Belarusian Diaspora

Belarusian diaspora refers to emigrants from the territory of Belarus as well for people of Belarusian descent.

According to different researches, there are between 2.5 and 3.5 millions of people of Belarusian descent living outside the territory of the Republic of Belarus. This number includes descendants of economic emigrants from Belarus of late 19th century and early 20th century, of emigrants of times of the Second World War and emigrants of the wave that started in the 1990s. Another group of Belarusian diaspora are people who migrated within the USSR before 1991 and who after its dissolution became inhabitants of other post-Soviet countries. A separate group usually associated with the Belarusian diaspora are ethnic minorities in the borderlands of Belarus with Poland, Lithuania and Russia.

A separate group of emigrants from Belarus were Belarusian Jews who have established significant communities in the USA and Israel. The historic name for Belarusian Jews were Litvaks, a corrupted term of Litvin or "Lithuanian" in Belarusian.

There is a tendency to a decline in the number of people identifying themselves as Belarusians according to official censuses.

The biggest and best organized Belarusian diasporas live in Russia (including Siberia), Ukraine, Poland, the USA, Canada, the UK, the Baltic states (i.e., Estonia and Latvia), Central Asia (primarily the Soviet-era Farming settlement program in Kazakhstan) and the TransCaucasus nations (i.e., Armenia and Georgia).

There are small Belarusian communities in Scandinavia, Germany, Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal and Ireland as a result of European Union and Council of Europe contract labor agreements to recruit Belarusian and Ukrainian workers in the late 2000s.

The World Association of Belarusians based in Minsk is the international organization uniting people of Belarusian descend from around the world. The government of the short-lived Belarusian Democratic Republic is in exile since 1919 and acts as a consolidating centre for many Belarusians abroad, especially in North America and Western Europe (i.e., Belgium and Switzerland).