Rethinking the Shift in the Civic Space in Belarus from the Feminist Perspective

• In Event: Transnational Movements in Shrinking Spaces for Civic Society: Ideas, Resources, People

Abstract

The debate around the global trend of a “shrinking civic space” characterizes this term as limited, capturing insufficiently the reality of the civil societies around the world, the difficulties they face, and offsetting the unequal distribution of these difficulties among different civil society actors depending on the status of civic groups, such as NGOs, and activists and their proximity to the political establishment (OECD, 2020; Simsa, 2022). As an alternative, the concept of “shifting civic space” (Hossain et al., 2018) allows reimagining civil society in all its varieties, including tactics that the most vulnerable representatives use to reclaim civic space, practice their right to free assembly, and safely contribute to improving public institutions.
This paper focuses on women’s activism in Belarus. The need for a framing that extends beyond the concept of the “shrinking civic space” is especially relevant in the context of Belarus, where the feminist agenda was never supported by the current regime nor by the liberal opposition (Solomatina & Shmidt, 2015). At the same time, the Belarusian feminist movement has always been at the forefront of the struggle for a democratic and inclusive society for all and helped to mobilize the broader population of Belarus to alter interpersonal relationships within communities, strengthen networks of support, and rethink governmental power structures (Fürst et al., 2020; Shchurko, 2023a; Shparaga, 2021).
The aim of this study is to conceptualize the shifting of civil space in Belarus through a feminist perspective, which presents an interesting puzzle. On the one hand, feminist activism in Belarus operates in political dictatorship conditions, and targeted repressions result in women’s agency going beyond existing mechanisms and subverting dominant structures (Paulovich, 2021). On the other hand, rejecting one’s own feminist identity is a form of strategic concession in building solidarity within civil society (Littler & Rottenberg, 2020). I therefore ask: How do Belarusian civil society actors construct power disbalance, maintain and reproduce it from the position of gender aspects of meanings and current gender order? How do they represent changes in the civil space? What opportunities do they recognize to practice their agency and to contribute to the emergence of new types of civil society.
Building on existing scholarship and results of participant observations (Ciesielska et al., 2017), I find that a shifting space for civil society in the authoritarian context of Belarus actually entails a physical movement of activists to places outside the geographical boundaries of the country, while continuously being engaged with Belarus-based activists. I argue that comprehending the contribution of feminist actors’ physical movement across borders as constituting a shifting space in contemporary Belarus can help understand the institutional transition of civil society in Belarus, which is relevant for understanding authoritarian regimes worldwide.

References:
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Author

• Vera Syrakvash