According to various independent research institutions Poland is now seen as the fastest destabilizing democracy. After 1989, Poland was often presented in the international public discourse as an example of the successful political and economic transition away from Communism. However, since 2015, Poland has been associated with terminologies not previously linked with this country: “nationalism”, “populism” or “breaking rule of law”. The authors of the book analyze the reasons for democra...

This book analyzes the controversy surrounding imperialism associated with capitalist development. The last dozen years passed under the shadow of two momentous events: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conducted in the framework of the broader «war on terror», and the economic crisis. They occurred against the backdrop of global economic integration, but also against the contradictions in its development. Those events and processes are explained in the theory of contemporary capitalist imp...

This book describes struggles of different countries and their development after World War II. It presents a panorama of different ideologies of accelerated development, which dominated the world just before the war and in the next 40 years. The author explains why in the 1970s global and local elites began to turn away from the state, exchanging statism for the belief in the «invisible hand of the market» as a panacea for underdevelopment. He focuses not only on the genesis of underdevelo...

The Hawks of Peace. Notes of Russian Ambassador is a unique analytical edition where Russian Deputy Premier Dmitry Rogozin shares his notes on personalities and events that shaped the history of post-Communist Russia, believing that without those it would be impossible to understand the past and envisage the future of his country. Permanent Representative of Russia to NATO until recently, in his political dairy Dmitry Rogozin contemplates on the complex relationship between Russia and the ...

As evidenced by the election of celebrity and reality television star Donald Trump, popular culture has played a vital role in the conceptualisation of political leadership. This revised edition of The American President in Film and Television explores the complex relationship between the construction of fictional presidents on screen and the political cultures from which they emerged. How have our popular cultural fantasies of presidential leadership contributed to the c...

This book brings together a set of contributions that show the breadth and depth of the scientific work of Josef Fröhlich and his influence on Austrian research, technology and innovation (RTI) policy. It is edited in honour of the occasion of his retirement as Head of Innovation Systems Department at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. The contributors provide an overview of important issues of debate at the intersection of innovation studies and government policy, which have been p...

The author analyses competition as one of four coordinating mechanisms helping agents mutually to orientate their actions, avoid chaos, and produce social order. Competition is a key dimension of developed societies. It helps to structure and is also conducive to social change. Competing agents constrain one another, making it hard for anyone to change their position. They discover new routines the best of which may later be institutionalized. Competition is a solvent of power but only in ...

This interdisciplinary book brings an empirical evidence that social capital is an important building block in the reintegration processes, migration challenges and economic dynamism of the SEE communities. Such a conclusion opposes the common belief that (re)establishing social relations in a post-ethnic conflict environment is difficult, or sometimes even impossible. These are indeed societies where trust in people and institutions remains low, but it is often replaced with other forms o...

This book depicts a new research perspective of political leadership, in which the multi-level and dynamic leadership relation is explained as relations between the leader (human agency) and followers (sociological environment). In this sense, leadership comprises mutual influences between personal and structural domain. In morphogenesis, the subjective matrix of leadership keeps the division into private and public exposure, as well as individual and collective realization, which in fact ...

This book analyses the role of social networks in the process of migration. Based on stories of Polish Jews who migrated between Poland and Palestine in the 1920s, the author presents all stages of the journey and shows how networks of friends and families spread in different countries contributed to the migration experience. Presenting these stories through correspondence, she shows how migrants were not only motivated by traditional push and pull factors, or ideology, but also by depende...

This book is a response to the need for scientific research on one of the components of quality of democracy, id est accountability. The author analyses thoroughly in cross-section the accountability mechanisms in Poland and Spain. This approach required that each of the issues under investigation be reviewed synthetically, and only the aspects meaningful for the notion of accountability have been explored. This book may be a starting point for further, more in-depth analyses of accountabi...

"The Olympic Games" is innovative in its twofold approach: while helping to boost English language skills, it also instills in the student the peaceful values of the Olympic and Paralympic movement. Designed for pre-intermediate and intermediate language students, it can be used within the regular classroom setting or as an additional Grammar reference book. Each lesson gradually takes the learner to being able to comfortably use the future tense in active voice for simple and practical us...