Negotiating Marian Apparitions. The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine

Author(s): Agnieszka Halemba / Language(s): English

This book concerns the politics of religion as expressed through apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Dzhublyk in Transcarpathian Ukraine. The analysis provides insights into the present position of Transcarpathia in regional, Ukraine-wide, and European struggles for identity and political belonging. The way in which the apparitions site has been conceived and managed raises questions concerning the fate of religious communities during and after socialism, the significance of national projects for religious organizations, and the politics of religious management in a situation in which local religious commitments are relatively strong and religious organizations are relatively weak. The analysis contributes to the ethnography and history of this particular region and of the post-socialist world in general. The changing status of the apparition site over the years allows investigation of the questions concerning authority, legitimacy, and power in religious organizations, especially in relation to management of religious experiences.

Политичка антропологија и модерни светски систем

Author(s): Vladimir Ribić / Language(s): Serbian

The Neopopular Bubble. Speculating on "the People" in Late Modern Democracy

Author(s): Péter Csigó / Language(s): English

The common critique of media- and ratings-driven politics envisions democracy falling hostage to a popularity contest. By contrast, the following book reconceives politics as a speculative Keynesian beauty contest that alienates itself from the popular audience it ceaselessly targets. Political actors unknowingly lean on collective beliefs about the popular expectations they seek to gratify, and thus do not follow popular public opinion as it is, but popular public opinion about popular public opinion.This book unravels how collective discourses on “the popular” have taken the role of intermediary between political elites and electorates. The shift has been driven by the idea of “liquid control:” that postindustrial electorates should be reached through flexibly designed media campaigns based on a complete understanding of their media-immersed lives. Such a complex representation of popular electorates, actors have believed, cannot be secured by rigid bureaucratic parties, but has to be distilled from the collective wisdom of the crowd of consultants, pollsters, journalists and pundits commenting on the political process.The mediatization of political representation has run a strikingly similar trajectory to the marketization of capital allocation in finance: starting from a rejection of bureaucratic control, promising a more “liquid” alternative, attempting to detect a collective wisdom (of/about “the markets” and “the people”), and ending up in self-driven spirals of collective speculation.

POZIMNOWOJENNE DWUDZIESTOLECIE: 1989–2010

Author(s): Roman Kuźniar / Language(s): Polish

Książka jest pierwszą w naszej literaturze przedmiotu autorską próbą analizy przemian w życiu międzynarodowym po zimnej wojnie. Roman Kuźniar nie uchyla się przy tym od ocen. Polityka bowiem, podobnie jak inne sfery ludzkiej aktywności, nie dzieje się poza dobrem i złem. Książka ma przy tym charakter systematycznego wykładu, który obejmuje wszystkie regiony świata oraz główne dziedziny i problemy stosunków międzynarodowych w tym okresie. Punktem wyjścia rozważań jest konsekwentne przedstawienie przebiegu zimnej wojny. Następnie autor opisuje wydarzenia i procesy z okresu dwóch następnych dekad – istotnie różniących się od siebie. Od kryzysu 2008 datuje zaś nową epokę.Książka adresowana jest w szczególności do studentów stosunków międzynarodowych, ale jest też niezastąpioną lekturą  dla wszystkich interesujących się problemami współczesnego świata.

PROBLEMY OCHRONY PRAW CZŁOWIEKA W AFRYCE

Author(s): Grażyna Michałowska / Language(s): Polish

Za jedno z największych osiągnięć społecznych drugiej połowy XX wieku uznać można instytucjonalizację systemu ochrony praw człowieka i nadanie im wyróżnionej roli w stosunkach międzynarodowych.W Polsce stan badań nad prawami człowieka w krajach pozaeuropejskich prezentuje się dość skromnie ze względu na kłopoty z dostępem do materiałów źródłowych, egzotykę niektórych zjawisk i związane z nią ryzyko niewłaściwego rozpoznania istoty problemów. Książka ta jest unikatową, pionierską pracą w tej dziedzinie. Omówiono w niej całościowo funkcjonowanie praw człowieka w Afryce, odnosząc się do najważniejszych ich aspektów: od standardów wypracowanych w ramach ONZ i Unii Afrykańskiej, do dyskusji oryginalnych rozwiązań sądownictwa afrykańskiego. Sporo uwagi poświęca Autorka sytuacji kobiet na kontynencie.Grażyna Michałowska przedstawia w klarowny i uporządkowany sposób poszczególne zagadnienia w układzie problemowym, ujmując kontynent całościowo, ale nie ignorując jego wewnętrznego zróżnicowania. Analiza stanu przestrzegania praw człowieka w Afryce uwzględnia specyficzną perspektywę kulturową, bez której nie sposób pojąć procesów zachodzących w tej dziedzinie. Dzięki rozważaniom zawartym w tej książce łatwiej zrozumieć trudne i budzące protest obrońców praw człowieka afrykańskie praktyki dotyczące kary śmierci, stosowania kar cielesnych czy stosunku do kobiet. Wielkim jej atutem są bogate i aktualne materiały źródłowe.

