This Dispatch examines how religious symbolism and anti-migrant mobilization converged in Poland in mid-2025 to perform a sanctified politics of protection. Focusing on Catholic sermons, protests, and citizen border patrols, it shows how exclusion is recast as moral duty and care. Drawing on publicly circulated materials, the analysis develops the concept of affective legitimacy to capture moments when moral rightfulness is enacted through emotion, ritual, and ethical vocabularies as institutional trust wanes. The Polish case is treated as a diagnostic vignette of an emergent repertoire in which protection is felt rather than procedurally justified, highlighting how democratic authority can be reconfigured through affective publics rather than liberal-democratic accountability.

Although post-socialist civil society has been widely studied, scholars have rarely examined how political conflict reshapes its very meaning. This article addresses that gap by comparing the discursive constructions of civil society put forth by Poland’s liberal-left and conservative-right symbolic elites. Analyzing 53 opinion pieces published in Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita (2015–2023), I demonstrate that both camps instrumentalize the term as a tool for mobilization and legitimation. The liberal-left frames civil society as a pluralist watchdog that safeguards democracy and European norms, while the conservative-right associates it with national identity and cooperation with a strong state. Each narrative marginalizes civic actors that fall outside the partisan divide, thereby deepening polarization. These competing frames reflect a broader struggle between a pro-modernization project anchored in EU integration and a national-conservative alternative, which narrows public perceptions of Poland’s diverse civic landscape.

Scholars and political observers, alike, have associated political polarization with the weakening of democratic norms and the undermining of accountability, as partisans trade off the public interest against in-group loyalty. We probe how in-group bias shapes support for collective goods in actual high-stakes settings in an especially polarized democracy. Conducting survey experiments in Poland, we examine two scenarios: electoral integrity during the 2023 parliamentary election that could have entrenched authoritarian rule and national security after Russia’s 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Our findings show pronounced partisan bias undermining support for electoral integrity – approximately 40 per cent of party supporters with an average level of partisanship supported rerunning an election when their party unexpectedly lost – but less bias in judgments about national security, raising the possibility that individuals may view democracy as more of an instrumental than an intrinsic good.

This article is about the recent transformation of two powerful, paradoxical, and inseparable narratives of progress that developed in the postwar period: aesthetic autonomy and Holocaust remembrance. As far-right and illiberal parties have gained power across Europe, they adapted these foundational narratives of the liberal-democratic West to assert their own legitimacy and to reimagine the cultural inclinations of the European Union. This article examines how this process has taken place in the reception of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest (2023) and Agnieszka Holland's Green Border (2023)—both international co-productions produced during the repressive eight-year reign of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland. A close reading of these films and their reception in different contexts, exposes a world more complicated than one-dimensional dichotomies between the liberal and the illiberal. Likewise, the reception of the two films makes apparent the entanglement of the national and transnational, as well as a process of translation and mistranslation that takes place as cultural materials move across geographical and ideological boundaries. Understanding such dynamics helps us to comprehend the options for criticism available to artists working within repressive contexts.

In a time of polycrisis, internal contestation, and strained transatlantic relations, European identity is timelier and more relevant than ever. Do EU public policies operating in a multilevel governance system contribute to European identity-building, and what can jeopardise the process of identity formation at the level of policy elites? The article adopts a social constructivist and discursive approach and brings to the fore the lacking process of EU socialisation via discursive practices as a key reason leading to failed identity-building. Focusing on EU Cohesion Policy in Wales (UK), Crete (Greece), and Silesia (Poland), the analysis employs primary data and grey literature sources, along with 64 semistructured elite interviews, to show that, despite key differences among the three cases, Cohesion Policy has not contributed significantly to European identity-building among policy elites at different government levels and among the public. This is because the coordinative discourse about EU policies is dominated by ideas about economic goals and practical aspects of policy-making, while the respective communicative discourse is controlled by domestic political elites and the media and is ultimately determined by broader national/regional political cultures about the purpose and limitations of EU membership. Overall, the article contributes to the literature on European identity-building, EU socialisation, and discourse by arguing that the way EU public policies are designed, implemented, and communicated do not favour the achievement of political goals, such as the cultivation of a shared European identity.

