# Women's Collective Agency Mobilization as a Commoning Practice for Disrupting Institutions amid State-sponsored Violence

Viktoria Zhukouskaya

**Published on:** Sep 22, 2025

**URL:** https://replito.pubpub.org/pub/5i3keguw

**License:** Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
## Abstract

This working paper explores the emergence of collective agency and organizational *commoning* among Belarusian women activists in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential elections. Drawing on an auto/ethnographic account and 33 oral history interviews with exiled women activists and former political prisoners, it examines how women enact *commoning*, the collective production and maintenance of shared resources and solidarities, through grassroots initiatives, affective labor, and informal support networks. Crucially, the paper argues that state-sponsored violence functions not only as a suppressive force but also as a constitutive mechanism that shapes and intensifies practices of *commoning*. The author's own participation is reflected in auto/ethnographic vignettes, which are interwoven to illustrate lived experience and embodied knowledge. Finally, the paper reflects on the ethical complexities of conducting research on politically sensitive topics, offering insights into how *commoning* sustains resistance and builds alternative infrastructures of solidarity under duress.

## Introduction

Alexander Lukashenka, known as the last dictator in Europe, was fraudulently re-elected for the 6th time, triggering a wave of upheavals, resistance, and state-sponsored violence. It became known as the 'revolution with women's face'.

At the time, I was in Canada, pursuing a PhD at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies of the University of Ottawa, while my two children, aged 5 and 7 at the time, were back home in Belarus. Three days of political terror followed the elections, and I just couldn't bear being away at such a crucial moment and rushed home to Belarus to be with my children. Initially, my thesis was about domestic violence but witnessing state violence I decided to change my topic and to unpack ways in which state violence and domestic violence presuppose each other and are connected. As a feminist activist myself, I was long before involved in struggles against patriarchy and gender-based violence (GBV) and decided to join protest activities. As my son said then: "Mom, I saw how you run, you should not go to marches because you will not run away from police". I realized myself that participating with my body, as marked by one fellow-feminist, was not my way of protesting because I could not risk being separated from my children again. I understood that I could be more helpful doing some analytical (feminist) work for disrupting the violent institutional order in my country.

Nonetheless, none of us thought at that time that we needed to pursue a feminist agenda; we were simply against violence, violence which initially was directed towards men and boys. Surprisingly, at that time patriarchy prevented women from being beaten on the streets – at least it was at the beginning of political uprising.
Reflection on the field notes, Minsk, Belarus, August-November 2020

Although diverse groups of Belarusians resist the regime to date, there are inherent intentions amongst them as each of them had a different political agenda. Specifically, this ongoing autoethnographic research focuses on women's participation in this 'revolution with women's face' and amongst them, two distinct cohorts of women stand out notably: those with and without feminist agendas. An analysis of their respective collective mobilizations in the aftermath of this political crisis and the state-sponsored violence that followed, will allow us to explore women and feminist resistance as a form of commoning. Indeed, understanding ways in which collective agency mobilization emerges is pivotal for a better understanding of commoning and solidarity as organizing practices that foster regenerative and resistant social interactions, anchored in relational and embodied ethical affectivity (Mandalaki & Fotaki 2020). The Western notion of agency defined as "the capacity to realise one's own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles (whether individual or collective)" (Mahmood 2005, 8) is challenged by the Post-colonial scholars. This implies that women only express their agency, collective or not, when their actions are independent and autonomous, regardless of the constraints imposed on them by social and political institutions and when women intentionally engage in disrupting patriarchy. I, therefore, question if, when, how, and why women's collective agency can constitute commons, manifested through embodied commoning practices of collective solidarity, mobilization, and resistance to state-sponsored violence. These on-going reflections highlight how commoning is rooted in relational affectivity amidst the tensions and ambiguities underlying this far from a smooth or ideal form of collective action, emerging from internal fractures and disputes, difficulties to organize across borders and within a context of state-sponsored violence and censorship that has been denounced by numerous human rights organizations¹. These constitute weaknesses in their capacity to act collectively on the one hand, but also fuel the dynamism of affective resistance, within and beyond the trials imposed by threats, incarceration, exile, and other forms of violence.

