RADFORD -- Radford University geography professor Grigory Ioffe is stating a case for Belarus.

In September, Ioffe will speak about the new social landscape of the eastern European country at a conference organized by the Belarus Institute for Strategic Studies. The conference, “Toward the New Vision of Belarus,” will be held in Kiev, Ukraine.

“Belarus often is referred to as the Last Dictatorship in Europe,” Ioffe said. However, he says that this description is more of a political cliché and that the country and its president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, are products of Belarus’ setting and world view, most importantly its delayed nation-building. Belarus, a country of nearly 10 million people, is described in the CIA “World Fact Book” as “republic in name, although in fact a dictatorship.”

A native of Moscow, Ioffe is a specialist in human geography and an expert on Belarus. He has written extensively about the former Soviet republic, including a new book that is scheduled to be published in 2008. The book will be Ioffe’s ninth, and his fourth in English.

Ioffe has spoken at two other events in the past year in which Belarus was the topic. In April, he participated in a conference at the U.S. State Department which was organized to assess Belarus a year after its presidential election. Last fall, Ioffe spoke about Belarus at a conference in Warsaw, Poland.

In June 2006, Ioffe acted as an examiner for a Ph.D. candidate at London’s University of Kingston who was defending a thesis about Belarus. Ioffe worked with an internal examiner from the university to critique the student’s thesis.

Ioffe’s grandparents and mother were natives of Belarus, and he has visited the country numerous times.

Ioffe has served as an RU professor since 1990 and holds degrees from Moscow State University.