The existing literature debates how war can precipitate shifts in electoral coalitions. However, what remains unclear are the underlying cultural contestations affected by war, including how homo‐ and transphobia have been weaponized politically as a key social division during wartime elections. We examined original survey data collected before the 2023 Polish parliamentary election, which resulted in the defeat of the anti‐LGBTIQ Law & Justice Party (PiS). In that election, competing coalitions led by the centre‐right‐liberal opposition Civic Platform (PO) and the incumbent right‐wing‐conservative PiS diverged over values like tolerance of LGBTIQ rights, all amid the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Our survey experiment found that informing voters about the PiS's anti‐LGBTIQ rhetoric failed to boost either PiS or PO support. However, the same information coupled with Putin's homo‐ and transphobic justifications for the Russo‐Ukrainian war shifted voter support significantly towards the PO. These findings make an important contribution by showing the limitations of anti‐LGBTIQ rhetoric as a once ‘tried‐and‐true’ electoral strategy and offering a strategy to counter the appeal of political homo/transphobia.

On 13 January 2016, for the first time in its history, the European Union launched an investigation against one of its full member states, Poland. The dispute is about new Polish laws that allegedly disempower the Constitutional Court and the public media, thus breaching EU democracy standards. The dispute reaches far beyond Poland and questions the further perspectives of integration of the Central Eastern European (CEE) states within the EU. At the same time, it is closely connected with the current multidimensional European crisis. This article argues that the EU-Poland dispute is an outcome of the combination of the specific problems of governance in CEE with a superficial institutionalism of the EU. Poland’s governance controversies show that new attention of the EU to its CEE member states is needed, as they were for many years marginalized because of other concerns such as the economic and financial crises since 2007, the threat of a ‘Brexit’ and currently the refugee crisis. In order to salvage the European integration project, it will be crucial for Europe’s credibility to support the CEE countries to reform their socio-economic systems. At the same time, the case of Poland offers a chance for a debate about how the EU can cooperate more effectively and in extended manners.

The article investigates the intellectual foundations of the political projects led by Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán. We demonstrate that next to homegrown populist and traditionalist ideas, the radicalisation of conservative thought in the West, particularly in the USA, facilitated the illiberal turn of these two countries during the 2010s. The state-, nation- and family-centred narratives, born out of this West–East cross-fertilisation, were then re-exported abroad with considerable financial support from the countries’ respective governments. The collaboration of politicians and intellectuals, and the tolerance within the circle of the critics of liberal democracy, appear as important factors behind their success. The regimes led by PiS and Fidesz provided Western conservatives with a “proof-of-concept”, demonstrating the viability of their ideas and emboldening them to further challenge the liberal consensus.

Collaboration between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and public institutions, in accordance with the new public governance model, may contribute to actions by such organisations on behalf of both the co-production and co-construction of social services. The aim of this article is to assess the role of selected traits of NGO leaders in determining the chances of collaboration between NGOs and rural gmina offices in central, post-socialist Poland. The authors present the results of studies on selected subjective determinants of such collaboration, in which 104 leaders of NGOs from 29 rural gminas participated. Five independent research tools were implemented. Logistic regression analysis was used to assess the role of selected traits of NGO leaders in determining the potential for collaboration between NGOs and rural gmina offices. The final model indicates that the potential for collaboration between an NGO and a rural gmina office increases alongside higher levels of education, social competences and locus of control and decreased control ideology among NGO leaders. On this basis, the authors formulate practical conclusions concerning the education of leaders of rural NGOs in post-socialist Poland.

Hungary and Poland are often placed in the same analytical framework from the period of their ‘negotiated revolutions’ to their autocratic turn. This article aims to look behind this apparent similarity focusing on opposition behaviour. The analysis demonstrates that the executive–parliament power structure, the vigour of the extra-parliamentary actors, and the opposition party frame have the strongest influence on opposition behaviour, and they provide the sources of difference between the two country cases: in Hungary an enforced power game and in Poland a political game constrain opposition opportunities and opposition strategic behaviour.

The subject of this article is the state of the discipline of International Relations (IR) in Poland. In the communist era, IR was an arena of ideological confrontation. The political science approach was based on Marxist ideology. The transformation after 1989 can be described as a transition from real socialism to common sense realism, and hence an approach that is practical, but lacking in more far-reaching theoretical reflection. The closure of this gap is inevitably a slow process. However, it has been possible to sense some creative spirit within the discipline recently, as is attested by the publication of a series of major works by Polish and foreign authors, initiating a debate on the condition of IR and the establishment of the Polish International Studies Association. However, the state of the discipline in Poland will require a raising of the level of teaching at Polish universities, not least through a fuller account being taken of research methodologies and theories.