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Celem artykułu jest ocena socjologii Jakuba Karpińskiego, a w szczególności – jego teorii komunizmu. Opierając się na teorii Rene Girarda, która na przykładzie pisarzy wyjaśnia „powieściowe nawrócenie”, artykuł opisuje „nawrócenie socjologiczne” polskiego socjologa. To socjologiczne nawrócenie polegało na pozbyciu się iluzji autonomicznego podmiotu i odkryciu własnej zależności od czegoś, co przekracza jednostkę i czemu można dać świadectwo. Już na samym początku swojej drogi akademickiej Karpiński wybrał służbę swojej wspólnocie narodowej i naukowej, a całe jego pisarstwo jest opisem tego, w imię czego i przeciw czemu walczył. Wynikiem pracy polskiego socjologa jest integralna teoria komunizmu, która wartościuje i wszechstronnie opisuje miniony system, a zarazem wskazuje dwie drogi wyjścia z niego: prawdę i solidarność.The goal of the paper is to describe Jakub Karpiński’s sociology and specifically - his theory of Communism. It extends the Girardian concept of „novelistic conversion” to show that sociologists, just as novelists, undergo conversion that makes them realize that they are dependent on something they can give witness to. Already in the beginning of his academic career, Karpiński decided to serve his scholar and national community. His further work articulated what he fought against and what he fought for. In consequence, he constructed an integral theory of Communism, which validates, describes the bygone system as well as points to ways of overcoming it: truth and solidarity.
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Today, the battle between great ideas is not only fought via texts or speeches on TV screens, the radio, or at lectures or public debates, but also through real and virtual images, and so-called imagetexts. This paper tackles the image politics of the Romanian post-2016 anti-government popular resistance through some typical cases of imagetext: hashtags, symbols, videomapping, posters and some cases of visible space-occupation. These examples can present the anonymous (in some cases professional) artistic creativity, which helps the formation of a social solidarity and crystallizes the message of the resistance through aesthetic pleasure.
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The objective of this article is to challenge and destabilise existing approaches to state socialism as a historical period during which women remained passive observers of social and political realities. Beginning with the afterthought about the possibility of utilising some of the concepts and categories of feminist methodologies within the post-socialist context, I present results of the research conducted, between 2010-2014, with women active in communist parties and women’s organisations before 1989, in Poland and in Georgia. Drawing from in-depth interviews and archival documents, including the United Polish Workers Party and Women International Democratic Federation archives, I then examine three aspects of the experience of women active socially and politically under state socialism. First, I present diverse motives behind the decision to become a party member. Second, I explore the amount of autonomy that, in their own words, women active in the communist party and women’s organisations had at their disposal. And third, I look at the ways in which socialist activists can be positioned within existing narratives on feminism and women’s movements in post-socialism.
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The article attempts to look at the civic participation as a share of residents in public process management, which allows for taking active participation in events bound with city, citizen relations and the public authority. The necessity of correctly reading the expectations of local communities in relation to public services has an impact on the development of the public sector and also improving the mechanisms of functioning. The civic budget shows concrete possibilities of creating a decision space for the residents. The process of management in public administration units should be directed to balance and the order between citizens and their surroundings. That’s why appears an idea of implementation a civic budget as an instrument, which allows to realization this particular assumption. Implementation of the process management in local government, certainly affects the change of the perspective from functional to procedural. Because of this, the mechanisms impacting on better functioning of the organization are being built. The purpose of this article is to show the role of participatory budgets in improvement process. The article is also trying to find an answer for question whether the civic budget is an instrument for stimulating social development. The whole process of studies was based on analysis of literature from range of research subject and collected empirical data in the surveyed units.
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The article presents the problem of participatory budgeting in Poland, as a popular form of cooperation between the administration and citizens. The study describes the influence of participatory budgeting on people’s awareness and commitment to local issues. The author considers the legal, organizational, economic and social results of putting the procedure of participatory budgeting into practice. The aim of this article is to present the concepts of civic participation. The author describes the model of a participatory budget and the process of its evaluation.
