The Middle East region has played an important geopolitical and geoeconomic role throughout human history. This was due to its geographic location, which made it a kind of „bridge” in trade connecting Europe with Asia and Africa. Nowadays, one of the key aspects is the significant oil deposits located in these areas, as well as the converging geopolitical interests of regional and global powers. This has led to the region becoming one of the key geopolitical and geo-economic areas in modern international politics. Historically, the region has been dominated by states with authoritarian or monarchical regimes. In late 2010 and early 2011, however, there were mass uprisings in a number of countries in the region seeking to improve the political and socioeconomic situation of the societies living there, and the uprisings were later dubbed the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring changed the political landscape of the region, which especially affected the regimes in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. The Arab transition has had a number of political, socioeconomic and geostrategic effects. The situation in individual countries is inextricably linked to regional and global politics. Geopolitical and geo-economic factors and conditions are key, taking into account the roles of global and local players, i.e. the United States, China, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Iran or Saudi Arabia. The Arab Spring intensified the geopolitical rivalry and spread it to Syria. The article attempts to characterize the definitions of the concepts of geopolitics and geo-economics. The main objective was to present the changes in geopolitical and geo-economic conditions in the Middle East region after the events of the Arab Spring of 2011.

The main objective of the article is to examine the Arab revolutions in the early 2010s in a context of establishing democracy, in order to determine what lessons can be learned from the experiences. It starts with an overview of the revolutionary movement – the Arab Spring, that swelled across the MENA region, overthrowing some long-standing authoritarian regimes. Next, it analyzes the uprisings to indicate political, economic and social successes and failures in parts of the region. Finally, in the summary of the study, based on the conducted examination, the author discusses the results of the analysis and explains why these findings are important and thought-provoking.

The revolution in the Arab world, the wave of attempts by individuals to establish genuine democracy that began between 2010 and 2011 in one of the most sensitive regions of the world, the Middle East, and North Africa (MENA), challenged some of the region’s entrenched autocratic political structures. The region is warming twice as fast as the global average due to the effects of climate change. Yields are expected to decline, and food production is expected to be disrupted in many areas, increasing food prices and market volatility. Limited efforts by governments to address this had increased the likelihood of political instability in previous years.

This study thus attempts to establish a real and logical connection between the Arab Spring and the effects of climate change. The Arab Spring has shown that political instability is partly triggered by people’s basic needs for materials such as food and water. Climate change could therefore be a trigger for this meta-event. This study addresses this issue using the method of event extraction. This paper argues that climate change and its impact on the lives of people in the region allow for a reasonable claim that this phenomenon is related to the Arab Spring, as it is primarily due to food and water stress.

This text was inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, a wave of activation of the societies of North African countries and some countries in the Middle East region to carry out pro-democratic reforms, and improve the economic situation. The comparative analysis in this article focuses on two countries in the Persian Gulf subregion, namely Bahrain and Yemen. The internal situation in both countries translates into security dynamics throughout the region, which is why these countries are of interest to Iran and Saudi Arabia, both of which are in competition with each other to gain the greatest possible influence throughout the region. The comparative analysis is based on three factors: political, social and economic. These aspects had a huge impact on the events that occurred in 2011 in these countries. The analysis on events in individual countries focused mainly on countries in the Maghreb region, or at least Syria. The trials that took place in Bahrain and Yemen did not receive as much attention as events in other countries. Undoubtedly, regional actors had a keen interest in the events taking place in these countries, which also translated into their involvement in the events under discussion. A comparison of the Arab Spring in Bahrain and Yemen can be helpful in the process of identifying certain structural problems in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.

