One country, two stories
Getting ready to travel home for the recent winter break, I packed books on authoritarianism, installed Tor to avoid being monitored on the Internet, and deleted some political cartoons from my computer. I was flying to Belarus to see my family and to research civic activism. Three days earlier, Belarus had what was only its fourth presidential election. The winner was certain. President Aleksandr Lukashenka has ruled the country since 1994, which inspired a popular joke that running for president of Belarus requires a 10-year presidential experience. Expecting nothing unusual, I did not follow the election process. A Ph.D. student in Harvard’s Department of Government, I learned about massive protests in Minsk only when contacted by a foreign news network. Reading the Western media that was suddenly rife with horror stories there, I grew anxious. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest voting irregularities. Hundreds of people were...