This article is a review of the book edited by Krzysztof Brzechczyn and Marek Nowak, On the Revolution. Pictures of the Radical Social Change, Poznań 2007.

Prof. Joanna Mizielińska from the PAS Institute of Psychology explains why we should not remain indifferent to human suffering and why it is important to show solidarity to victims of aggression and violence.

Compared to the new state borders of the Danube basin after World War One, the drawing of the Austro-Hungarian border was not only different but required the longest time (1918-1924). It was not a territorial dispute between a victorious and a losing state, but one between the two losers of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Austria and Hungary. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic (March to August, 1919), only the Austrian delegation was invited to the peace conference. This delegation successfully argued, through peaceful diplomatic channels, to make Western Hungary part of the new Austrian Republic. Under the Austrian peace treaty of Saint-Germainen- Laye (September 10, 1919) and the Hungarian one of Trianon (June 4, 1920), Austria received the area as well. However, the Hungarian side, using the means of political violence namely the paramilitary activity, enforced a referendum on Sopron/Ödenburg, the natural capital of the territory, which was previously judged to Austria (December 12, 1920). The participants of the referendum and the entire frontier population decided about their homelands not on ethnic grounds but on purely economic interests.

In the summer of 2021 deliberate actions by the Belarusian state authorities led to a huge increase of people irregularly crossing the border from Belarus to Poland. Instead of addressing this humanitarian crisis, the Polish government responded with actions that were in violation of its international obligations and domestic law. Among these measures was carrying out “pushbacks” and grounding them in Polish domestic law. “Pushbacks” are the practice of returning people to the border without assessing their individual situation. The formalization of those practices in 2021 was done within two legal frameworks; one interim and one permanent. They continue to function in parallel while containing different provisions. This article assesses the two frameworks’ compatibility with domestic and international law and concludes that they both violate domestic and international rules. In the context of EU law, the article demonstrates the incompatibility of the two frameworks with the so-called Asylum Procedures Directive and Return Directive. The article further argues that the pushbacks violate the European Convention of Human Rights and would not fall within the exceptions to the prohibition of collective expulsions.

On the deeper complexities of this entreaty.

For those who experience it, sexual violence is a traumatic event, one that marks a major turning point in their lives. Recent years have witnessed many social changes affecting attitudes towards this type of violence.

This article discusses and expands on two related issues. The first is the unexplored reasons for the departure of Polish migrant women: the forced migration phenomenon. The author describes the system behind forced migration as created at the intersections not only of care, gender and migration regimes but also of legal regimes. Second, the author points out that the close relation between forced migration and the process of ‘unbecoming a wife in the transnational context’ creates a distinctive type of trans-national motherhood experience. In order to explain the specificity of these types of experiences better the author introduces a new typology of transnational motherhood biographies. The case study of Al-dona is representative of the experiences of some Polish women in the period under study, 1989–2010.

The aim of this article is to take a closer look at school communities in the Polish‑Ukrainian borderland in the 1918/1919 school year. Their members, particularly the headteachers, previously focused on teaching the students obedience and loyalty towards the emperor in Vienna, had to completely redefine their roles in order to find themselves in the new reality in the late autumn of 1918. Moreover, another year of the turmoil of war, countless teachers and students in the army, enormous economic problems, exacerbated by the fights for dominance on the disputed territory, forced the headteachers to deal with matters as they arose, and the decisions they made did not always work in practice. What cast a shadow over secondary school activity apart from the Polish‑Ukrainian war was also Polish‑Jewish relations.

One of the most common and dangerous conflicts in contemporary democracies is related to cultural differences in understanding of the basic principles of social organization. Such conflict is developing also in Poland. Its most recent manifestation is the serious confrontation between the new appointed Minister of Education and Science of the Polish government and the large part of the Polish scientific community. In the first part of the paper, I analyze on the basis of his publication the minister’s socio-political worldview. I am implying that it may explain his conflict arousing policy. I am focusing on his concept of the natural law and his use of this concept, on his understandings of democracy and secular state, and on his interpretation of minority rights in democracy. I am concluding that he represents the ultraconservative (right-wing) version of the Roman Catholic worldview and is trying to impose its implications on the Polish education as well as scientific institutions. In the second part of the paper, I am analyzing sociopsychological preconditions of cultural conflicts and factors that may determine the radicalization of these conflicts.

Cwaniary (Female Wanglers) is not only a metatextual novel with numerous references to popular culture, but above all an important contribution to the discussion about the place and role of women in contemporary society. The author breaks with the nineteenth-century image of matka Polka, the Polish Mother, whose existence is confined to family and home. The creations and actions of the female wanglers in Cwaniary, outsiders who defy popular stereotypes by pursuing outré lifestyles, are underpinned with allusions to a nascent rebellion against patriarchy, systemic suppression of women's rights, and the resulting marginalization of women in society. Unfortunately, Poles still have great problems with openness to other cultures, nations, and non-heteronormative sexual orientations. The Poles, it seems, are caught between an irrational fear of disintegration of the structures of their relatively homogeneous society and the need to move on and reinvent themselves as the 'modern subjects' of critical theory. It is a choice between holding on to an anachronistic model of Polish culture founded on suppression or catching up with the 21st-century world of openness, diversity and multiculturalism.