After 200 years of bondage, India gained freedom from the British through numerous revolutionary movements in 1947. But, within 20 years of the independence, insurgent movements had started arising against the Indian Government as well. In 1967, the Naxalite insurgency was initiated as a radical protest by the oppressed peasants against the colonial tenancy system retained by the feudal landowners even after the British had left the country for good. The uprising got pinpointed as Naxalism and the rebels as Naxals, as it all started at Naxalbari, a village in the Indian state of West Bengal. Spanning over 50 years, this ongoing movement initially acquired the respect of the general population of India with its radical ideologies of fighting against the oppressor imperialists but soon mutated into a source of terror. A qualitative assessment of the instances taken from secondary sources, such as context-related online journals and blog articles, will help this paper to explain the formation of the contemporary perception of Naxalism as an extreme radical armed revolution and one of the biggest security challenges against the Indian Government.

The European Union has been recognised as an international system whose decisions and actions are conditioned by environmental determinants, which is a dynamic process of change. The article attempts to explain the EU’s decisions based on the conclusions of the European Council in 2010–2022. 93 documents containing the conclusions of the European Council adopted during that period were analysed. It was found that the determinants of EU decisions and actions function – firstly – at the international system level and, secondly, at the level of the domestic systems of the Member States. In addition, the article: 1) reconstructed the discussion in the science of international relations on behavioural determinants, 2) reconstructed the perception of determinants in the conclusions of the European Council; 3) a model for organising the analysis of the determinants of the decisions of the European Council was proposed.

The article presents the clustering of Polish citizens based on the empirical dimension of support for European integration. The structure of the work is based on three key elements constituting the basis of the presented text. The first refers to the development of a scale to measure the extent of support for the integration of Poland with the EU. The second element covers an area of support scale modelling. After the substantial and statistical analysis of the adequacy of the probability distribution for the support scale, it was decided that a model in which the scale underwent mixing non-standard Beta distributions would be adopted. Applying the Maximal Likelihood Method (ML), the components for its fitted probability densities and estimators of prior (or mixing) probabilities were indicated. The procedure allowed us to define the clusters of which the population of voters was composed. The paper’s final section presents many practical and theoretical conclusions for political parties and scientists interested in the discussed area. The novelty of applying the ML method goes hand in hand with the findings that previously appeared in political science literature, although under different economic and geopolitical conditions.

The 20 principles of the European Pillar of Social Rights adopted by the EU in 2017 include the right to access such basic services as water, sanitation, energy or transport. In the face of the climate crisis, the first of these rights is becoming a service which, due to the progression of global warming, could lose its universal and easily accessible nature. It seems reasonable to ask about the chances of developing a ‘right to water’ within the framework of the EU’s system, which would unambiguously oblige the public authorities to ensure access to this right. The trigger for this research was the ‘Right2Water’ European citizens’ initiative addressed to the European Commission in 2013, which contained postulates to recognise access to water as a human right. Ten years after the launch of this procedure, it is reasonable to acknowledge the verification of the actions taken by the EU and whether the evolving EU water policy can be assessed as being oriented towards ensuring the right to water for all EU-inhabitants. The aim of this paper justifies the use of legal-dogmatic research methodology. Regarding the analysis of legal acts, the rules of legal hermeneutics were applied, esp. grammar and teleological interpretation.

Unrest, conflicts, and wars in various parts of the world have created huge political and business opportunities for private military companies. They can gather intelligence, provide security for rich and powerful political actors, and provide mercenaries to interest groups worldwide. Private Russian military forces with close ties to President Vladimir Putin are used in war zones and continue expanding their presence in many regions worldwide. The Wagner Group is the most famous Russian mercenary unit. It gained notoriety mainly by supporting Russian forces in the conflict in Ukraine in 2014. At that time, it also provided one of the services that the authorities in the Kremlin particularly appreciate in their actions, and that is the lack of attribution for conducting armed conflicts, thanks to which mercenaries play the role of separatist fighters. Since then, the organisation has been deployed in many countries, including Syria, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Venezuela, always to covertly support representatives of regimes favoured by Putin. Like all other mercenary units in Russia, the Wagner Group does not officially exist, because Russian law does not allow mercenary activities. The article has two main objectives: first, to present an analysis of the activities of the Wagner Group, using the currently available information; second, to prove that the concept of hybrid warfare could best explain the Kremlin’s use of Russian mercenaries.

The article aims to identify social impact activities in the context of information operations conducted by Ukraine during the 2022 war. An analysis of the creation and spread of information threats as a result of Russia’s ongoing conflict is driven by the increasing impact of communication on global security. The content of the study highlights the impact of trends in the creation of information threats, which are the determinants of social risks. In the article, an analysis of creating information threats, including producing and reporting information in propaganda and the traditional and modern media, is of significant importance. The impact and role of mass media on awareness-raising is presented, revealing mechanisms for influencing public opinion.

