CEPOS New Call for Papers 2023 13th International Conference after Communism. East and West Under Scrutiny
Place: Craiova (Romania); Date: 17-18 March 2023
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Place: Craiova (Romania); Date: 17-18 March 2023
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The article analyzes the peculiarities of Beijing’s positioning in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The author examines Beijing’s official rhetoric and actions regarding the war in the context of a number of key geopolitical and PRC goals – strengthening global influence by removing the US from leadership positions, taking control of Taiwan, turning Russia into a dependent country. Particular attention is paid to the internal determinants of Beijing’s position, such as national-historical sentiments, problems of socioeconomic development and the issues of further development of the political system. Currently, China’s geostrategy is dominated by the negative consequences of the war, for example, the growth of the unity of the West and the role of the United States, the strengthening of anti-Chinese sentiments in the Asia-Pacific region, the aggravation of the Taiwan issue against the background of PRC’s internal troubles.
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Review of: Melody Devries, Judith Bessant i Rob Watts (ur.). Rise of the Far Right: Technologies of Recruitment and Mobilization, Rowman i Littlefield, 2021. 287 str
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After first explaining the basis for such modeling, namely, changes in money in commerce appearing to mirror changes in free energy in coupled chemical reactions, with a striking correspondence between profit and reduction in free energy, a model of two ‘coupled Deliveries’ is constructed, noting the need also to model supply and demand, and using the somewhat literal example of a taxi journey up a hill, to help make sense of the approach. The modeling of supply and demand is then explained, the effect on prices being attributed to the spreading-out of energy from sellers to buyers. An expression for this effect is then derived, in terms of the corresponding concentrating of money. Various implications of the model are then expounded, concerning the nature of money, price and its relationship to value, and intelligence, and some supporting evidence given. Two secondary implications, concerning economics and political science, are then discussed to conclude.
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The notion of non-liberal democracy has become an inseparable element of the debate on the crisis of liberal democracy. For some scholars and journalists, non-liberal democracy is a consequence of the crisis of liberal democracy. It should be pointed out that when indicating the causes of this crisis in the economic, political, and cultural spheres, researchers rarely address the issue of the legitimacy of identifying democracy as non-liberal and its characteristics. Moreover, no one has initiated a broad debate on the possibility of a retreat from non-liberal democracy and the conditions that must be met to return to liberal democracy. That is why this paper attempts to describe the phenomenon called nonliberal democracy and analyse the conditions which should be fulfilled, both in political and social terms. It is to enable the return to the idea of liberal democracy
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The difference in the methodology of conducting military operations by Russian and Ukrainian troops during the war ongoing since February 2022 is striking. It does not result only from the adopted convention of conducting these activities but is conditioned on a much deeper mental level resulting from cultural conditions. They determine the perception and understanding of the phenomenon of war. In other words, the operational and tactical methodology can be adapted to changing realities, provided that the essence of such a change is understood in terms of achieving the assumed military and non-military goals. Furthermore, these goals could be achieved by conducting military operations according to a completely different methodology, probably with much greater effectiveness. Why, in such a perspective, did the Russian side choose such a barbaric way of conducting war, characterising the methodology of military actions of the past decades or even centuries? This paper aims to answer the research question: What premises condition the Russian methodology of military action in the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2022? Empirical methods were employed to obtain an answer to this question.
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The paper discusses populist appeals to emotions in political communication, considering their role in the proliferation of political polarisation and radicalisation. Revisiting the Emotional Rescue Model of anger, enthusiasm, and fear, we considered pride and compassion low-arousal alternatives to populist storytelling. In the experiments, we tested how participants (n=364) respond to appeals to pride and compassion in their brain activity, emotional expressions, prosocial behaviour, attitude change, and memorisation. In the paper, we primarily discussed the results of the fMRI (neuroimaging) study and compared them with the previous studies on authentic pride, compassion, empathy, and reappraisal. Considering similarities in the activation of the superior and middle temporal gyri, temporal pole, inferior frontal gyrus, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, we argue that compassionate political narratives should be the most effective low-arousal alternative to populist storytelling. Moreover, stimulation of the reappraisal-related network in that group suggests that participants reframed emotional negativity into prosocial acts of caring and helping, also re-evaluating their attitudes.
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The material scope of the research problem presented in the text encompasses the issues concerned with the possibilities for and limitations of recruiting secret collaborators by the Polish civilian intelligence service. The analysis of the problematics of secret collaboration focuses mainly on institutional and legal aspects, which can be seen in its inclusion in the systemic legal perspective, encompassing such dimensions as administrative and legal, criminal and legal, civil and legal, and ethical one. Next to the normative aspects, the text addresses sociological and psychological aspects of recruiting secret collaborators by special services, thereby depicting the main recruitment methods. The methodology adopted is chiefly based on the institutional and legal approach, in which use is made of, inter alia, textual, functional and systemic interpretations. The problem of possible abuse concerned with the recruitment of secret collaborators by special services is illustrated with an abstract case study and a relevant legal interpretation. Besides, to extend the analysis of psychological and sociological aspects of recruiting secret collaborators, the study uses limited open interviews with former officers of the civilian special services operating in Poland before 1990.
