Urban Form, Social Control, and Resistance in Belarus

This chapter focuses on the 2020 Belarus presidential election protests in which longtime president Alexander Lukashenko was implausibly declared the winner over reformist challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. The chapter relies on interviews with protest participants to track how protest strategy evolved from local actions to broad, mass protests that spread from Minsk to smaller cities and gained substantial international news recognition, only to recede back to neighborhoods once government crackdowns became too intense. The chapter also analyzes the role of state-controlled media in crafting a counternarrative, commenting on both its successes and failings in repurposing protest images to advance chosen narratives. The chapter dovetails with Kyiv in that it shows how the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity served as an inspiration for the techniques employed by anti-Lukashenko forces in Belarus.