Guest Editors: Olga Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse

Nationalities Papers is inviting manuscript submissions for a topical special issue on Belarus.

The presidential elections in August 2020 marked the beginning of a mass mobilization in Belarus. The developments caught many observers by surprise, and they challenge some of the assumptions in the comparative literature on protests. The prolonged nature of the demonstrations, their decentralized nature, the role of social media and messenger services, the informal organizational structure behind the mobilization, and the dynamics of regime repression are among the features that social scientists have begun to explore.

Nationalities Papers invites submissions that address different dimensions of the processes of societal and political change in Belarus. Contributions are encouraged to consider (but are not restricted to) the following questions:

•    How were state-society relations structured before August 2020, and how have they changed?
•    What factors enabled mass mobilization from August 2020?
•    Who are the protesters? How did they organize and adjust their strategies over time?
•    How have societal and state actors shaped the protests and the regime response (e.g. trade unions, churches, and security services)?
•    How have social media, messenger services, and independent media contributed to mobilization?
•    What has been the role of images in this mobilization?
•    What role have international actors played?
•    How do the Belarusian protests compare to other cases of mass mobilization?

Submission Guidelines: Deadline for papers: October 1, 2021

•    Please submit your paper in line with the journal’s submission guidelines via Manuscript Central. Papers should be designated special issue articles in Manuscript Central, and authors should select “Mass Mobilization in Belarus” in the special issue drop down menu.
•    The guest editors are responsible for ensuring the quality and collective coherence of the manuscripts in the special issue, and the authors' adherence to the journal's submission guidelines.
•    All articles selected from the pool of articles by the guest editors will be submitted for blind peer review.

If your article is selected for this special issue, you will be notified by the editors. Excellent manuscripts may still be rejected due to issues of fit, scope, and space. If your paper is not selected, we encourage you to submit it for consideration at Nationalities Papers as a regular submission. We routinely publish articles on the politics and history of Belarus, and the region is of substantial interest to our readers.