To improve the validity of our comparative endeavors in ethno-politics, this piece re-examines the relationship between conceptual definitions, categories of classification used in large-N datasets, and thick description found through case studies. It does this through the lens of claims to autonomy by ethnic minorities, and in particular through a detailed comparative case study of what autonomy means as a programmatic goal for ethnic minority Hungarian elites in Romania and Slovakia. Three unexpected findings emerge which make the case for qualitative research to better inform the categories and variables used in large-N datasets (1) there is a weak relationship between the conceptual definitions of autonomy and the way it is coded in relevant datasets like the Minorities at Risk (MAR) dataset; (2) empirically, the Hungarian comparative case studies show that elites do not think of autonomy in the same way as the conceptual literature nor do their understandings of autonomy easily fit into the coding categories of datasets; (3) there is inconsistency across Hungarian minority elites in their own definitions of autonomy as well as the lack of distinctions between autonomy and other institutional arrangements. This raises issues of equivalence and ambiguity and I conclude with suggestions for better measurement.

How can and should we analyze mass mobilization and its outcomes in authoritarian (and potentially democratizing) states as social scientists? Are there any distinctive features to the study of mass mobilization and its outcomes in Eastern Europe? And how much should we focus on comparative analyses versus context and country specificities? The case of the 2020 mass mobilization in Belarus offers an opportunity to engage with and answer these questions in a reciprocal dialogue between scholars of protest and activism, politics of competitive authoritarian and democratizing contexts, and regional and country experts. This symposium brings together a diverse set of scholars and combines comparative and case-specific analyses and empirically driven and interpretive analyses that focus on different political, social, and cultural angles of this episode of mass mobilization and its aftermath.

Who are the people who, in the face of extreme repression, unexpectedly take to the streets en masse in an authoritarian state? This article aims to answer this question with reference to the case of the Belarusian anti-Lukashenka mass mobilization of 2020. It employs unique data from an original online protest survey among citizens of Belarus who were 18 or older and residing in the country at the time of the protests (Onuch et. al.; MOBILISE 2020 & 2021; n = 17,174), fielded August 18, 2020–January 29, 2021.2 This survey was designed to: (a) capture as many protesters as possible; and (b) capture a large enough sample of non-protesters as a comparative reference group enabling us to better understand how different anti-Lukashenka protesters (n = 11,719) were from non-protesters (n = 5,455). Guided by theoretical and empirical expectations of contentious politics scholarship, we first provide descriptive statistics about the socio-demographic characteristics of the protesters, self-reported protest grievances and claims, and median protester preferences on a range of attitudes and policies. This portrait of the protesters is followed up by regression analysis to test whether these patterns hold at a statistically significant level when comparing protesters and non-protesters.

Belarus is one of the least religious societies of the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless, two Christian denominations – the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church – do have a specific impact on social discourse, be it through facilitating the discourse on conservative moral values or linking their political and societal strategies to their Russian or Polish mother churches. However, neither of the churches has actively participated in civil protests criticizing the political regime. The protests before and after the Belarusian presidential election in August 2020 affected the churches and seriously challenged their self-perception. This article shows how the churches turned out to be heterogeneous structures with different levels of theological awareness in political crisis, civil self-consciousness, and the ability to mobilize. These findings and the fact that religion became a visible element of the 2020 protests significantly questions the concept of the church as a homogeneous and state loyal institution. Combining both empirical and theological approaches makes it possible to reassess the role of religion in post-Soviet social and political processes.

This article uses a comparison with Ukraine to investigate why protests against Lukashenka in 2020 failed to oust the Belarusian dictator. First, in contrast to his counterparts in Ukraine, Lukashenka successfully built new authoritarian economic and coercive institutions in the 1990s that raised the costs of opposition activity and reduced challengers’ access to business support. Second, Belarus has lacked a strong national identity that was critical to opposition success in Ukraine. In Ukraine, relatively powerful anti-Russian nationalism repeatedly motivated a core group of anti-incumbent activists and facilitated the opposition’s control over local power structures that supported protest activities at critical moments. In Belarus, weak national identity and consequent dearth of committed activists in national government institutions in the 1990s hampered efforts to challenge Lukashenka’s consolidation of authoritarian power. In addition, weaker national identity undermined the capacity of opposition forces to control local power structures that might have aided opposition protest.

Drawing on three theoretical perspectives—“protest-democracy,” “authoritarian/patronal regime dynamics,” and “contentious politics”—developed in the study of popular protests in post-Soviet electoral autocracies, this article argues, first, that the 2020 postelection mobilization in Belarus was not to be expected for both structural and agency-related reasons. Second, by the summer of 2020, the political opportunity structure had opened up because of contingent choices by individual actors, with Alyaksandr Lukashenka committing several major mistakes, particularly on pandemic (non)control and the administration of the upcoming presidential election, and political newcomers taking on the role of challenging him. After the election, mass mobilization unfolded in two waves triggered by two additional regime mistakes: blatant electoral fraud and excessive repression. These mistakes served as focal points for spontaneous coordination, substituting for the deliberate “engineering” of protest by an organized opposition typical of the post-Soviet color revolutions. Third, Lukashenka survived in office because popular protests did not lead to elite defection. Instead, he was able to secure the loyalty of elites because he avoided gross blunders against both regime insiders and Russia. The case of Belarus indicates that hegemonic-authoritarian regimes are more vulnerable to mistakes by incumbents than to challenges from below and outside the regime.