Arabska Wiosna była ważnym zjawiskiem w dziejach Bliskiego Wschodu. Wydarzenia, które miały wtedy miejsce, zmieniły sytuację w tym regionie. Artykuł jest próbą analizy wpływu rewolucji arabskich na bezpieczeństwo Izraela. Przedmiotem analizy jest ocena wydarzeń, które dokonywały się w państwach regionu: Egipcie, Syrii, Libanie, Jordanii, krajach Półwyspu Arabskiego. Autor będzie również pisał o działaniach Hezbollahu i Palestyńczyków. Wszystko to ma służyć odpowiedzi na pytania: czy, na ile i dlaczego zmieniał się poziom bezpieczeństwa Izraela w wyniku zjawisk zainicjowanych przez tzw. Arabską Wiosnę.

The impact of the so-called Arab Spring on Israel’s security – regional dimension

The Arab Spring was an important phenomenon in the history of the Middle East. The events that took place at the time, changed the situation in the region. This article is an attempt to analyse the impact of the Arab revolutions on Israel’s security. The subject of analysis is an assessment of the events that took place in the countries of the region: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. The author will also write about the actions of Hezbollah and the Palestinians. All of this is intended to answer the questions of whether, to what extent and why Israel’s security has changed as a result of the phenomena initiated by the Arab Spring.

The aim of the article is to analyze the causes and origins of the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border and the actions of the EU aimed at solving it, as well as to determine the significance of the crisis for the EU immigration and asylum policy. The main research hypothesis is the assumption that the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border has shown the problems and weaknesses of the EU in the development of immigration and asylum policy, the most important of which is the lack of instruments to quickly respond to the actions of third countries instrumentally using migrants.

Non-governmental organisations, in the face of crises, play a key role, and their activities result in saving people’s lives and health, alleviating suffering and caring for their dignity and rights. This study identifies the legal conditions for the provision of humanitarian aid, and describes the actions taken by selected NGOs in the context of the Polish-Belarusian border crisis (2021-2022). Non-governmental organisations have offered material, legal or informational support (forms of aid that most often occur in the face of crises such as war). However, the crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border has its own specificity. The activities of the organisations and the state authorities were not linked, which was largely due to a different interpretation, including legal, of the situation.

Ukraine and Belarus were linked by a common history, similar culture, language and border. It seemed that these countries were difficult to divide, and despite Alexander Lukashenko’s authoritarian rule, friendly relations would last for years. However, the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine in February 2022, including the attack from the territory of Belarus, clearly destroyed – it seemed – the deep cooperation that had been built for over 30 years. In the article, the author will try to answer how this huge shift in bilateral relations took place, and whether the opposite actions are possible in the future.

The crisis on the European Union’s eastern border was probably one of the possible key security threats in Central and Eastern Europe in 2021. In the face of the deteriorating situation on the Polish-Belarusian border, the idea of engaging the People’s Republic of China as a mediator became relatively popular in Poland – as evidenced by numerous articles on leading Internet portals (such as Money.pl, Onet.pl or Rp.pl) and the increased interest in this topic in social media (observed by the author in discussions on Twitter in particular). At its core was the belief that the two countries represent an important place in China’s economic policy – with a particular emphasis on their transit role within the New Silk Road. This article is intended as an attempt to answer to what extent this concept may have come to fruition, and how much do Minsk and Warsaw really mean to China?

The main goal in this article is to explore the causes and nature of economic migration from the Republic of Moldova. The conceptual and analytical frame­work is based on the widening and deepening of meanings of security, as part of the transition from traditional, Cold War, state-centric understanding of security to the multisectorial approaches of security. Two relevant sectors of security are selected in this study, namely economic security and societal security, because they provide in-depth understanding of economic migration from Gagauzia and Transnistria. The methodology is based on interviews taken with migrant work­ers from the two regions and on interpretation and analysis of research findings. Before discussing the findings, we documented migration experiences of migrant workers who belong to different ethnic groups, tracing their pre-migration situ­ations and post-migration life. Also, we documented how their economic aspira­tions and ethnic identity shaped their migration intentions and perceptions of different countries of destination.

