Nine Stories of One Crisis

Context and stakes. After the 2020 Belarusian presidential election, whose official results were rejected by a large part of society, the country experienced its largest-ever protests and their violent suppression. Hundreds of thousands emigrated, and public politics inside the country was effectively eliminated. The Coordination Council (KS) — a representative body of the Belarusian democratic forces created in 2020 and operating mainly from abroad — became one of the structures through which a claim to democratic representation is advanced. In spring 2026, Belarusians abroad (and partly inside the country) elected the fourth-convocation KS. These elections took place not amid a brief crisis but under conditions of prolonged exile, mass repression, the collapse of legal politics at home, and Russia’s war against Ukraine, in which the Lukashenka regime is implicated as Moscow’s ally. As emigration became the principal arena of politics, the dispute over who may speak in the name of Belarusians intensified.

The corpus and why it is analytically valuable. Criticism of émigré political structures points to real limits on their representativeness: detachment from the experience of people in the country, dependence on external infrastructure, unequal access to resources, and the risk that public opinion is replaced by the opinion of the most visible figures. Yet these limits do not negate the fact that developed political positions can today be publicly articulated chiefly in emigration, since repression and the destruction of legal participation suppress such articulation inside the country. The bloc programs therefore matter not as proof of the indisputable legitimacy of émigré institutions but as the most comparable corpus of political statements: all nine arose in one electoral situation, under one procedure, with one claim to representation. This synchrony enables a “clean” comparison — differences cannot be attributed to differing circumstances of creation, so they become material for analyzing differences not only in the content of promises but in how each program portrays the crisis, the acting subject, the permissible instruments, and the desired future.

The animating question. Nine lists competed, each acting as a political actor: advancing a representative claim, explaining the crisis, defining possible modes of action, and offering its own image of the future. On the surface the programs say nearly the same thing — the regime is illegitimate, political prisoners must be freed, Belarus must be democratic and independent, Russian dependence is a threat, pressure on the regime must be maintained. Such shared formulas, migrating from program to program, produce what discourse scholars call the appearance of a discursive coalition (Hajer, 1995); the difficulty of distinguishing the blocs’ substantive positions is also noted in empirical work on the field, even to the point of characterizing the factions as lacking distinct ideologies (Pierson-Lyzhina, 2025). Hence the question shaping the analysis: either the democratic field is genuinely unstructured and the nine lists are variants of one position, or differences exist but lie at a level captured neither by thematic comparison nor by the classification of thick ideologies — a level at which the field proves, on the contrary, ideologically structured, though thinly. The article argues the second. The verdict that the blocs lack distinct ideologies (Pierson-Lyzhina, 2025) is, on this reading, an artifact of a coarse instrument: a shared democratic vocabulary is no guarantee of shared positions, since the meaning of each common thesis depends on which crisis it is tied to, whose action it justifies, which boundary it draws, and which future it sustains — connections that a morphological, not a thematic or thick-ideological, reading brings out.

The instrument and its cost. This is why the analysis requires a complex instrument, whose cumbersomeness is the price of access to the level at which programs become distinguishable. First, the initial crisis frames are isolated: the frames through which each program offers to see the situation. This step makes verifiable the decision about which of the several frames present in every text is the root one. The frames are then unfolded into a narrative reconstruction: how a frame gives rise to a story with a disrupted order, a hero, an antagonist, a path of action, and a desired ending. The frame answers what is taken to be the essence of the crisis; the story shows who responds to that crisis, how, and toward what future. Each layer extracts what the other cannot, and the distance between them — whether a program’s frame coincides with the disruption that launches its story — is itself a distinguishing feature. This approach avoids two reductions: programs cannot be collapsed into lists of policy measures (they specify not only what is to be done but why that action is deemed necessary and who is entitled to act), nor can they be aggregated into a few metanarratives without losing essential differences, since shared themes (law, sanctions, Europe, Ukraine, political prisoners, the KS, representation) recur across programs but perform different — sometimes opposite — functions. The same action may stand under a moral prohibition in one story and be morally obligatory in another.

Structure of the article. The methodology section justifies combining frame analysis and narrative policy analysis, supplemented by representative-claim theory and the concept of discursive coalitions. The initial frames are then isolated and nine dominant stories reconstructed. The stories are subsequently compared along the main lines of divergence — who acts and in whose name, what counts as the obstacle, to whom the action is addressed, where the boundary of the permissible runs, how political time is organized. A concluding comparative block fixes the political work of each story, its mobilizing register, and the unresolved tensions it leaves behind.

Limits. A program is not identical to the organization advancing it and does not prove that organization’s capacity to realize the stated policy. But this limitation partly reflects a property of the field itself: under a destroyed legal space at home, contested representation, and low turnout in KS elections, the ordinary mechanisms for confirming a mandate work weakly. The claim to representation is advanced here above all as a narrative act — through a story about who Belarusians are, what happened to them, and who is entitled to speak for them. The article therefore centers only on what the programs themselves say: how they construct the crisis, action, representation, and the future, and on what basis they claim the right to speak for Belarusians or for particular parts of the Belarusian political community. The analysis of narratives thus covers precisely the layer on which the struggle for legitimacy largely unfolds.

The post-2020 democratic structures emerged in a field long described through limited competition and weak institutionalized opposition, kept dependent on the state by an authoritarian regime that used preventive control (Silitski, 2010; Wilson, 2021). After the protests, legal political space collapsed and the representative claim shifted to structures operating outside Belarus. Existing scholarship has approached 2020 primarily through protest mobilization, new forms of self-organization, and changing political subjectivity: as the formation of a new political nation (Kazharski, 2021), as local self-organization and emergent peoplehood (Petrova & Korosteleva, 2021), and as a process generating new subjectivities, emotional styles, and gender roles (Bekus & Gabowitsch, 2023). Attention then shifted from the moment of mobilization to its organizational consequences — the transformation of civil society and the institutionalization of democratic structures in exile (Chulitskaya & Bindman, 2023; Pierson-Lyzhina, 2025) — with the work closest to this article describing the Belarusian transnational “political society in exile” through actors, resources, international recognition, and competing strategies (Kazharski & Pierson-Lyzhina, 2024).

