Piotr Żuk
Biographic Data
| ID | 122346 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Piotr Żuk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Piotr |
| FAMILY NAME | Żuk |
| SIGNATURE | ŻUK P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wrocław |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3153-7022 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 196 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Whose Forest
The article analyzes – in the context of global threats to forests and the transnational process of deforestation – the possibility of moving beyond state and private forms of forest ownership, which place a particular emphasis on the productive functions of forests. The authors stress that state ownership of forests does not mean that they are public, as society often has no influence whatsoever on the shaping of forest policy. The adjective ‘pu…
Climate obstruction and nationalism
Nationalism is notoriously an ideology that can fit opposite ideological and political necessities. Since 2020, an emerging literature exploring nationalism’s connections with climate change has developed. Yet, nationalism’s role in the decisive practice of climate obstruction has hitherto not been conceptually mapped. This integrative review inductively analyses various forms of nationalism, focusing on each form’s role in climate obstruction an…
Beyond the Weaponization of Energy
Energy, Place, and Space
In 2011, a special issue of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers entitled “New Geographies of Energy” emphasized the importance of geography in understanding the dilemmas of energy
The lost battle for the working classes and the far right’s march towards hegemony
How can the risk of a wave of fascism in Europe be prevented? Why is the liberal mainstream unable to block the march of the far right? Drawing on Polish experience, the author advances the thesis that neoliberal transformation was both the cause of and the coin to right-wing authoritarianism – the two trends are logically interconnected and mutually reinforcing. This leads to a ‘closing of the political universe’, leaving a large part of society…
Energy self-defence against official policy
This article analyses the obstacles and opportunities that prosumers from the V4 countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) perceive in relation to the further development of prosumer energy. Given the growing number of prosumers in these countries, we are particularly interested in the motivations behind their actions. Our hypothesis assumes that the rapid increase in the number of prosumers in recent years represents a form of…
Glocalisation of environmental challenges
This article analyses the impact of the war in Ukraine on air quality and heating practices in Polish cities. In this case, it does not focus on the direct impact of military activities, but on various social and political decisions, as well as changes in social behaviour undertaken under the influence of the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine. The authors defend the thesis that it is worth analysing air quality and heating practices in l…
The European Green Deal and the peasant cause
Healthy nation body, foreign viruses and border control
Power, Environment, and Depoliticized Conflict in Social Space
Ageism, welfare, and the energy transition
Wall-building policy
The article analyses the situation that arose after the crisis on the Poland-Belarus border in the second half of 2021. The authors use the term “borderphobia” to describe social, political and propaganda mechanisms that became a form of border space management used to legitimize and gain support for the actions taken by the right-wing populist government in Poland. The phenomenon of borderphobia can be a symbol of the symbiosis between political…
Social and spatial determinants of energy ageism
The article aims to identify the problems and challenges faced by senior citizens in the context of energy transition and also to develop a framework of social policy that would respond to senior citizens' concerns and is necessary for the effective implementation of the goals of the European Union's (EU) climate and energy policy. The authors focus on the analysis of the challenges of energy transition faced by older people who live in Poland in…
The role of trust, information and legal stability in the development of renewable energy
They attack the family and order”
The goals of this article are to describe and analyze the main themes in the narratives about feminists that can be found in the populist right-wing press in Poland. Although feminists-alongside LGBT circles, refugees and the left-had been treated as a threat to the existing order before, it was the women's revolt on Polish streets in late autumn 2020 that triggered a series of reports on the women's movement in the right-wing press. In addition …
Eco-terrorists
This article aims to outline the media and thematic framework within which environmentalists were described by the right-wing pro-government media in Poland from 2016 to 2020 and to explain the main ideological conflicts over ecology. On the other hand, the author shows how these conservative stereotypes about the environmental movement affect the opinions of Polish society. The author defends the thesis that the anti-ecological phobias of the ri…
Is it possible to defeat right-wing populist authorities by winning elections? The erosion of democracy and the system of the triple-masters class in Poland
The article poses an extremely important question of whether it is possible to remove authoritarian authorities using the methods of parliamentary democracy in a situation where the government has weakened or dismantled democratic mechanisms and institutions. The article treats the rule of right-wing populists as a comprehensive ruling system of the triple-masters class (identified with the apparatus of the ruling party), who fully controls the p…
The Turów Brown Coal Mine in the shadow of an international conflict
Civic energy and the traditions of the idea of civil society
Energy ageism
The Independence Day as a nationalist ritual