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: The article aims to address the following question: in the case of a war in Ukraine, is public international law an obstacle to the application of combined international enforcement action within the framework of the collective security system under the auspices of the United Nations, or whether such impediments lie elsewhere? Russia’s presence in the Security Council as a permanent member, and thus endowed with the privilege of vetoing resolutions, paralyses this body. Therefore, the subject of the analysis is what other actions of the United Nations are permitted by law. It is important for assessing the status of the UN as a collective actor in international relations, the main objective of which, under Art. 1 of the UN Charter, is “to maintain international peace and security, and, to that end: to take effective collective measures for (…) the suppression of acts of aggression”. Bearing in mind the fact that international law is a consensual legal order, the article assesses its available compulsory mechanisms and instruments. The supplementary objective is to determine whether it is permissible to use the term “war” with regard to the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
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: Contemporary terrorism is characterised by a complex and networked model of operation. While the main objectives of terrorist acts remain the same, the attack environment, tactics and tools are changing. The international community is taking steps to strengthen counter-terrorism systems, but these are peaceful solutions. These models do not consider the conditions of hybrid armed conflicts in which terrorism is an element of combat tactics. It is a relatively new phenomenon and particularly dangerous for the civilian population. The acts of terror in hybrid warfare are not mechanisms with a simple scheme of action, and, as we try to show in this article, they represent a deliberate and broad spectrum of action. Therefore, there is an urgent need to understand terrorism in the context of the threat of hybrid war (especially when terrorist acts complement hybrid tactics or significantly replace conventional tactics). This type of threat must be recognised before achieving its strategic goals. From the substantive point of view, the article studies the problem of terrorism as one of the threats of an armed conflict in Ukraine, commonly known as hybrid war.
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The article sheds light on the nexus between higher education and foreign policy. International higher education has become an increasingly prominent element of some states’ policies towards other countries as a flank to traditional foreign policy. It has occurred in Central Asia, where the European Union, China and Russia are all supporting teaching, research and capacity-building activities in the tertiary sectors of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Although they employ similar tools and instruments, the assumptions and visions underpinning their respective strategies diverge. Russia’s strategy is shaped by historically informed identity factors and the impulse to entrench predominance in the postSoviet space, whilst China uses its support for higher education as a soft infrastructure for its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Meanwhile, the EU has integrated higher education into its strategy for the region, which aims at drawing Central Asia closer to its orbit through democratisation and the rule of law.
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The pandemic that broke out in 2019 had a significant impact on the lives of all social groups around the world. The imposed restrictions and mandatory quarantine were crucial to limit the virus’s spread. The research comprises an analysis of the psychosocial impact exerted by the pandemic that attempted to determine the response to the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. For this purpose, a study on social resilience in the pandemic era was worked out. The study consisted of several parts: stress and the sense of safety, education, trust and defined needs and the mass media in COVID-19. The research team decided to present the study’s results in a series of articles that will contribute to forming a complete picture of the community in the context of the analysed variables. The paper is the first in this series. It contains an analysis of variables intended to determine the level of the experienced sense of safety and its constituent, i.e., stress, and the identification of socio-demographic data strongly influencing the studied variables. The study comprised 559 individuals who were surveyed between May 2020 and November 2020 with the use of an online survey questionnaire. SPSS Statistics version 21.0 and PQStat were used to conduct statistical analyses and correlate and assess the correlation of responses. Also used were Chisquare, Fisher’s test and Pearson’s linear correlation coefficient. A logistic regression analysis was carried out for dichotomous variables. The results of the study indicate that the level of experienced stress is influenced by age, place of residence, gender and job security. The sense of safety is inversely correlated with stress, i.e., as stress increases, the sense of safety decreases, indicating a need to undertake appropriate measures to reduce stress. It may be interesting to compare the level of stress with, among other things, information retrieval from different sources. These results will be presented in the subsequent studies.
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The COVID-19 pandemic affected the elderly in a special way. On the one hand, it contributed to the increase in health deficits and those related to social isolation. On the other hand, it also had a significant impact on the level and methods of support provided to seniors. The pandemic situation turned out to be a particular challenge for local governments and non-governmental organisations operating in various areas of senior policy. The general aim of the article was to analyse the state’s initiatives aimed at counteracting the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic addressed to seniors and examples of activities of the local government and the civil sector cooperating with it for the benefit of this group of people. In turn, the specific objective was to identify and understand the greatest difficulties that seniors had during the pandemic and the role played by the non-governmental organisation (both during the pandemic and as an entity of potential support in the future, which was particularly interesting given the European Union promoting services provided in the local environment). In connection with the specific objective, qualitative research was carried out using the in-depth interview method. The interviews were based on scripts that concerned four areas: problems and experiences of the elderly during the pandemic, help and support, communication, health, and well-being.