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The review of: Magdalena Grabowska, Zerwana genealogia. Działalność społeczna i polityczna kobiet po 1945 roku a współczesny polski ruch kobiecy; Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar 2018, ss. 322, ISBN 978-83-7383-931-1
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Background. The range of operation of e‑participation is constantly widening. The commonness of using e‑participation in public management makes one think about its effectiveness in implementing complex processes, particularly those occurring in cities, as the urban revitalization. This process traditionally benefits from wide stakeholder participation based on face‑to‑face relations. Research aims. The aim of the article is to present – in the context of literature – the experiences of the Cracow City Hall in the range of using e‑participation of the residents in the process of planning and implementing revitalization. The basic question is whether it is possible to use e‑participation instead or to a limited extent of traditional instruments based on face‑to‑face contacts. Methodology. The article is based on the results of a desk research (documents of the city of Cracow, the results of research and analyses in the field of interest), website analysis and social media profiles as well as focus group interview conducted by the author in June 2019 with the employees of the Revitalization Office at the Cracow City Hall. Key findings. By the example of Cracow, on the basis of literature research as well as own research and experience gained by designing several revitalization programmes, the author has claimed that face‑to‑face contact is inestimable. However, city government and its officials cannot avoid the necessity of conducting part of the communication process in social media. The example of Cracow has indicated some weaknesses and dangers which a city may face while using these tools the author has shown.
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Review of: David Ost - Historicizing the Left: A Review of Michał Siermiński, Dekada przełomu: Polska lewica opozycyjna 1968–1980, Warszawa: Książka i Prasa 2016
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What Yemenis are experiencing today from wars, conflicts, famine, and disease is the inevitable result of political instability for a long time. This article elaborates on the main dilemmas in the political instability in Yemen and proposes appropriate solutions. In fact, there are many reasons that led to the absence of political stability in Yemen, such as separatist calls in southern Yemen and Al-Qaeda wars. Yemeni tribes stand as a parallel political system to the Yemeni government because the Yemeni tribe has most of the state’s elements such as power, weapons, and money. The dynastic sectarian calls for the Imamate and the class like the Hashemite family claiming the right to rule Yemen simply because they related to the Prophet Muhammad. As a result, they led several wars against the Yemenis starting from the six wars in Sa'ada governorate, which lasted for six years and ended with the coup in September 2014.
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This is an edited version of an interview conducted in 1991 and first published in New Politics 4, no. 2 (1993): 155–72. The editors of EEPS publish this version after the recent death of Karol Modzelewski, 1937–2019. In the 1991 interview, Modzelewski reflected on the difference between Solidarność 1980–1981 as a mass social movement and the very much changed Solidarność that in 1989 formed the first non-Communist government in the Soviet bloc. His comments have a premonitory relevance for Polish politics today.
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The article presents the chronology of the events of 1968 in Poland and reviews their past and present interpretations. The perspective is that of a participant in the events and an engaged scholar. Eight versions of what happened are discussed, including those of conspiracy and provocation. The change in focus of the 1968 anniversary celebrations from exclusively Polish to predominantly Jewish is also analyzed.
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March 1968 in Poland witnessed two different revolutions. The first one occurred at the universities. The students—the generation of twenty-year-olds—revolted against an oppressive, authoritarian state and demanded freedom of speech. But there was also a second, parallel revolution. It exploded with the anti-Jewish purge carried out by lowand mid-level party officials in their forties. These apparatchiks, born around 1930, denounced the student revolt as a “Zionist plot” and pushed for a nationalist version of the communist system. This article explores why those two generations clashed in 1968 and what was the outcome of that struggle, both in political and social terms.
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Extant literature concludes that corruption may have a devastating effect on economic growth and institutional trust in transitional democracies, but scholars remain divided on how malfeasance influences political behavior. In this article, we explore the likelihood of a mobilization effect of corruption in a post-communist setting. We argue that the indicators used in previous scholarship on corruption vary in important ways and may affect citizen incentives for participation differently. In particular, we hypothesize and then assess whether actual experience with bribery, perceptions of widespread corruption, and concerns about increase of corruption in the future encourage individuals to engage in different sets of activities. Original data from a 2014 post-election survey in Hungary are used for empirical tests of several regression models. Our findings suggest that the type of corruption assessment is important for the specific political activity in which a citizen would engage.
