Social movements and political change in Belarus in 2020 and after

Chulitskaya, Tatsiana and Bindman, Eleanor ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4929-050X (2023) Social movements and political change in Belarus in 2020 and after. In: Belarus in the Twenty-First Century: between dictatorship and democracy. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies . Routledge, London, pp. 133-145. ISBN 9781032318059 (hardback); 9781003311454 (ebook)

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Abstract

This chapter explores the extent to which civil society organisations (CSOs) and social movements in Belarus mobilised in 2020 and contributed to the mass protests and other major political developments which took place there. In some respects, the fact that these types of organisation mobilised was an unexpected development as civil society and social movements in Belarus and many other post-Soviet and post-Communist societies had for many years been seen within the dominant research narrative as relatively weak and marginalised. Yet a reassessment of post-socialist civil society is long overdue and there is a need to investigate the newer hybrid forms of formal and informal activism and organisation seen in many countries and contexts across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). These differ from the more ‘NGO-ized' model of civil society which dominated the field until the 2010s and was often criticised for being elitist and out of touch with the needs of the people it claimed to represent. As a result, it is important to analyse the ways in which traditional Belarusian CSOs and newly formed social movement organisations mobilised existing activists and new members, and participated in both large- and small-scale protests against the incumbent regime from 2020 onwards.