As an activist, I personally embody first-hand the difficulties of sustaining collective action under such circumstances. Thus, I exemplify ways in which women who found themselves at the forefront of the fight against the regime manifest their agency differently. Yet, collective actions evolved through the emergence and the emergency of their collective agency through commoning. I depict this through an auto/ethnographic research – adopting a way in which Mackinlay (2019) refers to doing simultaneously ethnography with auto/ethnography as ‘auto-ethnography’ or ‘auto/ethnography’. Doing auto/ethnography means approaching observations and analysis through both ethnographic observations of research participants and reflection of the personal experience of participating in certain socio-cultural and political events. Autoethnographic vignettes, as the one used to open this introduction, are therefore the lifeline I hold onto in these narratives to interrogate the deeper meaning of this ‘revolution with women’s face’. Women’s collective agency can be considered a commoning practice.
The paper begins with a description of the empirical context of this paper. Then, I will detail the auto/ethnographic data collection as a participant observer in these events and interviews I have conducted with other fellow activists and women (ex)political prisoners. For the purpose of this paper, I shall highlight the questions triggered by my affectively charged memories and testimonies of the interviewees, how they resonate, challenge, and infuse our embodied thinking, knowing, and writing about commoning.

## Context

The Belarusian revolution-in-progress, which started after the fraudulent elections in August 2020, is known as the ‘revolution with woman’s face’. Women's participation was initially symbolic, but since those elections, it has developed into a significant catalyst and driving force for Belarus' political awakening and the sprouting of numerous activist movements of resistance. Three months before the elections, male candidates were persecuted as they were seen as a threat to Lukashenko, president of Belarus since 1994 and running for the sixth time. One of the oppositional leaders, Viktar Babaryka, a successful banker, was imprisoned with his son and other colleagues. Following Babaryka's arrest, another candidate, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, a famous youtube blogger, was also detained. The third candidate, Valery Tsepkala, ex-diplomat and head of the High-tech park, was forced into exile.

Women's participation began when Maria Kalesnikava, a musician and art manager who represented Viktar Babaryka's election office, Veranika Tsepkala, an IT manager and Valery Tsepkala's wife, and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a stay-at-home mother, a teacher by training, and Siarhei Tsikhanouski's wife, agreed to merge three electoral teams and to become one, the Triumvirate, advocating for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya as an alternative candidate to Lukashenko. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya took the initiative and chose to run for office instead of her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanousky. She later acknowledged that it was a last-ditch effort to have her spouse released following his detention. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and the Triumvirate were not initially considered to pose a threat to Lukashenko, who is notorious for his sexist and patriarchal actions and views², and Sviatlana was permitted to continue running for office. Thus, the three women came to symbolize the dream of democratic changes in Belarus, which mobilized the entire society.

> The elections on August 9th 2020, were “neither free nor fair”³ and the dictator won again as he did every election since 1994⁴. In a quest for the truth and calling for a peaceful transfer of power, peaceful demonstrators throng the streets. However, the winner of the so-called election unleashed unprecedented violence and terror on the people. Following the polls, three days of bloodshed, rape, and torture claimed hundreds of lives nationwide⁵. To break up the scene, women in white clothes with white flowers in their hands flooded the streets all over Belarus. They used traditional feminine symbolism of innocence and purity to confront violence and ask for the release of detainees. At the time, it was a turning point that at least ended violence on such a large scale. Sviatlana Alexievich, the Belarusian writer and the Nobel Prize winner in literature of 2015, and the author of “Unwomanly face of war” said: “Women have
realized that they can and should do something, and they will tell their children: we did everything we could"⁶.

Now, more than two years after the elections, women are still at the forefront of the Belarusian fight for democracy and independence. Feminists are part of the Coordination Council as Femgroup, a non-governmental body announced by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskay for the transition of power in August 2020, and advocate for equal rights and opportunities for women amongst democratic institutions.⁷ Women self-organized in numerous grass-root initiatives which provide help to (ex)political prisoners and their families, to refugees both Belarusian and Ukrainian, to domestic violence survivors, and organize protest events outside of Belarus.