Two gaps follow. First, the newest empirical work registers a widening gap between exile structures and the grassroots diaspora, but does so from the receiving side: drawing on 2025 focus groups in Lithuania and Poland, Navumau (2026) shows the Office and KS are perceived as detached and insufficiently accountable, yet how the structures themselves construct and justify their claim in their own texts remains unexamined. Second, the level of public articulation — how participants define the situation, designate the acting subject, advance a representative claim, and link present to future — is systematically under-studied; within the institutional and ideological frame the blocs appear barely distinguishable (Pierson-Lyzhina, 2025). This article proceeds from the premise that they are distinguishable on a different level — narrative in procedure, and morphological in its ideological yield. The apparent absence of ideology is reread here through Freeden’s (1996) morphological approach: ideologies differ not by the presence or absence of a worldview but by how they decontest core political concepts, and thin ideologies fix only a narrow core while drawing the rest from a shared vocabulary. On this view a uniform democratic lexicon is a shared periphery that can mask divergent cores, so the blocs may be thinly but determinately ideological precisely where thick-ideological classification finds nothing.

The theoretical apparatus is then assembled. Narrative policy analysis describes how actors build stories with a disrupted order, hero, and resolution through which a problem comes to demand a particular action (Bruner, 1991; Jones, Shanahan & McBeth, 2014); the cognate tradition of causal stories shows that defining a cause is not neutral but simultaneously constructs the responsible party and legitimizes a response (Stone, 1989); and frame analysis shows that the selection of some aspects over others sets the very definition of the situation, structurally invisible to those inside the frame (Entman, 1993). Saward’s (2010) theory of the representative claim treats representation not as the reflection of a ready mandate but as a claim constructed in the act of speaking for others — especially productive for diaspora actors, where the boundaries of who represents the nation are themselves contested (Adamson & Demetriou, 2007) and where unequal access to recognition and donor resources weakens ordinary mandate-confirmation, so that the claim is realized chiefly as a narrative act (Al-Ali, Black & Koser, 2001). Finally, Hajer’s (1995) concept of discursive coalitions shows that shared story lines can coordinate action across differences of interest without requiring unity of stories or conscious coordination — a conceptual distinction whose empirical application to the program texts of post-Soviet democratic movements remains undeveloped, and never previously undertaken for the Belarusian case.

The corpus should not be equated with the whole spectrum of Belarusian democratic positions: organizations, expert milieus, and people in the country who did not stand in the elections lie outside it. But the same condition that bounds the corpus constitutes its value — the conditions of creation of all nine texts are identical (one procedure, one occasion, one audience), so the differences reflect not differing circumstances but competing ways of making sense of one and the same situation. This synchronic cross-section of representative claims is what allows analysis of the structure of the field rather than of individual programs.

Object and tradition. The bloc programs are treated as public texts in which collective political actors construct a particular version of the Belarusian crisis and of the necessary action. The object of analysis is not the set of promises but the dominant story through which a program links a disrupted order, hero, antagonist, path of action, and desired ending, on the understanding that events and choices acquire meaning through narrative (Bruner, 1991). Narrative policy analysis exists in two versions: the structuralist, quantitative Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), which operationalizes narrative elements for statistical testing on large corpora (Jones & McBeth, 2010; Jones et al., 2014); and the interpretive version of Roe and Stone, which reconstructs dominant and competing stories qualitatively (Roe, 1994; Stone, 1989). This study belongs to the second. From the NPF it borrows only the structural vocabulary of narrative (setting, characters, plot, moral), while proceeding interpretively. Applied to the genre of an electoral program, the four NPF elements are specified into five: setting becomes the disrupted order (the program situates action in a crisis demanding response); characters are split into hero and antagonist; plot becomes the path of action and mechanism of resolution (a program narrates proposed action, so its plot is a project, not a chronicle); and moral becomes the desired ending (the political conclusion is delivered as an image of a future order). Two adjustments follow from the field: the question of who is entitled to act is a separate object of analysis (Saward, 2010), so the acting subject is not dissolved into the cast of characters; and the represented are deliberately placed outside the character set, since the relation between the hero and those in whose name he speaks is fixed by a separate step as a representative claim, and the non-coincidence of these figures is itself an object of comparison. Victims and allies are recorded across two slots — as object of capture and as the protected / participants in action.

The corpus comprises the electoral programs of all nine blocs that contested the fourth-convocation Coordination Council elections, as submitted to and published by the electoral commission during the campaign period. Analyzing the texts in this officially registered form fixes the corpus at a single point: each program is taken as the version the bloc itself advanced for the election, under one procedure and one set of conditions, which is what makes the comparison synchronic.

Supporting steps. Reconstruction is preceded by frame analysis describing perception of the situation through four functions — problem definition, causal explanation, moral evaluation, and proposed solution (Entman, 1993) — used here as a preliminary qualitative step, not a content analysis in itself, establishing through which root frame a program offers to see the crisis and by which textual markers that frame can be isolated. The causal logic is read through causal stories (Stone, 1989): a condition becomes a political problem once understood as the result of human action and as amenable to intervention, so for each program it matters not only what is named the problem but how its origin is explained, to whom responsibility is assigned, what intervention is proposed, and who is entitled to act — distinctions that matter because the source of the crisis, the immediate target of criticism, and the subject of the solution may not coincide. Representative claims are treated, following Saward (2010), as constructed in the act of speaking for others rather than reflecting a ready mandate. The concept of discursive coalitions (Hajer, 1995) is used not as a standalone procedure (story lines were not coded, actors’ practices not traced) but as an interpretive frame for assessing whether the shared vocabulary performs coalitional work — distinguishing coordination of action, possible across different stories, from the reducibility of the stories themselves, which such coordination does not require.

Roe’s procedure and the scope of this study. Roe describes work with such stories as four steps: (1) identifying dominant narratives; (2) identifying narratives of another type — non-stories lacking narrative form, and counterstories directed against the dominant ones; (3) comparing the two sets, from which a metanarrative is generated (for Roe it is not constructed over the stories but “told” by their very comparison); (4) testing whether the metanarrative recasts the problem into a form more amenable to solution. This study performs the diagnostic foundation (steps 1–3) of the procedure — reconstructing the competing stories and carrying their systematic comparison up to the threshold of step 3, but not performing the synthesis from which a metanarrative would be told. The reconstruction supplies both sets the procedure requires: stories that assert a position, and counterstories built out of another’s narrative as their own premise (here “Nastup” and “Vash holas”), so step 2 is performed, not merely described. Synthesis is a separate prescriptive task lying outside the article’s descriptive aim.

