Nicola Belli

Bio

Nicola Belli is a research fellow at the University of Eastern Piedmont, in Italy, and he is involved in the project “Reframing globalization in the European peripheries: Intellectual and expert networks facing political and economic transformations (1975-2022)”. His main research focus is Lithuania between late Soviet decades and perestroika. In particular, before and during his PhD, defended in June 2022, Nicola Belli concentrated on the postwar urbanization of the republic, while he is currently focusing on the Lithuanian environmental movement at the end of the 1980s. From September 2024 to January 2025 Nicola Belli was a visiting researcher at the Lithuanian Institute of History, in Vilnius. 

Research project

The research project is aimed at performing an in-depth and source-based study of the environmental activism in Lithuania during the perestroika. From 1986, protests against the development of industrial plants and resources’ exploitation projects became the first systematic and successful form of opposition to Soviet policies in the republic. Within this framework, the work is committed to identify the main protagonists of the phenomenon, with a specific attention to the role of scientific and cultural intelligentsia. Moreover, the research is aimed at discovering which industrial infrastructures have caused the greatest ecological concerns and how the opposition to their implementation, as well as the request of transparent information about their activities, have been carried out. In the end, the project is devoted to analyze the relation between environmentalism and the Lithuanian national movement.