2020 Election Campaign in Belarus

What is it about?

My article "The 2020 Belarusian Presidential Election Campaign: Crisis Performance as a Pillar of Lukashenka’s Communication Strategy," co-written with Prof. Jan Holzer, is now published in the Journal of Belarusian Studies. The core of the article was developed a few years back, but it was revised substantially thanks to discussions at conferences in London and Philadelphia, and comments from reviewers. I wanted this article to finalize my study of the 2020 election campaign in Belarus. I took a very detailed approach - analyzing each of Lukashenka speeches and the communication situation from May to August using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It also includes my Prof. Holzer' theoretical analysis, which extends to elections in unfree regimes. Honestly, I'm delighted that Belarusian studies has succeeded in attracting such a distinguished specialist in authoritarianism. Therefore, the research explains that for the authoritarian camp in Belarus, and populists in general, crisis performance is standard practice. What was different in 2020 was the communication environment itself. The usual appeals to "the people" didn’t work for several reasons (explained in the article), so Lukashenka and apparatus turned to communication situations where they could (and did) get the results they wanted. I think that since 2020, we're not seeing consolidated authoritarianism, but rather a consolidated power apparatus that is efficient, and the article demonstrates how it functions.

Featured Image

Photo by Andrew Keymaster on Unsplash

Photo by Andrew Keymaster on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The very nature of manipulative communication (which existed long before 2020), made possible by inequality and discrimination, undermines any contract, whether social or security-based — however, this theoretical framework remains the leading approach among scholars to understanding Belarusian politics before and during 2020, and it has every chance of being reconsidered in the near future.