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The theory of hybrid warfare has changed profoundly the American debate about future conflicts, priorities of forces planning, military doctrines, organisation and training within the U.S. Armed Forces. It had originally been proposed in the context of a debate on the nature of future military conflicts and warfare, but the concept was initially misunderstood. Following a lengthy evolution, the current theory of hybrid conflict is much more mature and advanced, even if areas for further research still remain. It took the Pentagon a full decade to recognise this theory and accept the new terminology in strategic documents. At last, the National Military Strategy of the U.S. (July 2015) uses the term hybrid conflicts, reiterating the need to adapt to those and learn to cope with such warfare.
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The academic discussion on the specificity of the hybrid warfare concept and its unique methods has been going on for almost a decade now and has been dominated by military strategists. The question whether a hybrid war is a new phenomenon or just another fashionable label to denominate the complexity of modern warfare has not been resolved, but the concept is particularly useful in examining the recent Russian-Ukrainian conflict. This article aims to analyse the conflict from a very narrow angle of the key characteristics of modern hybrid warfare, attempting in particular to explain what hybrid warfare actually is in the Ukrainian context and to assess the potential for Russia’s extension of the new hybrid methods to other states, first of all the post-Soviet neighbouring countries.
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For many Central Europeans hybrid warfare is only available to strong states wishing to mask their involvement in conventional warfare, not to weak non-state actors. The article tests this hypothesis and looks at the organisations on the Foreign Terrorist Organisations list in an attempt to establish whether or not they meet the requirements of a hybrid threat. Such an analysis helps establish if non-state actors could and would go “where eagles dare,” reaching for solutions such as those adopted by the Russian Federation in Ukraine. If so, and indeed this will be shown to be the case, this offers valuable takeaway points also for the exposed NATO eastern flank, which borders on the hybrid-prone Russia.
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The aim of this article is to answer the question: why totalitarianism, as a form of statehood, a particular form of social governance fights against religion and human religiosity. In other words, the author of the article tries to explain the anti-religious nature of totalitarianism. This outstanding issue is intended to be presented on the basis of philosophical knowledge referring to the personalistic vision of man and realist metaphysics. The presentation of the issue will be juxtaposed with indication of the relation between religion of human life and social governance, shaped in the context of Western civilisation. The author emphasises that religion makes it possible for a human being to exercise her or his transcendence in contrast to the whole world, and her or his freedom from the world, from its finiteness and insufficiency. Thanks to religion, a human being has the chance to discover her or his dignity, i.e. her or his personal exceptional goodness, constituting the basis for all human entitlements. Thanks to religion, there is hope in the human heart that gives strength to overcome any difficulties, obstacles to fight for what rightly belongs to this person and for what rightfully belongs to others. The lack of religion in human life means the lack of foundation for the discovery of her or his identity, destiny, inborn dignity and freedom; its lack means also the inability to understand and perceive oneself in a mature way.
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The author presents the views of John Paul II concerning totalitarian system. The Pope discussed the aforementioned issue in several documents he published during his pontificate. In Centesimus annus John Paul II warned against totalitarianism at the services of democracy, in Veritatis splendor he identified the fallacies of contemporary thinking about ethics, adopted by some proponents of catholic moral theology, which indirectly justify and give raise to totalitarian thinking and practices. In the encyclical Evangelium vitae he determined the contemporary civilisation as ‘death civilisation’, the essence of which is the death of conscience because the desensitisation thereof in the face of fundamental crimes springs from fallacies in thinking about ethics. In addition, Fides et ratio postulated rebuilding trust in reason and in particular pragmatic aspect thereof, i.e. the conscience which navigates human actions – as the conditio sine qua non for rescuing Christianity and protection against new forms of totalitarianism. Based on the views of John Paul II, the author attempts to answer the question: what is the fallacy in thinking about ethics faced even by the contemporary moral theology and leading us towards totalitarianism?
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The article shows that the pontificate of the Pope who was a Slav became a great symbol for the world. As a witness of two totalitarian systems, he showed that any programmatic assault on the basis of morality is a form of totalitarianism thinly disguised under the mask of democracy. John Paul II underscored that following the harmful principle, “think and act as if God does not exist,” is especially present in mass-media. Therefore, there is a great responsibility of media people not to manipulate the truth, because the negation of truths about God, man and society is a source of totalitarianism in all its forms. In his article, the author indicates remedial measures which protect the society against totalitarianism.
