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Cover -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: Civil Society and Democracy -- 1. Civil Society As a Normative Concept -- 2. Anti-communist Opposition and Civil Society -- 3. Democracy, Democratization and the Importance of Civil Society -- Part II: Democratic Theory and Participation -- 4. Normative Democratic Theories: Concepts and Questions -- 5. Deliberative Democracy and Citizenship -- 6. The Public Sphere and Democratic Participation -- Part III: Challenges of Post-communist Democratization and Civil Society -- 7. Corruption and Democratization -- 8. Weak Civic Participation and Democratic Consolidation -- 9. Habituation to Democracy in a Divided Society -- Bibliography -- Index

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The aim of this article is to examine and compare two republican approaches to politics and res publica presented in the sixteenth century by Wawrzyniec Grzymala Goślicki and Gasparo Contarini.
THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: Both authors define the core elements of a republican scientia civilis but emphasize different aspects as being of primary importance for a well‑ordered civitas libera. Goślicki saw the best safeguards of a free and well‑ordered commonwealth in the character and virtues of the rulers and citizens, whereas Contarini believed that such safeguards could only be found in a good legal and institutional structure that kept corruption at bay. The article follows the contextual method typical for intellectual history to present different arguments that Contarini and Goślicki formulated in their understanding of scientia civilis and the best commonwealth looking at both the context of their works and their arguments.
THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: After introducing the context for the two works the next two parts focus on Goslicki's and then Contarini's vision of scientia civilis and the most effective ways to keep corruption and decay at bay followed by comparison and conclusion.
RESEARCH RESULTS: A comparison of these two visions should shed some light on the later development of both polities and republicanism in modern Europe more generally which largely followed Contarini and not Goślicki. It can also provide an important lesson for our own understanding of politics and political philosophy that should underpin a political order to make it resilient to corruption and backsliding.
CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Examining these two authors and their prominent works helps better situate political discourses in the two countries that explain different trajectories of their constitutions and political developments, and for us today provide an interesting lesson on how we should understand politics and respublica.

Transitions, democratization and recent democratic backsliding in CEE provide
a rich context for examining the meaning and shifting of civic activism and how people
participate and organize in civil society today. This article offers a fresh and comparative
analysis based on empirical data on the question of what motivates formal and informal
activism, and the potentially transformative role of civil society that has recently faced
such challenges as democratic backsliding, shrinking public space and polarization. It
looks specifically at the responses of Polish and Hungarian activists and advocacy CSOs
to these new challenges. Their strategies bring an important lesson on how civil society
actors can adapt, continue their mission, or even turn challenges into opportunities.
These new trends indicate that civic space in CEE is shifting which is further influenced
by the reactions to new forms of social, economic and political crises. It is argued that
this shift and the new trends in civic activism require not only fresh empirical data, but
also a revision of normative and methodological approaches that have so far been used
in civil society and social movement research.

The developments that took place in Central and Easter Europe (CEE) over the last three decades have consequences for how researchers define and understand the concept of civil society. This article revisits four major approaches to civil society that were developed after 1989 and provides reasons for a reconceptualization in light of new research and empirical data. It argues that civil society in CEE needs to be studied not as an outcome or a facilitator of democratization and democratic consolidation, but as a phenomenon in its own right. The article also supports an earlier claim of scholars that the static liberal approach to civil society has limited explanatory potential in the CEE context and advocates a dynamic approach, which is guided less by normative assumptions and more by the actual experience of societies practicing various forms of social self-organization. Four criteria of the dynamic model that are proposed include a broad understanding of civic activism as the key dimension of civil society, a clear focus on its potential, a better understanding of the normative content of civic activism, and a recognition of a value-related aspect of civil society activism.

The Revivals of the Jagiellonian Idea: Political and Normative Contexts
The article has two major aims. First, it provides a short analysis of three revivals of the Jagiellonian idea which took place in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in different historical and political circumstances. Second, it locates these revivals within the political and normative contexts of the time, and looks at different reasons that explain the persistence of the concept. The article also addresses more general questions, such as the ways that the Jagiellonian idea can be conceptualized, debates over its practicality and usefulness and its lasting presence in Polish national memory. Although there does not seem to be an agreement on the very meaning of the Jagiellonian idea, it certainly has enough normative or symbolic potential to animate strategic policy visions even in the twenty-first century.

In recent years, political theory has benefited from a neo-republican perspective that brought to the fore the conception of a 'republican democracy' which assumes a robust public sphere, civic involvement, and vigilance, as well as a neo-Roman conception of liberty understood as the absence of arbitrary power. Neo-republicanism, however, has not engaged much in a wider consideration of the importance of political education in democratic societies. This article presents an approach to political education that can be inspiring for both substantive and instrumental neo-republican political theories as well as democratic theory and practice. It considers political education as primarily self-education, a process of learning that aims at greater political awareness, empowerment, and better judgment on political issues. As such, political (self-)education can be seen as liberating and as a necessary condition of active political involvement, community service, citizenship, civic intelligence and political liberty.

The theoretical analysis presented in this article links the social and institutional conditions of democratization by looking at two rarely associated concepts, civic unity and the rule of law. It attempts to bring a novel approach to the study of democratization in a divided society such as Ukraine, building on a selection of the existing literature on the subject and focusing on the civic dimension of the process. It follows the approach of those political scientists who have challenged the "no precondition' line in democratization research by looking precisely at context specific conditions that may sustain democracy. It is argued that the common sense of citizenship and belonging to a political community, supported by legal and institutional mechanisms and conscious effort of political elites, would contribute to the development of civil society and perhaps even democratic consolidation in the long run. Thus the civic and institutional dimensions of democratization should not be separated, especially in case of some post-communist societies such as Ukraine. The relationship between these two dimensions, however, is problematic at least from a methodological point of view and requires careful examination. ; The theoretical analysis presented in this article links the social and institutional conditions of democratization by looking at two rarely associated concepts, civic unity and the rule of law. It attempts to bring a novel approach to the study of democratization in a divided society such as Ukraine, building on a selection of the existing literature on the subject and focusing on the civic dimension of the process. It follows the approach of those political scientists who have challenged the "no precondition' line in democratization research by looking precisely at context specific conditions that may sustain democracy. It is argued that the common sense of citizenship and belonging to a political community, supported by legal and institutional mechanisms and conscious effort of political elites, would contribute to the development of civil society and perhaps even democratic consolidation in the long run. Thus the civic and institutional dimensions of democratization should not be separated, especially in case of some post-communist societies such as Ukraine. The relationship between these two dimensions, however, is problematic at least from a methodological point of view and requires careful examination.