A new article for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology by Tatiana Shchyttsova (European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania).
Tatiana Shchyttsova – “The Strength of the Strengthless: Women, Aged, and Disabled People as a Subversive Force in the Belarusian Protest Movement 2020”
JBSP (Received 17 Jan 2023, Accepted 08 Jun 2023, Published online: 22 Jun 2023).
Abstract: This article examines the Belarusian protests of 2020, triggered by the rigged presidential election results and the illegal disproportionate use of force by the authorities. Given that most protesters were apolitical before 2020, the article seeks to clarify how it happened that passive vulnerable individuals were unprecedentedly mobilized for sustained collective political action. The author focuses on protest actions organized by particularly vulnerable social groups (women, pensioners, the disabled) and reveals their importance for the democratic protest against the patriarchal-authoritarian order. The article traces three stages in the protest development: the moment of traumatic shaking, the caesura of the political sublime, and the rapid scale of the peaceful protest movement characteristically represented by the social groups in question. It is argued that their protest actions had a subversive effect with respect to the autocratic rule and re-actualized an alternative normative and axiological horizon in a given life-world.
Full article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2023.2224833
Tatiana Shchyttsova, Department of Social Sciences, European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania
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