"Youth Movements in Serbia and Belarus: From Otpor to Zubr"
Olena Nikolayenko, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL
Mon., March 9, 12 noon
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The Serbian youth movement Otpor made international headlines when it mobilized thousands of people and brought down the repressive regime of Slobodan Milosevic. A few months later, the youth movement Zubr, modeled on Otpor, was formed in Belarus to put up resistance to autocratic practices of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the incumbent president running for the re-election. Since 1994, Lukashenka rules the country and uses political violence against his opponents. Why did a model of nonviolent resistance succeed in Serbia and fail in Belarus? This talk will seek to address this question by analyzing the political situation in each country, history of youth activism in the post-Soviet period, and protest strategies of the youth movements.
Olena Nikolayenko (Ph.D. Toronto) is a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research interests include comparative democratization, public opinion, social movements, youth, and corruption. In her dissertation, she analyzed political support among the first post-Soviet generation grown up without any direct experience with communism in Russia and Ukraine. Her current research examines why some youth movements are more successful than others in applying methods of nonviolent resistance to mobilize the population in non-democratic regimes. She has recently conducted fieldwork in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Serbia, and Ukraine.