70 articles tagged with poland were found.
This article analyzes the Polish police narrative on Roma during the interwar time, unveiling attitudes and potential practices. According to the police journals and handbooks, Roma were mobile and disposed to theft and deceit. Their traditional crafts were merely a smoke screen for illicit activities. As countermeasures, searches of caravans, meticulous checks of identity documents, indiscriminate fingerprinting of Roma suspects, among several measures, were recommended. This narrative constituted part of a larger police professional discourse and is likely to be an indicator of practices on Roma. Polish police followed the contemporary European expertise on Roma produced by the fields of criminalistics and criminology. As there were no discriminatory laws targeting Roma in Poland, it appears that police used legislation against begging and vagrancy, among other tactics.
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
April 23, 2024
The aim of the article is to examine what is called the “Polish Eastern policy”. This concept covers certain conceptual foundations on which subsequent governments in Warsaw have tried to build their relations with their neighbors from the post-Soviet area. The topic has already been widely described and discussed. Due to the limited volume of the article, this issue will be considered mainly in the context of the example of Polish-Ukrainian relations. The starting point will be a description of the circumstances in which Poland was the first country in the world to recognize the independence of Ukraine in 1991. Then, the motives of Polish decision-makers will be characterized. This applies both to 1991 and to the way they behaved during subsequent “Ukrainian crises.” For this purpose, Colin Flint’s concept of “geopolitical code” will be used.
Essay by
Michał Wawrzonek
April 23, 2024
This Special Issue include eight articles that endeavor to analyze more deeply different aspects of the influence of transnational “soft power” aimed at coopting youth in authoritarian and hybrid regimes through radical and nationalist youth organizations, patriotic education, and youth wings of ruling parties. By means of such activities, governments try to distract the youth from countercultural movements and opposition politics as well as to educate an obedient and loyal generation. The purpose is to “vaccinate” such generations with illiberal or authoritarian values in order to eliminate potential threats to regimes’ stability.
Essay by
Oleg Antonov and Olena Podolian
August 23, 2023
New Conservatives in Russia and East Central Europe. Eds. Katharina Bluhm and Mihai Varga (London: Routledge, 2019), 309 pages.
By
Anna Schwenck
October 25, 2021
Discussions about the assessment of historic events have always had their place in the public discourse in democratic societies, whereas totalitarian regimes such as the Communist one preferred an official version of history that is not up for debate. This is why a conflict-prone memory boom in the CEE was to be expected after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The only recently intensified trend is to fight memory wars with the means of memory laws, i.e. by using laws prescribing and proscribing certain representations of historic events as a weapon to protect one’s national collective memory from divergent interpretation by others. Such approach to governing memory wars are detrimental to the neighborly relations, i.e. turning them into un-neighborly ones.
By
Anna Grinberg
October 25, 2021
On the Watchpost. The complicity of the Polish and Polish Criminal Police in the Holocaust. Review of Na posterunku. Udział polskiej policji granatowej i kryminalnej w zagładzie Żydów Jan Grabowski 432 pages. Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wolowiec 2020.
By
Piotr Wawrzeniuk
April 22, 2021
Political and scholarly debates on European (meso-)regions have returned time and again over the past 100 years. The conceptualizations of Central and Eastern Europe plays a major role in the debates, which affects the Baltic Sea region and Northern Europe as well. These issues have already been addressed many times, but recently, a new development deserves our attention: the launch of the “Three Seas Initiative” in the summer of 2015 by the presidents of Poland and Croatia, comprising 12 EU member states between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas.
Essay by
Jörg Hackmann
April 21, 2021
The author has analyzed the coverage of the 30th anniversary of the Roundtable Agreement and June elections in Polish newspapers of all political hues. Additionally several official speeches held in connection with the commemorations have been scrutinized. The goal has been to examine the uses of memory of 1989 in Polish politics of 2019 and highlight the strategic choices and constraints faced by mnemonic actors in this context. Thus, the study presented may be seen as a follow-up to Bernhard’s and Kubik’s investigation conducted ten years ago. However, this analysis expands the focus of Bernhard’s and Kubik’s work by paying special attention to cultural constraints on politics of memory. Thus, the aim is both to give insight into contemporary politics of memory in Poland in relation to the recent past and contribute to the more general understanding of how culture works in politics of memory.
By
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa
April 21, 2021
In his book of reportage: Białystok. White Power, Black Memory Marcin Kącki documents oblivion and denial of the memory of the former Jewish inhabitants of the city; paradoxically, it is also a call for this memory to be restored. In other words, we are dealing here with the two basic attitudes and forms of remembering historical trauma, distinguished by LaCapra: The first results in the process of “working-through”; the other is based on denial and results in “acting-out”.
By
Jan Miklas-Frankowski
February 15, 2021
Memory can be retained and archived. You can, however, also manipulate it, obliterate its fragments and sometimes whole segments, using its stores as a tool in a political fight with minorities. Historical memory is only seemingly a domain of objective knowledge.
The point of departure for my artivistic practice is always work with archival material. With time, my experiences led me to outline a specific understanding of historical memory as a process in which the most important role is played by the migration of ideas, a peculiar kind of nomadism.
Essay by
Zuzanna Hertzberg
February 12, 2021
Issue 2024, 1-2: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.