The article addresses the cultural security of ethnic and national minorities by analysing the example of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. It is the most signifi¬cant minority in the country, present there for several centuries. Moreover, the Turks, alongside the Pomaks and some Roma, constitute part of Bulgaria’s most considerable religious minority – the Muslims. The preservation of their identity and the protection and development of their cultural heritage, i.e. the fundamental elements of cultural security, are conditioned by many exogenous and endogenous determinants. The most important ones include the policies of the state of residence and the home state, demographic factors, the nature of the settlement, and economic factors, among others. On the other hand, one can distinguish the preservation of the Turkish language, the protection of material cultural heritage, and the possibility of intergenerational cultural transmission among the challenges of cultural security for Turks in Bulgaria. The main research problem is to situate the cultural security of the Turkish minority in the broader context of the socio-political and economic changes occurring in Bulgaria. In the theoretical part, the cultural security of ethnic and national minorities is defined, and then the concept of cultural genocide and securitization of ethnic and national minorities were introduced as selected threats to cultural security. The next part presents the policy of the communist authorities towards the Turkish minority, the negative consequences of which are still noticeable today. It is followed by the outlined contemporary situation of the Turkish minority after 1989 in the context of the possibility of preserving and developing its culture and cultural identity. The considerations conclude with a detailed analysis of selected problems of cultural security of the Turkish community, which limit the opportunities for the Turks to use their undoubted advantages in maintaining their cultural security – the number of people, territorial concentration, a strong sense of identity, geographical proximity to Turkey. Therefore, the Turkish minority faces the necessity to take measures to strengthen these assets and eliminate the factors adversely affecting its cultural security level.

Radicalism and extremism are concepts that are closely intertwined in the formation of state security policy. They are invoked both in the area of national and local policies. It seems necessary to refer to the definitional sphere of the aforementioned concepts, which often seem to be abused and freely interpreted. Although in most countries there is no legal definition of radicalism and/or extremism, there are instead many government programs relating to countering these phenomena, since both are linked to a specific form of political violence, i.e. terrorism. The results of terminological and conceptual analyses of the definitions of extremism and radicalism indicate a consistent search by researchers for a common interpretive denominator to concretize the aforementioned phenomena in terms of the broader social sciences (including security sciences).

The article aims to indicate the lack of transparency in the definition of phenomena/processes in the area of conceptualization of issues related to radicalism and extremism, and attempts to organize them. The context of consideration is the events related to the radicalization of a group of young Muslims from Delft (the Netherlands), whose members undergoing the process of radicalization were recruited to Syria.

Immigrants from the former Soviet Union came to Israel under various circumstances motivated by political, economic, social and security factors. Their greatest number came to the Jewish State in migration wave of the 1970s and, above all, the „great Russian Aliyah” of the 1990s. Next numerous groups emigrated in 2000-2009 and 2014-2019. Also the number of Ukrainian Jews coming to Israel increasing due to the open Russian aggression in Ukraine. Expatriots from the former Soviet republics are another component of Israeli multiculturalism. A peculiar community among the Russian-speaking newcomers are the post-Soviet oligarchs, businessmen and billionaires, who have an influence on the socio-political life of the country, especially in the institutional sphere. Worth noting thing is the current tendency to combine Soviet and Jewish elements in the field of historical policy and to supplementing the Israeli historiography of the Second World War with Soviet components. The main objective of this article will be to analyze the role and importance of the Russian-speaking Jewish community in Israel. The text will be an attempt to answer the question to what extent and on what spheres the merge of two communities – local Israeli and immigrant can be observed.

Today, we see crimes against humanity in the 21st century in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region within the borders of China. Human rights violations experienced by Uyghurs living in the aforementioned geography for centuries are not a new development, but they remain up-to-date. The state’s approach to the Uyghur people has evolved into a new dimension with the camps, which are described as vocational training centers by the state and also known as political re-education camps and internment camps in the literature. These camps, which are part of the state’s security policies, have inevitably been the subject of many research, especially in the context of human rights violations. This article explores how political re-education camps, unlike others, are represented in some Western media sources and in the Chinese media, using the method of critical discourse analysis. The analysis revealed that the camps have been a part of a panopticon-like society and places where the lives of Uyghurs are surveilled from every angle, and both violation of rights and political indoctrination have been experienced. However, these places have been portrayed by the Chinese media as places where minorities have been rendered safe, enabling stability, security and development.

