In 2020, the religious factor turned out to gain importance to both protest mobilizations and to government repression in Belarus, where the initiatives of religious groups had fostered collective action in the state system that was punitive against any dissent. This happened for the first time in the country, which had been affected by the legacies of Soviet anti-religious policies. The forms of protest that churches could suggest fitted neatly into the non-democratic settings of Belarus, providing a necessary opportunity structure for otherwise forbidden mobilizations. Analyzing the attitudes of the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Churches toward the events of 2020 in Belarus, this research note discusses why their social contract with the authoritarian regime was broken. We argue that the churches' stance and the role they played at a time of political turmoil confirmed their status as influential non-state actors who are capable of having their say in the rough circumstances of an authoritarian and repressive political regime. At the same time, it has also confirmed the limits of the authoritarian state to influence religious institutions and the growing opportunities for clergy and laypeople from these institutions to have a common say on important issues of moral and ethical dimensions, inspired by Christian principles and values.

This article considers in detail the choosing of a language for the liturgy and sermons in Roman Catholic parishes in Belarus. The choice of the Belarusian language is part of a deliberate nation-building policy by the Catholic Church. Moreover, a whole network of local peculiarities, historical stereotypes, and political attitudes is concealed beneath the unified cover of a preference for the use of the Belarusian language. Based on interviews with clergy and religious activists, the article shows that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly works out compromise solutions that allow it to adapt to the pressures of the state and believers going through a process of contradictory and conflicting nation-building.

This article analyzes the position of the Christian churches on the protests in Belarus in 2020. This study contributes to the research on the state-society relationship in autocratic regimes by nuancing the thesis that civil society is either marginalized or fully co-opted by the authoritarian state. The protest wave showed that the initiatives of religious groups fostered collective action in a state system that is punitive of any dissent. The article identifies churches as an ambivalent space: one where the state can exercise social control, but where potential resistance to the repressive state might also occur since they enjoy a greater degree of freedom than other organizations in authoritarian Belarus. Moreover, our study argues that religion can be seen as a privileged arena of protest within existing legal frameworks of the “contract” between the state and the church. By looking at the societal engagement of different religious confessions campaigning for their rights and promoting their visions of desirable political development on the grassroots level, this article addresses a range of opportunities to engage in civic activism in Belarus. 

Based on extensive fieldwork across Belarus, this article analyses an ongoing discussion within the Belarusian Orthodox Church (boc) regarding various issues that are key inassessing the country’s identity politics and politico-ideological developments. Since the independence of Belarus in 1991, the Church has continuously played an important public and societal function. A special agreement, signed between the Church and Belarusian Government in 2003, has fostered Church cooperation with various governmental institutions, including educational establishments. Discussing the contribution of the boc to the construction of a distinct Belarusian national identity, we will address the national language, relationships with the state, foreign policy orientation and the Church’s autocephaly. The empirical part of this study is based on seventeen in-depth interviews with clergymen and laypeople from the boc. Our study shows that Church representatives have not hesitated to develop their profound perspectives on the important issues of identity politics and the relationships of the boc and state, and these perspectives were often reflective of wider debates within Belarusian intellectual circles.

This article seeks to cast light on the creation of mixed race and mixed ethnicity identities and the conceptualization of being different in Sweden. A characteristic feature of Swedish society is that racial heterogeneity is only measured in terms of mixing with Swedes. What makes ‘mixed race’ a separate category in Sweden is the assumed extent of the integration into Swedish society of those designated in this manner, along with the intermediate position they hold in the social hierarchy between the normative whiteness of Swedes and the constructed blackness of immigrants and their descendants. Such notions as ‘multiracial’ or ‘biracial’, which are accepted in British and American sociology, do not adequately reflect the Swedish realities since they are neither the precise categories around which Swedes of heterogeneous origin build their own identity, nor the categories yet utilized by researchers and institutions. This study shows that mixed identity in Sweden is largely understood as ‘mixed with the majority population’ and therefore well-integrated. This contrasts with the perspective of the ‘ethnic groups’ that are being mixed, which is linked with being ‘Swedified’ (försvenskad) or having attained Swedishness.