New CSCW 2026 Paper Explores How Belarus's Protests Reshaped the Role of IT Professionals

Vasil Navumau, the founder of RADAR_BY, and Jean Hardy have published a new paper, "Digital Expertise Under Pressure: The Evolution of IT Professionals' Roles in Belarus's Contemporary Protest Movement," accepted to CSCW 2026, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

The 2020 Belarusian protests have been analyzed from many perspectives. This paper takes a different angle: the transformation of the expert role of IT professionals who played a prominent part in the movement. It draws on 11 in-depth interviews with Belarusian IT professionals, including people directly involved in technological initiatives supporting the protests. The authors look not only at what they built (election verification systems, secure communication channels, alternative financial infrastructures) but also at how their expertise and their understanding of their own roles changed over time.

A central theme is the encounter with the limits of technological solutionism. The belief, common in the IT industry, that virtually any social problem can be addressed with a technological solution increasingly ran up against state adaptation and repression, as well as the limitations of technology itself. As a result, the role of IT professionals expanded from building tools toward knowledge sharing, risk management, and digital literacy.

The paper complements existing work on the technologies of protest, including Virtual Spaces of Freedom by Vasil Navumau, Dmytro Khutkyy, Mike Cole, and Olga Matveieva, and Lesia Rudnik's Machinery of Dissent, by asking what happens to professional expertise when it becomes a resource for political action and meets problems that code alone cannot solve.

For Navumau, this is his first publication at one of the leading venues in HCI/CSCW, which makes the paper particularly meaningful.

The authors thank Vika Andrukovič for conducting the interviews, and the community of IT professionals who contributed to the research, including Yuliana Shemetovets, Yaraslau Likhacheuski, Pavel Liber, and Sasha Asterman.

Read the paper: Digital Expertise Under Pressure (ACM Digital Library)