olga Karach, became increasingly visible. Both participated in international research and policy projects focusing on feminist political theory, gender, citizenship, and democratic participation. These themes gradually became central to the intellectual work associated with Adliga.

Activists and researchers connected with ADLIGA also participated in international mobilisations against the anti-feminist and anti-gender campaigns that were gaining strength across Europe during this period. Particularly notable was their involvement in protests against the World Congress of Families, an international conservative network campaigning against women’s reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

Through these activities, Adliga increasingly positioned itself as part of a broader transnational feminist movement, linking the experiences of Belarusian women and civil society activists with wider European debates on democracy, human rights, gender equality, and social justice.

After 2020: Working Under Conditions of Mass Repression

Following the presidential election of August 2020, Belarus experienced the largest political crisis in its modern history.

After the effective destruction of independent civil society inside the country, Adliga’s activities moved almost entirely to the international level. The organisation and its partners increasingly relied on international mechanisms, including the United Nations, the CEDAW Committee, the OSCE, the European Parliament, and international human rights organisations.

Women became one of the most visible groups within the protest movement, while repression against women activists reached an unprecedented scale. International human rights organisations and UN bodies documented politically motivated violence, mass repression, the liquidation of non-governmental organisations, and the persecution of women human rights defenders.

For Adliga, this meant that many of the issues the organisation had been addressing since its foundation suddenly moved to the centre of international attention.

One of the key areas of focus became gender-based repression. Adliga and researchers associated with the organisation increasingly addressed issues such as sexualised violence, degrading treatment of women in detention, the use of gender stereotypes in state propaganda, pressure on women human rights defenders and journalists, and the persecution of women as family members of political activists.

Whereas before 2020 Adliga had primarily analysed discrimination against women in politics and public life, the wave of mass arrests and political persecution transformed the discussion. As a result, gender perspectives became an important component of international reporting on the situation in Belarus.

Representatives of the organisation and its partners participated in international discussions on the status of women in Belarus and contributed analytical materials and expert commentary for international institutions.

Adliga actively utilised UN mechanisms and international human rights institutions to draw attention to the situation of women in Belarus.

The objective of this work was not only to document violations of women’s rights but also to ensure that gender issues became an integral part of the international agenda on Belarus.

Much of this advocacy was guided by a simple principle:

It is impossible to speak about democracy in Belarus without speaking about the situation of women.

This principle represented a natural continuation of the ideas that Adliga had been developing since the early 2010s, linking gender equality, citizenship, democratic participation, and human rights into a common framework of analysis and action.