COLLECTIVE TRAUMA: THE CASE OF BELARUS AFTER 2020

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of the collective trauma of Belarusian society received during the violent suppression of protests that broke out in 2020 after the falsification of the presidential elections and lasted for several months. The empirical basis for the article comprised two sociological studies conducted in 2022 and 2023 under the leadership of the author of this paper. The methodological basis of the study is grounded in the theoretical developments of trauma studies research programs. However, the specificity of the Belarusian situation, which consists in ongoing retraumatization, necessitated the development of the author’s version of the research methodology. It is based on a distinction between “traumatic experience”, “trauma” and “post-traumatic growth.” Based on this, the scale of traumatic experience, the degree of traumatization of so- ciety and the coping strategies used by society are separately examined. All parts of Belarusian society need to be studied from the point of view of collective traumatization, but this article considered only the protesting part of Belarusian society as the most traumatized during the protests. The article shows that the entire protest-minded part of Belarusian society has a traumatic experience. In addition to the ongoing repression, the traumatic situation is aggravated by media retraumatization. At the same time, there is no need to talk about a high degree of traumatization.

Although Belarusian society is characterized by an increased level of anxiety, there are no negative assessments of past protest experiences. On the contrary, participants in the 2020 protests tend to idealize this experience. In addition, both the adoption of intact coping strategies and the functioning of a predominantly positive protest narrative help overcome traumatic experiences. At the same time, the “protest narrative” has not yet been formalized to the extent that collective trauma would begin to function as cultural trauma.