The edited volume Belarus in the Twenty-first Century Between Dictatorship and Democracy makes an important contribution to the existing research on Belarus and to the wider scholarship on the fluctuations of the post-communist transformation between democratic and dictatorial tendencies. The book is produced by international scholars and practitioners who draw on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies. It includes thirteen chapters, preceded by an introduction, and is divided into three parts. While the political and social mobilization against the rigged presidential election in 2020 are central to all chapters, the collection avoids narrow focus on protests’ failure measured by mere impact on the regime dynamic and offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the year 2020 in a broader context of nation-state building and its sociopolitical, economic and legal undercurrents.

Part I, on History, Identity and Politics, includes chapters that examine the role of historical representations and memory politics in Belarus. The first chapter by Andrej Koljarchuk, Andrej Radaman, and Elena Sinitsyna examines how statehood and national identity have evolved throughout history. It reflects on the 2020 protests as a projection of the conflict between official historical doctrine and the variety of political symbols and interpretations of past developments, such as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or the Belarusian Revolutionary Hramada that have been aligned with alternative conceptions of Belarusian statehood. The chapter by David R. Marples and Veranika Laputska investigates the use of the concept of the genocide of Belarusians by official memory politics to reinforce the exploitation of the Second World War for ideological aims. While manipulations of history are nothing new in the populist toolkit of the Belarusian authorities, the chapter sheds light on the recent shift concerning new memory laws that criminalize alternative history interpretations that aim to consolidate control over historical narratives. The question omitted in the chapter, however, concerns the international context for this development and the extent to which instrumentalization of the concept of genocide for defining crimes against Belarusians under Nazi occupation was forged in response to parallel genocide narratives that focus on the Stalinist crimes in Baltic countries or Ukraine. In her chapter on the Soviet roots of the 2020 protests, Natalya Chernyshova demonstrates the importance of changes in Belarusian society under Petr Masherau’s rule (1965–80) for shaping a distinctive collective identity by drawing on the examples of economic transformation, urbanization, and Soviet development of Belarusian culture. The chapter focuses on the symbolic tropes of Belarusian mobilization in 2020 that display the ideas of post-Soviet nationhood that co-opt rather than alienate the experience and legacy of Soviet modernization, which makes Belarus an exception in the post-Soviet space, since most counties construct their nationhood in opposition to the Soviet past. The chapter by Huawei Zheng situates the Belarusian protests in the context of international relations and scrutinizes the confrontation between foreign policy developed by grassroots opposition that gained international recognition in the west and the constraints for the former in-betweenness that was pursued by the official foreign policy that became impossible since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Part II focuses on several aspects of Belarus’s economic and legal development. The chapter by Aleś Alachnović and Julia Korosteleva provides an overview of the economic policies since 1991. It demonstrates that the model of state capitalism developed in Belarus reveals multiple limitations and dispositions to stagnation, aggravated by economic sanctions since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. In their chapter on public health, Christopher J. Gerry and Cora Neumann show the connection between the lack of adequate policies in response to COVID-19, the economic difficulties resulting from long-term stagnation, and the protests. Two chapters in this Part focus on legal aspects of Belarusian development: Liudmila D’Cruz, Liudmila Kozak, and Paverl Kuryan discuss the Belarusian judiciary system in comparison to the experience of Georgia and Ukraine, which allows them to highlight the shortcomings of Belarusian development and identify the possible strategies for their mitigation in the future. The following chapter by Thomas Kruesdmann and Anna S. (anonymised for protection) assesses the legal tradition of Belarus and stresses the importance of law as an agent for change that would help to build a transparent society in the future.

In Part III, the chapter by Tatsiana Chulitskaya and Eleanor Bindman examines the formation of social movements mobilized during the protests in Belarus to indicate a move towards more grassroots development than the old elitist NGO-style initiatives. As the chapter demonstrates, despite the repression civil society faced after the protests that put them on the edge of survival, they retain the potential to act as an agent for change both inside and outside the country. The chapter by Elena Korosteleva and Irina Petrova sheds light on societal emergence as a potentially transformative force. It considers 2020 as a turning point in forming a “peoplehood,” the notion introduced to reflect on the complexity of a new dynamic in shaping collectivity driven by self-organization, alignment, and mutual help. The chapter by Elena Gapova looks at the rise of women’s political subjectivity as a defining feature of the protests intertwined with a larger movement toward socio-political change and linked to the pursuit of a renewed concept of citizenship in Belarus. The following chapter by Anastasiia Kudlenko provides a comparative study of social mobilization in Belarus and Ukraine, highlighting their unifying features, such as the importance of self-organization as a driving force for emerging peoplehood as the alignment of identity and aspirations for good life. In the concluding chapter, Viktor Shadurski provides a summary of multiple shifts in the Belarusian state that indicate not only structural problems due to a lack of reform strategy but also because of the moral bankruptcy of the state apparatus that was put on display by the events in 2020.