The article contains a cultural analysis of the March of Independence as a symbol of nationalist revival in Poland. The authors analyse the social context of this event, show its history and, inspired by Goffman's classic approach, describe the theatrical setting of this annual event - its scenography, props, musical setting and costumes ('patriotic clothing'). In addition to participant observation, the authors analyse materials posted by the or…
From the Anti-Semitic Campaign in 1968 to the Nationalism of the Populist Right 50 Years Later
The main purpose of the article is to deconstruct slogans and phrases that transmit anti-Semitism in Poland despite the apparent changing political and historical context. It contains a comparative analysis of messages from two historical periods: the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 and the nationalist and anti-Semitic revival in 2018. The material related to the 1968 events comes from archival press materials published between 1967 and 1968. On th…
Nation against the system”
This article analyzes the phenomenon of nationalist rap in Poland. According to the authors, the seemingly independent rap uses a more radical version of the discourse of the right-wing establishment that refers to nationalism, Islamophobia, and opposition to migrants. As there is no left-wing cultural narrative in the public space, nationalist rap has become a voice of those who have not benefited from the process of neoliberal transformation in…
The Dialectic of Neoliberal Exploitation and Cultural‐Sexual Exclusion
This article analyses the process of spatial segregation in Poland: the transition from economic deprivation and the neoliberal logic initiated in the 1990s, which can be symbolised by special economic zones, to the atmosphere of cultural exclusion manifested by LGBT‐free zones created at the level of municipalities, cities and regions in Poland in 2019 and 2020. The authors defend the thesis that events in Poland have confirmed that not only the…
Between Private Property, Authoritarian State and Democracy
The article describes the widespread tree felling that began in Polish cities in 2017. The authors show the relationship between this phenomenon and the ideology that gives priority to private property over public good. This ideology was the basis for the new Nature Conservation Act that came into force in Poland in 2017. The new regulations not only made cutting down trees in cities and private properties easier, but also allowed real estate dev…
Unpacking the right-populist threat to climate action
Murderers of the unborn’ and ‘sexual degenerates’
The article analyses the language used by the Polish nationalist right in relation to LGBT communities and the right to abortion. The authors show links between the language of Church hierarchs and right-wing columnists as the ideological backbone of the governing right-wing populist right. According to the authors, the attack on gender is the same method of political mobilisation and power management as the campaign against refugees and the anti…
Eco-terrorists
This article aims to outline the media and thematic framework within which environmentalists were described by the right-wing pro-government media in Poland from 2016 to 2020 and to explain the main ideological conflicts over ecology. On the other hand, the author shows how these conservative stereotypes about the environmental movement affect the opinions of Polish society. The author defends the thesis that the anti-ecological phobias of the ri…
Dangerous Liaisons between the Catholic Church and State
This article describes the history of relations between the Catholic Church and the Polish state in the period from the 1990s to the present. The authors defend a thesis that, although political elites and the state underwent pressure from the Church, the society had many opportunities to separate its religious beliefs from its own political choices, begin the slow process of secularization and learn the lessons of Enlightenment in this part of E…
Multimodal analysis of the nationalist discourse and historical inspirations of the spectacle of the populist right in Poland between 2015 and 2017
From crisis to crisis
Far from being an event of a decade ago, the 2008 global financial crisis is a manifestation of an ongoing crisis of the world order, with social, political and ecological dimensions that cannot be seen separately from each other. The root cause of the crisis can be traced back to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in August 1971, and the failure to design an equitable and inclusive global financial and economic governance architecture cons…
The national music scene
The article contains the analysis of lyrics created by bands associated with the "national music scene" in Poland, as well as the means of fascist propaganda used in music by far-right extremists. The article also shows the cultural and political similarities between the official right in Poland (PiS party) and extreme right wing movements. These environments are bridged by a similar cultural narrative, which is based on the cult of the nation an…
Energy ageism
Non-alternative reality? On the misery of the Left in Eastern Europe
This article is a socio-historical analysis of the current weak position of the left wing in Poland and an attempt to explain the social causes of this situation. The author focuses mainly on the last 26 years and the political and economic processes, which took place in Poland and in Eastern Europe after the cold war and the restoration of capitalism in this part of the world. He also points to historical events taking place in the seventeenth a…
The Dialectic of Neoliberal Exploitation and Cultural‐Sexual Exclusion
This article analyses the process of spatial segregation in Poland: the transition from economic deprivation and the neoliberal logic initiated in the 1990s, which can be symbolised by special economic zones, to the atmosphere of cultural exclusion manifested by LGBT‐free zones created at the level of municipalities, cities and regions in Poland in 2019 and 2020. The authors defend the thesis that events in Poland have confirmed that not only the…
Democracy Is Not for Everyone