Frame and narrative are kept analytically distinct. This is not a doubling of the analysis but a solution to the problem of selection: most programs contain several frames at once, and more than one story could be reconstructed from a single text. Frame analysis secures the verifiability of the choice — before unfolding a story, one must establish by criteria of dominance and textual markers which frame is the root one.

Criteria of dominance. Roe’s dominant narratives organize a whole controversy; here dominance is operationalized at the level of the single text, so that the nine dominant stories are themselves the competing narratives of one controversy — a legitimate adaptation justified by the structure of the field, where the contest is among nine competing dominant stories rather than story versus non-story. A frame is dominant if it defines the originating cause of the crisis rather than one of its manifestations (other frames appearing as consequences or special cases), organizes the moral evaluation and the proposed solution, and is anchored by stable textual markers (recurrent formulas, metaphors, causal links). A story is dominant if it sets the disrupted order and ending of the program as a whole rather than of one thematic block, subordinates the other motifs (which function as means, not as autonomous plots), and survives a coherence test: mentally deleting it destroys the program’s logic, whereas deleting subsidiary lines does not. Because all three conditions test dominance through the boundaries and subordinating force of the story, the four-element frame carries the load; the antagonist — which substantively differentiates stories from one another — is redundant for testing dominance within a single program. Where several autonomous thematic lines run, what is recorded is not a single story but a hierarchy: a leading narrative and lines subordinated to it.

Reconstruction procedure (sequential): isolating each program’s initial frames through stable semantic markers (illustrated by “Volia,” where dictatorship and unfreedom are derived from external control, so the dominant frame is hybrid occupation rather than the more conspicuous dictatorship theme); fixing the representative claim (Saward, 2010); reconstructing the causal story (Stone, 1989); isolating the structural narrative elements in the five-part specification; determining the dominant story by the criteria above; testing its stability through additional parameters (type of legitimacy justification, moral boundary, addressee of action, mobilizing register, institutional concreteness); testing the distinguishability of stories by comparing thematically close programs to verify that a shared theme does not mean a shared story; and testing by negative cases — most clearly the Latushka–Rukh “Za Svabodu” coalition, readable as a story of international pressure, of legal responsibility, or of diaspora support, but assigned the dominant story of the distinction “Belarusians are not the regime,” since that alone sets the disrupted order and ending while the other lines serve as means of holding the distinction on the international agenda. As with “Volia” at the frame stage, this shows the dominant configuration to be the result of a verifiable choice among competing readings, not a self-evident datum of the text.

After reconstruction, the narratives are compared along the axes: main crisis, acting subject, path of solution, addressee of action, type of legitimacy, moral boundary, mobilizing register, image of the future, and institutional concreteness — axes that do not introduce a new classification over the nine stories but allow the already-reconstructed configurations to be compared.

Delimitation. The blocs’ political weight (organizational resources, electoral results, social bases, actual capacity to deliver) lies outside the analysis; narrative force cannot be read as evidence of a real mandate, since these dimensions are independent. This partly reflects a property of the field: where there are no recognized elections, no uncontested procedure, and no stable ground to appeal to, legitimacy is not confirmed but advanced, and the claim is made above all as a narrative act (Saward, 2010). The limit of the method thus coincides with a property of the object — the text is silent because, beyond the text, the mandate is not fixed either. Qualitative reconstruction is therefore not a forced substitute for unavailable data but a method matched to the object: pitched at the level of the claim rather than the confirmed fact.

Before reconstructing the stories, each program’s initial frame — the lens through which it offers to see the crisis — is fixed. This step does not duplicate the narrative reconstruction but makes it possible: the programs are multilayered, several frames coexist in each, and without a verifiable decision about which is the root one, reconstruction would be arbitrary.

The two-layer design also yields its own result. A frame may be anchored in any of Entman’s four functions, whereas a story is always launched by a disrupted order; frame and disrupted order therefore sometimes coincide and sometimes diverge, and that distance is itself informative. Where the dominant frame is named through problem definition (“system of hostage-taking,” “threat of the community’s disappearance,” “crisis of representation,” “strategic inertia”), frame and disrupted order nearly coincide. Where the frame is anchored in a cause (“hybrid occupation”), in a solution (“preparing the rules,” “a state for the person,” “restoring the law”), or in moral evaluation (“Belarusians are not the regime”), the reconstruction performs an extra step — unfolding the cause into derivativeness, restoring the disruption to which the proposed order responds, or locating the capture against which the distinction is set. This is not technical: in some programs the mobilizing stimulus is the crisis, in others its cause, its ready answer, or a moral distinction — visible only when both layers are fixed.

The frames map onto the subsequent stories as follows: “threat of the community’s disappearance” → a story of holding the bond together under pressure; “system of hostage-taking” → a story of converting lived risk into action; “hybrid occupation” → a story of de-occupation; “crisis of representation” → a story of control and accountability. The table below presents the frames as empirically grounded entry points; the order of programs follows the order in which the stories are analyzed.

The section presents nine analytical reconstructions of how each program’s dominant frame unfolds into a story. These reconstructions are deliberately not merged into a few generalized narratives, as narrative analysis usually expects. The programs draw on a single democratic vocabulary and converge on particular themes, but behind the coincidence of words lie different configurations: who speaks, from where, to whom, what counts as the originating problem, where the boundary of permissible action runs, and how the ending is imagined — each of these is connected differently in each program.

The order (neither alphabetical nor electoral) follows how political action itself is understood in the reconstructed narratives. First come the stories where action is the holding of community, subjectivity, sovereignty (Enough Fear, Belarusy dzeyannya, Volia). Then those where action is the building of transition rules, a normal life, a coercive order, external representation, a verifiable result (OGP, European Choice, Law and Order, the Latushka–Rukh coalition, Nastup). The section closes with Vash holas — the story in which action becomes the testing of representation itself.

Each story is reconstructed on the five-element frame specified in the methodology. The prose below carries the voice and temporal movement of each; the matrix that follows sets all nine frames side by side, so that the configurations can be read down the columns — how the antagonists differ, how the endings differ — as well as across each row.