Reflection on the field notes, October 2023

Women make up the majority of activists' cells, backyard communities, and other grass-roots initiatives within Belarus that carry out various protest activities regardless of the great risk of exposure. Notably, the majority of such initiatives are volunteer-based and unpaid. According to interviewees, participating in protest actions is equivalent to working a third or even fourth shift for them⁸. Even those who work for relocated NGOs indicated that oftentimes their salaries are not enough to cover rent payments, let alone have access to free health care or pension savings. Women contrasted the high-paid top positions held by men in NGOs with their own grassroots involvements, which lack social support and compensated prospects. Women in Belarus do not envision stopping their actions and fighting for freedom and democratic changes despite the lack of resources and marginalized locations. Two years ago, they initially explained their active involvement by the unprecedented violence sponsored by the state and their inability to witness it silently and do nothing. In a similar vein, given the current situation, women cannot envision abandoning political prisoners with their families, refugees, and other oppressed groups. Although the majority of the interviewees reported feeling fear, anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and a lack of resources for sustaining their lives, women generally acknowledged that they are willing to fight until Lukashenko is overthrown and democratic transformations occur in Belarus.

> My friends from my feminist bubble, as I use to call my feminist environment, who initiated those first "women in white" protest activities confessed that somehow pursuing feminist agenda slipped out of their attention back then. Violence was so unprecedented and unimaginable that the need to stop violence immediately was so pervasive and ubiquitous. The only possible response could have been peaceful contrasting police violence and as a strong message to the regime: "We are no threat to you; we are peaceful. No violence from us. Look at us. We are in white and barefoot. We can do not harm. We urge you to stop violence and release our men, husbands, sons, brothers".

During our long reflections on those events, I oftentimes questioned women whether they were not afraid to be subjected to violence themselves. They did and they took the risk because no one could predict
whether riot police would direct violence at women. I can speculate here that it was the second time when Lukashenko's sexism and misogyny underestimated women's power⁹ and allowed women to use it. It did not last long, around two months, even though women used their femininity and femaleness not only to convey strong political messages but also literally to protect men with their bodies from police. It was an unexpected moment of common embodiment. During street protests, women formed so called “hitch”¹⁰ by bonding with each other with their arms in a way in which it could not be broken without force. Women hid men behind them this way. The police could not seize men without using violence against women, for which they had no orders at that time.

I was trying to wrap my head around at which point women understood when to form hitch. I asked this question on multiple occasions to those who stood in hitch and in the majority of cases the general answer was: “We just formed it. We saw police running to us and we had to save men and boys around us. We moved in a circular formation, with men in the center, towards the edge of the protest march away from the police, so that they could then run away and hide from the police.” It sounded for me like a very intuitive embodied action with a lack of leadership who could give orders. There was no need of any identifiable leader. Like in many other occasions, women acted on their own. Their bodies just knew.

## Auto/ethnography and commoning

Feminist methodologies argue that drawing on personal experience is valuable for research (Oakley 1981) and blurring the line between professional and personal identities makes ethnographic research partly autoethnographic in and of itself. I cannot say precisely when my auto/ethnographic fieldwork began, but more importantly, I was trying to understand at which point it will end for me as it is a lived-through process for me with my active engagement in bringing democratic changes to my country. Like many of my interlocutors, I was involved in activities which are now considered to be highly politicized and have led me to write from the locus of being in exile.

> The arrest of Viktor Babaryka came as a great shock to many. I clearly remember that day in June 2020, the fleeting hope that has started to vanish and my first thought: "If we, if I, do nothing now, nothing will change". At that time, I lived in Ottawa where I had begun my PhD and saw in a local Facebook group a post from another Belarusian about the need to do something. This was my starting point of active engagement in disrupting the institutional order in Belarus. Activists whom I later interviewed and who also initiated solidarity activities echoed my own experience and the feeling that we were urged to do something, and if it was not us, it would be any woman at that point who could have done that. Ideas of solidarity and importance of doing so was in the air and so dense that one could even touch it.

Auto/ethnography and the idea of the new thesis theme came right after the elections and three days of terror following it, when I returned to Belarus. Nonetheless, my observations and field notes were quite sporadic at that time. In June 2021, I left Belarus to find myself in Lithuania. There, being in safety, I became more
engaged in the work of the Feminist group of the Coordination Council (the Femgroup). The Coordination Council was announced by the President-elect, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, as a proto-institution for the peaceful transition of power. Since then, I have taken part in most meetings of the Femgroup where we discussed advocacy campaigns, public messages on various occasions, elaboration of strategy for developing the feminist movement, and achieving gender equality. Also, I participated in numerous other events such as conferences for human rights defenders, larger feminist gatherings, gave interviews for independent media, conducted gender analysis of policies, elaborated advocacy campaigns, and developed projects for donor funding. These activities also pertained to the majority of other feminist and queer activists. Thus, a major part of my auto/ethnographic observations and fieldnotes is related to the feminist activism and done amongst other fellow feminists.

