Abstract This article examines the Belarusian revolution of 2020–2021, with an empirical focus on the peak phase of mobilization in 2020; it assesses events as a struggle over cohabitation. Rather than approaching the protests primarily through electoral politics or regime resilience, it analyses revolution as a spatial conflict and embodies process unfolding in everyday environments, where collective action was inseparable from affective attachment, repetition, intimacy, and practices of care. Drawing on critical urban theory, feminist political thought, and performance-oriented approaches to protest, the article conceptualizes “choreography of spaces” as a political organization of movement, visibility, access, and suspension. The analysis combines theoretical reflection with case-based readings of authoritarian spatial order, grassroots spatial reappropriations, and artistic interventions, showing how bodies and spaces were mutually reconfigured under conditions of repression. The article argues that the emancipatory potential of the Belarusian revolution lies less in immediate institutional outcomes than in durable transformations of relationality between bodies, communities, and lived environments.
Abstract This article scrutinizes the structural underpinnings of Belarus’s enduring reluctance to alignment with EU norms and values. It ascertains three primary drivers: the absence of an autonomous national identity, the regime’s economic legitimacy among the working classes, and the entrenched nature of the EU’s democratic conditionality, which together caused the loss of this key geopolitical foothold to Russia. In response, the article argues for a more flexible EU strategy centred on gradually eroding Russia’s strong grip on Belarus’s economic wellbeing. By relaxing some trade restrictions, the EU may foster a domestic capitalist stratum with vested interests in realigning Belarus’s long-term trajectory.
