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Women have a critical role in sustaining the economy and in the development of trade. However, such role has long been invisible due to orthodox conceptions that have ignored the gender variable in commercial analyses. Today, it is generally accepted that neither the economy nor business are gender neutral and that the performance of these activities often impact negatively the lives of women. Women’s participation in trade, on equal terms as men, in any of the various possible roles ― producer, wage earner, consumer, merchant, taxpayer ― will not only favour the lives of women, but also the performance of the economies in which they participate. Transparency, as a principle of the multilateral trading system, can play a significant role as a strategy for the empowerment of women.
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Book review: ALIEVA, D. (ed.): Anatómia revolúcie: Historické poučenia a sociologické analýzy. Bratislava: Sociologický ústav SAV, 2020. 159 s. ISBN 978-80-89897-21-6.Alieva , D. (ed.): The anatomy of revolution: Historical lessons and sociological analyses. Bratislava: The Institute for Sociology of SAS, 2020. 159 p. ISBN 978-80-89897-21-6.
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Book review: LANDEMORE, H.: Open Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, 272 p., ISBN: 978-06-9118-199-8
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Book review: DUPKALA, R.: Úvod do filozofie dejín: príspevok k problematike historiosofie. 3. vyd. Prešov: Express Print, 2019, 243 s., ISBN: 978-80-89353-16-3 DUPKALA, R.: Introduction to the philosophy of history: a contribution to the problem of historiosophy. 3. ed. Prešov: Express Print, 2019, 243 p., ISBN: 978-80-89353-16-3
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Before the US can make progress on climate policy or environmental policy more generally, the new administration of President Joseph R. Biden must first undo the damage created by his predecessor in office, who dismantled existing US climate policy, pulled the US from the Paris Agreement, and sought to disable the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating polluters. The courts blocked some of the Trump Administration’s more egregious anti-environmental protection policies for violating the 1946 Administrative Procedures Act and/or the express terms of an environmental protection statute (such as the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act), but the Biden Administration still has a great deal of work to do. Already, Biden has announced that the US will rejoin the Paris Agreement as part of its plans not just to reinstate but to expand on climate policies adopted during the Obama Administration. This essay explains how the Biden Administration plans to achieve these climate policy goals, using mostly the very same administrative tools that the Trump Administration used to undo Obama era climate policies. Inter alia, advantages and disadvantages of pursuing policy goals administratively, rather than through legislative processes, will be addressed.
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The environmental implications of the UK leaving the EU have yet to be fully realized, but the picture is by no means all negative. Initially, as far as possible, all EU environmental legislation continues to apply in the interests of regulatory certainty but di-vergences are beginning to emerge. Brexit has led to the proposed establishment of a new independent environmental watchdog, and the Government has committed itself to ambi-tious environmental goals. The Common Agricultural Policy will be replaced by financial schemes that will pay farmers only for public benefits, mainly concerning the environment. At the same time, a consequence of Brexit is that that the UK will see increasing divergen-cies in environmental law and policy within its devolved administrations.
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The european Green Deal is a comprehensive initiative aimed at reshaping the functioning of the european Union towards sustainable development. While the immediate trigger for this initiative of the newly appointed european Commission under Ursula van Leyen was the need to address the challenges associated with climate change and to move towards carbon-free and circular economy – its goals seem to be much more ambitious: to put into practice the concept of sustainable development. Against the background of the concept of sustainability and its various ambiguities and interpretations, the article provides a brief description and analysis of the key pillars of the Green Deal, namely: the financial framework for promoting sustainability, the climate and energy strategy, and the strategy for industry and circular economy. It also presents and critically assesses the horizontal goals of the Green Deal i.e. improving involvement of the public into the decision-making and assuring equal opportunities for marginalised groups.
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in May 2018, the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Directive 2008/98/EC on waste (2018/851) was redrafted. These amendments constitute a direct cause of changes in the internal law of the European union countries in terms of Extended Producer responsibility (EPr). Poland also projects changes to the provisions of national law in order to manage waste in a better and more efficient manner. The packaging deposit-return system (with reference to plastic bottles, glass bottles, cans) currently operates in 10 European countries, covering 26% of the European population. in Poland, the planned date of launching the deposit-return system is January 2022. The aim of the article is to present the concept of EPr and an attempt to diagnose this system comprising the possibility of introducing a deposit-return system, made from the perspec-tive of legal sciences.
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Although the institution of posting workers to provide services in another Mem-ber State does not constitute a significant share in the internal market of the European Union, it has become a thorny issue among its Member States in recent years. For some of them, it meant the possibility of rendering competitive services on the markets of other countries, whereas others perceived it as a threat to gaining access to the labour market. This is especially visible in the recent amendment to the rules on the posting of workers laid out in Directive 2018/957. The split between Member States resulted in action brought to the Court of Justice of the European Union by Poland, representing one of the sides to the abovementioned division. The doubts expressed in the complaint mainly concerned the application of the concept of full remuneration rather than minimum rate of pay and the introduction of the new category of long-term posting.
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This paper illustrates how People’s Republic of China has applied a form of economic diplomacy to Central and Eastern Europe in order to extend its regional political influence. Using the “17+1” Initiative, the Chinese state sought to provide financial privileges to member states so that they would later become dependent on Beijing’s political and economic visions. However, despite the European Union’s concern, the results of the project were not as expected, with great doubts about the initiative’s future. These were confirmed by the position of NATO, which considered that China’s efforts do not represent a security issue for the Alliance’s eastern flank.