During 2022-2023, this has been complemented by a collection of oral stories with other women who did not identify as feminists, and this presented an element of questioning. Indeed, during my last two fieldtrips in Vilnius, Lithuania on March, 2023 and in Vilnius, Lithuania and Warsaw, Poland in May, 2023, I interviewed women of the Belarusian diaspora (including refugees and (ex)political prisoners who have fled), most of whom did not belong to the feminist community, did not identify themselves as such or quite oppose feminism as they described themselves. Due to my constraints of going to the field in Belarus, I preferred to conduct interviews in person with women whom I had not met before or did not have any close relationship compared to my regular feminist bubble.

Following a feminist methodology, it is crucial to give voice to those women who are not normally heard or seen, and women (ex)political prisoners are chiefly amongst them. But although literature on prisoners' experience gives voices to prisoners, it does not pay much attention to the connection between the ethnographer and researched participants (Jewkes 2012). Auto/ethnography, which reveals the researcher's personal emotional responses to the object under study, involves reflexivity and significance about the ethnographer's role in ethnography. Phillips and Earle (2010) argue that ethnographers are impacted by the defences from anxiety and painful emotions they experience during interactions with prisoners. Research on prisoners cannot be disentangled from the researcher's reflections about their own emotions, personal traumas, and memories. For example, memories and experiences of gendered violence or violence resulting from "incautious political activity" by researchers (Phillips & Earle 2010, 366) augment similar experiences of the participants. Bosworth (1999), in her influential work on women's agency and resistance in prisons, describes how overidentifying with the women prisoners has negative consequences for her health due to drawing on the politicized feminist agenda with the blurred borders between personal and political.

> Before starting the selection of interviewees, I was somewhat hesitant about how to approach women (ex)political prisoners¹¹ because I was rather cautious of not doing harm and not re-traumatizing them even more. One of the interviewees, Volha Zazulinskay, the head of the fund working with the political prisoners, advised to say that we need to refer to them as "political prisoners" when we talk about
people who are no longer sentenced. She emphasized that we could say ex-political prisoners only in the case when these people will be rehabilitated. Officially, the regime says that there are no political prisoners in Belarus. I adopt the way to write as (ex)-political prisoners both to distinguish from those who are still sentenced and to stress that they need to be rehabilitated to be recognized as “ex” without brackets.

I got in touch with the leaders of grassroot organizations who work with them on a daily basis and asked for advice on whether it was a good idea to talk to them at all. I was ensured that women who were in Lukashenko's prisons would love to talk to me and share their stories because it would give them a sense that prison time was worth it. They also seek reparation through making their stories public and reminding the public about other political prisoners who are still behind the bars¹². Some of the women I talked to spent from 14 days up to two years in the Belarusian carceral system and left prison and consequently Belarus between a year ago and up to three weeks prior to the moment we met.

I approached those meetings carefully, I tried to read as much as possible about my interviewees, if I knew their names in advance, which was not always the case. When I did not know anything about them because not all of them were public, first, I tried gently to briefly ask them where they were imprisoned, for how long, and whether they served their time in full. Such a general picture allowed me better to navigate our communication and relate to them and their lived experiences. However, before asking these questions, in most of the cases, I shared my story, which often times for me personally sounded as an excuse (I thought that I even experienced some guilt)¹³ that I did not have my own experience of imprisonment or even participating in the protest marches in Belarus.

## Theoretical Perspectives on Commoning

De Angelis (2017) defines commons as those who share resources for which they do not need to pay and admits that this resource-based definition is quite limited and does not incorporate relational aspects. He argues that the concept of the commons needs to include three intersectional things. The first one refers to “non-commodified means of fulfilling people's needs.” Then, community is a necessary aspect of commons characteristics; however, he admits that communities can swell translocally and can be culturally heterogeneous. The third element is commoning, which is a process of constructing and reproducing commons.

