Dissent, Distance, Dilemmas: The Belarusian Diaspora, ICTs, and Adaptive Authoritarianism

In August 2020, Alexander Lukashenko's re-election, amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud, marked his uninterrupted presidency since Belarus's independence and sparked an unprecedented wave of mass protests in the country's history. Lukashenko’s adaptive authoritarian regime responded with brutal repression and systemic human rights violations. In this context, the diasporic social movement community, leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs), emerged as critical actors supporting the anti-regime social movement in their homeland of origin. Based on semi-structured interviews with 13 members of the North American Belarusian diasporic social movement community, this paper explores the role of ICTs in facilitating their political actions during the 2020 protests, as well as the factors that facilitated or hindered their participation and use of ICTs. Our study highlights that ICTs facilitated diaspora geopolitics from below by enabling ``social movement community,'' where otherwise disparate diasporic satellite publics converged around the common political goal of overthrowing the Lukashenko regime. However, the diasporic social movement community’s use of ICTs was also fraught with ethical and moral complexities, navigating the ``proximity dilemma'' of remote participation and influencing a cause from a distance, while benefiting from socio-spatial privileges in their host country. Furthermore, the diaspora's ICT usage is shaped by the political regime, fear of transnational repression, and the geopolitical positions of both the origin-homeland and host country, as a consequence of adaptive authoritarianism in the Belarusian case. We discuss how CSCW can support decentralised, geographically dispersed diasporic organising with respect to social movements under varying authoritarian constraints.