Understanding resilience in theory and practice: what have the 2020 protests in Belarus showed us, anew?

Resilience seems to be ‘all-things to all people’. Having emerged in ecological sciences in the early 1970s, it soon made its way to life and more recently, to social sciences, offering a better understanding of change and systems’ response to it. More critical studies of resilience (Chandler 2020; Korosteleva and Petrova 2021; Coaffee 2017; Bourbeau 2018), have come to argue that ‘resilience is always more’ (Bargues 2020), and is there to essentially underscore an open system’s ability to ‘bounce forward’, adapt and even transform, in the face of adversity. This transformative effect of resilience could be usefully demonstrated when applied to societies, which for years have been seen as ineffective and even dormant in their democratic struggles against the authoritarian regimes (e.g. Belarus) until the latter crumble under the weight of their own ‘peoplehood’, a groundswell of mass mobilisation, which often sweeps the hitherto well established regimes into oblivion, even if their tangible outposts are still in place. Both sides of this struggle - the society and regime - display signs of enduring resilience, but of a different kind: they draw on divergent resources and power dynamics, which naturally gives a lease of life to one but not necessarily the other. Using the case study of Belarus, this paper will demonstrate this logic of resilience in a complex adaptive system of Lukashenka’s repressive regime, to argue that the 2020 groundswell of popular mobilisation is not just a one off event, but a sure sign of change, which will eventually bring Lukashenka’s authoritarianism down, no matter how ‘resilient’ it may seem to the world.