ABSTRACT
Drawing on complexity-thinking and one of its core principles of emergence, the chapter aims to scrutinize the often-overlooked processes of societal self-organization, and their meaning for democratic rebuilding. It argues that while the literature on democratization, identity- and nation-building reflects some important dynamics in the post-2020 Belarusian society, the knowledge gap persists about how informal, horizontal, and bottom-up societal structures emerge and self-organize for collective action, to eventually transform into an enduring force of political change. We draw on the insights from natural sciences concerning the principles of emergence – separation, alignment, and cohesion – and apply them to the social world to examine how people's self-identification and the emergence of grassroots communities have transformed a hitherto dormant Belarusian society into a formidable network of self-sustaining collective action, and a powerful political force of change, which we term here as “peoplehood”.