This article examines the anti-Lukashenka protest movement in Belarus by comparing it to the Solidarity movement in Poland. We organize our analysis around the concept of four stages identifiable in the development of social movements: emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization, and decline. We argue that protests in Belarus reached the bureaucratization stage, but their transformation into a more durable movement was slowed down by the brutal repressions unleashed by the Lukashenka regime propped up by Putin’s Russia. However, the spectacular changes in people’s conceptions of national identity built around symbols different from those associated with the officialdom may sustain emotional mobilization necessary for formation of higher levels of organizations in the oppressive context of today’s Belarus. The contours of this process are brought into sharp relief when compared with the long, cumulative trajectory of the 1956-89 anti-authoritarian Polish revolts. This opens the way for cautious prognostication.

In the wake of the most recent protests in Belarus following the 2020 Presidential Election, it is useful to explore patterns of satisfaction with the political system, confidence in political institutions, and political participation at different points in time during President Lukashenko’s rule. We utilize Wave 3 of the World Values Study (WVS) and Wave 7 of the Joint European Values Study (EVS)/WVS to (1) analyze whether citizens’ dissatisfaction with the Belarusian government differed between 1996 and 2018, and (2) whether there was a change in political participation during that period. Responses over time suggest that satisfaction with the government and confidence in institutions was not lower in 2018 than it had been in 1996. However, as we discuss in the article, this may be an artifact of authoritarian consolidation and concern/fears about revealing preferences. We also find that the willingness to engage in protests remained more or less the same between these two time periods, especially among those dissatisfied with the political system. These results suggest that once highly dissatisfied citizens took to the streets in 2020, a number of internal and external factors might have triggered a bandwagon effect that pushed other citizens to also join the demonstrations.

State-society relations in authoritarian settings are a recurrent topic in the respective literature. Phenomena ranging from loyalty and apathy to dissent, open protest, and resistance have been widely researched. The different patterns of regime response or the way authorities mobilize forces themselves have been discussed to a much lesser extent. This contribution analyzes the gradual deterioration of the state-society relationship in Belarus. These fragile relations have been brought to the brink of collapse by the authorities’ mishandling of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the fraudulent presidential election in August 2020, which became a catalyst for the eruption of mass protests in the country. As a consequence, Belarus has developed into a state obsessed with security concerns. The pretense of legitimacy and the promise of a social welfare state have been replaced by an unvarnished clientelist dictatorship, relying on an inflated security apparatus. The article identifies indicators for an increased “securitization” of state politics in recent years and corresponding measures that guided authorities in their endeavor to counteract societal resistance. The aim is to shed light on how securitized interactions have become emblematic of dysfunctional state-society relations in Belarus.

The many recent crises in Belarus are often seen through the prism of democratization, post-communist transition, and nation- and identity-building. As a rule, it is put into the context of the 1989 democratization in Central and Eastern Europe and compared with similar societal mobilization in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004; 2014), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). This article, however, argues that while these theoretical approaches provide an important explanatory potential, they nevertheless fail to account for informal, hidden, and unstable processes presently unfolding in the Belarusian society, leading to profound change. We argue that, in the vulnerable, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world of today, our knowledge and ability to plan and achieve desirable outcomes are limited in contrast to a largely positivist or interpretivist epistemology of the mainstream theories, which conceive of the world as a closed system. In this article, we offer an alternative explanation of the many crises in Belarus by drawing on the insights of complexity-thinking to suggest that (hidden) transformative change in the country is now irreversible.

This article shows how the Soviet government perceived higher birth rates in Central Asia as a threat to national identity and the stability of the USSR. The issue of demographic change was complex, and concerns about differential fertility between republics were not informed solely by prejudice. Rather, prejudice and racism mingled with practical concerns about labor surpluses and shortages. The Central Asian Republics had low labor mobility because people were unwilling to leave their cultural community, had a low level of Russian, and tended to not to be trained in the kind of heavy industries that required workers elsewhere in the Soviet Union. I argue that rather than aiming to change these factors, the government misdiagnosed economic problems as demographic ones. They placed primary emphasis on changing patterns of reproduction to remedy the situation by changing the population itself, portraying Slavs and Central Asians as distinct groups who had a predetermined role and place in life. In doing so, Moscow elites failed to address the structural and operational issues of Soviet socialism and inflamed tensions with local leaders who saw demographic campaigns as an attack on their culture.

