Transitions Online_Around the Bloc-Thursday, 22 October 2020
Regional headlines: cluster bombs in Karabakh; Pole gets asylum in Norway; Ukrainian elections; EU and Kosovo at cross purposes; and a gold strike in Siberia.
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Regional headlines: cluster bombs in Karabakh; Pole gets asylum in Norway; Ukrainian elections; EU and Kosovo at cross purposes; and a gold strike in Siberia.
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Regional headlines: Shocking result for Zelenskiy’s party; Azerbaijan captures Karabakh town; Moldova gears for presidential election; a strike in Belarus; and ex-Riga mayor might be running out of luck.
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The article focuses on the obstacles to legal immigration imposed by the Trump administration against those who are already in the US pursuant to their valid non-immigrant classification and those who are abroad and trying to reunite with family members in the US or seeking entry having a legitimate job offer from a US employer. Recent changes in US immigration policy have been achieved through restrictive interpretation and enforcement of existing law by the USCIS which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and by the State Department (DOS) rather than by substantive legislative changes done in Congress. The article provides an overview of the most recent governmental restrictions affecting so called “business immigration” and family-based immigrant processing, and also restrictions on suspension of entry to the US due to Covid-19, introduced through presidential proclamations. Although the federal courts blocked several of these administrative initiatives, the anti-immigrant atmosphere is having a big negative impact on many groups of foreign nationals. Nationalistic notions of “making America great again” that should be accomplished through “buy American and hire American” principle, and legal uncertainty causing ongoing federal lawsuits will undoubtedly lead to America’s further isolationism if President Trump wins the November 2020 election.
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Inflow and settlement of people originating from the Near and the Middle East in Europe is anything but a new phenomenon. It has its long-standing tradition and well documented history. Since the Early Middle Ages these processes were an inseparable element shaping ‘European identity’. Therefore the recent intensification of the migration process from the Middle East to Europe should not be perceived as an unique event. Within such a context, cyclical character of migration processes may be worth consideration. A new contextualization of the recent migration processes needs to take into account new criteria, especially dynamics of the demographic growth. This article argues that aforementioned circumstances in the regions surroundings Europe are of primary importance for its future, and strives for proper understanding of their impact. For Europe, North Africa and Near East are especially important.
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RESERACH OBJECTIVE: The aim of the article is to present the conditions and course of presidential crises from the point of view of authorizing legalism and legalizing political leadership. An additional goal is to determine the scale of the impact that the so called The “Paris Agreement” of 1939. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The author also intends to confirm or question the hypothesis according to which in the authoritarian system of power it was not possible to legitimize the actual political authority and take this authority to the highest office in the state without authorization of political decisions on the part of the person actually exercising control over this office. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: In political science, the issue of the functioning of the authorities of the Republic of Poland after the German and Soviet aggression in September 1939 remains almost absent. The reasoning is based on the description of the ability to maintain the legal continuity of the government and the president after leaving the country. RESERACH RESULTS: It has been proven that the political activities under taken in 1939–1954, as well as the political behavior of the main actors, directly influenced the consolidation of the authoritarian order. Paradoxically, the more efforts were made to legitimize and sanction the position of people enjoying universal authority, the more it led to an authoritative interpretation of the legal foundations on which refugee legalism was based. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, AND RECOMENDATIONS: On this occasion, a research postulate should be formulated to investigate the impact of the dispute over the legitimacy of authority on the political capacity of the independence refugees. The implementation of this research postulate goes beyond the scope of this article.
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Since the start of the war, in February 2022, almost three million Ukrainians have crossed the border to Romania, out of which 146.507 are currently registered for temporary protection or similar national protection schemes. Such a massive inflow of people in need of assistance and protection demands an institutional organized response, which has been provided by the Romanian state, in cooperation with civil society, and benefitting from the support of international organizations. The public-private model of cooperation employed in this response has been unprecedented, starting with the mobilization of Romanian citizens in offering housing and food to the refugees, and continuing with the involvement of non-governmental organizations. This article aims to assess the systemic reaction to the arrival of Ukrainian refugees in Romania and to investigate the role of systemic cooperation in providing this reaction. Based on data available from the main public institutions involved in this response, combined with information provided by non-governmental organizations and international organizations, the study evaluates, from the system theory perspective, the types of cooperation and collaboration that emerged and their effectiveness in this situation.
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The war in Ukraine is the third asymmetric shock that the European Union has experienced in the last two decades, after the 2008 financial and economic crisis, the following Eurozone crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Russia’s and Ukraine’s shares in the global trade and production are relatively small, they are important suppliers of basic products, specifically food and energy. Therefore, the trade consequences of the war for the European Union, Ukraine’s important trading partner, deserve special attention. The war also disrupts trade relations between the EU and Russia. The EU’s direct trade sanctions are limited to specific sectors, such as oil, coal, arms, dual-use goods, as well as the aviation and space industry. However, financial sanctions, particularly the SWIFT ban imposed on seven Russian banks, increase the costs of commercial transactions considerably. This paper aims to present the trade effects of the war in Ukraine from the European Union’s, Member States’ and, in particular, Poland’s perspective. This refers not only to the trade creation and diversion effect, but also to changes in the structure of the EU’s trade regarding the main groups of goods. These effects will vary depending on direct trade links, dependence on Russian energy and susceptibility to rising energy prices. Given an extensive range of parties involved and issues covered by the research, this paper focuses only on the main aspects of the problem.
