‘I am tired of being afraid’: Emotions and protest participation in Belarus

Abstract

Belarus witnessed a staggering level of mass mobilization in the aftermath of the 2020 fraudulent election and disproportionate use of police force against peaceful protesters. Using the case of anti-government protests in Belarus, this article argues that a confluence of moral and reflex emotions explains an incredibly high level of protest participation in a hard autocracy. Specifically, indignation over the magnitude of electoral malpractices and the intensity of police violence, in congruence with the loss of fear, provides a moral battery for generating and sustaining mass mobilization. It is further argued that a sense of unity within the protest movement mitigates fear of repression and facilitates sustained engagement in protests. Drawing on media reports and protesters’ narratives, the study traces how citizens overcame their fear of state reprisal and took to the street. The article contributes to contentious politics literature by elucidating the role of emotions in shaping mass mobilization.

Differentiable characteristics of Telegram mediums during protests in Belarus 2020

“…More recent studies analyzed the reasons for the actual outcome of the protests in Belarus 2022 (Mudrov 2021 ; Robertson 2022 ). Several research articles provided quantitative analysis, such as Nikolayenko ( 2022 ), where the author studied the role of emotions in shaping mass mobilization. The closest research to our paper (Herasimenka et al.…”

Emotion Work in Tabligh Jama’at Texts

“…While each of these factors are important for a movement's ability to engage in activism, in the past few decades, social movement scholars have researched the emotional dynamics of mobilisation (for a review of this literature, see Van-Ness and Summers-Effler 2019), exploring emotions that lead to participation (Pickard and Bessant 2018;Hu and Wu 2021;Weiss 2021;Asún et al 2022;Nikolayenko 2022;Petrini and Wettergren 2022), emotions that sustain commitment (Feigenbaum et al 2013;Ransan-Cooper et al 2018;Pirkkalainen 2021), and emotions that hinder mobilisation (Summers-Effler 2010; Østbø 2017). These studies support Jasper (1998, p. 407), who observed, early on, that emotions play a role in individuals being drawn to a particular movement, and in their subsequent decision to remain in the movement and to participate in its activities.…”

Is Protest Only Negative? Examining the Effect of Emotions and Affective Polarization on Protest Behaviour

“…Anger was pinpointed as a crucial driver of protest action (Gaffney et al, 2018;Salmela & von Scheve, 2017;Vasilopoulos et al, 2019), as it closely relates to feelings of frustration, indignation (Jasper, 2014b), or ressentiment (Capelos & Demertzis, 2018). By contrast, studies emphasized that fear and anxiety deter individuals from engaging in protest, particularly in auto-cratic contexts, where the risk of repression and violence is high (Dornschneider, 2020;Nikolayenko, 2022). In democratic contexts, Capelos and Demertzis (2018) show that, during periods of crisis in Greece, anxious people reported a low political activity while those who were angry reported a high degree of participation, especially in violent actions.…”

“…Yet few of these studies look at the combination or simultaneous effect of positive and negative emotions (for exceptions, see Dornschneider, 2020;Landmann & Rohmann, 2020;Nikolayenko, 2022). One has to look at social movement theories to find studies dealing with sets of emotions as crucial elements in the process of collective identity building and as potential drivers of collective action (Jasper, 1998;Polletta & Jasper, 2001).…”