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The Handbook introduces to readers (accessibly for specialist and non-specialist scholars, students and layman audiences) the diverse universe of non-state actors (NSAs) that have played or are currently playing a significant role in the context of East-West relations (from 1945 to the present). With a view to the oft-seen political debates about which non- state actors may be independent or controlled by particular states, and in what ways they may be useful or harmful to the interests of particular actors, this volume is interested in analysing and assessing the relationship of NSAs to key state actors in the context of the politics of East-West relations. Key state actors in this context ...
This book tells the story of the dissident imaginary of samizdat activists, the political culture they created, and the pivotal role that culture had in sustaining the resilience of the oppositional movement in Poland between 1976 and 1990. This unlicensed print culture has been seen as one of the most emblematic social worlds of dissent. Since the Cold War, the audacity of harnessing obsolete print technology known as samizdat to break the modern monopoly of information of the party-state has fascinated many, yet this book looks beyond the Cold War frame to reappraise its historical novelty and significance. What made that culture resilient and rewarding, this book argues, was the correspon...
Tracing the paths of Jewish things across time, place, and culture, this collection reveals complex stories of individual and collective struggles to survive.
This book discusses historical continuities and discontinuities between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, interwar Poland, the Polish People’s Republic, and contemporary Poland. The year 1989 is seen as a clear point-break that allowed the Poles and their country to regain a ‘natural historical continuity’ with the ‘Second Republic,’ as interwar Poland is commonly referred to in the current Polish national master narrative. In this pattern of thinking about the past, Poland-Lithuania (nowadays roughly coterminous with Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia’s Kaliningrad Region and Ukraine) is seen as the ‘First Republic.’ However, in spite of this ‘politics of memory...
No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. This multilayered and contradictory icon features prominently in public spaces and state institutions. It is anchored in the country's visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates urban and rural landscapes. The cross recalls Poland's historic struggles for independence and anti-Communist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country's current position in Europe as a self-avowed bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both a national symbol - defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country's Others - and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Despite its long history, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures. Cross Purposes is the first cultural history of the cross in modern Poland, deconstructing this key symbol and exploring how it has been deployed in different political battles.
The key objective of this work is to answer the question: To what extent do contemporary Polish TV series try to change stereotypes about women and to what extent do they preserve them? The analysis involved a total of eight series produced and broadcast by Telewizja Polska, TVN and Telewizja Polsat, grouped by genre into: (1) drama series – soap operas; (2) historical drama series; (3) crime dramas and (4) comedy series. The analysis included 76 episodes of the above series with a total length of 49 hours and 51 minutes. The subject of quantitative analysis was the total speaking time of female characters and their visibility on the screen. The qualitative analysis was based on the identi...
Trust in Contemporary Society, by well-known trust researchers, deals with conceptual, theoretical and social interaction analyses, historical data on societies, national surveys or cross-national comparative studies, and methodological issues related to trust. The authors are from a variety of disciplines: psychology, sociology, political science, organizational studies, history, and philosophy, and from Britain, the United States, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, and Japan. They bring their vast knowledge from different historical and cultural backgrounds to illuminate contemporary issues of trust and distrust. The socio-cultural perspective of trust is important and increasingly acknowledged as central to trust research. Accordingly, future directions for comparative trust research are also discussed. Contributors include: Jack Barbalet, John Brehm, Geoffrey Hosking, Robert Marsh, Barbara A. Misztal, Guido Möllering, Bart Nooteboom, Ken J. Rotenberg, Jiří Šafr, Masamichi Sasaki, Meg Savel, Markéta Sedláčková, Jörg Sydow, Piotr Sztompka.
Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.
Reveals the harrowing story of life in Warsaw under Nazi occupation and explores resistance to the regime by the Warsaw intelligentsia.
This book is the first to systematically examine the connection between religion and transitional justice in post-communism. There are four main goals motivating this book: 1) to explain how civil society (groups such as religious denominations) contribute to transitional justice efforts to address and redress past dictatorial repression; 2) to ascertain the impact of state-led reckoning programs on religious communities and their members; 3) to renew the focus on the factors that determine the adoption (or rejection) of efforts to reckon with past human rights abuses in post-communism; and 4) to examine the limitations of enacting specific transitional justice methods, programs and practices in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union countries, whose democratization has differed in terms of its nature and pace. Various churches and their relationship with the communist states are covered in the following countries: Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Belarus.