This article will examine the response of the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) to the COVID-19 pandemic from an ontological security approach to illustrate how critical junctures may help de facto states in their quest for status and internal legitimacy. Stressing the pandemic’s role in the reconstruction of political narratives and self-legitimating practices among Turkish Cypriot elites, it sheds light on the effects of this global crisis on domestic power struggles in Northern Cyprus as well as its quasi-foreign relations with its patron state (Turkey), parent state (Republic of Cyprus), and the European Union. The study shows that both nationalist and federalist elites of the de facto entity instrumentalized the pandemic in their legitimation strategies and engaged in opportunistic behavior amid the outbreak. It also reveals how the pandemic enhanced the ontological security of Northern Cyprus while advancing its nationalist leadership’s claims for legitimate authority by enabling state-specific forms of agency and unilateral acts concerning the Cyprus dispute that may jeopardize the resumption of peace talks with Greek Cypriots. Thus, it can be assumed that advanced ontological security of the TRNC is highly volatile given the prospects of further isolation and de-engagement in the post-pandemic era.

This article investigates the ethnic entanglements of the land reform debate in the first Polish Diet (1919–1922). Against the backdrop of global comparative studies, interwar Poland, haunted by land hunger, rural poverty, and high concentration of land ownership, is an odd case. Despite conditions conducive to far-reaching land reforms, that is, a high level of inter-elite conflict and semiautocratic order, the Polish reform was very moderate, if not disappointing. Unpacking the series of moves in the debate and the sequence of hairbreadth voting on its shape, I ask why, despite broad acceptance of the reform across the political spectrum, it could not attract enough support to be swiftly executed. The ethnic composition of the country triggered controversies concerning German farmers and peasants of the ethnically diversified eastern borderlands. Major political parties shared tacit Polish nationalism, but the history of political alignments made the nationalist politicians susceptible to the lobbying of the landed elite and estranged them from peasant parties. The land holdings of nobles were considered a bulwark of the nation, which effectively blocked the alternative idea of integrating the ethnic minorities via land ownership.

It has been more than five decades since Ted Robert Gurr asked the question, “Why Men Rebel” (1970), in the most popular scholarly work of political rebellion and protest. The subsequent research often focused on grievances as the main motivation behind collective mobilization (Collier and Hoeffler 1998; Fearon and Laitin 2003). Yet the questions of how and why grievances lead to group mobilization and violent or nonviolent conflict onset still attract much scholarly attention. Not all groups with grievances engage in violent and/or nonviolent mobilization. Some do. This is the puzzle Manuel Vogt addresses in this theoretically novel and empirically rich book. He focuses on the type of state birth, i.e. colonial settler or decolonized states, as the backbone of several causal paths from grievances to ethnic conflict onset.

Why do ethnic minorities who have been cut out of power choose, in some contexts, to take up arms and, in other contexts, to take to the streets? This question might seem an obvious one to ask, and yet it has rarely been posed in quite these terms – in large part because ethnic politics research has concentrated far more on violent resistance than its nonviolent alternative. We have reams of pages on the roots of ethnic insurgency, violent secessionism, and ethnic civil war but far less on why and how marginalized ethnic groups might mobilize using unarmed strategies of civil resistance. Manuel Vogt’s impressive new book makes this point well – and offers a succinct and parsimonious explanation to answer the question of why an ethnic group might choose one path over another.

Why African Americans do not rebel? Why is there no armed insurrection of African Americans across the USA, especially in cities and states where they make up almost half of the population? In many parts of the world, ethnic, racial, and religious groups that are much smaller in size, much less disadvantaged socioeconomically and politically, and with relatively fewer historical grievances than African Americans, launched armed insurrections that lasted for decades. The quiescence of African Americans is a momentous puzzle if one subscribes to grievance-based theories of violent ethnic insurgencies (e.g., Gurr 1970). There are more than 40 million African Americans in the USA, which makes them a more populous ethnic group or a potential nation than any Eastern European nation in the European Union. Yet, approximately 40 million African Americans, despite their high level of collective consciousness and multifaceted grievances, did not produce as much armed insurgency as less than three million Basques in Spain have, to expand a comparison Manuel Vogt (4) briefly alludes to. What accounts for this dramatic difference?

I would like to start my response by expressing my profound gratitude to the three commentators for their in-depth engagement with my book, their generous comments, and the rich variety of though-provoking challenges and critiques. Their contributions urge me to refine the theoretical and empirical implications of the book in novel ways. Responding to all of their excellent observations would go beyond the scope of this short essay, but I will address what I identify as the most fundamental arguments, clustered in three main themes, according to which I will structure my response. The first part will address the comments of the reviewers that relate to key definitions and case classifications. The second part focuses on challenges to the theoretical argument, including alternative explanations. Finally, the third part addresses unresolved questions in the book identified by the reviewers, which open up promising avenues for future research.