International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

‘Emotions and Protest Participation’ is our Topic of the Month for January 2025. On this topic, enjoy Free Access to this article by Olena Nikolayenko (Fordham University, USA) published in International Sociology, ‘I am tired of being afraid’: Emotions and protest participation in Belarus. Read on to know more about the author’s trajectory and work.

Olena Nikolayenko

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engage on that research?

O. Nikolayenko: In the summer of 2020, I was struck by the fact that so many people took to the streets to protest against the tyrannical government in Belarus. Individuals from different walks of life participated in protest marches despite a high level of state repression in the country. It was a remarkable case of civil resistance under precarious conditions.

Do you have any video, recorded conference, or online material that you would like us to share with others?

O. Nikolayenko: I attended a special event devoted to the opening of a mural honoring Belarusian political prisoners at the Belarusian House in Warsaw, Poland in August 2023. The Belarusian musician Lavon Volski performed his songs, and I recorded a fragment of his performance. The Belarusian-language song is titled “The Sun Will Help Us” (Sontsa nam dapamozha).

What would you emphasize about your academic trajectory? Can you highlight which have been your academic positions, universities, awards, departments and research centers?

O. Nikolayenko: I am a Professor of Political Science and Director of the FCRH Honors Program at Fordham University. Originally from Ukraine, I received my PhD in political science from the University of Toronto and held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law before joining Fordham. Most recently, I was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University (the IRES Visiting Researcher Program), the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania (Title VIII Research Scholar Program), the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, and the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan (Foreign Visitor Fellowship). My research interests include comparative democratization and contentious politics, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe. I am the author of three books, Citizens in the Making in Post-Soviet States (Routledge, 2011), Youth Movements and Elections in Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Invisible Revolutionaries: Women’s Participation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan (Cambridge University Press, 2025).