Like many of his classmates, Luke Forster '08 (Averill Park, N.Y.) opted to do research this summer. Forster, a world politics major and Chinese minor, spent his summer on the Hill, working with Assistant Professor of Government Sharon Rivera on a comparative study of democratization in Ukraine and Belarus.
Forster is the recipient of the William M. Bristol, Jr. '17 Scholarship, a prestigious Hamilton grant awarded to incoming first-year students. As well as providing half-tuition scholarships, the Bristol Scholarship includes a research grant, which Forster chose to use for his work this summer.
In 1991 the USSR broke up into 15 independent nations, all of which announced they were democracies. This positive mood, however, did not last, and many of these smaller states became dictatorships. In the last six years some of these dictatorships have been shaken and several of the countries are moving toward real democracy.
Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia and Kyrgyzstan have all undergone successful revolutions, known as color or flower revolutions, started by grass-roots movements. Forster was trying to identify the reasons why these revolutions occurred in some countries but not in others, guided by the question, "what does it take to make a revolution like this?" Because of various constraints, Forster focused his investigation on two of the 15 countries: Ukraine, which has had a revolution; and Belarus, which has not.
Forster carried out his research by doing a good deal of reading, mainly newspapers and academic journals. He said that one of the hardest things about researching his topic was that it was both recent and obscure, and that finding information, especially about Belarus, was difficult.
The culmination of the project was a paper with a master list of answers to the central question. Some of the conditions which, by Forster's conclusion, must be present for a color revolution are: an unpopular dictator, media services which are at least semi-free, a soft dictatorship, evident election fraud, and a split in the armed forces.
Regarding his two countries, Forster concludes that a revolution of this sort could not occur in Belarus in the next few years. Out of his list of 10 requirements, Belarus only meets two; President Alexander Lukashenko, Forster said, "is on the ball."
But, Forster went on to explain, the requirements on his list can change very quickly and "there is more than one way to topple a government." Lukashenko's control and popularity is based partly on economic support from Russia, which is becoming less supportive than previously. "If things go badly for Russia," explained Forster, "it's pretty much the end of the regime."
He became interested in democratization in the former Soviet Union after taking Rivera's course Politics in Russia, and chose this topic because he is interested in applied government. "It's really gritty and hands on," said Forster, who also enjoyed the fact that it dealt with a current subject.
Forster was pleased with his first summer of research. "It's good to have independence," he said. "[I get to] choose my own topic, make my own schedule." Although it was sometimes hard to focus, Forster was happy with his work and his results and his ability to deal with a topic that was "something unique that no one's really studied."
-- Lisbeth Redfield