System-based research remains an important yet usually outdated and internally contradictory approach in political science and international relations. Based on concepts borrowed from physiology, cybernetics, and general system theory, the system-based approach popularised in the 1960s was cast away as outdated and ill-focused. Despite those systems, the theory was developed in natural sciences, eventually creating a paradigm more applicable to domestic and international politics. The weakest element of past systems (like the one proposed by D. Easton) was that they did not allow for a sudden and catastrophic transformation and lacked emergence. This paper aims to present a model that would allow for the system’s ordinary and catastrophic transformation. The complex adaptive system features were defined using relevant literature on a paradigm of complexity. Connecting it with the propositions of D. Easton, R. Axelrod, and M. Cohen, as well as R. Jervis, such a model was constructed. The theoretical introduction is supplanted with a general case study of the early phases of the Arab Spring in Tunisia. The model mirrors the complex systems’ dynamics, considering the agent-structure problem.

Political parties that operate in the public space are classified, inter alia, according to the criterion of their ideological convergence (Mair, 2010; Gallagher, Laver, Mair, 2011). If we look at the convergence through the prism of the values declared by the parties, then the adaptation of Shalom H. Schwartz’s circular model makes it possible to explain many correlations. Ideological convergence must then be considered a derivative of the rules of compliance and conflict that Schwartz described. These become the starting point, the basis for selecting further axioms and, consequently, a guideline (imperative) in constructing political agendas. The article aims to show that the mentioned rules define party agendas, and the circular model can be used for analytical purposes. The manifestos of the pirate parties selected from 11 countries were used as an example. The method applied in the article is the meta-value matrix. Adapting the Schwartz model, it should be seen as a qualitative content analysis method.

The Polish State, with due regard to the time constraints on its continuity, is perceived from the perspective of more than a thousand years. Simultaneously, as an organised entity with its own values, it has been a mental problem for Poles since the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries and is continued until now. Thus, the reflections here have been restricted to the mentioned period because it is then that the main drawbacks of the Polish State began to occur. They include a description of these major flaws as we understand them and their effects. We often express the belief that our state disappeared from the map of Europe mainly due to the actions of our aggressive and finally partitioning neighbours. However, in doing so, we distance ourselves from the mistakes in managing the state made by the generations of our ancestors. This article analyses and exemplifies a deeper, critical academic reflection on these errors committed internally during the mentioned period and visible until today.

The article attempts to answer whether, and if so, to what extent, the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union (the so-called Brexit) impacted the British model of democracy. The starting point for the analysis is the famous classification of Arend Lijphart, who distinguished two main models of democracy – Westminster and consensus – identifying the United Kingdom as a prime example of the first of them. Using the method of institutional and legal analysis and the historical method, the author tries to prove the thesis that Brexit has shaken the foundations of the majoritarian democracy in the United Kingdom. However, the transformations of this model are not a new phenomenon, as they are part of the trend of changes occurring in this country, at least since the end of the 1990s. The article also proves the thesis that the serious political and systemic tensions to which Brexit – for very different reasons – led can be treated as temporary, as there is little indication that these tensions would permanently undermine the foundations of the Westminster model of democracy in the United Kingdom.

The study refers to the role of building relations between the direct supervisor and employee teams, indicating the opportunities and threats resulting from conducting selected aspects of internal communication in the so-called uniformed organisations. The authors draw attention to the roles of communication competencies and their social overtones, seeing in these elements both opportunities and threats to the involvement of employees in the performance of official tasks, as well as their readiness to deepen relations with their direct superior. The presented results of empirical research concern the organisation of the Ministry of National Defence and the State Fire Service and are only an element of a larger research project. The aim of the research process was to determine the opportunities and threats generated by aspects of organisational communication in the context of maintaining a satisfactory state of personal security of the examined institutions participating in activities in the field of defence and protection of population, property and the environment.

The paper considers organising wireless access in vehicular environments. Such environments are normally affected by Doppler effects, so the IEEE 802.11p standard is expected to ensure an appropriate quality of service for moving objects. Theoretically, the IEEE 802.11p standard compensates for Doppler effects, but it should be ascertained whether 802.11p is still efficient at tiny Doppler shifts and when an object moves at higher speeds. The 802.11p link provides a data rate which is twice as low for 802.11a. Thus, an end-to-end simulation is carried out for the links at wide ranges of signal-to-noise ratio by varying the Doppler shift from 0 Hz to 100 Hz. The simulation also involves 8 modulation types for 128-, 512-, and 1024-bit packet transmissions to cover all possible study cases. The efficiency criterion is the packet-error rate, to which the data rate is additionally considered. The main simulation result is that the 802.11p link is efficient only at not high speeds. The packet length should be shortened to suppress the influence of the object’s speed. Therefore, to enable high-quality wireless access in vehicular environments, a combination of the 802.11p and 802.11a links should be used, where phase shift keying is more effective for 802.11a and quadrature amplitude modulation is more effective for 802.11p. The trade-off herein is a data rate versus margin speed.

Morale is one of the most frequently recurring concepts in the media covering events from the country and the world. It is used by journalists and experts representing the scientific and military communities. The concept is also used by ordinary people commenting on the attitudes and achievements of various individuals and social entities, especially in situations of particular threats to human life and health. Since the term morale is used in different contexts and meanings, many different ways of understanding it can be noted. It can also be seen that approaches to the phenomenon of morale differ in time – interest in it decreases during peace and social stability and increases during conflicts, revolutions, or wars. For example, in the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s, known as the “end of history” or the “peace dividend” period, there was little scientific work on morale. But earlier, during the “Cold War”, such publications were numerously created in the West . From the emerging interest in the concept of morale in modern times, it appears that it is still valid and important.