In turn, Federici (2018, 110) argues that the community should not separate one community from another on the basis of common interests within one community, like with religious or ethnical communities. Communities need to be constructed on a relational basis, and responsibility that goes beyond human relations and includes the earth, the forests, the seas, and the animals. In the case of Belarusian women, care and bodies become such common.
Commoning is widely used in urban and environmental studies, political ecology, and economics, and challenges market-based approaches and capitalist modes of production. Commoning is a concept that allows us to resist the neoliberal idea of privatization and commodification of resources. Federici (2018) argues that international development organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations exploited the idea of the commons to serve the privatization of community-owned resources. The feminist perspective on the matter of commons emphasizes ways in which women are more penalized by privatization of natural resources due to women's reproductive functions and greater reliance on collective ways of living (Federici 2018). Also, commoning is a way of organizing that challenges structures of hegemonic power and protects women from state violence and intimate partner violence.

## Embodied Commoning and Relationality in the Belarusian Protest

Women activists in their non-violent response to the state violence materialized commoning in a very tangible and embodied way. Women sacrificed their lives, health, well-being, relationship with families and children, and endured suffering and violence themselves, which were all pivotal parts for creating commons. The body politics of forming a human shield is not unique to the Belarusian case (for an analysis in a climate activist context, highlighting the tensions and vulnerabilities, see Rahmouni Elidrissi & Courpasson 2021), but here the joining of women's bodies to shield the men appeared as an enactment and embodiment of commoning in a strong relational way Mandalaki & Fotaki 2020. Women's bodies themselves became commons in the fight against state-sponsored violence.

Stavrides (2015) offers the concept of an open common that allows for downplaying differences in identities and participants' backgrounds and common people in the moment for mobilizing in the squares. In Belarus' women's protests, chains of solidarity, women's Saturday marches, and women's partisan grassroots activism included women from various life avenues and backgrounds. Affiliation with political organizations if any was not anyone's focus for commoning to happen.

Previous studies about social movements and leadership might not be enough to explain women's mobilization in the extreme context that emerged in Belarus in 2020 (Eatwell 2006; Ganz 2009; Morris & Staggenborg 2004; Zuliver 2022). For example, in his work on social mobilization, McAdam (1999, 47) suggests that there is a need for a recognized leader during political uprisings: "who can be called upon to lend their prestige and organizing skills to the incipient movement". He also argues that without a leader with prior experience, collective action is impossible, even if the people who have arisen have the potential to act.

However, the case of Belarus, as experienced and shared here, seems to point in a different direction. There was no leader or anyone who could claim that she was an organizer. Women who initiated chains of solidarity back in August 2020 did not recognize themselves as leaders, whether feminists or not, and some of them even refused to call themselves as such, emphasizing that the relationship amongst women protesters was horizontal
and everyone was equal. Such sensitivity towards enacting hierarchical structures was expressed mostly by feminists, reflecting an underlying value of sisterhood and horizontal connections.

Federici (2018) calls collective forms of care labour as one of the crucial elements of commoning, which was largely deprived by capitalism. Women are becoming new commons in the case of Belarus by recreating new forms of social reproduction amid the emergence of violence in the country. For example, Tania¹⁴ could not participate with her body by going directly to the streets because fear shackled her and restrained her physical activities. But this woman organized what can be described as a collective form of childcare. Her friends brought their children to her, she took care of them while their friends participated in the protest activities. The most important protests took place during weekends when state childcare facilities were not operational. Another interviewee's daughter oversaw pets. Pet owners gave her keys from their apartments so that in the case of their arrests, she could have access to pets and take care of the animals and home plants.

Kira¹⁵ remembered that when she started her protest activities, she was ready to be subjected to violence. Upon her arrest, she accepted that she would be beaten and admitted that she was not particularly afraid of pain. She endured being electroshocked while they were attempting to get passwords from her phone. She said in the interview: “I am not Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya in any way. I was just trying to buy some time.”

Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was a teenage girl who was killed by the Nazis and later depicted as a martyr who fought for Soviet ideology and communism. Kira further explained that she needed that time (enduring the torture of being electroshocked) so that her phone software could delete information about other people involved in her activist cell work. By referring to Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, my interviewee meant that she did not pursue any meta-goals or ideological purposes; she endured pain from the taser to make sure that other people would be safe. This strongly emphasizes the relational aspects of commoning (Mandalaki & Fotaki 2020).