Zagrożenia twarzy w tłumaczeniu ustnym: pragmatyczne studium debat plenarnych w Parlamencie Europejskim

Author(s): Magdalena Bartłomiejczyk / Language(s): English

This monograph focuses on pragmatic aspects of simultaneous interpreting, and istherefore intended both for translation scholars and for linguists interested in interlingual transfer of pragmatic meaning. Efforts have been made to avoid dense, strictly scientific language and the use of unexplained specialist terminology in the hope that the book might also appeal to practicing interpreters and interpreter trainees, although it should be noted that its character is descriptive rather than prescriptive. The main problem under discussion is how simultaneous interpreters handle face-threatening acts and impoliteness directed by politicians at their opponents, and the authentic material under analysis comes from plenary debates of the European Parliament, which are routinely interpreted into all the official languages of the European Union. Chapters 1–4 are meant to set the scene. Chapter 1 presents the European Union as a multilingual institution, with a special focus on its translation and interpreting services. Chapter 2 zooms in on the latter, considering such features of plenary debates of the European Parliament that have direct consequences for interpreting, and also including an overview of existing research on interpreting for the needs of various EU bodies. Chapter 3 provides the pragmatic background to the study, shedding light especially on the crucial notions of “face,” “facework,” “face-threatening acts” and “impoliteness,” while Chapter 4 reviews existing research on facework performed by interpreters in various settings and interpreting modes.The author’s empirical contribution is presented in Chapter 5, which scrutinizes Polish interpretations of British Eurosceptics’ plenary speeches, in particular ones that fiercely attack and possibly offend the speakers’ political opponents. Five speeches undergo detailed discourse analysis covering all identifiable aspects of facework as performed by the original speaker and the interpreter, whereas a considerably larger corpus of source texts and the corresponding interpretations is analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of personal reference and impoliteness. The interpretations are searched, first and foremost, for signs of interpreting strategies at play during transfer of face-threatening input. Many of these strategies result in mitigation of the originally intended impoliteness. Chapter 6 develops this topic, endeavouring to find multifarious explanations of the pronounced trend towards mitigation by the interpreter within the wide framework of modern translation studies. Both this chapter and the final conclusions devote much attention to avenues for future research that would offer some possibilities of triangulating and complementing the results of thepresent study.

Srpsko pravo i međunarodne sudske institucije

Author(s): / Language(s): English,Serbian

Pressed By a Double Loyalty. Hungarian Attendance at the Second Vatican Council, 1959-1965

Author(s): András Fejérdy / Language(s): English

The history of the Second Vatican Council and the history of the policy of openness towards the East-Central European Communist countries, that is, the so called Vatican “Ostpolitik,” were looked at until now as two separate topics of research. The virtue of András Fejérdy’s work is to demonstrate, at the end of a thorough-going study through various available archives (first of all of the party and state, but also ecclesiastical ones), that it is not like that, but in reality the two topics are closely linked. Analyzing the history of the Hungarian presence at Vatican II in the context of the Hungarian Church policy and the evolution of the relations between the Holy See and Hungary, the book reveals that in consequence of the interests of the Holy See and the Hungarian party-state related to the Council—from the perspective of Hungary—Vatican II was not primarily an ecclesial event, but it remained closely joined to the negotiations between the Holy See and Hungary. During the Council, Hungary became the experimental laboratory of the Vatican’s new eastern policy.

Neostvarena prava i promašene politike 2: Zastupljenost nacionalnih manjina u državnoj upravi, pravosuđu i policiji

Author(s): Ljubomir Mikić / Language(s): English,Croatian

Relying on the fact of by law guaranteed right on proportional representation of national minorities members in public authorities that has for years presented a big problem and challenge for the Republic of Croatia, Serb National Council (SNC) published the analysis Unrealized Rights and Failed Policies: Representation of National Minorities in State Administration, Judiciary and Police in March of 2014. The analysis was based on competent authorities’ data about the representation of national minorities in stated institutions, highlighting the representation of Serbs followed and collected by SNC and the Independent Democratic Serbian Party Club in the Croatian Parliament between the middle of 2008 and the middle of 2013, respectively until the beginning of the EU membership of Republic of Croatia in July of 2013. The results of the analysis were devastating. It has been noticed that during the analysed period, despite the specific measures of the Government of Republic of Croatia, not only there was no improvement in realization of the rights, but previously achieved level of representation demonstrate tendencies of moderate to significant degradation. Former politics of the Government directed towards increasing the number of national minorities’ members in competent authorities have been rated as useless, and stated reasonable doubt they were only fulfilling the form in order to meet the criteria of the EU entry negotiations. The conclusion, among other, stated the necessity for the Government and other competent authorities to undertake decisive, comprehensive and concrete measures in collaboration and with participation of national minorities’ representatives and independent experts in the following period in order to implement the corresponding guaranteed rights.

