Individual and collective voices of the 2020 Belarusian protests.
Forthcoming, Palgrave 2025.
Co-authored with Sofie Bedford, Eleanor Bindman and Tatsiana Chulitskaya. Today’s presentation focuses on Chapters V–VI, with passages co-written with Chulitskaya.
with protest leaders and participants — collected by Bindman, Chulitskaya & Rudnik across two projects.
The 2020 protests followed an electoral campaign of unprecedented scale, rapid digital coordination, and one of the most violent crackdowns in the country’s history.
Source: DataReportal 2020/2021; Greene 2022; Lawtrend; Viasna 2024; Voice 2020.
Mobilising structures include both formal organisations and informal micro-structures: family, friends, voluntary ties.
Resources = goods (anything with utility) which actors can control: money, media access, sympathisers, rooms, rights, knowledge, skills.
The 2020 Belarusian protests were underpinned by a dense set of non-technological resources that predated and structured the effective use of digital tools.
Together, these constituted a social infrastructure that enabled rapid mobilisation, resilience under repression, and large-scale coordination in the absence of formal political opportunities.
Source: Opp (2009); McAdam, McCarthy & Zald (1996)
Family, friendship, neighbourhood and professional ties provided trust, labour and coordination capacities that no platform can produce.
“We gathered around fifty volunteers, almost fifty. These were students who, again, were all verified, and who had to literally go through everything by hand and recheck all the materials that were coming to us.
“These were all neighbours. They decided themselves. And then, very naturally, a group of people formed who were responsible for controlling the area, and they walked around, they figured out among themselves where they would go and at what time.
“Why were there so many IT people? These are people of a completely different formation, young people who grew up in society, who did not see the Soviet system, who travelled the world… Digital technologies do not bring something entirely new, but they accelerate tendencies that already existed.
Crowdfunding via Molamola, BySol, Kickstarter. Private donations from Belarusian businesses. Neighbourhood Telegram chats covering fines for detained residents.
Independence from state-controlled funding — embedded in trust between organisers, donors and local communities.
Independent media as an autonomous structural element of Belarusian politics (Greene 2022). TUT.by reached 96% of independent-media consumers and 52% of state-media consumers.
Media capital lived in people, not platforms — PR professionals, event organisers, large-business veterans on activist boards.
IT and data engineering: chatbots, neural-network vote verification, secure-channel design. Legal & human-rights expertise translated into ‘what to do if detained’ cards.
Knowledge circulated peer-to-peer under repression — “people simply started downloading Psiphon and passing it to each other.” (Interview 14)
“The second trick we figured out was that when all the social networks started getting blocked, Tinder still worked. The important thing was to match on Tinder so that we could message each other. Sorry, but that’s what we had to do.”
Telegram + Viber chatbots → neural-network verification → human review on the ~20% the model couldn’t recognise. Manual equivalent: 1,000+ volunteers.
“All of this eventually led us to the idea that we should use Telegram channels that are difficult to track. At that moment, the most reliable were chatbots, because in the case of a chatbot, you do not know where its backend is located, so you do not have a clear point of attack.
Beyond ‘a set of tools’: platforms shape the form of interaction, alter relations between actors, co-construct identities, and expand the geography of a movement.
Source: Della Porta & Diani 2020; Gerbaudo 2012; Sayes 2014; Costanza-Chock 2020.
Telegram’s mediation produced more than information. It produced a feeling of momentum — and that feeling itself shaped participation.
“If we talk about NEXTA, it is like a fast carbohydrate. You read it and think, the riot police dropped their shields, we took Pinsk. You have no verifying evidence, nothing, but you get a quick emotion, a quick effect.”
“People stopped talking to their neighbours, sometimes greeting each other, sometimes forgetting their names, and then suddenly remembering them again — then these district chats appeared, people signed up with the same nicknames they signed up with 15–20 years ago…”
Three ascending levels of effort and impact — used here as a lens, with two caveats: authoritarian shutdowns reshape the repertoire, and both tools and users can be co-opted.
Forwarding NEXTA posts; mass dissemination of “8 pm, 9 August, polling stations”; likes & views as a measurable metric of opposition support (Interview 7).
BySol / Molamola / Kickstarter solidarity funds; neighbours covering each other’s fines; teaching grandparents to vote via Holas; 103,000 signatures on the WRW-flag petition.
Holas + Honest People + Zubr electoral infrastructure; mass photo/video archives of repression; Cyberpartisans publishing KGB & police-informant databases.
