SONIC VIOLENCE CONTINUUM IN CONTEMPORARY BELARUS

Abstract

This article analyses the use of sound — music, noise, and vocalization — within the context of politically motivated violence in Belarus since 2020. The goal of this study is to analyze the sonic violence practices and map their range.

The first part of the text reviews literature about the use of sound and music for public space control, political indoctrination and “re-education”, interrogations, tortures, and executions by various — not only authoritarian — political regimes. The concept of sonic violence used in the following analysis, allows studying the use of musical and non-musical sounds, and focusing not only on external sonic influence but also on victims’ own voices weaponized and used against them.

Since 2020, Belarusian pro-democratic media and human rights initiatives have gathered hundreds of interviews with people who underwent harsh treatment and violence from “law enforcers”. Many witnesses mention experiencing forced listening, speaking, chanting, singing, and other kinds of sonic violence. The article’s second part presents a qualitative analysis of publications in independent and state-funded media (2020–2023), reports of human rights NGOs, as well as other empirical materials (audio recordings, participant observations) that identify situations where sound, music, and vocalization were used by various Belarusian state agents in a coercive or violent context. Coding and categorizing such cases allows creating a typology that can be mapped as a continuum — according to the character, intensity, duration, and impact of violent techniques and traumatic experiences caused by them.

This is the first study of sonic violence in contemporary Belarus, that not only shows its widespread and systemic character, but also analyzes its forms and strategies used to counteract it. The study shows the place of the current Belarusian events in the history and genealogy of sonic violence, revealing parallels with similar practices of other political regimes, both contemporary and historical.