• Enough Fear — Belarusians once showed they exist as a political community; the regime answered to ensure it would not recur. But direct violence is not the only threat: people may grow used to it, the regime may drift back into international agreements, prisoners may become objects of barter, the bond with those inside may weaken. Not to retreat now — to hold out and preserve oneself — is what will one day return the country.
• Belarusy dzeyannya — The regime has made Belarus a country of hostages. But there are people who passed through prisons, the underground, volunteering, war, and loss, and know the system from within. Experience does not place them above others; it obliges them to act — to enter the KS to act through it, achieving results rather than performing representation.
• Volia — Foreign troops entered the country; the dictatorship holds not on its own but as power installed and sustained by an external force. Unfreedom cannot end while the country is occupied; freedom begins with de-occupation, to be achieved by force. A liberated Belarus seeks no new master, standing among free neighbors.
• OGP — The dictatorship destroyed the rules on which the country rests. It will fall, but its fall may become the most dangerous moment, when power is seized by the strongest rather than the elected. To prevent this, the rules of the new state are written in advance, so that the transition is entered with clear rules, not empty hopes.
• European Choice — A dignified life — work, legal protection, security about tomorrow — has become a privilege dispensed for loyalty. But a state for the person already works nearby, in Europe; a team of professionals undertakes to bring that experience home, so that what now goes to the few becomes simply life.
• Law and Order — The state turned its force against those it should protect. Those who kept their oath know the punitive machine from within and know how to dismantle it — not for revenge but for justice: the guilty answer in court, the slandered are rehabilitated, and force returns under the law and society’s control.
• Latushka–Rukh coalition — The regime appropriated the right to speak for Belarus; the longer it lasts, the more the world grows used to not distinguishing Belarus from Lukashenka. The main work proceeds where this identification forms — in parliaments and international institutions — holding one distinction in every office: Belarusians are not the regime.
• Nastup — For five years democratic politics repeats itself — more sanctions, resolutions, exile institutions — while results do not come and the imprisoned pay the price. Belarusians tired of permanent exile judge politics only by verifiable results; sanctions become an instrument of bargaining, each tightening or easing buying something concrete.
• Vash holas — Exile institutions have long spoken for Belarusians; what is missing is any sense that it changes a life. Representation that answers to no one is imitation. Only Belarusians themselves, as a community that decides, checks, and demands, can reclaim it — and the KS has 99 days to prove it is needed.

Allies, victims, and the represented

Beyond the five frame elements, three further figures recur across all nine stories — allies, victims, and the represented — and the way each behaves is itself revealing. Allies (Ukraine, international partners, democratic neighbors) are everywhere built into the path of action — as instrument or condition of resolution, never as autonomous agents. Victims (political prisoners, threatened families, the persecuted) are distributed across two slots: in the obstacle they display the mechanism of capture; in the path of action they become the protected / those to be freed. The represented, by contrast, behave variously. In some stories they are identical to the hero (Enough Fear’s community of resistance is whom it represents; Belarusy dzeyannya’s hero is set apart by experience but returned by obligation). In others a distance opens — a professional team speaking for people whose everyday life should become the norm, a coalition of international access speaking for society. In Vash holas the relation is inverted: the represented occupy the hero’s position, and those who would represent are reduced to executors. This gap — coincidence, distance, or inversion of hero and represented — is a further axis of difference, analyzed below.

The reconstructions also reveal the unequal standing of the stories within the corpus. Only two function as counterstories in Roe’s sense. Nastup is built against the democratic forces’ dominant strategy; Vash holas against the field’s own dominant narrative of representation. Both are aimed not at a common opponent but at narratives of the field itself, and the criterion here is constitutive: a counterstory does not merely conflict with other stories (all nine diverge along one line or another) but is built out of another’s narrative as its own premise and cannot exist without it. Remove the prior strategy from Nastup’s premise and the story collapses; Vash holas’s disrupted order is the field’s representation narrative turned into imitation. The presence of counterstories means the corpus contains both sets the Roe procedure requires: stories asserting a position, and stories built from another’s narrative as their premise.

The remaining seven stories are aimed against the regime, external control, or a destroyed order. They compete among themselves for attention and support but are not arranged into a logical chain: none is the condition or continuation of another — and this is precisely why the narratives do not aggregate. Each story is closed on its own premise and does not complete its neighbor.

Common words, different plots

All nine programs use a shared democratic vocabulary — freedom, independence, law, Europe, political prisoners, sanctions, representation, responsibility — and at this level a broad consensus seems to appear. But in narrative analysis meaning is set not by the word itself but by its place in the story: which crisis it is tied to, which action it justifies, whom it entitles to speak, and which ending it makes possible. The same concept can work as a moral boundary, an instrument of a deal, an element of international pressure, part of a future legal order, or an image of normal everyday life. Releasing political prisoners sets the limit of permissible compromise in one plot and becomes the criterion of result in another; law restrains force in one, prepares the transition in a second, enters the everyday norm of a “state for the person” in a third. This makes the familiar binaries imprecise: the programs resist any stable split into “radical” and “moderate,” “national” and “pro-European,” because each story binds disrupted order, hero, antagonist, path, and ending in its own way. The comparison therefore proceeds not around themes but around divergences in the logic of political action itself.

The comparison parameters set in the methodology distribute unevenly here, and the distribution reflects the analysis. The main crisis is already fixed at the level of frames and disrupted orders, so it forms no separate line. Acting subject and type of legitimacy are inseparable: in this corpus the question of who acts passes immediately into the question of the ground on which the right to act rests. The path of solution is disclosed through the structure of the obstacle, since the obstacle sets what response looks necessary and sufficient. The moral boundary and political time each require their own treatment, with time drawing in the image of the future and its institutional concreteness. Closing the comparison is the mobilizing register, treated not as a separate axis but together with the political work of the stories and the tensions each leaves unresolved.

Who acts, and in whose name

All stories speak of or for Belarusians, but the figure of the political subject is built differently — to the point that in some stories Belarusians are not the subject at all. In some they act for themselves: as a community preserving itself under pressure (Enough Fear), as people of action turning lived risk into responsibility (Belarusy dzeyannya), as a political nation liberating the country (Volia), or as a community controlling its representatives (Vash holas). In others Belarusians appear rather as the object of care and protection: people whose everyday problems a state-for-the-person must solve (European Choice), the harmed whom a restored law must protect (Law and Order), a society whose voice is held in international politics (the coalition), a country for which transition rules are prepared (OGP), people in prison and exile for whose sake bargaining is conducted (Nastup). The wider the word “Belarusians” is used, the less obvious who exactly acts and whose situation is central. Each story thus solves a double task inside that word: it chooses a vantage point and distributes who will act and who becomes the addressee of care.

