Community Resilience in Belarus and the EU response

The presidential election held on 9 August 2020 and the subsequent popular mobilization marked the end of an era in the history of post-Soviet Belarus. Cautious and apolitical for three decades, Belarusian society seems to have awakened (Petrova and Korosteleva, 2021), in a short space of time observing a profound transformation of state-society relations taking them to a qualitatively new level of self-awareness and self-organisation.

This article explores the emergence of peoplehood in Belarus from a complexity-thinking perspective. This lens naturally lead us to the principal conceptual frame of this article - societal resilience as a process of self-organisation - which encapsulates and explains the gist of the recent developments in Belarus, and helps us understand why the rise of peoplehood as a process of emergence in the country may result in irreversible change.