Suchergebnisse

Defence diplomacy is increasingly important in modern states' foreign and security policies. The ever-expanding circle of issues of interest fosters the strengthening of the role and importance of defence diplomacy. Alongside the traditional areas of military cooperation based on dialogue and support, other areas of interaction serving international security are becoming more visible. Each state has a different set of instruments at its disposal, and they try to shape defence diplomacy in their own way, taking into account the specificities of their own national interests and the environments in which they operate. Despite their natural differences, there is a common understanding that defence diplomacy can enhance trust and transparency in international relations. Nevertheless, with all the similarities in states or international security organisations, it is not easy to talk about a universal model of defence diplomacy. The wide range of diplomatic instruments allows each state to select and adapt them to the specific situation and the conditions dictated by geopolitics or geo-economics in the relevant international policy areas.

The article analyzes the Polish reason of state in changing international order understood as the loss of hegemon position by the United States. The author defines the reason of state as an analytical operant and relates it to the security and sovereignty of a state in the international environment. The text also outlines possibilities of development of Poland's reason of state in the region and global geopolitics.

The changing nature of global and national security threats have made Special Forces the fundament of many states' armed forces. This article focuses on the Polish Special Forces, their roles and functions, both independently and in cooperation with other armed services of the Republic of Poland. After outlining the Polish national security system, the analysis proceeds with a discussion of the modalities of the Special Forces functioning in the times of peace, crisis and war. The article concludes with suggestions regarding legislative changes which would contribute to further development of the Polish Special Forces.

The report presents theoretical framework of relationships between terrorist organisations and media, and it describes them as an interactive modelling of a message. It introduces the concept of mediatisation of terrorism, and it offers a definition of this process. Moreover, the report develops it with six theoretical hypotheses related to: influence of media on selection of terrorists' targets, adaptation of an act of terror to the 'logic of media communication', personalisation of terrorism and celebritisation of terrorists, creation of biased and oversimplified stereotypes, transformation of terrorist objectives into catch-phrases, as well as a role of political violence in agenda-setting of main news broadcasts. The presented concept will be verified in the ongoing comprehensive, quantitative-and-qualitative study on mediatisation of terrorism in American television, that will investigate the process between September 11, 2001 and the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013.

Book Review: Krzysztof Masiul, Bezpieczeństwo Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej wobec współczesnego zagrożenia terroryzmem. Szczytno: Wydział Wydawnictw i Poligrafii Wyższej Szkoły Policji 2014 (pp. 292). ISBN 978–83–7462–414–5. Price: PLN 38.00.

A questionnaire-based study conducted in October 2021 provided analytical material on the degree and sources of disinformation in Polish society. The material has representative qualities and is the first comprehensive research project in Poland to cover issues regarding information security in such breadth and detail. The paper aims to analyse and present a study on disinformation in Polish society conducted on a representative group of Poles in 2021. The project's key research questions are: How receptive is the Polish public to disinformation content? What are the channels of information provided to Poles? Is the notion of disinformation familiar to the Polish audience, and do the recipients of media content search for methods to verify disinformation? The analysis and interpretation of the results identified some important features of the Polish disinformation map. The concept of disinformation is now commonly familiar to the Polish public (86%), and the sensitivity to content credibility can be regarded as high; the respondents were found to verify information, actively searching through various sources. Disinformation is rife in climate, energy (52%), and health (44%).

The paper presents results of the qualitative–to–quantitative narrative analysis of the transitional remembrance policy in South Africa during Nelson R. Mandela's presidency. It refers to findings on the structure of political applications of historical interpretations to the issue of national identity reconstruction during democratisation. Therefore, the paper considers a degree in which remembrance story–telling was used to legitimise, justify, explain and promote the Rainbow Nation, the inclusive and non–racial vision of South Africa's 'ideal self' based on Archbishop Desmond Tutu's theology of Ubuntu hoping. It investigated these relationships on eight levels – legitimisation of new elites, presence of former elites, transitional justice, social costs of transformations, promotion of new standards, the symbolic roles of democratisation, need for national unity and the new state's identity in international politics. Moreover, the paper introduces a draft comparison with other cases of transitional remembrance policy – Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland and Spain – and it offers the structural model of the use of historical interpretations in South African transition, as well as discussing it with reference to the general model of the transitional remembrance policy.