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The history of the development of human communities opens up a large number of chapters of the alliance of rationality and power. The determining power of the implementation of elements of purposeful rationality at the political level is almost always represented by the legitimation of a certain type of interest associated with the greatest power to enforcing them. The primary goal of this paper is in an endeavour to place the normative nature of current (democratic) political regimes where we encounter the need for a more fundamental theoretical argument that would enable us to respond to their dynamic, often contradictory development. We focus on the productivity of dichotomies in the theory and practice of rationalism, irrationalism and liberal democracy. Their interaction in fact defines and creates the conditions for experimenting with different forms of political structures in the search for a better human and the world. At the same time, its performance not only defines the conditions for the theoretical justification of the idea of power, but also becomes a tool for its implementation. The theoretical background of this approach develops monitoring the content turbulences in the political systems of liberal democracies, with an emphasis on political life in Slovakia. Hence, in the present study, in the context of possible effects of the infectious disease COVID-19 on the activities of individual political actors, we point to a unique experience that contributes to addressing the issue of the way of establishing "softer" forms of political communication instead of political struggle, especially at the level of relations between the conservative, socialist, and liberal party-political communities not just in Slovakia, but also in other countries around the world.
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The more than a quarter century-long engagement of the International Community (IC) and European Union (EU) in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has contributed to the rise of “‘stabilitocracy’, that is, weak democracies with autocratically minded leaders, who govern through informal, patronage networks and claim to provide pro-Western stability” (Belloni, 2020, p. 236, BiEPAG, 2017, Bieber, 2018, Bieber 2020, Börzel and Grimm, 2018, Cvijic, 2020, Pavlović, 2017) in the Western Balkan region in general and BiH in particular. This article aims to further examine the stabilitocratic argument and its potentially destabilizing implications in terms of the EU/IC’s practices in BiH while focusing on their reaction to the recent still under-researched 2018 civic protests and bottom-up mobilization triggered by the violent death of young student David Dragičević. As such, this study sheds the light on the ongoing dynamics of the interplay between the EU/IC and the BiH’s ethnonationalist political leaders, as well as analyses the implications of this relationship on the daily reality of BiH citizens in reference to the 2018 mass public protests and investigation of David Dragičević’s case. Additionally, the insights presented in this article are based on analysis of the primary data obtained from the three rounds of thirty-seven semi-structured interviews that took place in various cities in BiH in the period between September 2020 and August 2021, and also on an examination of the secondary sources associated with the EU/IC’s peacebuilding activities in BiH. Overall, on the basis of the findings presented in the article, the continuation of the stabilitocratic path by the EU/IC could not only lead to additional loss of credibility for external actors’ activities in BiH, but could also negatively influence the demanded stability within this country.
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The Central African Republic, located in the central part of Africa, has been known for decades of conflict between the communities. Citizens of local communities first influenced the solution to the conflict. However, the mentioned country cannot solve it, and external actors must contribute to these processes. International organisations (United Nations, European Union, and African Union) and the powered world countries (the United States of America, China, and France) were also significant, active, and influential in this process. Russia obtained a unique position in the process. The present study attempted to critically evaluate this country's historical background, current conflict situation, and perspectives. The study aimed to answer the essential question of the external players, activities, and roles in the Central African Republic and asserted their interests in the mentioned region by the complex of general theoretical methods. Special attention was paid to Russian activities in this country. It is obvious that the mutual relations of external actors fundamentally influence the situation in the mentioned country. The conflict situation in the country was affected, is affected, and will be affected not only by inside processes but also by outside processes.
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The state and its administration have been constantly confronted with profound changes, which they not only faced, but which must be shaped in order to better fulfil their diverse tasks and be able to fulfil their responsibilities. One such modern and fast-moving change is digitalization, which affects every area of life. The potential of digitalization has, of course, also affected the administrative activity of the state, from the design of optimal framework conditions for the economy and society through the improvement of infrastructure to more efficient administrative work. The aim of the article was to identify the key moments in building e-Government in Germany and, in the context of assessing its current state, to identify the main shortcomings of German e-Government. In this context, we have focused on defining and clarifying the nature of e-Government, introducing the positives and negatives. In the second part, we have focused on a brief analysis of the development and current state of implementation of the e-Government concept in Germany. The biggest shortcoming of the German public administration in terms of digitalization is the issue of effective interconnection of online services into one functioning overall system. There is still no central portal in Germany that contains all the information and service offers from a single source. It is still in the process of building. Even public registers, i.e., data collection and office archives, are not sufficiently interconnected. It requires, first and foremost, political will, an attractive range of services, initial investment as a driving force and a source of inspiration, and municipalities and Länder are also key in this process as the first points of contact for citizens
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