Source: George & Leidner (2019); applied by the authors.
The same tools that hosted the infrastructure of dissent became, within months, the primary infrastructure of repression.
“I moved because some well-wisher posted my information in the Telegram chat “Act according to your conscience”… There was a screenshot of messages I’d written in a former extremist group, formerly called ‘Hrodna 97%.’ It was in August 2020, during the hottest days, that I scribbled something and conveniently forgot about it. They invited me to come to the HUBOP. I thought I had to leave because it was a nightmare. I was already afraid to sleep, afraid to live.
The same platforms that hosted the digital infrastructure of dissent became, within months, the primary infrastructure of the regime’s surveillance and propaganda networks.
What began as a space of relative freedom for opposition actors became a contested space in which the state sought to reassert informational dominance.
Source: Rudnik 2024; Roberts 2018; Feldstein 2021; Center for New Ideas 2025.
Read alongside Della Porta & Diani (2020), Gerbaudo (2012), Sayes (2014) and Costanza-Chock (2020): platforms in 2020 Belarus were not only resources but mediators — they shaped the form of interaction, the relations between actors, and the geography of the movement.
The combination of broadcast channels, closed group chats and anonymous feedback bots enabled a form of decentralised coordination that no single actor controlled.
As the August 2020 election approached, opposition figures, media and ordinary users migrated to Telegram, ensuring continuity of communication despite expected state-imposed disruptions.
Channels were chosen not by reach but by what attackers could not see: chatbots became central precisely because their backends were opaque to the regime (Interview 27).
District Telegram groups rebuilt neighbourhood bonds that years of distrust had eroded — and carried protest beyond Minsk into smaller towns (Mateo, 2022).
The temporal grammar of the platform — quick effect, low verification — generated a feeling of momentum that was, in itself, mobilising.
Technology expanded the ecosystem of mobilisation, but the agency of the movement resided in the social solidarities and civic dispositions participants brought to it.
“People trusted that nothing would happen to them, that if they sent something in, it would not come back to harm them. And Telegram channels used this like a normal media platform — they published everything people sent them.
“We encouraged people to join the chatbot, saying we needed 140,000 people… more than 27,000 joined. But the regime didn’t stop there. They honed their Telegram skills — identifying people, recording them, doing it demonstratively on camera, so others would be scared.
Where does ‘decentralised coordination’ end and ‘leaderless vulnerability’ begin?
Is the George & Leidner hierarchy useful for understanding mobilization in closed authocracies?
How do we conceptualise platforms that function simultaneously as mediator, weapon, and archive?
What does ‘success’ mean for a movement whose digital traces become evidence against its participants?
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Castells, M. (2015). Networks of Outrage and Hope. Polity.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice. MIT Press.
Della Porta, D. & Diani, M. (2020). Social Movements: An Introduction. Wiley.
Earl, J. et al. (2022). The digital repression of social movements. Annual Review of Sociology.
Feldstein, S. (2021). The Rise of Digital Repression. OUP.
George, J. J. & Leidner, D. E. (2019). From clicktivism to hacktivism. Information & Organization.
Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the Streets. Pluto.
Greene, S. (2022). Media polarization and protest in Belarus.
Gunitsky, S. (2015). Corrupting the cyber-commons. Perspectives on Politics.
Hierasimenka, A. et al. (2020). Telegram and Belarusian protest mobilisation.
Mateo, E. (2022). All of Belarus has come out onto the streets. Post-Soviet Affairs.
McAdam, D., McCarthy, J. D. & Zald, M. N. (1996). Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements. CUP.
McCarthy, J. D. & Zald, M. N. (1977). Resource mobilization and social movements. AJS.
Morozov, E. (2011). The Net Delusion. PublicAffairs.
Opp, K.-D. (2009). Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements. Routledge.
Roberts, M. E. (2018). Censored. Princeton.
Rudnik, A. (2024); Rudnik, A. (2025). Forthcoming, Palgrave.
Rudnik, A. & Rönnblom, M. (2024). Telegram in the Belarusian protest.
Sayes, E. (2014). Actor–Network Theory and methodology. Social Studies of Science.
Wijermars, M. & Lokot, T. (2022). Is Telegram a ‘harbinger of freedom’? Post-Soviet Affairs.
DataReportal (2020, 2021); Voice (2020); Viasna (2024); JXF (2025); Lawtrend; Center for New Ideas (2025).
I welcome any comments that strengthen the conceptual base — especially where classic mobilisation theory falls short.