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In the introduction to the article, the author cites and analyses the key assumptions of personalistic anthropology made by Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. Based on the aforementioned philosophical analysis, the author of the article notices that in the centre of both content and message of the poetry by Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II there is a human being whose personal features may be perceived through the prism of poetic considerations given to work, fatherland and social life, over faith and prayer. It is a poetry bearing the stamp of two totalitarian systems as well as the aversion of the author to avant-garde which ‘has forgotten about a human being’. The exemplary anthropological threads specified above are intertwined and become prominent when one assumes the perspective of reference to God and to the miracle, which consists in discovering His Existence and the miracle of trying to penetrate His Mystery.
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The author is deeply convinced of the impossibility of imagining the Church deprived of a certain poetic style of life. It was also the belief of the Pope John Paul II, the one nostalgically awaited by the Romantic generation who dreamed about “the throne opened for the Slavic pope” according to the prophetic intuition of Juliusz Słowacki in his well known poem The Slavic Pope, published in late 1848. When Karol Wojtyła was elected the Vicar of Christ, the Poles immediately recalled this visionary text of their celebrated poet – a kind of aftermath of the political and religious background at the time. What is more, the St. Paul’s successor turned out to be a man of artistic vision which he often took advantage of in his pastoral work. For this reason a question arises in the further part of this article as to the role poetry can play in people’s lives: can it have a real influence on their decisions or does it remain a mere expression of their personal sovereignty? To give an answer to this question it is necessary to ponder over the nature of creativity as such, especially the lyrical creative output. It seems that the ability to choose poetic forms from the endless language resources combined with a certain state of mind – kind of poetic frenzy, inspiration, mysterious concentration – can produce poetry that constantly suggests the content hard to express. While our daily language is usually informative and meaningful, the language of poetry goes much further. A poet, while building a certain semantic structure makes use of it to create a phenomenon. It should be regarded as an experienced abundance of meanings held together by structural order. This is the reason why faith open to poetic word and, more generally, to art constituted for Karol Wojtyła-John Paul II an effective tool of strengthening the relationship with God and other people. Aesthetic beauty paired with moral beauty, noticeable subtlety, sensitivity to the voice of consciousness and other people’s internal and external sovereignty made him able to draw individual people and entire communities to Christ. To quote the words of Osip Mandelstam, the tragic poet sentenced to death by the soviet communists, whose body was placed in a common grave – the words he threw back in face of his persecutors: “Don’t take from me the movements of my lips.”
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The objective of this article is to analyse cyberspace as a warfare environment. The text presents specific forms of action and measures that may be used in cyberspace and become components of modern warfare. As such, they might have a significant impact on warfare and a potential to change its nature, contributing to its hybridisation, although they will not be able to replace conventional means of warfare entirely. Their role will be of utmost importance if they complement conventional measures, and only then will they play a role in determining the balance of power in international relations in the long term.
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Hybrid warfare, even while posing a challenge as a combination of different methods of conducting conflicts, is not the surprising, new phenomenon it is sometimes depicted as. Public international law, even without labelling conflicts as “hybrid wars,” contains norms which deal with the various aspects of hybrid warfare. International humanitarian law, for instance, regulates a substantial scope of hybrid wars by imposing humanitarian obligations also on non-state actors. Moreover, one can refer to international law regulations on new types of weapons, propaganda and information warfare. These examples confirm that international law embraces the mechanisms.
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The Transatlantic Partnership on Trade and Investment (TTIP) will in all likelihood generate gains first and foremost for large multinational corporations engaged in investment and trade between the United States and the European Union. The agreement brings numerous threats to the countries of the European Union and might significantly weaken the competence of EU and national authorities in formulating policies in such areas as consumer protection or the environment. It will boost competition on both the EU and U.S. markets, undermining workers’ rights and resulting in a further delocalisation of production to countries with lower labor costs. If the ISDS mechanism is included in the TTIP, it will strengthen the position of corporations in disputes with governments.
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Over the past 50 years the United States and European Union states have developed high but divergent consumers protection standards. A free trade agreement based on unifications of standards is unrealistic, so functional equivalents and/or mutual recognition of standards might be a recipe. The EU single market is based on mutual recognition of national standards whenever there is no common EU standard, and an ideological approach to the protection of consumers could undermine the extent of benefits from TTIP.
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M. Pietrasiak, D. Mierzejewski, K. Żakowski (red.), Narzędzia polityki zagranicznej Chińskiej Republiki Ludowej(Justyna Szczudlik-Tatar)
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