Fear of a Usurper's Stigma
The greatest challenge for the rulers of today’s Russia is legitimising their power in the eyes of the public.
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The greatest challenge for the rulers of today’s Russia is legitimising their power in the eyes of the public.
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Relations between the United Kingdom and Russia remain cordial with growing economic ties. A look underneath the surface, however, reveals an intricate game of spying and tit-for-tat diplomacy.
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Promoted by the slogan “Question More”, Russia Today is the greatest Russian media project since 1991, and was designed to be competition to BBC World and CNN International.
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On March 17th 2012, the world learned of the execution of two young men convicted in the April 2011 bombing of a Minsk metro station. The investigations, arrests and hearings were swift. Yet many doubted the guilt of the accused. Since their execution, public support for the death penalty in Belarus has dropped from almost 80 to 40 per cent.
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Belarus needs a new approach. EU policy towards Belarus should be working out the power system around Lukashenko and getting through to people who are most interested in change.
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Despite co-hosting the EURO 2012 football championship, the most prestigious sports event in Europe, Ukraine remains an outsider in terms of political values. Informal networking is the most prominent governmental standard, with the president traditionally at the top of the pyramid.
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The debate about Ukrainian language and culture consists of constant rows and going from one extreme to the other. “If your given name happens to be Russian, pack up and go back where you belong,” was the advice given to kindergarten children by one extreme-right activist.
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Crowd-surfing through cheering party members with a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand and a smile on his face, Robert Fico rejoiced the results of Slovakia’s general election. Fico’s Smer-SD (Direction-Social Democracy) won a majority of seats and ushered in the first one-party government since 1989.
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The First World War, in addition to producing an extraordinary boom in technology, also saw a proliferation in film production. New media, which had existed for less than two decades when the war broke out, were generally regarded as vulgar forms of entertainment. The war years radically changed the assessment of film, which in many countries was elevated to the status of a national art, able to rouse the population to battle and reveal the “true face” of the enemy. The First World War was unquestionably a period during which cinema rose to supremacy. Its dominant position among the other arts led both policy-makers and film producers to realise that the specificity of the new medium was its ability to create, not just record reality, and that the “truth of time” and “the truth of the screen” were two distinct things that were often impossible to reconcile. In the decades following the war, a canonised cinematic discourse arose that continues to influence the aesthetics and ethics of storytelling about war. Around 1930, the means used to construct film narratives took the shape that today in a virtually unchanged form is still considered de rigueur, and is transferred from one armed conflict to another. To understand contemporary film visions of conflicts, threats and dehumanization, it is necessary to reach back to the films produced during and after the war.
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This article discusses the protests of the summer of 2013 in Istanbul as a struggle for the discursive hegemony over the city’s past. In the context of developing Istanbul into a global city, the administration attempted to impose a vision of the city’s past as an Islamic imperial capital in conjunction with Ottoman imperial glory and neoliberal economics. This clashed with competing visions of the city as an Eastern Roman capital, multicultural, a resident-centred cosmopolis, a theatre of a modernist Turkish state, or a site for leftist struggle suppressed in blood. Gezi Park stood for the right to the city (Lefebvre) articulated through these historical visions.
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This article revisits conclusions from my earlier ‘The Refugee and the City: Is the Camp Indeed a Space of Exception?’ (Critique & Humanism 42/2013). There, I analyzed Michel Agier’s perspective of the refugee camp as a space of exception (a concept, in turn, based on Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’). My discussion then was driven by my own ethnographic material on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, as opposed to the massive refugee camps in Africa which seemed to have been the base for Agier’s conceptualization. However, in 2015, hundreds of thousands of refugees entered Europe, in what the European media and many of its governments proclaimed to be a ‘refugee crisis in Europe’. This crisis rhetoric bears resemblance with that of the‘state of exception’, representing the suspension of law and politics. But beyond media and governmental rhetoric, is Europe indeed facing a crisis and, if so, what is its nature? Is Europe on the brink of a state of exception?
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The aim of this paper is to determine whether municipalities have sufficient tools for shaping spatial policy allowing to maintain or gain (recovery) order and aesthetics of public space as well as whether these tools are used. For the analysis six coastal communes of Western Pomerania have been selected. The reason behind the selection as the object of the analysis of the coastal communes was the assumption that, due to their location in the attractive tourist space, those municipalities are on the one hand subjected to strong pressure senders of advertisers and, at the same time, users of this space expect a high level of spatial aesthetics as a place of recreation and rest.
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This article treats on the problem of historical objects located in the province of Małopolska and used by universities. It features an outline of the history of the palace and the park in the village of Młoszowa near Trzebina, Duke Alexander Lubomirski Foundation Shelter – Main Building, and other components of the complex of the historical character that are currently the seat of the University of Economics in Cracow and Botanical Garden of the Jagiellonian University. The aim of the article is to show how these historic and ancient objects perform their modified and updated function nowadays as well as their economic and financial condition.
More...Современный polis. Размышления над состоянием государства
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The objective of this article is to analyse cyberspace as a warfare environment. The text presents specific forms of action and measures that may be used in cyberspace and become components of modern warfare. As such, they might have a significant impact on warfare and a potential to change its nature, contributing to its hybridisation, although they will not be able to replace conventional means of warfare entirely. Their role will be of utmost importance if they complement conventional measures, and only then will they play a role in determining the balance of power in international relations in the long term.
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The Transatlantic Partnership on Trade and Investment (TTIP) will in all likelihood generate gains first and foremost for large multinational corporations engaged in investment and trade between the United States and the European Union. The agreement brings numerous threats to the countries of the European Union and might significantly weaken the competence of EU and national authorities in formulating policies in such areas as consumer protection or the environment. It will boost competition on both the EU and U.S. markets, undermining workers’ rights and resulting in a further delocalisation of production to countries with lower labor costs. If the ISDS mechanism is included in the TTIP, it will strengthen the position of corporations in disputes with governments.
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Over the past 50 years the United States and European Union states have developed high but divergent consumers protection standards. A free trade agreement based on unifications of standards is unrealistic, so functional equivalents and/or mutual recognition of standards might be a recipe. The EU single market is based on mutual recognition of national standards whenever there is no common EU standard, and an ideological approach to the protection of consumers could undermine the extent of benefits from TTIP.
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M. Pietrasiak, D. Mierzejewski, K. Żakowski (red.), Narzędzia polityki zagranicznej Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej(Justyna Szczudlik-Tatar)
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