It’s now been over one hundred days of protests in Belarus. It’s estimated that over twenty-five thousand people have been detained. From here in the US, viewing the endless images from Minsk of riot police and videos punctuated by the flash of stun grenades, it’s impossible not to admire the extraordinary resilience and commitment to the democratic ideal of the Belarusian protestors. With a growing unease about whether Trump’s refusal to concede is mere childishness or something more sinister, we can only hope that, if it came to it, such a display of solidarity in the face of authoritarianism would be possible here too. As Jeff Isaac asked back when the protests began, we can’t help but ask: is some version of our future now playing out on the streets of Minsk?
There was something of this on November 7th: not in the violent repression, but in the coming together of people. When the AP called Pennsylvania for Biden, and thus the election for Biden too, the reaction was almost more heartening than the news. Here in Brooklyn, people came out onto the street. They shouted and sang, made tearful phone calls, and banged pots and pans. Down my street someone played the uncensored original of a certain YG and Nipsey Hussle song—which I will leave unnamed—so loud that the bass set off car alarms. In Grand Army Plaza and down Vanderbilt Avenue people, all kinds of people, danced well into the night. I was reminded of what Marshall Berman wrote in his moving response to Perry Anderson: the streets, in Brooklyn as in Minsk, are “crowded with human passion, intelligence, yearning, imagination, spiritual complexity and depth’ alongside ‘oppression, misery, everyday brutality, and a threat of total annihilation. But the people in the crowd are using and stretching their vital powers, their vision and brains and guts, to face and fight the horrors.”
Needless to say, it’s been a busy time for the Democracy Seminar. Karolina Koziura and Aliaksandr Bystryk’s latest article, ‘Strategies of Protest from Belarus’, offers an antidote to the constant stream of oppressive images from Belarus by focusing on the use of aesthetic protest strategies and the reclamation of public space. We have also tried to highlight the diverse groups and interests who have come together in the protests, as in last week’s webinar The Deep and Broad Social Dimensions of the Protests in Belarus: a conversation between Vytis Jurkonis, the Project Director at the Vilnius office of Freedom House; and Maksimas Milta, the Head of Communication and Development at the European Humanities University. The webinar focused on the involvement of NGOs, women and students in the protests in Belarus and the nature of the social changes that have occurred since the presidential election on August 9th. Continuing this theme, we published Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer and Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz’s article ‘Poland’s Abortion Ban Protests Are a Harbinger of a Wider Social Movement,’ on the solidarity between women’s rights and LGBTQ activists in the Polish pro-choice protests and this alliance as the basis for a new social movement.
Of course, the US elections have also been a focus of much of our recent activity. Jeffrey Isaac’s latest article ‘The Day After?’ captures some of the mood here in the United States. As a follow-up to our November 5th panel on the US election, yesterday we hosted ‘The U.S. Elections and the Future of Democracy: Perspectives from Abroad,’ a panel offering perspectives from Argentina, Brazil, India, Poland, Romania, South Africa and Turkey on the recent U.S. election, its outcome, and its aftermath.
At the webinar, there was agreement that the election results in the U.S. present real promise for a democratic revival, both in the U.S. and abroad. There was also agreement that for this promise to be realized democracy must be supported by the determination and imagination that has been revealed on the streets of Minsk, Warsaw, New York and far beyond. Our seminar will explore this more fully in the coming, weeks and months. We are starting tomorrow, with a book talk on Partha Chatterjee’s recent publication I Am The People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today from 12:00 to 2:00 PM EST. Think of it as a kind of companion piece to our earlier book talk on Nadia Urbinati’s ‘Me, the People.’ Chatterjee will be joined by Sandipto Dasgupta and Sanjay Ruparelia to explore the ideas contained in the book, and discuss the challenges that western and postcolonial democracies face in the current conjuncture. We hope to see you there.