This article analyses how Georgian civil society resisted autocratisation by leveraging the government's rhetorical commitment to European Union (EU) integration. Using process tracing, we examine three episodes between 2022 and 2024 concerning EU candidacy and the "foreign agents" law. Drawing on public statements, media coverage, and eight interviews, we show how civil society invoked EU norms to expose hypocrisy, mobilise citizens, and attract international support. Entrapment proved effective when the government needed a pro-EU image but weakened once incumbents deepened autocratisation despite retaining EU rhetoric. Our research contributes to debates on resistance to autocratisation under a weakening liberal international order.
How do citizens evaluate policies toward co-ethnic populations abroad? Despite the prevalence of kin-state engagement across Europe and beyond, we lack systematic evidence on public preference formation for these policies. This study employs a survey experiment with 1,050 Serbian adults to test how cost considerations and nationalist appeals shape support across different kin-state policy domains. The results reveal striking domain specificity: while cost primes significantly reduce support for economic and cultural assistance programs, and nationalist appeals enhance such support, neither frame substantially affects attitudes toward territorial revision. These findings challenge unified theoretical approaches to kin-state politics and suggest that public resistance to aggressive territorial policies remains robust despite nationalist rhetoric. The malleability of support for assistance programs versus the stability of territorial attitudes has important implications for understanding democratic constraints on kin-state engagement and the potential for conflict escalation.
From 2015 to 2023 and during Poland's 2025 presidential campaign, the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party frequently invoked religion. This article analyses these discursive strategies amid growing concern about illiberal tendencies in the region. It shows how the national-conservative leaders used religion to advance a reactionary agenda, including restrictions on gender rights and changes to research evaluation criteria. It also examines the use of religious references by conservative countermovements and progressive social movements. The article concludes that the increased prominence of religious references among political and social actors reflects, and contributes to, deepening polarisation in Polish politics and society.
This article introduces the Comprehensive Index of Volatility (CIV), addressing methodological gaps in electoral volatility research. Beyond traditional aggregate measures, it integrates electoral, parliamentary and governmental dimensions through 15 indicators, capturing party-level vote shifts and personnel-level change: leadership turnover, candidate renewal and elite defection. This separates within-system volatility (vote redistribution among established parties) from extra-system volatility (new-party-driven realignment). Applied to Slovakia since independence, the CIV reveals a punctuated pattern: a legislatively amplified shock in 2002, a fall to its 2012 low, then steady, structurally driven rise. New-party entry is the main accountability mechanism, a role programmatic competition plays in consolidated democracies.
What were the means by which Poland's illiberal government adapted collective memories of wartime suffering to pursue strategic goals? This article substantiates the concept of a hybrid mnemonic resource and explains how its introduction in domestic politics reverberated in diplomatic practices. Focusing on a lawfare operation undertaken by the Law and Justice (PiS) government, we employ process tracing to explain the design of this hybrid mnemonic resource, composed of anti-defamation legislation and memory narratives, with the formation of the latter being enabled by intensified international news coverage of the legislative process. We then demonstrate how this political action, launched at home, which led to Poland's diplomatic dispute with Israel and the United States, advanced strategic goals through the repurposing of collective memory. The implications of this lawfare operation for scholarship on diplomatic practices under the fluid conditions of the illiberal turn in Polish politics are subsequently discussed.
