Search results

The impact of pandemic governance on state regimes is a topic of lively debate. While some researchers suggest that governments may use a 'state of exception' to consolidate their power and introduce new methods of control, others see it as an opportunity for new civil society initiatives and social innovation. In this paper, we examine both the actions and discourses of the Polish government and its associated actors and the independent bottom-up responses of Polish society and how these were incorporated or rejected by the government. Our primary focus is on public health governance, including quarantine policies, the management of scarce personal protective equipment, related narratives and societal responses. This study is based primarily on desk research, analysis of key legislation and regulations tailored to the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland and analysis of social media (X/Twitter) discourse related to COVID-19. Our research reveals a crisis not only of governance but primarily of the neoliberal capitalist state. We conclude that governance during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland showed uneven patterns.

AbstractThe political landscape of the radical right has long been a major discussion point in the political and social sciences. By considering the variety of radical right organizations (movement parties and non-parliamentary organizations) and the particular national and transnational political and discursive opportunity structures, the paper aims at a comparative analysis of the main discursive frames present in political programs and manifestoes of radical right social movement organizations and movement parties in Poland (Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość and Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny) and Germany (Alternative für Deutschland and Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland). Moreover, based on approaches developed by Cas Mudde and Jens Rydgren, this article analyses how the features presumed essential to the radical right (nativism, authoritarianism and populism) are reflected and interconnected in the official discourses of the selected radical right organizations.

This article discusses conditions, properties and consequences of life strategies of young people in Poland in the context of the rise of precarious, low paid and uncertain employment. The analysis is developed against the background of the debates about three transitions, to adulthood, flexible and precarious labour market and changing political-economic regime. Based on the tentative analysis of 45 biographical narrative interviews with young people, aged 18–30, in various forms of temporary, low-paid jobs, and unemployed, a typology of coping with the three transitions is proposed, including four types: proletarian, postetatist, projectarian and entrepreneurial. The typology reflects the logics of stories' told by young people, the desired relationships between the world of work and world outside work, as well as the relevance of resources and reflexivity for the transitions among the types of life strategies in coping with precarity. The authors conclude that the "normalization of precarity," manifested into the emergence of institutional action schemes which define insecure employment as an expected pattern of occupational careers, encounters its biographical limits within each types. It is suggested that these "gaps and cracks" in the institutionalization of insecurity might represent important sources of young people collective mobilization in various spheres of political and social life despite an overarching individualization of their life strategies.

With the increasing popularity of the radical right, much research has tried to explain the motives of voters. Less attention has been paid to the motives of people to become radical right activists – specifically young people, a group with a high tendency to join right-wing parties. Within the context of the internationalisation of the radical right, this article draws on 28 narrative interviews conducted between 2019 and 2021 with young radical right activists in Poland and Germany, two countries with considerably different political and discursive opportunity structures. We propose to recognise a new motive for becoming involved in political activism: career-oriented individual self-realisation in Germany, as opposed to fulfilling a duty to the nation in Poland. While we identify two different types of radical activism within the different contexts – the (nationalist) anti-establishment populist career type in Germany and the (nationalist) anti-political intellectualism/elitism type in Poland – they both point to the normalisation of the radical right in the two countries.