Thus, in the case of Belarus, I see commoning as a possible (if not the only) response to violence. Examples drawn from the interviews, still being digested, and in a proto-stage of embodied and affectively charged analysis, hint at how institutional and interpersonal violence triggers such forms of commoning. Although I have noticed the differences in the forms of commoning and activism by feminists and non-feminists, it requires further analysis and conducting in-depth interviews with feminists to draw evidence-based differences between the two cohorts of women.

## The Nation as Woman, the Woman as Nation

Shortly after elections, Lukashenko ended his speech with “Belarus is behind us. Clean and bright, honest and beautiful, hard-working, a little bit naive and a little vulnerable. But she is our beloved. And you can't give away your beloved” (Figure 1). For him, Belarus is a feminine object. This exclamation depicts the logic of the abuser who does not want to let go of someone under their control, they have power over and even an
obsession with. A violent state and a violent head of the state legitimize and even approve of violence in both the public and private spheres.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1 - It appeared on social media in the first week of June 2023. This is a draftee who holds a card with Lukashenko's picture in a military uniform and with his words from that speech he gave in September 2020, discussed above. The date and the author of the photo are unknown.</figcaption></figure>

Verdery (1994, 227) argues that “to the extent that the modern nation-state is defined in relation to a geographical territory, “nation” parallels “gender” in linking the physical “body” of the state to a set of meanings and affects, thus rendering physical space socio-political”. On the one hand, men who are engaged in various kinds of military and police services directly signify the state’s involvement in the bodies of its male subjects (Verdery 1994). On the other hand, the state also interferes with female bodies when women in the situation of domestic violence are left without any legislative, social, or economic protection and support. The rhetoric “And you can’t give away your beloved” exemplifies the way in which the control over the body of the state and women’s bodies is tied together. In resisting with their women’s bodies, they were countering this male-dominated logic and constituting commons in a relational way that displaces and resists the objectified ‘beloved’ in Lukashenko’s speech. For twenty-six long years, Lukashenko, as the USSR revanchist, attempted
to create what Verdery (1994) calls “socialist paternalism” when the state collects total social products and distributes them, but, in the case of Belarus, the state was substituted by the autocrat. Such a quasi-familial dependency does not contribute to the production of the subject’s agency and intertwines tightly the state-parent and its people (Verdery 1994). Lukashenko, in his role as the great patriarch, controls his family-state and wants love from it in a way in which a domestic aggressor extends control over his female partner and obsessively demands love.

Symbolism of femininity is often applied in describing nations. Some nation-states that are considered weaker are feminized and feminine traits are attributed to them, and Belarus is no exception in this regard (Brzozowska 2003; Mosse 2020; Verdery 1993). Brzozowska (2003) argues that even the WW2 narrative of Belarusians' participation and their heroism was passive and signifies passive agency and unwillingness to get into the conflict with anyone, contrasted with active agency on the national level. WW2 heroes who became heroes against their will in response to the injustice are echoing heroes who emerged as a result of brutal violence and repression in Belarus. Brzozowska (2003) claims that resistance manifested by Belarusians during WW2 did not overshadow their portrayal and perception as victims. Similarly, interviewees suggest they went on the streets in response to violence and utter injustice happening in the country after the elections in August 2020. Women flooded the streets to protect men from the state terror and oppression, both symbolically and physically. Women hid men with their bodies, and that's where sexism came into play and was used as a paradoxical form of resistance.

The symbology of the nation's femininity is associated with the female body, which is represented by the Belarusian land as a passive object. Especially now with the war in Ukraine, when Russian troops and the army use the Belarusian space as a bridgehead to attack Ukraine. In a similar vein, before Russia exploited it as a passage from West to East and back. Such a passive positionality of Belarus has feminine attributes where body-land is given and possessed by strangers. In this way, Belarus is twice feminized in its internal relationship with the autocrat and externally within Belarusian-Russian relationships. Here, the family relationship is the primary metaphor to symbolize and organize relationships between the state and gendered subjects. The division between private and political is blurred in the case of violence and oppression in Belarus, but the way women – regardless of their feminist (or not) agendas – have responded in an embodied way, using the ‘feminine’ attributes and stereotypes, challenge our ways of thinking about how commoning is enacted.