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This article examines how the Maidan protests of 2013–2014 were a space for the collision of conflicting narratives on what Ukraine is and what it should be, and how past, present, and future were used to imagine contemporary Ukraine. Making use of speech acts by local and international actors and politicians on the Ukraine crisis, historical narratives on Ukraine, Maidan protest slogans, and field work data gathered throughout 2013–2016 in Ukraine, we identify four meta-narratives that enable us to unravel such an imagining: (1) Ukraine as a liminal category between East and West; (2) Ukraine as Russia, Ukraine as non-Russia; (3) Ukraine as Europe, Ukraine as non-Europe; and (4) Ukraine as Ukraine. We trace and contextualize these narratives in four separate sections. Positing all narratives in a discursive battleground and problematizing them as a struggle between stories, the article demonstrates that the imagining of contemporary Ukraine is deeply conditioned by the conflict between all four narratives. Ukraine is simultaneously all and none of them.
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This article presents a detailed analysis of the concept of nation in the work of Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer. In his view, the nation is conceived as an evolutionary process of political, open and plural construction. His work also unravels the connections of nation with a plurinational democratic state, which was at the time a novel political and institutional vision. The article argues that his work is very relevant today, with rising complexity of the new contexts of global society and the multiplication of migrations and refugees; and the need to respond through an accommodation of minorities through mechanisms of territorial and non-territorial autonomy. Much of these concerns form the substance of Otto Bauer’s work.
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Karl Renner’s theory of national autonomy has not been sufficiently taken into account by scholars due to difficulties in its reception and puzzling content. Neither liberal nor communitarian, his original theory combines individual rights with collective rights, territorial autonomy with personal autonomy, classical federalism with establishment of nations as constituent parts of the state. This paper will introduce the reader to Renner’s main concepts. It will start by presenting Renner’s ideas on the nation, the multinational state, the role of the majority principle, and the need for nations’ legal recognition by and within the state. Then, Renner’s core notion of national autonomy and its organisation through the personality principle will be discussed. Further, the paper deals with Renner’s concept of the representation of national interests at the federal or supranational levels. Lastly, it sums up the discussion and draws conclusions regarding Renner’s theory of autonomy in general.
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The Kurdish-led autonomous entity called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) – also known as Rojava – considers women’s liberation an imperative condition for shaping a democratic society. The practice of autonomy in NES shares strong resemblances with Non- Territorial Autonomy (NTA) models; however, it introduces a novelty in the role of women as active agents in building a plurinational democracy. This paper examines (1) the intellectual and political origins of the political role ascribed to women in autonomous administrations and (2) how the practice of autonomy in Rojava has advanced women’s rights by shedding light on both institutional implementation of women’s rights, as well as the creation of (non)-territorial spaces of women’s emancipation within the autonomous model. The argument made is that the conceptual framework of the Rojava model goes beyond the Kurdish question and can be considered an attempt to resolve a democratic deficit of liberal democratic nation-states through bringing together solutions that address the intertwined subordination of minorities and women.
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Non-territorial autonomy (NTA) incorporates a mixture of different arrangements such as consociationalism and national-cultural autonomy (NCA), and forms of representation that de-territorialize self-determination. The paper analyses NTA possibilities in reaching indigenous self-governance and reveals the dilemmas in the applicability of NTA for securing the right to self-determination of indigenous peoples. Although the practice points towards some positive examples and successes of NTA institutions related to ingenious peoples (e.g. Sámi Parliaments), the question remains whether NTA holds sufficient potential for addressing indigenous needs upheld by the international principle “right to land, territories and traditionally owned resources.”
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This essay explores the paradoxical relationship between Václav Havel’s dramas and his essays, in particular, The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s plays aimed at creating a new community awareness of the “post-totalitarian” system in which people were trapped. His essays employ similar dramatic and analytic techniques to show a way out of that trap by “living within the truth,” that is, living in a way that exposes the mendacity of “post-totalitarianism” and spreads the virus of truth and change throughout society. The present essay argues that the ultimate aim of the “existential revolution” Havel calls for is in fact the regeneration and strengthening of civil society and the creation of institutions that serve people, not power. It concludes by looking at the continuing relevance of The Power of the Powerless today.
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