Govor mržnje i nasilje prema Srbima u 2015.

Author(s): Tamara Opačić / Language(s): English,Croatian

The year behind us was marked by an increased number of physical assaults on Serbs in Croatia, threats against them and destruction of their property. In 2015 Cyrillic script1 in Vukovar was practically abolished and we have witnessed numerous attempts to rehabilitate the Independent State of Croatia (NDH)2 as well as an increased incidence of hate speech by public figures and part of the media. For this reason 2015 will be remembered as the year in which nationalist and anti-minority atmosphere – which became more intense since Croatia’s accession to the European Union in 2013 – has reached a worrying scale.

Alternativni izvještaj o primjeni Okvirne konvencije za zaštitu nacionalnih manjina

Author(s): Ljubomir Mikić / Language(s): English,Croatian

The Serb National Council (SNC), a national coordination of councils of Serb national minority representatives, is an elected political, advisory and coordination entity that operates as a self-government of Serbs in the Republic of Croatia. The SNC is engaged with the protection and promotion of Serbs’ human, civil and ethnic rights, and issues of their identity, participation and integration into Croatian society.The SNC was founded per the Erdut Agreement and the Letter of the Croatian Government about the completion of peaceful reintegration, which guarantees the Serb minority self-government as well as the right to organise as based upon the centuries old tradition of Serb self-government: from church/popular parliaments, to legislative and political acts which regulated the position of Serbs in the 13th and 14th century, to the documents of the National Antifascist Council. It was established in 1997, in Zagreb, at the initiative of the Alliance of Serb Organisations (SKD Prosvjeta, Serb Democratic Forum, Community of Rijeka and Istria Serbs and Joint Council of Municipalities) and among the founders were also the Idependent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS) , Baranja Democratic Forum, Association of refugee and displaced Serbs, representatives of parts of the Serb Orthodox Church (SPC) church municipalities, members of parliament and prominent individuals.

Between Anarchy and Censorship. Public discourse and the duties of social media

Author(s): Judit Bayer / Language(s): English

Social media platforms have become powerful enough to cause perceptible effects in societies on a global scale. They facilitate public discussion, and they work with excessive amounts of personal data – both activities affecting human rights and the rule of law. This specific service requires attention from the regulator: according to this paper, a new legal category should be created with clear definitions, and a firm delineation of platforms’ rights and responsibilities. Social media companies should not become responsible for third-party content, as this would lead to over-censorship, but they should have the obligation to create and maintain safe and secure platforms, on which human rights and the rule of law are respected.

The Difficult Road to the Schengen Information System II: The legacy of ‘laboratories’ and the cost for fundamental rights and the rule of law

Author(s): Joanna Parkin / Language(s): English

This paper seeks to understand the reasons behind the considerable complications facing the project to develop a new, second generation version of the Schengen Information System (SISII). Despite the centrality of this large-scale EU database for immigration and border control purposes and the increasing prioritisation of security technologies within the EU’s internal security strategy, the project has encountered substantial delays, an escalating budget, political crises and criticisms of the new system’s potential impact on fundamental rights. To uncover the underlying causes of these difficulties and deficiencies, the paper examines the decision-making processes that have shaped the development of SIS II over the last decade. It argues that there are strong parallels between the policy processes surrounding SIS II and decision-making under the old Schengen regime, where expert driven, security oriented and fragmented decision-making took place outside the EU framework and beyond the reach of democratic and judicial oversight.