Women's bodies as commons embodied a relational way of resisting violence and regenerating a sense of hope amidst a context of extreme institutional and political violence. The social interactions being reconfigured in this 'revolution with women's face' shine through the bodies of women in significant ways. The affective power of their commoning constitutes an embodied 'pathway to freedom' (Fotaki et al. 2017; Pouthier & Sondak 2021) and of becoming (Singh 2017) expressing itself both in the public space of the street (Cnossen
et al. 2020) and the private space of the home, the Capital's square or the scattered diaspora, through aesthetic, embodied and relational resistance to violence that crosses pain, fear, and borders.

## Conclusion

> It takes a great deal of responsibility to write about events and people in the situation when in the country there are more than 5000 political prisoners, and nothing has ended. Violence is ongoing, repressions are ongoing, women struggle in exile are ongoing. On many occasions, I thought to pause my activist work and put all my efforts into my thesis and my children experiencing mental health issues as the result of our relocations and challenges with adaptation. But then I think about our political prisoners, especially women who carry greater burdens due to having children, and I again and again continue my activism because voices of those outside of Belarus are the only voices Belarusian women in the country have. And oftentimes the line where I am a researcher, activist, human rights defender is blurred in a similar way as borders between personal and political are equally blurred.

The early version of this working paper has been submitted and presented at the EGOS conference at the University of Cagliari in July 2023.

## Footnotes

1. For example, https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/belarus/report-belarus/ ; https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/09/office-high-commissioner-describes-climate-repression-belarus-deterioration ; https://reliefweb.int/report/belarus/situation-human-rights-belarus-report-special-rapporteur-situation-human-rights-belarus-anais-marin-ahrc5058-enru Date of access 06.05.2023

2. https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/articles/2020/08/25/7264020/ Date of access 23.04.2023

3. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/european-council/2020/08/19/ Date of access 06.06.2023

4. Lukashenko won only the first fair elections in 1994, the rest were fraudulent https://www.rferl.org/a/elections-in-belarus-how-lukashenka-won-and-won-and-won-and-won-and-won-/30767860.html Date of access 05.06.2023

5. See for example https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/08/11/belarus-violence-abuse-response-election-protests ; https://www.euronews.com/2021/08/09/revolt-repression-and-reprisals-a-look-back-at-a-year-of-turmoil-in-belarus ; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53762995 Date of access 13.06.2023

6. https://www.svoboda.org/a/30743714.html Date of access 15.06.2023

7. Number of proto-institutions and non-governmental organizations have emerged after the elections. All of them are located outside Belarus. Around 1280 civil society organizations were liquidated under
Lukashenko's order as of June 2023 Some of them continue their operations in exile or/and under cover.
[https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-65353178](https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-65353178) Date of access 05.06.2023

8. Women here refer to the “double burden” or “double-shift” women traditionally do. The first shift is regular day-time paid job, the second shift is care work about children and family. In the case of Belarus, women, especially those who left the county, are employed in low-paying jobs, and must juggle a few of them to provide forthemselves and their children. Thus, involvement in grassroot initiatives is a job after their jobs. In the study conducted by the Femgroup in October 2020, some women even admitted that they had to leave paid jobs in order to have time to be involved in urgent protest activities. Presumably, they had some source of income in such instances, but this hampered their overall access to the resources. See for example study made by the Femgroup in March 2021 [https://telegra.ph/Research-on-needs-of-Belarusian-women-involved-in-the-transformation-processes-within-the-country-03-12](https://telegra.ph/Research-on-needs-of-Belarusian-women-involved-in-the-transformation-processes-within-the-country-03-12) Date of access 17.09.2025

9. First time was when he allowed Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to run the office and was sure that no one would support her because she was a woman. [^12]

10. Initially using “hitch” was offered by Belarusian anarchists as a way to stand against police violence. [^11]

11. The term “political prisoner” is highly contested in the Belarusian context which is discussed somewhere else (Zhukouskaya, upcoming). Here I adopt writing (ex) before “political prisoner” to emphasize that these people are no longer incarcerated, yet they were not rehabilitated by the state. See the following citation by Volha Zazulinskaya. [^10]

12. The number of political prisoners according to different sources varies from 1800 up to 5000 people as of July 2023. [^9]

13. Amongst Belarusians, the following saying emerged after August 2020: "If you did not spend time in prison, you are not true Belarusian", which means that having prison term is a sign that you are against the regime and ready to fight for it no matter what. Field notes, Minsk, November 2020 [^8]

14. Pseudonym [^7]

15. Pseudonym [^6]

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