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The paper analyses the Polish government’s actions to support Polish studies units abroad and examines the relationships between these units and institutions in Poland. It aims to understand the forms and scope of support offered to Polish studies units and to explain why public diplomacy actions also target the Polish diaspora. The analysis is based on official documents related to public diplomacy and Polish diaspora policy, as well as the results of an empirical study conducted among representatives of Polish institutions responsible for promoting the Polish image abroad and representatives of Polish studies units. The conclusions indicate the heterogeneity of these units and differences in support for units in the East and the West. In the case of units operating in former Soviet Union countries, Polish diaspora policy dominates, aiming to maintain connections between local Polish communities and Poland. In the West, support for Polish studies units stems from both Polish diaspora policy and public diplomacy.
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The changing character of diasporas and states’ politics intersect with new challenges in the policymaking process. This study aims to investigate the priorities and hardships of the diaspora education policies in Poland and Lithuania. The study applies the three-dimensional approach (Lesińska, Popyk 2021) to study diaspora policy and draws on qualitative research with the diaspora state institution representatives in the two countries. This paper compares the role of diaspora education policy in a broader policy context, alongside presenting the challenges, namely “socio-demographic”, “methodological”, “political” and “financial”, that state institutions face while ensuring education for the young members of diasporas. It contributes to the scholarship on diaspora policies studies by presenting how state institutions approach and govern the relationships with young diasporas through ensuring education and support social and cultural life of diaspora schools.
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The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) in its eight decades of history frequently collaborated with organizations of other ethnic groups in the U.S., particularly with academic and cultural organizations of East and Central Europe diasporas. Among them strong ties have been established with Ukrainian organizations, especially the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences. The paper describes levels and forms of institutional cooperation. It tries to answer the following questions: was this collaboration accidental or rather resulting from PIASA’s long-term vision and goals? In what fields partners managed to build joint representation?
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These emigrants created a number of diasporas inhabiting the border zones with the USSR. The Soviet authorities treated these communities as hostile, and the hermetic nature of the Soviet border meant that contact between the diasporas and the country of origin was negligible. With thecollapse of the USSR and the opening of the borders of the diaspora, they began to play an essential role in the so-called ethnic revival of minorities in Russia. The incorporation of previously demonized, disloyal, and hostile frontier communities required the introduction of new discourses and representations in local public histories. On the example of the Buryat diaspora in China, the article shows the process of including diasporas in the field of ethnic politics in Siberia and negotiating their social status in contemporary Russia.
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The presence of war refugee camps around the world and their development into places of political resistance for identity formation, alternate governance systems and lives has been part of academic studies for quite some time now. Less attention has been paid to frame refugee camp spaces for studying the complexity of the concepts of resistance and indifference for reclamation of human identity. Despite attention to the mass movement of refugees-asylum seekers, there is a huge gap in scholarship to understand the center-controlled and marginalized refugee existence in camps because refugees are often silenced, insignificant obscure figures in the grand war discourse of reports and case studies—lives not worth saving. Furthermore, refugees’ resistance against the center’s anti-humanity beliefs, ideologies and practices calls for a reengagement with the camp space because it has become a source of material and knowledge production for the center to profile and subject all types of refugees to any physical, mental and psychological testing-experimentation whenever it develops a new weapon, therapy, theory or technology. This paper intends to cover these gaps and build its analysis of a refugee camp, through the text Red Birds (2018).
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Families, including those with children, constitute a significant group of people crossing the Polish-Belarusian border. The aim of this article is to analyse the discourse on the Polish-Belarusian border in the context of the place that the category of “family” finds in it, and what role and responsibility is assigned to children and parents. The theoretical framework for these reflections is primarily critical childhood studies. For this purpose, the author analyzed Polish-language online statements about the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border published between mid-August 2021 and the 1st of January 2023. The research included statements by institutional actors (e.g. Border Guard), media publications as well as public comments by social media users (Twitter). In the case of the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, the term “family” is used in a variety of ways – from building a sense of symbolic solidarity (the “Families Without Borders” group), through referring this term to the presence of particularly vulnerable people among migrants, to attributing responsibility for the risks regarding the situation of children at the border to either parents or state institutions, depending on the discourse. Reflections on the Polish-Belarusian border seem to be part of the tensions related to the concepts of “family”, “parenthood” and “children”.