Korzenie antyautorytaryzmu

Author(s): Nina Witoszek / Language(s): Polish

Jedną z najważniejszych, niedokończonych rewolucji we współczesnym świecie jest rewolucja godności: walka jednostek i grup o uznanie i respekt – niezależnie od religii, narodowości czy orientacji seksualnej. Autorka dowodzi, że rewolucja godności jest często dziełem małych, odważnych grup „humanistycznych renegatów”, od których zależy postęp moralny. Na nowo odczytuje polską rewolucję godności z lat 1976–1989: okres wyjątkowego „drugiego renesansu” w Europie, powrotu do ideałów godności, altruizmu, odwagi i współczucia. Pyta, jak wcześniejsze sposoby walki z autorytaryzmem mają się do XXI-wiecznych fejsbukowych rewolucji. Porównuje je z siłą przepływów cyfrowych, które napędzają współczesne „sieci oburzenia i nadziei”. Pokazuje, że rewolucja godności ma swego mrocznego sobowtóra: populizm, który obiecuje przywrócenie narodowej dumy i wielkości za cenę nowego autorytarnego zniewolenia.„W czasach, gdy pojęcie populizmu nabrało tak negatywnych konotacji, dobrze jest przypomnieć sobie jego emancypacyjne, postępowe oblicze. To książka, która mogłaby dać nadzieję George'owi Orwellowi”.Roger Griffin, prof. historii i politologii, Oxford Brookes University

THE USE OF GEO-TARGETING DURING ELECTIONS

Author(s): Nora Biteniece,Kristina Van Sant / Language(s): English

Internet users around the globe demand different information and experiences that correspond to their geography. The most immediate difference is language: people want news, entertainment and services in their own language. Other things that vary by geography are culture, currency, climate and consumer norms. Geo-targeting is a common tool for targeting information to a specific geographical area and is widely used in digital marketing, in combination with information gleaned from available user data about consumer preferences, to deliver location-specific content. Itis a cost-effective way to match information with consumers.

DISINFORMATION AS A GLOBAL PROBLEM – REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES

Author(s): Rachael Lim / Language(s): English

This research project discusses disinformation in the European Union (EU) and Southeast Asia (SEA). The report examines the characterisation and context of disinformation, provides an overview of its creators and its circulation, where creation refers to production and its underlying motivations and circulation refers to the different ways it is disseminated, amplified and sustained, and rounds up with a discussion on foreseeable trends. It finds that disinformation is ultimately a national security problem, and any assessment of, and response to, disinformation must be formulated with developments in other domains.

TOWARDS RULE OF LAW IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

Author(s): Filippo Raso,Vineta Mēkone / Language(s): English

This report summarizes an invite-only workshop held in Riga, Latvia on 12 December 2018 that focused on exploring which legal and ethical principles can promote the safety and reliability of the digital environment and reduce its risks to democracy worldwide.

Russia’s Activities in Africa’s Information Environment. Case Studies: Mali and Central African Republic

Author(s): Karel Svoboda,Paula-Charlotte Matlach,Zack Baddorf / Language(s): English

This paper focuses on Russia’s strategies in Africa. The first ever Russia-Africa summit, co-hosted in October 2019 by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi in Sochi, was presented by both Russian and international media as a milestone in Russia’s return to the African continent. Leaders and delegations of the vast majority of African states met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and other Russian representatives to discuss possible projects of cooperation between their respective countries. The summit ranked among the largest of recent Africa-partner summits (EU-Africa, China-Africa, US-Africa, and Japan-Africa). For example, Russia was able to welcome more state delegations than the US at their summit. The declared initiatives of cooperation appeared impressive, ranging from nuclear energy, oil and gas, to automobile production and financial loans for various fields. This meeting sparked numerous claims by both Western and Russian media that Russia is a key player in the region. There are plans for organizing another summit in 2022.

Abuse of Power: Coordinated Online Harassment of Finnish Government Ministers

Author(s): Kristina Van Sant,Rolf Fredheim,Gundars Bergmanis-Korats / Language(s): English

This report is an explorative analysis of abusive messages targeting Finnish ministers on the social media platform Twitter. The purpose of this study is to understand the scope of politically motivated abusive language on Finnish Twitter, and to determine if, and to what extent, it is perpetrated by inauthentic accounts. To this end, we developed a mixed methodology, combining AI-driven quantitative visualisations of the networks delivering messages of abuse with a qualitative analysis of the messages in order to understand the themes and triggers of abusive activity. We collected Twitter data between 12 March and 27 July 2020, a period spanning the state of emergency declared in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This report is informed by the findings of three recent Finnish studies, one of which investigated the extent and effects of online hate speech against politicians while the other two studied the use of bots to influence political discourse during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary elections.

Falsification of History as a Tool of Influence

Author(s): / Language(s): English

This study deals with the growing trend of Russia’s use of historical propaganda to further its foreign policy goals. It contains chapters written by experts in the field in the respective countries of Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Poland. The methodological aspects of the project were discussed in detail during a seminar in Riga on 11 December 2018. It was agreed that, for the integrity of the compendium, at least the central theme should be commonly understood as Jowett and O’Donnell conceptualise it: propaganda is a deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist. Its systematic nature requires the longitudinal study of its progress. Because the essence of propaganda is its deliberateness of purpose, considerable investigation is required to find out what this purpose is.