Assessing Western biases in studying post-soviet resistance movements

As part of my PhD-project, I study several cases of nonviolent resistance in post-soviet countries. Although the development of nonviolent resistance as a method of political action seems to originate from all over the world, the scholars in this field tend to be predominantly Western. Inadvertently, these scholars, including myself, operate on the notion of a democratic state, of an assumption on a somewhat equal relationship between a state and its citizens. The core research question that brought me to Turkmenistan revolved around how these people accept this level of repression and human rights infractions without taking political action. A question inherently based on an interactive notion of citizenship and pluralistic view on power. Yet, as one of my respondents adequately put it ‘they don't have this skill, this habit of expressing themselves in a political way, expressing themselves nonviolently. No one taught them’. During this session, I will delve deeper into my findings on these presumptions in studying resistance movements in Turkmenistan and Belarus. Additionally, I will reflect on the impact of these different state structures and cultural backgrounds on the criminalization of these types of movements and the resulting sense of paranoia that hinders participation.