Paper short abstract:

The presentation examines navigation of different futures prospects and care (those of two states and of kinship networks) in Polish-populated parts of Belarus, where choice-making of the youth is vastly shaped by the idioms of geopolitical and civilisational rivalries between the West and the East.

Paper long abstract:

In mostly Polish-populated rural areas of north-western Belarus, the growing discrepancy between living standards of Belarus (a stagnating semi-authoritarian state) and Poland (the economically advancing EU member), puts various local actors – parents, children finishing school and choosing their future, and school officials, – in need of problematic coordination of mutually exclusive visions of the future prospects and care, differently allocated to different actors of national and local level. Local educational agencies that openly try to coerce the youth to stay in the country, are often seen as profoundly ineffective and 'stealing our children's future' for ideological reasons, while Polish state-actors foster ‘kin-immigration’ from ‘the East’, which only instigates the tension on the ground.

In my presentation I demonstrate how uneven power relations of institutionally arranged moralities of local, ethnic, national and ‘civilisational’ belonging affect the action of local actors, critically engaging with literature on the state, kinship and Europeanness. I draw on 12-month long ethnographic research conducted in the region.

Moral contours of parental care are shaped by mobilisation against the malevolent agencies of their 'own' yet civilisationally alien (‘Bolshevik’, ‘Russian’) state, underpinned by the 80 years-long tensions between the state and local community. Such antagonism is also fuelled by vastly uneven infrastructural promises of the two countries and their respective civilizational projects (the ‘European’ one of Poland and the quasi-Soviet one of Belarus). Competing visions of welfare, dignified subjectivity and modernity, embedded in conflictual geopolitical trajectories, only aggravate the burden of navigation of problematically exclusive personal potentialities. Various tactics of subversive action emerge, causing further moral ambiguities (i.e. emigration, saving the future generations while debilitating local community).