The boundary between subjecthood and the addressee position runs not only between stories but within them. Vash holas makes Belarusian subjecthood a programmatic promise rather than a present state: the controlling community has yet to be created — the story speaks in the name of a subject it must itself produce. Nastup draws the line still more sharply: its hero belongs among Belarusians and its ending is voiced for them, yet the people in prison for whose sake the bargaining proceeds do not take part in it. Partly this is set by the hostage condition itself — one who has become the object of a deal cannot be its party. But the condition does not predetermine everything: there remains the question of what weight the will of the prisoners themselves carries — transmitted refusal, families’ voice in shaping the packages. On this the story is silent, transforming the forced into the chosen: they are negotiated about without them. A program built on criticizing barren gestures for the sake of real people reproduces the very configuration the field’s slogan — “nothing about Belarus without Belarusians” — is directed against.

This distribution relates the hero to the represented differently in each story: coincidence (Enough Fear), coincidence held by a caveat (Belarusy dzeyannya), distance (European Choice; the coalition), and inversion (Vash holas). Coincidence, distance, and inversion are not stylistic variants but different answers to where the source of political will lies — inside the represented, beside them, or above them. And the gap between hero and represented makes the question “who acts?” pass at once into “on what ground?”. The right to act is derived variously: from steadfastness and the bond with the community (Enough Fear), from lived risk turned to obligation (Belarusy dzeyannya), from a kept legal-parliamentary tradition (OGP), from professional competence (European Choice), from knowing the coercive system from within (Law and Order), from international access and ties (the coalition), from the capacity for verifiable results (Nastup), or from readiness to be accountable (Vash holas). Volia stands apart: its right to act is derived not from the subject’s qualities but from the country’s situation — occupation authorizes resistance. Yet no single ground is a self-sufficient source of legitimacy: lived violence does not replace a procedure of accountability, competence does not equal a mandate, international access does not exhaust the bond with society. The struggle over representation therefore runs not only between organizations but between different ways of grounding the right to speak.

What counts as the chief obstacle

All programs oppose the regime, repression, and Russian dependence. But a narrative must also define how the opponent blocks action: the antagonist of the frame is not the enemy’s name but the manner in which action is blocked, and it is by this that the stories split into four configurations.

In some, the obstacle is the rupture of the political community (Enough Fear): fear, fatigue, exile, prisons, and the normalization of violence threaten the very bond that holds Belarusians together; the answer is holding. In others, the capture of subjectivity, with an important difference of level: in Belarusy dzeyannya the people themselves are captured (turned into instruments of mutual control); in Volia the country’s choice is captured; in the coalition the voice is captured; in Vash holas representation is captured (so the institutions’ unaccountability is, for this story, a form of the same capture). The common type does not erase the difference of level, since in all four the answer aims at return. A third group sees the obstacle as the destruction of order (OGP, Law and Order, European Choice): law, court, elections, coercive structures, property, and services have ceased to work as predictable rules, so the answer is preparation and restoration. Finally, one type locates the obstacle in the ineffectiveness of democratic politics itself (Nastup, joined by Vash holas, whose critique grows from the capture of representation): the problem is the repetition of habitual actions yielding no verifiable result. This is the only obstacle situated partly inside the democratic camp — the antagonist splits into the regime and the field’s own inertia.

No single prevailing obstacle forms across the stories. The regime, repression, and Russian dependence form a common background, but each story specifies differently what exactly is blocked — and so the answers differ: holding, restoring the capacity to act, preparation and restoration, revision of strategy. Stories adjacent by type of blockage prove irreducible along other lines: shared diagnosis does not mean a shared story. The obstacle types also correlate with frame anchoring: all three stories with solution-frames fell into the destroyed-order group — a frame named through the answer presupposes that what is broken can be restored, so the type of answer is set already at the level of the frame.

To whom the action is addressed

The stories differ not only in what is blocked but in whom the unblocking action targets. The addressee of action — whom it must change, compel, persuade, or create — coincides neither with the antagonist nor with the represented and, unlike them, forms no separate slot of the frame: it is the directedness of the path of action, reconstructed from the relation of elements rather than standing beside them. The addressee is not deduced from the obstacle: the same blockage can be removed through different actors (Belarusy dzeyannya and Volia share a captured subjectivity, but one turns action inward, the other onto the opponent; Vash holas could address the crisis of representation to the regime that destroyed its conditions, yet addresses it to the field’s own institutions). The scene of action, in turn, is derivative of addressee and path and forms no independent line.

Some stories address the democratic field itself: Belarusy dzeyannya demands that the KS turn representation into influence; Vash holas addresses the same institutions in another modality — not to make them work but to call them to account. Two stories addressing the regime diverge more sharply than any other pair: for Volia the regime and the external force behind it are a compelled addressee (not spoken to, but displaced); for Nastup the regime is a counterparty (a side of a deal, spoken to without recognition, every overture priced). Compulsion and bargaining exclude each other not as means but as definitions of the opponent. A special case is Law and Order — the only story addressing action inside the opponent’s apparatus, to those in uniform who may choose the oath to the people, drawing the front line through the regime rather than between field and regime. The coalition addresses third parties (governments, parliaments, institutions) — politics through an intermediary is not its weakness but its construction, since “Belarusians are not the regime” has meaning only in the eyes of one who might conflate them. The remaining stories address people and community variously: Enough Fear its own (and, on a second contour, the world); European Choice Belarusians as recipients of a norm (action directed at people but demanding no action of them); OGP a moment not yet arrived — action addressed to a future time, the corpus’s most unusual addressee.

Divergence by addressee crosses the other lines without repeating them: stories with a shared addressee diverge on the boundary of the permissible, stories adjacent by obstacle strike at different points. The addressee is thus a story’s independent choice of what change is the key to resolution.

Where the boundary of permissible action runs

All programs speak of pressure on the regime, releasing prisoners, and protecting Belarusians, but define differently the limit past which action loses legitimacy. The boundary of the permissible is not a list of rejected means but the point at which a story forbids something to its own hero.

