Diasporas participate in the home country’s development through remittances, philanthropy, knowledge transfer, investment, and political engagement. Based on the theoretical perspective of network governance, this paper argues that governments can enhance diaspora contributions by offering incentives to engage with the homeland. The paper then applies this perspective to assess the effectiveness of Lithuania’s diaspora engagement policy. Based on successful strategies adopted by other countries, the paper makes recommendations on how to strengthen the incentives for the diaspora to participate in Lithuania’s political, social, economic, and cultural life, and on how to create a better environment for the diaspora’s contributions.

The goal of the paper is to present a Simplified Offensive Language (SOL) Taxonomy, its application and testing in the Second Annotation Campaign conducted between March-May 2023 on four languages: English, Czech, Lithuanian, and Polish to be verified and located in LLOD. Making reference to the previous Offensive Language taxonomic models proposed mostly by the same COST Action Nexus Linguarum WG 4.1.1 team, the number and variety of the categories underwent the definitional revision, and the present typology was tested in the annotation on the publicly available offensive language datasets of each of the four languages. The results of the annotation are presented and as they are contained within the accepted statistical values on the inter-annotator agreement in the SOL categories and their aspects, we propose this taxonomy as a core ontology which represents the encoding of the supported offensive languages and justify its use on new data in terms of a more universal Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) schema.

The chapter explores the trajectories of the evolution of political science (PS) in four former Soviet Socialist Republics (Estonia and Lithuania, the Republics of Moldova and Belarus) after the USSR collapse. Departing from the premise that PS is appreciated as the science of democracy, the authors claim that its identity and autonomy are particularly important. Research shows that PS in these countries started from the same impoverished basis (“scientific communism”), but it soon took diverse trajectories and currently faces specific challenges. Democracy, pro-Western geopolitical settings and the shorter period of Sovietization contributed to the faster and more sustainable development of PS in two Baltic States. However, in Estonia, political developments have led to the retrenchment of PS and to downsize of universities’ departments and study programmes. In Lithuania, political scientists are very visible in the public sphere. In Moldova, its uncertain geopolitical orientation and a series of internal political conflicts have led to the weak identity of PS and questionable prospects for its further institutionalization. In authoritarian Belarus, PS as an academic discipline exists within a hostile political environment and under a hierarchical system of governance offering practically no degree of academic freedom.

The article provides the theoretical analysis of co-production phenomenon. The interests in co-production and related concepts are examined applying the methods of Google Trends statistical analysis and information visualization. The activity of business, government, society and research sectors during the last five years are compared, the trends of interest change and the balance of inter-sectoral interest in co-production is assessed. The relative evaluation of interest in co-production indicates that the situation in different sectors is not the same – the asymmetry in interest in co-production prevails. The article concludes that cooperation between public sector organizations with private sector organizations and society in providing public service as well as cooperation between scientific research, methods and technologies is developed at a different rate thus hindering breakthrough on a larger scale.

Although the Lithuanian Government has an active programme (Global Lithuania) to engage with citizens residing abroad, there is a lack of social protection policies for non-resident nationals who are facing economic difficulties. This is due to the public opinion that Lithuanians abroad are in a better financial position to contribute rather than benefit from the already limited state budget. Nevertheless, some assistance exists in the area of health care: Lithuanian consulates help Lithuanians abroad with evacuations or if they get into an accident and wish to return to Lithuania. Consulates also assist emigrants with the receipt of pensions and family-related documents.