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The EU-Turkey relationship finds its basis in the EU Enlargement Policy, which is one of the organisation’s most important foreign policy instruments. Thus, the integration of a relevant actor such as Turkey gains important regional connotations, with one of Turkey’s gains in this relationship being the access to the EU single market. Although the beginning of the relationship seemed promising, its subsequent development is governed by countless divergences and tensions, the result reached so far being eloquent: of the 35 chapters negotiated for accession only 16 were opened, of which only one was provisionally closed. This article aims to highlight the relationship between the two actors, with the effort being directed towards analysing Turkey’s EU accession process. Through a critical analysis of the literature, statements and official documents devoted to the subject, the article provides an overview of the accession process and presents some ideas on the advantages that both actors can gain from this relationship. Subsequently, some opinions are issued on the evolution of the EUTurkey relationship, concluding that in the near future we cannot expect Turkey to fully integrate into the EU.
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The first half of 2021 was marked by the continued spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus throughout the African continent, by the desperate attempts of the UN and regional powers to implement the Ceasefire Agreement in Libya and keep security situation under control, and increasing the number of illegal migrants to Europe. The COVID-19 pandemic did not reduce terrorist acts in the Sahel region, nor did it stop the wave of small immigrant boats to Spain and Italy from Africa. But the coronavirus pandemic has led to the closure of many African borders, bringing the economies of those countries to the brink of bankruptcy and deteriorating the humanitarian situation in North Africa and the Sahel region. The international community has difficulty monitoring the situation in the area, especially the humanitarian crisis and illegal migration, which is seriously affecting security in its vicinity.
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Palestine, a historical land inhabited by both Jews and Arabs, has been the source of disagreement for the two ethnic communities since their establishment in this territory. Over time, as a consequence of this antagonism, the Middle East region has hosted a multilateral conflict generated by a number of factors (historical, ethnic, national and religious), which is currently manifested in three subsequent disputes: Arab-Israeli, Israeli-Palestinian and religious. The social dispute was initially generated by the inter-communal misunderstandings between Arabs and Jews, in the territory of the British mandate of Palestine and degenerated into a series of wars between Israel and the Arab states that led to an open armed conflict between Israel and Gaza. Also, the religious dispute, which permanently accompanied the other two, is related to the equally claiming by Jews and Muslims of both the entire territory of this historical land, as well as Jerusalem. The paper is intended to be a clarification of what the historic Palestinian region represents and how it has transformed under the impact of the conflict generated against the background of the desire for statehood expressed by Jews and Arabs in the same space. In the following, some aspects will be shown presenting the historical sources of territoriality, statehood and conflict in the region, and current forms of Palestinian multilateral conflict, as well as the predominant side of the conflict in the contemporary period, focusing on developments in the first half of 2021, but also some trends that are expected in the evolution of the Palestinian issue.
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On January 6, 2021, an angry mob attacked security forces and stormed the United States Congress, a significant portion of which carried placards containing Christian symbols and manifested ultra-religious conduct. The crowd chanted religious slogans and songs mixed with extremist ideological-political landmarks, QAnon conspiracy theories and racist attitudes. The protesters also followed a ritual found in the Bible, in the Old Testament, in the book of Joshua Navi, an Israelite leader to whom God indicated how he would conquer the City of Jericho, full of corrupt and fornicating people if he obeyed the divine command. The participants in the assault followed the same ritual to “conquer” the fortress of the Capitol a month before and repeated it starting with January 5, 2021. Since religion is the belief in God and represents the relationship between the faithful man and divinity, the acquisition of elements of political ideology by ultra-religious people was considered natural and mandatory in shaping a society to develop on Christian principles in the form of a “Christian city”. In this article, by analyzing the attitude of the Christian community in two distinct phases, before and during and after the assault on the US Congress, the result of the manifestation of the phenomenon of ultrareligiosity combined with an extremist political ideology will be revealed.
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Hezbollah (Allah’s Party) is a non-state actor that has a decisive influence on how political and security dynamics in Lebanon evolve but also manages to have an important impact on the evolution of the entire security complex in the Middle East. However, in order to understand the behavior of this actor, we must understand its main ideological landmarks. Thus, the research question which formed the basis of this study is: How the ideology assumed by Hezbollah leaders influenced the behavior of the organization? Through this study we aim to highlight the historical context of Lebanon during the ‘80s, as well as make an analysis of the main factors that determined the materialization of the Hezbollah organization; to understand Hezbollah’s main ideological pillars and how they influence the organization’s goals and actions; to examine how Hezbollah and Western states perceive each other; and to present the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah from the perspective of the motivations and interests that decision-makers in Teheran have in relation to the growth of their area on influence in the Middle East.
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Conspiracy theories ignore the law of parsimony which states that out of two competing explanations, the simple one should be chosen. Yet, some people tend to favor such theories, no matter how contorted their explanations. The present paper will argue that both extrinsic factors (such as conspiracies and lies fabricated by governments, or unpredictable events also known as Black Swans) and intrinsic elements (a innate human need for story-making) play equally important roles in people adhering to conspiracy theories.
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Jerzy J. Wiatr, P ‒ Pamięć historyczna w służbie autorytaryzmów (rec.: Tomasz Stryjek, Współczesna Serbia i Chorwacja wobec własnej historii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, Warszawa 2020)
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