Following the mass protests in Belarus in 2020 and the subsequent wave of political repression, tens of thousands of Belarusians left the country. Today, several hundred thousand live in exile across Europe, leading to the rapid emergence of politically active diasporic communities. This paper examines Belarusian diasporas in Lithuania, Poland, and the Czech Republic, conceptualizing them not merely as communities of forced migration but as active mnemo-political actors operating under conditions of political and geopolitical uncertainty. The paper argues that uncertainty produced by authoritarian repression, exile, and shifting regional power relations has become a constitutive condition shaping diasporic memory practices, political imagination, and collective identity formation. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 represents a further rupture, intensifying reflections on history, imperial legacies, and the fragility of regional and global orders. In this context, memory emerges as a key resource through which diasporic actors negotiate uncertainty, articulate political agency, and formulate alternative visions of Belarus’s past and future. Empirically, the analysis draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted between 2017 and 2025, including more than sixty in-depth interviews, participant observation, and the analysis of commemorative practices, public events, and diasporic discourse. The paper explores how memory practices are shaped at the intersection of historical legacies, geopolitical frameworks, and host-society contexts, which provide not only institutional infrastructures but also discursive opportunity structures for the political mobilization of the past. Conceptually, the paper introduces the notion of an inter-imperial memory field to capture how contemporary Belarusian memory activism unfolds through the interaction of overlapping historical legacies, including the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Soviet continuity, and alternative oppositional traditions. These legacies function as symbolic resources selectively mobilized to legitimize diasporic identity and stabilize political imaginaries under conditions of uncertainty. The paper compares three diasporic centers in Central and Eastern Europe. Vilnius is shaped by densely layered historical symbolism, Warsaw functions as a laboratory of experimental memory-making in exile, and Prague draws on the legacy of the interwar Belarusian People’s Republic as a resource for cultural diplomacy. Together, these cases demonstrate how memory in exile operates as a form of political infrastructure enabling diasporic actors to cope with uncertainty and intervene in debates on regional order and post-imperial futures.

This paper examines how spatial distance shapes imaginaries of homeland and belonging among Crimean Tatars, a stateless people subjected to repeated episodes of forced displacement. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Crimean Tatars residing in Russian-occupied Crimea, mainland Ukraine, and Western diasporic contexts, the study explores how differing political, legal, and affective environments inform perceptions of the homeland’s present condition and imagined future. While all interlocutors articulate a strong emotional and moral attachment to Crimea, their understandings of responsibility, agency, and possibility diverge significantly across spatial locations. Crimean Tatars living in Crimea tend to foreground everyday survival, community cohesion, cultural preservation, and moral resilience under conditions of repression and surveillance. In contrast, those residing in freer socio-political contexts – particularly in Ukraine and Western diasporas – more often emphasize political mobilization, international advocacy, and the pursuit of Crimean Tatar statehood or meaningful self-determination as a framework for securing collective rights. These differing emphases occasionally generate tensions, moralized judgments, and mutual misperceptions between homeland and diaspora communities. Despite such divergences, aspirations for Crimean Tatar statehood emerge as a powerful unifying motif that sustains transnational connections and a shared political horizon across spatial distance. The paper argues that spatial separation does not simply fragment collective imaginaries but actively reshapes them through differentiated experiences of risk, freedom, and political opportunity. Analytically, the study draws on Avtar Brah’s concepts of diaspora space, belonging, and otherness, alongside Rogers Brubaker’s framework of boundary maintenance, to examine how symbolic and moral boundaries are constructed and contested within a dispersed community. By situating Crimean Tatar imaginaries within broader dynamics of displacement, occupation, and transnational activism, the paper contributes to debates on stateless diasporas, transnational belonging, and the politics of homeland attachment. It demonstrates how imaginaries of the homeland are simultaneously moral, political, and mobilizing, shaping both internal community relations and outward-facing claims for justice and recognition.

The article deals with the of Crimean Tatar identity used as a tool for the russification of Crimean Peninsula. It will show how from the beginning of the annexation in 2014, the Crimean Tatars have been one of the biggest problems and threats to the mechanisms of Russian propaganda and russification and how the new authorities decided to adopt the methods on brutal force and uncompromising subordination, as well as the clear marking of absolute dominance. But when the occupational authorities succeeded in pacifying of political opposition on the peninsula, they changed their attitude toward the symbols and identity of Crimean Tatars. They were no more the symbols of Crimean Tatar extremism and became a part of the new “federal” identity of the peninsula. Crimean Tatars identity was no longer a threat but a tool in political and social actions. This analysis, based in-depth research and partly also on OSINT tools, wants to show dynamically the approach of the occupation authorities toward Crimean Tatar identity is changing and how elements of Crimean Tatar culture can at the same time be symbols of extremism and an artefact of harmonious cooperation between nations. How religion is used, and how folklorization is applied as false proof of strengthening the role of Crimean Tatars in local contexts. Russian propaganda in this context works not only through lies, falsification and manipulation but also through selection and reinterpretation, as well as through the creation of new elements of Crimean Tatar identity. In the wider context of actual and future analysis of such mechanisms requires constant adaptation and an understanding of the broader context of events, which can be used with high variability for political purposes.