The sharpest boundary concerns contact with the regime. For Enough Fear the limit is the refusal to normalize violence — the regime cannot become an ordinary participant in politics, nor people material for exchange. For Nastup the same problem turns the other way: impermissible is the strategy that leaves prisoners in cells for the sake of a correct but barren position. One narrative limits action by a moral prohibition, the other by a demand for verifiable result — and the same action (negotiating people’s release) lands on opposite sides of the two boundaries. The same logic appears with force: for Volia its admissibility is set by the task of liberating the country; for Law and Order by its subordination to law and civic control, with the limit drawn inside its own camp (“we do not seek revenge, we demand justice” is a prohibition addressed to one’s own). On representation the boundary shifts to the right to speak for others: between representation as access to political platforms (the coalition) and representation as control by the represented (Vash holas).

The boundary is not drawn equally sharply everywhere, and that unevenness itself differentiates the stories. For OGP the limit runs along how rules are set — prepared in advance and open to debate, versus dictated at transition by whoever proves strongest; its own work approaches that boundary, since preparing rules for all always risks substituting for shared participation in setting them. For European Choice the boundary is not thematized at all — the only story in the corpus where a limit is placed on the opponent but not on the hero’s own action; transferring a ready norm has no side that ought to be constrained, and the hero decides for people what their norm will be. This absence of self-limitation is not neutral: it leaves undrawn the very boundary OGP at least sees. For Belarusy dzeyannya the boundary runs inside its own ground: lived experience “does not confer moral superiority” — a rare self-limitation aimed at the source of one’s own legitimacy.

The dispute between stories is thus not about means as such (negotiations, sanctions, force, advocacy, reform) but about the criterion of their admissibility: action may be justified by a moral boundary, a verifiable result, the task of liberation, legal control, or accountability. The familiar opposition “values versus pragmatism” is therefore insufficient: it assumes some stories defend principles and others pursue results, whereas here moral prohibition, demand for result, legal control, and accountability all act as competing value grounds. The field is divided not into the principled and the pragmatic but by which ground is recognized as justifying — and by whether the prohibition is addressed only to the opponent or also to oneself.

The future and political time

All programs are oriented toward the future of a democratic Belarus, but that future is not equally near, equally detailed, or equally tied to present action. In some it is deferred: first one must hold out and keep the bond (Enough Fear), regain subjectivity (Belarusy dzeyannya), or liberate the country (Volia). In others it is an order to be prepared in advance: rules, court, elections (OGP); welfare, education, services (European Choice); law and control over force (Law and Order). In a third it contracts to a verifiable result: are people freed, have the conditions of return changed (Nastup), has the institution proved its usefulness within the allotted term (Vash holas). The coalition stands apart: its future — a “democratic independent Belarus” — is set beyond the horizon of present work, whose time is filled by holding the society/regime distinction, which does not bring the ending nearer but keeps it from becoming impossible.

This difference sets the criterion for judging action: a story of prolonged resistance cannot be judged by immediate result (its task is to keep future action possible), whereas a story of managed transition demands measurable steps or loses its own ground. Tied to tempo is the institutional concreteness of the future, and here the corpus shows a regularity: the future is described in more detail the farther its definition stands from the represented themselves. The most elaborated images belong to stories where the order is prepared or transferred for people (OGP, European Choice, Law and Order); the sparest belong to stories where the future is to be defined by Belarusians themselves (Vash holas is detailed in procedures of control but nearly silent on the content of the future order, because that content is the very matter of the decisions “you decide”). Detail is thus not a sign of a program’s maturity but a trace of the distribution of roles: a detailed order and an open procedure for defining it almost never appear together.

In other words, what differ are not only images of the future but the admissible tempo of politics — and these tempos cannot be reduced to a single scale of effectiveness: what reads as patience and steadfastness in one story reads as inertia in another. Mutual reproaches of “appeasement” and “barrenness” are, from this angle, less moral diagnoses than a collision of incompatible temporal regimes: the sides measure the same action by different clocks. Hence one of the main rifts: the stories answer differently when politics must prove its viability — at once (through released people, services, accountability), before the transition (through prepared rules), after the country’s liberation, or in the long time of resistance. In each story the future not only completes the plot but sets the temporal regime of action in the present.

The political work of a narrative is the function a story performs within the political field: what it makes visible, which action it justifies, to whom it ascribes the right to speak and act, which boundary of the permissible it draws, and which image of the future it sustains. Under uncertainty and conflict such a story does not merely express a position; it stabilizes the premises of action, since it sets what counts as the chief crisis, which causal links to treat as significant, which risk is primary, whose action is necessary, and by what signs to judge the result.

This function is performed through a definite mobilizing register — not the authors’ emotion or the audience’s presumed reaction, but the affective-rhetorical mode through which a story turns a diagnosis of crisis into an impulse to act. The register shows by what energy a program holds together crisis, subject, and ending, and is therefore treated together with political work rather than as a separate axis. The table below brings three parameters together: how the story mobilizes, what function it performs, and what tension it leaves unresolved.

The register explains why, inside each story, one action looks necessary, another insufficient, a third impermissible: steadfastness justifies holding the community; fatigue demands result; disappointment leads to control; indignation to justice; hope to an image of normal life. In this sense the register is part of the narrative logic through which the function is realized.

Mobilizing energy is distributed unevenly across the corpus, and this itself differentiates the stories. In some, the register carries a genuinely affective charge (fear of disappearance, indignation at arbitrariness, disappointment in institutions, fatigue with a barren strategy). In others it is closer to a rhetorical strategy than a feeling: the coalition’s “insistent distinction of society from regime” or European Choice’s “hope for a normal life” describe not so much an emotion as a way of holding attention on a particular frame. The distance between frame and disrupted order, fixed when the frames were isolated, returns here as a difference in the mode of mobilization: the farther a program’s frame stands from the disruption itself, the less its register draws on affect. The register is therefore recorded as an unevenly expressed parameter, not as an obligatory emotional coloring of every story.

Finally, the summary comparison makes visible an asymmetry that forms no separate line but characterizes the field: only three stories thematize the very institution whose election they contest. Belarusy dzeyannya demand that the KS exert real influence; Vash holas proposes a timed test; Nastup criticizes its inertia. The other six are practically silent about the KS, their stories unfolding as though the site of the claim were neutral. Silence about the institution through which the right to speak is asserted is itself a position — one that leaves the question of the KS’s status to the stories for which it has become part of the crisis.