The article deals with polish public policy issue towards the Roma community living in Poland on the example of Lubusz voivodeship. It presents the most important effects and effects of the policy towards the Roma community in Poland in recent years. The authors characterized the genesis of the creation as well as the main guidelines of government programs for the Roma community in Poland and its impact on the life of this minority group, social and civic integration in the context of the security of this group and local security on the example of Lubusz voivodeship. An extremely valuable element of the article is to present effects of this politic in recent years from the perspective of the Roma community in Lubusz voivodeship, in particular what has been done for its so far and what gives it such a program, how it contributes to the improvement of life the Roma community in this part of the country.

The article was devoted to the power corporation, the registered Cossack organizations, inspired by one of the subethnos of the Russian nation. The aim of the study was to show their place in the national security system of the Russian Federation. A hypothesis was put forward and positively verified that registry Cossacks constitute an important element complementing the ineffective system. The attention was focused on the military security system and the security and public order system, although the problem was also shown in the context of other subsystems of the Russian national security system.

The aim of the article is to define and characterize the key premises proving that the implications of the Polish-Lithuanian dispute in 1919-1922 adversely affected the security of the reborn Polish state. The analysis was based on archival material collected in the Archives of the Józef Piłsudski Institute in America, as well as on the available literature.

It was accepted that the escalation and continuation of the Polish-Lithuanian dispute had a negative impact on the security of the Polish state in the years 1919-1922. It adversely affected the position of the Polish state in various security areas.

The arguments presented allow us to state that the Polish-Lithuanian conflict in 1919-1922 affected various security areas of the Second Polish Republic. It has adversely affected both the internal security and external security of the state. It concerned military threats in connection with the activities of the Lithuanian army and temporarily organized partisan units as well as boiled down to numerous non-military threats.

Przedmiotem studium są główne kierunki badań polskich historyków w zakresie podpisanego 23 VIII 1939 r. paktu Ribbentrop-Mołotow, który doprowadził do geopolitycznego upadku Polski we wrześniu 1939 r. W ciągu ostatnich trzydziestu lat prowadzono badania w następujących obszarach: badanie i analiza źródeł drukowanych (tekst zasadniczy paktu Ribbentrop-Mołotow, protokoły dodatkowe i komentarze do nich); studium wspomnień polskich dyplomatów jako użyteczne źródło do analizy koncepcji polityki zagranicznej dyplomacji II Rzeczypospolitej w okresie przedwojennego kryzysu politycznego; analiza pozycji międzynarodowej Polski i stosunków polsko-radziecko-niemieckich w sierpniu 1939 r.; analiza stosunku rządów francuskiego i brytyjskiego do paktu Ribbentrop-Mołotow i jego wpływu na losy Polski (ocena polsko-angielskiej deklaracji o nieagresji z 25 VIII 1939); międzynarodowa ocena prawno-polityczna działań dyplomatycznych ministra spraw zagranicznych J. Becka w sierpniu 1939 r.

The Results of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 in the Fate of Poland (Polish Historiography of the 1980s–2000s)

The subject of the research is the main directions of Polish historians’ study of the results of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact on 23 VIII 1939 in the geopolitical collapse of Poland in September 1939. In the last thirty years, research has been conducted in the following areas: study and analysis of printed sources (articles of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, additional protocols and comments to them); study of memoirs of Polish diplomats as a useful source for analyzing the foreign policy concept of diplomacy of the II Rzeczpospolita the prewar political crisis; analysis of the international situation of Poland and Polish-Soviet-German relations in August 1939; analysis of the attitude of the French and British governments to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and its impact on the fate of Poland (assessment of the Polish-English declaration of non-aggression of 25 VIII 1939); international legal and political assessment of the diplomatic activities of Foreign Minister J. Beck in August 1939.

