How authoritarian power constructs reality — and what this does to society
Belarusian propaganda is not simply a matter of lies, manipulation, or a collection of political messages produced by the regime.
We approach it as a communication system of power, one that offers society a particular picture of the world: it defines insiders and outsiders, explains political decisions and repression, and constructs threats, norms, and visions of the future.
We are interested not only in what propaganda says, but also in how it works, why it uses particular narratives, and what consequences this has for people and the public sphere.
The series brings together research and analytical work by Iryna Sidorskaya conducted since 2022 in cooperation with Belarusian and international research, media, and civil society organizations, and continues as part of Kantrapunkt’s research agenda.
Four interconnected dimensions of propaganda — from mechanisms to consequences
How conspiracy narratives, dehumanization, discrediting, enemy construction, the personalization of power, the sacralization of historical memory, and other mechanisms are used to assign politically useful meanings to events.
How media communication legitimizes the political order, repression, and social hierarchies — and how power is presented as natural, rooted in popular will, stable, and without viable alternatives.
How propaganda frames war and historical memory, relations with Russia and the West, migration, culture, gender, “traditional values,” and other issues, combining individual messages into more durable interpretive frameworks.
How propaganda affects trust and social ties, the way people interpret their own experience, civic and professional agency, and the range of actions they perceive as realistically available to them.
2022—2025
The study examined how Belarusian state media use conspiratorial interpretations of social and political events: how such narratives can be identified, why they are incorporated into propaganda discourse, and how they affect journalistic standards and perceptions of reality.
Iryna Sidorskaya was the lead expert on the study.
Following the study, Media IQ published a dedicated six-part series — ranging from explanations of how conspiracy theories work to analysis of how Belarusian state media use conspiratorial narratives to manipulate public opinion.
This study shifts the focus from analyzing present-day propaganda to a different question: how to avoid reproducing a propagandistic model of state communication after democratic change.
Iryna Sidorskaya co-authored the report. It was prepared as part of a joint project by the Belarusian Association of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.
The study connects the problem of propaganda to the broader question of the architecture of public communication, the role of state media, and professional standards in a democratic Belarus.
Read the report ↗
The study covers five distinct cases of Belarusian state propaganda. By comparing different thematic areas, it seeks to identify the principal strategies and tactics used for propaganda influence and the spread of disinformation.
Iryna Sidorskaya prepared the analytical component of the study across all five cases, drawing on the monitoring and initial analysis.
This made it possible to move beyond documenting individual messages and identify more persistent patterns: the legitimation of power, enemy construction, the use of historical memory, cultural and value-based polarization, the discrediting of democratic actors, and the portrayal of Belarus as a “strong,” “peaceful,” and “independent” state.
For example, in the “3 July” case, an analysis of 34 original media texts identified 19 core narratives grouped into five clusters — from war and historical memory to the cult of Lukashenko, geopolitics, and the justification of social hardship.
In the “Slavianski Bazaar” case, the analysis showed how a cultural event becomes a multifunctional propaganda platform: a vehicle for legitimizing power, reinforcing the alliance with Russia, mobilizing anti-Western sentiment, and promoting “traditional values.”
The study was published under the collective name Belarusian Centre for Strategic Communications. The project was funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland under the program Public Diplomacy 2024–2025 – the European dimension and countering disinformation.
Read the study ↗The topic was studied by Iryna Sidorskaya and Dzmitry Nikanovich both jointly and through separate research projects. Dzmitry Nikanovich holds a PhD in Communication and Media and is an independent researcher.
The resulting academic article was co-authored and brought together different parts of the research corpus.
The authors conducted this work in part within a public task commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland «Public Diplomacy 2024–2025 – the European dimension and countering disinformation».
The study analyzes how Belarusian state media construct the image of Poland and how individual storylines combine into a broader propaganda model.
The focus is not simply on negative messages about Poland, but on the function this image serves in the Belarusian regime’s domestic political communication and in legitimizing authoritarian rule.
The academic article “The Image of Poland in Contemporary Propaganda of Alexander Lukashenko’s Regime: Dominant Narratives”, prepared by Iryna Sidorskaya and Dzmitry Nikanovich on the basis of the study, is forthcoming.
A dedicated study page will be added after the article is published
The research is accompanied by public-facing analysis that translates research findings into a more accessible format and connects theoretical models with current media cases.
Between 2022 and 2025, Media IQ published several successive series by Iryna Sidorskaya on propaganda and public communication.
On weak social ties, denunciations, dehumanization, failures in public communication, and trolling as a mechanism for disrupting communication
On the fundamental differences between forms of information and communication activity, and why propaganda cannot be treated simply as another form of persuasion
On the characteristics of propaganda messages, what distinguishes twenty-first-century propaganda, the possibilities of journalism, and professional approaches to propaganda content
The public-facing analytical output of the study of conspiracy narratives in Belarusian state media
State communication about “traditional values,” gender roles, and perceived “threats” uses mechanisms characteristic of propaganda more broadly. In Media IQ in 2023, a dedicated three-part series examined why state propaganda embraced the “defense of traditional values.”
Gender, Media and Power →In the study of professional agency among forcibly displaced Belarusians, propaganda is considered not only as a system of messages, but also as a factor that can shape how people interpret their own experience and narrow the range of possibilities they perceive as available to them.
Underutilized Human Capital →Understanding propaganda matters for more than simply debunking individual falsehoods.
It allows us to see how communication becomes part of the system of power itself: how it turns political choices into a “natural order,” repression into “protection,” dependence into “independence,” and the absence of alternatives into social consensus.
For Kantrapunkt, studying propaganda therefore also means studying power, the public sphere, and human agency.
