42 articles tagged with belarus were found.
This article, based on the analysis of media, video production and songs, as well as semi-structured interviews, pursues three objectives. First, it analyses Belarusian rock musicians’ modes of protest engagement in the context of the 2020 Belarusian post-electoral protests and the 2022 Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Second, it situates their engagement within the Belarusian underground rock artistic tradition that took root in the 1980s, but which was updated in waves as new impulses were given to protest. Finally, it provides an overview of four types of social logics that have historically contributed to the protest politicization of Belarusian rock music.
By
Yauheni Kryzhanouski
October 23, 2025
Being once a central component of Soviet popular culture, the Vokal’no-Instrumental’nyi Ansambls [Vocal-Instrumental Ensemble] (VIA) repertoire has become a shared heritage across today’s former Soviet republics. While portrayed in the media as a depoliticized historical phenomenon, some music groups still active today like the Soviet Belarusian VIAs Pesniary, Siabry, Verasy and Charaunitsy have in part also become entwined with domestic politics.
Focusing on Belarus, this article explores through virtual ethnography and a multimodal critical discourse analysis the intersection between popular music and politics. It especially focuses on how Belarusian president Aliaksandr Lukashenka, drawing on populist strategies, champions artists like the mentioned VIAs that support his ideology. Over his 30-year rule Lukashenka has promoted a national identity based in part on Soviet nostalgia. The mentioned VIAs are not only important drivers of contemporary Belarusian national identity, but they also provide a bridge to the Soviet past. Not only are they (in) directly supported by Lukashenka and the Belarusian state, they in different ways also support Lukashenka and were thus notably absent in the protests following the contested presidential elections in 2020.
By
David-Emil Wickström
October 23, 2025
Alesia Rudnik is a political scientist based in Sweden, originally from Belarus. Her research has been published in journals such as Europe-Asia Studies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Media, War & Conflict and Internet Policy Review. She is also a regular contributor to Baltic Worlds (see for example the co-authored article with Malin Rönnblom in BW, vol. 17, no. 4, 2024). She currently serves as the Director of the Center for New Ideas, an independent Belarusian think tank operating in exile. She previously led a Belarusian diaspora organization in Sweden and was awarded “European of the Year 2022” in Sweden for her civic engagement.
Rudnik’s academic work focuses on the relationship between people and technology in the context of political protests under authoritarian regimes. On September 12, 2025, she defended her doctoral dissertation in political science at Karlstad University, titled Machinery of Dissent: People and Technology in Political Protests in Autocracies. In conversation with Baltic Worlds, Dr. Rudnik reflects on research in Sweden concerning Belarus, the 2020 Belarusian protests, and the role of digital platforms in mobilizing protest movements within authoritarian contexts.
By
Joakim Ekman
October 6, 2025
This essay analyzes the transformation of the Belarusian political community following the 2020 protests through an examination of eight articles published within the Fifth Republic project. The analysis identifies four dominant narratives: repression as a catalyst for political action, the legitimacy crisis as a political opportunity, the role of diaspora and political exiles as new political actors, and "Caring Democracy" as an alternative political model. Each narrative demonstrates distinct mobilization potentials and limitations. The study reveals that while the Belarusian political community exists in a fragmented state—resembling a "shattered mirror"—it maintains remarkable resilience through adaptive practices of solidarity. The research suggests that integrating these diverse narratives could provide a framework for overcoming current political fragmentation while recognizing the value of multiple voices and experiences within the democratic movement.
Essay by
Marina Sokolova
September 23, 2025
Minsk, the capital of Belarus, has always astonished foreigners with its peculiar eerie atmosphere. Broad, empty, impeccably clean avenues adorned with WW2 obelisks and pompous statues of Soviet heroes attracted untrained gazes reminding the guests of the city of the utopian settings by Orwell and Huxley. But to me, a born Minsker, they reminded more of a hospital — with the ghosts of the collective memory sanitizers leaders safeguarding imaginary peace and order
By
Olga Bubich
September 23, 2025
The repression in Belarus is targeting academia. Olga Shparaga is one of the co-founders of the European College of Liberal Arts in Minsk (ECLAB), and former lecturer at the European Humanities University (EHU), that was forcibly closed 2004 and moved into exile in Vilnius. In a conversation with Friedrich Cain, she describes how the Belarusian exile Academia, although persecuted even abroad, still works to educate Belarusian students and support teachers inside Belarus as well as in exile through various networks and strategies.
By
Friedrich ´ Cain
April 16, 2025
Over the past decade, social networking platforms have become an important communication channel for protesters in autocratic countries. In August 2020 and January 2021, the messaging application Telegram and social media platform Tik-Tok became platforms for protest mobilization and coordination in Belarus and Russia respectively. This article applies previous research within social movements and democratization studies about the use of Facebook and Twitter to instigate and galvanize protests in autocratic countries in order to explore how protest mobilization on newly politicized platforms such as Telegram and TikTok is manifested. For this purpose, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of 1,128 protest-related publications (posts) on Telegram’s channel NextaLive and 100 videos on TikTok. The conclusion provides an extended framework for analyzing political mobilization online and argues that social networking platforms can themselves be considered spaces that are commensurate with those of offline protest and not merely tools to stimulate democratic participation.
By
Alesia Rudnik and Malin Rönnblom
December 10, 2024
Russian military personnel driving vehicles without license plates, billboards advertising holidays in Moscow, and Belarusians facing the demand to speak “a normal language” — that of the aggressor country responsible for about 30,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine since 2022. As well as these, one can find many more indicators of the growing presence of the so-called “Russkiy mir” (Russian world) in Belarus, a state in which Putin’s occupation is using less obtrusive tactics.
By
Olga Bubich
September 18, 2024
The Belarusian Republican Youth Union (BRYU) is an administered mass organization for youth in contemporary Belarus and has been supported by the Lukashenka government for decades. It is therefore well positioned to engage in international activities. What’s more, it claims to develop “multi-vector international youth collaboration” by participating in international programs and projects. This article aims to map and explain the international activities of the BRYU from the early 1990s until the present day. It asks how the association’s international activities look in practice and what explains these patterns. It finds there is a qualitative difference between the BRYU’s international activities with actors in Russia, the European Union and China. The article suggests that in comparison to the BRYU’s domestic activities, which have been the primary focus of previous research, the youth league’s participation in international affairs is limited. It argues that this state of affairs can be explained by its structural subservience to President Lukashenka, for whom the BRYU’s international activities are of secondary importance.
By
Kristiina Silvan
August 23, 2023
A Taste for Oppression — A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus Ronan Hervouet: (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2021) 254 pages. (Original: Ronan Hervouet: Le Goût Des Tyrans. Une Ethnographie Politique Di Quotidien En Biélorussie (Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2020) 281 pages
By
Leo Granberg
June 20, 2023
Issue 2025, 3: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.