The authors of the article show manifestations of homophobia in a range of Eastern European countries. They use the example of Poland to compare the current situation of LGBT people with that in the communist period. The article defends the thesis that homophobia, which goes hand in hand with Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and widespread dislike for any cultural minority, is a cultural compensation for economic disappointment and an expression of t…
Nation, national remembrance, and education — Polish schools as factories of nationalism and prejudice
This article describes and attempts to explain the reasons for the conservative and nationalist character of Polish schools. The author uses data from surveys, analyzes political programs, postulates concerning education put forward by conservatives, and quotes poems emphasizing national identity from textbooks used at schools to teach reading skills. According to the author, it can be observed that nationalists build an atmosphere of aversion to…
Between Private Property, Authoritarian State and Democracy
The article describes the widespread tree felling that began in Polish cities in 2017. The authors show the relationship between this phenomenon and the ideology that gives priority to private property over public good. This ideology was the basis for the new Nature Conservation Act that came into force in Poland in 2017. The new regulations not only made cutting down trees in cities and private properties easier, but also allowed real estate dev…
Euro-Gomorrah and Homopropaganda’
Anti-Semitism in Poland, yesterday and today
The European Green Deal and the peasant cause
The Independence Day as a nationalist ritual
The article contains a cultural analysis of the March of Independence as a symbol of nationalist revival in Poland. The authors analyse the social context of this event, show its history and, inspired by Goffman's classic approach, describe the theatrical setting of this annual event - its scenography, props, musical setting and costumes ('patriotic clothing'). In addition to participant observation, the authors analyse materials posted by the or…
From the Anti-Semitic Campaign in 1968 to the Nationalism of the Populist Right 50 Years Later
The main purpose of the article is to deconstruct slogans and phrases that transmit anti-Semitism in Poland despite the apparent changing political and historical context. It contains a comparative analysis of messages from two historical periods: the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 and the nationalist and anti-Semitic revival in 2018. The material related to the 1968 events comes from archival press materials published between 1967 and 1968. On th…
Nation against the system”
This article analyzes the phenomenon of nationalist rap in Poland. According to the authors, the seemingly independent rap uses a more radical version of the discourse of the right-wing establishment that refers to nationalism, Islamophobia, and opposition to migrants. As there is no left-wing cultural narrative in the public space, nationalist rap has become a voice of those who have not benefited from the process of neoliberal transformation in…
Retirees without pensions and welfare
This article describes the chaos caused by the 1999 privatization of the pension system in Poland. The recent measures taken by the right-wing populist government of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which reduced the retirement age and announced the complete elimination of ‘open’ (private) pension funds at the end of 2016, have not improved the situation of present and future retirees. Various forecasts show that the elderly will not be able to c…
Energy self-defence against official policy
This article analyses the obstacles and opportunities that prosumers from the V4 countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) perceive in relation to the further development of prosumer energy. Given the growing number of prosumers in these countries, we are particularly interested in the motivations behind their actions. Our hypothesis assumes that the rapid increase in the number of prosumers in recent years represents a form of…
The Turów Brown Coal Mine in the shadow of an international conflict
Social and spatial determinants of energy ageism
The article aims to identify the problems and challenges faced by senior citizens in the context of energy transition and also to develop a framework of social policy that would respond to senior citizens' concerns and is necessary for the effective implementation of the goals of the European Union's (EU) climate and energy policy. The authors focus on the analysis of the challenges of energy transition faced by older people who live in Poland in…
They attack the family and order”
The goals of this article are to describe and analyze the main themes in the narratives about feminists that can be found in the populist right-wing press in Poland. Although feminists-alongside LGBT circles, refugees and the left-had been treated as a threat to the existing order before, it was the women's revolt on Polish streets in late autumn 2020 that triggered a series of reports on the women's movement in the right-wing press. In addition …
Is it possible to defeat right-wing populist authorities by winning elections? The erosion of democracy and the system of the triple-masters class in Poland
The article poses an extremely important question of whether it is possible to remove authoritarian authorities using the methods of parliamentary democracy in a situation where the government has weakened or dismantled democratic mechanisms and institutions. The article treats the rule of right-wing populists as a comprehensive ruling system of the triple-masters class (identified with the apparatus of the ruling party), who fully controls the p…
Codename
Although homosexuality was not officially penalized in the communist period in Poland, sexual minorities were practically deprived of any rights and were under the extensive surveillance of the sta
Women's health as an ideological and political issue
The authors describe the problems of women in Poland, who have limited access to abortion, in vitro fertilization procedures, and prenatal tests. The current situation stems from ideological pressure, which affects women's health issues. This is part of a broader syndrome of the conservative approach to women's health in Eastern Europe, as well as the factor that strengthens the extreme right in Europe. As women's sexual health is demonized, wome…