The analysis shows that a shared democratic vocabulary does not compose a single political story. The conclusion proceeds in three movements: first it gathers what the two-layer analysis (frames and stories) established about the structure of the field; then it states why the nine stories do not aggregate into a few metanarratives, and what this implies for discursive coalitions; and finally it sets out the four axes along which the positions do not complement but exclude one another.

From the two layers to a property of the field. At the level of frames the differences appeared in the initial ways of naming the crisis and in the function through which the frame is named: four programs fix the crisis through problem definition itself, the rest through its cause, a ready solution, or a moral distinction. Frame and disrupted order therefore did not coincide in every program. Where the frame was fixed otherwise than through the disruption, the disruption had to be reconstructed separately. This distance shows the source of mobilization (the crisis itself, its cause, a ready answer, or a moral distinction) and would have been invisible had the analysis confined itself to either frames or stories alone. In the comparison it surfaced twice: all stories with solution-frames fell into the “destroyed order” obstacle group, and the registers split into the affective and the framing along the same line. What began as a technical distinction between two layers of analysis turned out to be a property of the field itself: some programs are built around the crisis, others around the response to it, and this difference is then traced through the types of obstacle and the modes of mobilization.

Why the stories do not aggregate. The narrative reconstruction clarified how frames transform into stories of political action, each binding disrupted order, hero, antagonist, path, and ending in its own way. The programs do not assemble into a few stable metanarratives, because the groupings of stories along different lines of comparison do not coincide with one another. Stories sharing a type of obstacle diverge on the grounds of the right to act (Belarusy dzeyannya and Volia, sharing a captured subjectivity, turn action in opposite directions). Stories sharing an addressee are incompatible on the boundary of the permissible (Volia and Nastup are both addressed to the regime, but what for one is the only language is for the other a taboo). Stories sharing a temporal regime diverge on the obstacle. Groups formed along one line of comparison do not survive the move to another — and this is what forbids reducing the nine stories to a few “grand narratives.”

The limit of discursive coalitions. The same holds for discursive coalitions. The corpus lets their possible outlines be seen: where a formula is shared by several blocs, those blocs form a potential coalition — the distinction “Belarusians are not the regime,” reaching far beyond its bearer; the demand for a verifiable result, shared by Nastup and Vash holas; support for Ukraine; preparation of the rules of a future order. But a shared formula, as shown, does not mean reducible stories: the corpus’s broadest formula — the release of political prisoners — is simultaneously its most split, since in some stories it is guarded by a moral prohibition on bargaining while in others bargaining is the very path to its fulfillment. Nor does the corpus permit a verdict on whether discursive coalitions actually exist. That would require material of another type — from the circulation of formulas in the blocs’ public communication to traces of coordination in practice, including joint statements and votes within the new KS convocation. Relating the structure fixed here to organizational resources, the actors’ real weight, and actual coordination is a separate task requiring other data.

What can nonetheless be established. If actual coalitions cannot be judged from the corpus, the differences in the logic of political action can be established with some precision. The word “Belarusians” gathers different political subjects in different stories, and in most of them Belarusians stand in the position not of subject but of addressee of care and protection. The obstacle is built differently: rupture of the bond, capture of subjectivity, destruction of order, strategic inertia. Action targets different addressees: the field’s own structures, the regime as object of compulsion or as party to a deal, the inside of its apparatus, third parties, people, or the not-yet-arrived moment of transition. The boundary of the permissible is set not by means but by the criterion justifying them, and by whether the prohibition is addressed only to the opponent or also to oneself. The political time of the stories is incompatible: from prolonged resistance to a short test of usefulness.

The four axes. All these differences reduce to four axes — lines of division along which positions do not complement but exclude one another. This criterion is stricter than mere divergence, so not every line of comparison becomes an axis. Differences in the structure of the obstacle and in the addressee form no axes of their own: divergent diagnoses of blockage are compatible with one another, and the sharpest divergence by addressee (the regime as object of compulsion versus as party to a deal) enters the axis of permissible action as its limiting case. The axis of participation in defining the future, conversely, had no separate subsection and is assembled from tensions fixed in the analysis of political time, institutional concreteness, and the boundary of the permissible.

First axis: representation. At one pole the right to act is grounded in lived risk and the bond with the community (Belarusy dzeyannya, Enough Fear); at the other, in the accountability of those in whose name one speaks (Vash holas). Between them lie groundings through professional competence (European Choice, Law and Order), kept legal tradition (OGP), international access (the coalition), and verifiable result (Nastup). Outside the scale stands Volia: its right to act is derived not from the subject’s qualities but from the country’s situation — occupation “authorizes” resistance but does not indicate who exactly is authorized to speak for the nation. And within the scale the grounds do not reduce to one another: lived violence does not replace a procedure of accountability, competence does not equal a mandate, international access does not exhaust the bond with society. Several competing grounds of legitimacy thus coexist in the field, joined by no common procedure. This same rift runs inside the stories as the gap between the hero and those in whose name the story is told — they coincide, diverge, or change places. The split between exile structures and the diaspora that empirical research records at the level of perceptions (Navumau, 2026) turns out to be inscribed in the program texts themselves, as the distance between who acts and those for whom they act.

Second axis: permissible action. The field is divided not into “radicals” and “moderates” but by the criterion that justifies action. At one pole, the moral boundary: Enough Fear builds its position around the prohibition on “trading people” and the refusal to normalize the regime. At the other, the verifiable result: Nastup deems impermissible the very strategy that leaves people in prison for the sake of a pure but barren position. The release of political prisoners through contact with the regime — one and the same measure — receives opposite normative status in the two programs. The opposition “values versus pragmatism” does not describe this rift: moral prohibition, demand for result, legal control, and accountability all act here as competing value grounds. The field is divided by which ground is recognized as justifying, and by whether the prohibition is addressed only to the opponent or also to oneself.

Third axis: political time. The stories determine differently when politics must prove its viability, and these horizons are incompatible. The longest horizon belongs to prolonged resistance, for which a long holding of the community is not a defeat (Enough Fear, Belarusy dzeyannya). The shortest belongs to the test of usefulness, for which delay means imitation (Vash holas with its “99 days,” Nastup with its demand for verifiable steps). Between them lie the time of preparing rules before transition (OGP), the time of de-occupation (Volia), the stretched time of reforms (European Choice), and the time of holding, which does not bring the ending nearer but keeps it from becoming impossible (the coalition). These tempos cannot be reduced to a single scale of effectiveness: what is patience in one story reads as inertia in another. Mutual reproaches of “appeasement” and “barrenness” prove to be not moral diagnoses but a collision of temporal regimes: the sides measure the same action by different clocks.