Celem badawczym niniejszego tekstu jest ukazanie stanowiska Niemiec w stosunku do proklamacji ukraińskiej niepodległości oraz analiza stosunków niemiecko-ukraińskich w latach 90. XX w. Historyczne powiązania między Niemcami a Ukraińcami były bardzo głębokie. Jednak natura tych relacji pozostawała asymetryczna. Nie ulega wątpliwości, że dobre relacje z Rosją były w okresie lat 90. XX w. dla Niemiec priorytetowe w porównaniu z byłymi republikami sowieckimi. Przyczyn takiego stanu rzeczy można upatrywać w wielu czynnikach: politycznych, gospodarczych i historycznych. Począwszy od 1991 r. Niemcy nie posiadały klarownego, sprecyzowanego i celowego programu politycznego w stosunku do Ukrainy, a wszelkie polityczne działania były wypadkową relacji z Rosją, która stanowiła główny punkt odniesienia dla polityki wschodniej Berlina.

German policy towards the proclamation of Ukrainian independence and its aftermath in the last decade of the 20th century

The purpose of the paper is to show the most important dimensions which shaped the German-Ukrainian relations in the year 1991 and and the rest of the 90s. Nature of these relationships remained asymmetric. There is no doubt that good relations with Russia were a priority for Germany in the 1990s compared to the former Soviet republics. The reasons for this can be found in many factors: political, economic and historical. The German-Ukrainian relations were strongly determined the German-Russian relations which were the main point of reference for Berlin’s eastern policy.

The presented publication provides a brief analysis of the development of Belarus after the gaining of state sovereignty. After the final collapse of the USSR (XII 1991), Belarus had the opportunity to independently shape its domestic and foreign policy. The young state, having received rapid international recognition, began to put into practice the division of branches of government, to involve active citizens in a discussion about the prospects for the the country.

The author tries to find out the reasons for the transformation of Belarus from a parliamentary republic to an authoritarian state that began after the first presidential elections (VII 1994). It is argued that this transition at the initial stage enjoyed the support of the majority of the population, who, in conditions of low political culture, associated the socio-economic difficulties of the transition stage with democratic transformations. The establishment of a personal dictatorship in Belarus has led to the gradual degradation of the main state structures.

The researcher sees the main reason for the desire of many Belarusians to return to the Soviet order in the incompleteness of the Belarusian nation-building, in the split of society into several identity groups, in the absence of a collective strategy for finding answers to the challenges of the time.

The article emphasizes the thesis that the Russian leadership played a negative role in the development of Belarus, which in practice did not recognize the independence of the post-Soviet state, denied the uniqueness of the Belarusian language, culture and historical narratives. Lukashenko’s pro-Soviet and pro-Russian views were supported by the Kremlin, which, under the guise of various support, sought to establish control over the Belarusian regime. In February 2022, Moscow used the territory of Belarus to invade Ukraine, greatly questioning the sovereignty of the neighboring country.

Mass protests in Belarus against the gross falsification of the presidential elections (VIII 2020) demonstrated that the Belarusian society rejects the authoritarian regime, its domestic and foreign policy. The regime, in its actions to get out of the deep crisis, placed the main emphasis on brutal repression against dissent. This makes the future of the Belarusian state poorly predictable, makes it dependent on many internal and external circumstances.

FUNDING

Статья подготовлена в рамках стипендии NAWA (Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej, umowa nr BPN/SZN/2021/1/00025/U/00001) на кафедре восточных исследований Вроцлавского университета.

The article contains theoretical considerations on the scope of meaning of the notion of energy security, energy transformation and the power sector. The author describes the main goals of the European Union’s climate and energy policy as the main factor influencing Poland’s energy policy. The article also defines the horizontal goals of the energy transformation described in the strategic document Poland’s Energy Policy until 2040.