My NEC fellowship will be dedicated to a study of the protest movements that occurred in Belarus between 2017 and 202o, with a view to assessing the democratization potential of populist mobilizations in an authoritarian environment. Building on my doctoral research on Belarusian authoritarian populism, in this study I compile a database of the protest events and analyse their ideological triggers and consequences. I hypothesize that these mobilizations were driven by the breakdown of the protesters’ identification with the image of ‘the people’ as projected by populist discourse.

A full-length study is available here.