Fourth axis: participation in defining the future. Many stories formulate strong images of the future: a rule-of-law state, a dignified life as the norm, a democratic independent Belarus, accountable representation. But they diverge on whether the image embeds a procedure of political participation in choosing among options. The future is either presented as a self-evident order to be prepared or built (OGP, European Choice), or given as a mechanism in which the represented themselves set the priorities (Vash holas with its “you decide — we execute”). A strong image of the future and a procedure of participation in defining it are pulled apart in the corpus: the more a program details the desired order, the less it says about who will determine its content and how. The single story in which a limit is placed only on the opponent and not on the hero’s own action turns out to be simultaneously the story with the most detailed image of the future (European Choice).

Poles as cores of thin ideologies. The four axes are more than lines of divergence: each marks a place where a core democratic concept is decontested — fixed in one meaning against its competitors. Freedom, representation, justice, and the proper time of political action are not contested as words — all nine programs affirm them. The dispute begins where these words are given determinate content. The programs diverge at the core: each places a different concept at the center and fixes its meaning differently. For Vash Holas, the central concept is representation, defined as accountability. For Volia, it is sovereignty, achieved through de-occupation. For Law and Order, it is justice, understood as the subordination of force to law. For Nastup, it is result, treated as the criterion by which all action is judged. This is why the corpus produces an appearance of homogeneity and yields, under institutional or ideological classification, the verdict that the blocs lack distinct ideologies (Pierson-Lyzhina, 2025): a coarse instrument reads only the shared periphery and misses the divergent cores.

On Freeden’s morphological account this is precisely the signature of thin ideologies — limited cores that decontest a narrow set of concepts and lean on a broader shared vocabulary rather than supplying a full political worldview. The blocs are not thinly ideological because they are vague; they are thinly ideological because each fixes a small core and borrows the rest. The axes do not lie orthogonal to one another — time and participation in defining the future are partly coupled (the detail of the future order is a function of tempo and of distance from the represented), and several blocs cluster repeatedly at adjacent poles. This coupling is itself the point: it is the stable interlocking of poles across axes, not any single pole, that forms a recognizable ideological profile. One case recurs at the edge of every scale — Volia, whose right to act, addressee, and image of the future all fall outside the others’ ranges. Its systematic outlying is not noise but a sign that its core (sovereignty) belongs to a different conceptual family from the rest, the clearest instance of a distinct thin-ideological configuration within an ostensibly uniform field.

What the axes answer. The four axes answer the question with which the article began: whether the democratic field is structured, given that neither thematic comparison nor ideological classification distinguishes it. The way out of the difficulty depends on the level of analysis. The differences are caught neither by comparing themes nor by classifying thick ideologies, because they lie deeper — in how each program builds its story. It is the narrative reconstruction that brings them out: what a program takes to be the disrupted order, who becomes its hero and on what ground, to whom its path of action is addressed, where it forbids something to itself, and by what time it measures its own viability. Comparing these stories along the set lines is what yielded the four axes. Established first at the narrative level, the differences then prove to be thin-ideological configurations: around each pole sits the decontestation of a core concept, and the story itself is the way that concept draws the rest around it. The method is thus narrative in procedure and morphological in yield — what is reconstructed as nine stories is read as nine thin-ideological configurations.

At this level the field is structured rigidly, to the point of incompatibility of positions — and the same rigidity is what forbids reducing the nine stories to a few groups: a program’s coincidence with another on the periphery does not mean a coincidence of cores, and the groupings formed along one axis fall apart on the move to another. Each of these differences is established not by the reader’s impression but by a verifiable procedure: criteria of dominance, textual markers, comparison along the set lines. This also delineates the limit of the discursive-coalition mechanism: shared story lines assemble a coalition only so long as the stories into which they are built remain compatible; here the shared vocabulary — the common periphery — produces the appearance of a coalition, and of ideological homogeneity, without producing the grounds of either. The complexity of the instrument was the price of moving from “the programs are broadly alike” to a map of the rifts along which the field is already divided. The reconstruction fixes the present configuration of advanced positions, not the future dynamics of institutions: it shows how the space of democratic programs is arranged, not how the forces behind them will behave.

The practical stake and the two remaining tasks. The divergences also have a practical significance. In the approach this analysis draws on, the reconstruction of competing stories is not an endpoint but the ground for a further step: building a metanarrative that would not abolish the conflict of stories but recast the problem so as to make it solvable (Roe, 1994). The present work performs the diagnostic part this requires — identifying the dominant stories and the axes along which they diverge. Without such a map the recasting is impossible, since a metanarrative is built from the comparison of competing narratives, not over them. The axis most acutely in need of such a step is representation, divergence along which blocks joint action. So long as the competing grounds of legitimacy (lived risk, accountability, competence, tradition, international access, result) are advanced as mutually exclusive, the field lacks a common procedure through which its participants could speak and act as a whole. A procedure is not in itself the solution: any rule of joint action will be rejected by those whose ground of legitimacy it lowers. A metanarrative of legitimacy would therefore neither eliminate these grounds nor choose among them, but translate the question “whose right to speak for Belarusians is the true one” into a question of a representation able to hold several types of legitimacy at once. The reconstruction conducted here delineates the conditions of such a recasting without performing it, since building the metanarrative requires separate analytical work — and, as Roe himself stresses, neither the existence nor the uniqueness of a workable metanarrative is guaranteed for any controversy.

Two linked tasks thus remain beyond the article — the empirical and the prescriptive: identifying the actual discursive coalitions, for which the corpus supplies candidate formulas and the axes supply a prediction of the lines of rupture; and building the metanarrative, whose material can only be formulas with a demonstrated unifying force — precisely what the first task establishes. The order is not accidental: recomposing the field begins with verifying what already holds within it.

Thus narrative analysis does not let one choose the “best” program and does not prove the blocs’ capacity to deliver. But it makes visible a political field in which the common language of democracy already exists, while the procedures for joining different subjects, times, risks, and images of the future are not yet formed. The four axes show along which lines this field remains unstitched.