A New Land ─ Rediscovering Agency in Belarusian History, Politics, and Society

This special issue provides a forum for discussion of what Belarusian Studies are today and which new approaches and questions are needed to revitalize the field in the regional and international academic arena. The major aim of the issue is to go beyond the narratives of dictatorship and authoritarianism as well as that of a never-ending story of failed Belarusian nationalism—interpretive schemes that are frequently used for understanding Belarus in scholarly literature in Western Europe and Northern America. Bringing together ongoing research based on original empirical material from Belarusian history, politics, and society, this issue combines a discussion of the concept of autonomy/agency with its applicability to trace how individual and collective actors who define themselves as Belarusian—or otherwise—have manifested their agendas in various practices in spite of and in reaction to state pressure. This issue offers new approaches for interpreting Belarusian society as a dynamically changing set of agencies. In doing so, it attempts to overcome a tradition of locating present Belarusian political and social dilemmas in its socialist past.

Guest editors: Felix Ackermann is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. He teaches historical anthropology and applied humanities as a visiting associate professor at European Humanities University (Vilnius). His recent publications focus on the link between state violence, migration, and urban space in the post-Soviet borderlands of Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland.

Mark Berman is a graduate student at the University of Giessen. He completed his M.A. in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service.

Olga Sasunkevich is an assistant professor in gender studies at the University of Gothenburg. She obtained her doctoral degree in Eastern European history from Greifswald University in 2014 and her master of sociology with specialization in gender studies from the European Humanities University (Vilnius) in 2008. She is the author of Informal Trade, Gender, and the Border Experience: From Political Borders to Social Boundaries (2015). She is currently finalizing her research project “De-essentializing Ethnicity: ‘Karta Polaka’ and the Process of Ethnicization in the Belarus–Poland Border Region.” Her next project is dedicated to feminist and LGBTQ activism in contemporary Russia.