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The article focuses on the analysis of the evolution of work on Polish migration policy in the period 2016–2022. In it, we draw attention to the importance of not defining clear goals of the state’s migration policy and setting the rules for their implementation. This concerned the failure to work out a compromise between the goals related to the interests of the economy and the demographic needs of the society and the narrowly understood priorities of maintaining state security. This gave rise to both internal competition between individual institutions within the central administration, and was conducive to high political sensitivity of work on developing the program of this policy. Its effect was that the state’s migration policy took on the character of a public policy without politics, i.e. consistent actions in various fields of migration (such as the labor market, Polish diaspora policy, border protection and refugee policy) without broader political and official discussion about its long-term goals.
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This article analyses the process of migration from Belarus to Poland in the second decade of the 21st century. The aim of the article is to reveal the social and demographic features of the migration movement from Belarus to Poland and to show the specific motivation and adaptation of Belarusian immigrants in Poland as a new place of settlement. In order to achieve the intended purpose, the article will answer the following questions: what is the socio-demographic features of the migration movement from Belarus to Poland? What are the motives of migration of Belarusian citizens to Poland? What are the specific features of adaptation of Belarusian immigrants in the new place of settlement? In order to obtain answers to the questions posed, a comprehensive methodology was used: analysis of found statistical data and qualitative research conducted with the technique of individual in-depth interview. The analysis of the found statistical data created a perspective for presenting the specifics of migration, first of all as a physical spatial movement from Belarus to Poland, and also made it possible to detail the social profile of Belarusian immigrants. At the same time, the data collected as part of the qualitative study provided a basis for defining the specifics of the adaptation process and learning about migration motivation among Belarusian immigrants.
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While there are many studies concerning different aspects of migrants’ occupational trajectories, little attention has been dedicated to migrants’ own views on career success. In this paper, drawing on qualitative interviews with Polish migrants, we aim to bridge this gap in migration studies by examining how the migrants themselves understand and experience the concept of career success. We also took into consideration factors contributing to migrants’ occupational success, with a particular focus on the role of migration in their occupational biographies.Our analysis shows that interviewees define success in terms of subjective and objective criteria, focusing on immaterial rewards. Most of the migrants who participated in the study were unsure if they had already achieved career success. Among those who did, internal factors connected with a person’s character were mostly pointed out as contributing to career success. Despite the fact that work was the primary motivation for migration for a significant part of our sample, the results of the migration on career and chances of achieving success were varied.
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By taking the case of the Lithuanian diaspora occasioned by forced migration to Siberia, this article discusses the (im-)possibility – and possible explanations for the ambiguous character – of ‘victim diasporas’ in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. I assert that, differently from its counterparts in the West, the Lithuanian diaspora of displacements in Russia represents an atypical case that bears signs pertinent to ‘victim’, ‘accidental’, as well as ‘demobilising’ diaspora. Among the key reasons for this are a historically restrictive socio-political environment towards victimised groups, limitations for the organisation and activity of ethno-national communities, as well as more of an amplified state agenda by the Russian government presided by Vladimir Putin. The discussion draws on the relevant theoretical considerations and qualitative primary research conducted as part of a PhD project on Lithuanian diasporas of displacements. Taking into account the time of writing, it has been adapted to include a brief commentary on the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on the Lithuanian diaspora.
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In the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens of German or Jewish nationality immigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany. Most of these emigrants came from Siberia or Central Asia – peripheral regions of the USSR – to which they were largely forcibly resettled during the Stalinist era. The majority lived there until the collapse of the Soviet Union, before they emigrated due to the worsening economic, professional and security conditions. When they arrived in the Federal Republic of Germany, many of them discovered that, despite the legal freedoms offered to them by the German state, they felt freer in the USSR. Russian Germans and Jewish quota refugees particularly remembered the period under Leonid Brezhnev (mid-1960s to early 1980s) as a period in which – despite the autocratic nature of the Soviet state – they enjoyed various freedoms, including on material, cultural and political levels. The perceived absence of the Soviet state allowed them to carry out individual actions in their everyday lives that they do not see as given in the Federal Republic due to the existing legal and social circumstances. As a result, many of them got the impression that they were ‘freer’ in their Soviet homeland than they are in their current everyday lives.
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The conflict between the security forces and immigrant children, who perceive that they are deprived of equal citizenship rights in France, takes place both in factual reality and in fiction through its reflection in cinema. The film Athena (2022) brings the story of the uprising and rebellion process that begins in a fictional suburb of Paris after the alleged murder of a 13-year-old Algerian boy by the police. This study aims to examine the film Athena in the context of social exclusion through thematic analysis method with the assumption that “cinema is a presentation of society” and that immigrants are excluded by the wider society as one of the disadvantaged communities in the countries of immigration and that the problematic of social cohesion and integration leads to mutual conflict. Despite its weaknesses that miss the reality of the causes of the divisions in French society, the film clearly shows that social exclusion and discrimination experienced by immigrants in different areas lead to uncontrollable anger and that the spiral of mutual violence can lead to deadly conflicts and consequences.
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