Non-alternative reality? On the misery of the Left in Eastern Europe
This article is a socio-historical analysis of the current weak position of the left wing in Poland and an attempt to explain the social causes of this situation. The author focuses mainly on the last 26 years and the political and economic processes, which took place in Poland and in Eastern Europe after the cold war and the restoration of capitalism in this part of the world. He also points to historical events taking place in the seventeenth a…
Anti-military protests and campaigns against nuclear power plants
The Polish People’s Army played a special role in communist Poland. As Eisler (2016, 19) points out, the military had a strictly political function and was the main tool of the communist authoritie
Inequalities, Social Exclusion and Radical Political Struggle – Some Historical and Social Thoughts on the Interwar Period in Poland (1918–1939)
Anti-Semitism in Poland, yesterday and today
Gender and class
This essay shows the effect of the systemic transformation on the role and place of women in society in post-war Poland. Relations between the socialist state and women were dynamic and changed over time. In the first post-war period, many women hoped that the new political order would improve their lives. The industrialization of the country led to the professional activation of women and changed their places of residence, social positions and l…
Multimodal analysis of the nationalist discourse and historical inspirations of the spectacle of the populist right in Poland between 2015 and 2017
Retirees without pensions and welfare
This article describes the chaos caused by the 1999 privatization of the pension system in Poland. The recent measures taken by the right-wing populist government of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which reduced the retirement age and announced the complete elimination of ‘open’ (private) pension funds at the end of 2016, have not improved the situation of present and future retirees. Various forecasts show that the elderly will not be able to c…
Nation, national remembrance, and education — Polish schools as factories of nationalism and prejudice
This article describes and attempts to explain the reasons for the conservative and nationalist character of Polish schools. The author uses data from surveys, analyzes political programs, postulates concerning education put forward by conservatives, and quotes poems emphasizing national identity from textbooks used at schools to teach reading skills. According to the author, it can be observed that nationalists build an atmosphere of aversion to…
An ‘ordinary man’s’ protest
The article describes the tradition of self-immolation in Eastern Europe as a form of radical protest during periods of structural crisis. The authors describe cases of self-immolation (Ryszard Siwiec, Jan Palach, Evzen Plocek, Musa Mamut) which took place in the communist period, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. In the context of Eastern European tradition, they also describe the last case of self-immolation, when Piotr Szczęsny set himself …
A city is not a company, a flat is not a commodity
This article describes urban and tenant movements that have been created in Poland in response to the commercialization of urban space and the complete commodification of the right to housing. On the one hand, spatial segregation in Polish cities was fully approved by the state; on the other hand, it became a source of income for new owners of acquired buildings, who often used criminal methods to intimidate tenants. Brutal evictions encountered …
From crisis to crisis
Far from being an event of a decade ago, the 2008 global financial crisis is a manifestation of an ongoing crisis of the world order, with social, political and ecological dimensions that cannot be seen separately from each other. The root cause of the crisis can be traced back to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in August 1971, and the failure to design an equitable and inclusive global financial and economic governance architecture cons…
Dangerous Liaisons between the Catholic Church and State
This article describes the history of relations between the Catholic Church and the Polish state in the period from the 1990s to the present. The authors defend a thesis that, although political elites and the state underwent pressure from the Church, the society had many opportunities to separate its religious beliefs from its own political choices, begin the slow process of secularization and learn the lessons of Enlightenment in this part of E…
Euro-Gomorrah and Homopropaganda’
Murderers of the unborn’ and ‘sexual degenerates’
The article analyses the language used by the Polish nationalist right in relation to LGBT communities and the right to abortion. The authors show links between the language of Church hierarchs and right-wing columnists as the ideological backbone of the governing right-wing populist right. According to the authors, the attack on gender is the same method of political mobilisation and power management as the campaign against refugees and the anti…
The Secret War of Intelligence
For nearly a decade, a colonel on the Polish General Staff, Ryszard Kukliński, provided invaluable information about Soviet and Warsaw Pact military activities to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the codename “Jack Strong.” Along with Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who cooperated with the CIA in the late 1950s and early1960s until he was arrested and executed by the Soviet regime, Kukliński has gone down in history as one of the m…
Edward Abramowski's concept of stateless socialism and its impact on progressive social movements in Poland in the twentieth century
The author traces the impact of Abramowski's ideas on the recent history of Poland. His concepts were not only popular in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the syndicalist movement in the interwar period (1918–1939), but they also exerted a profound influence on the cooperative movement and democratic left-wing opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. The leaders of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) were much influenced by Abramowski's ideas and,…
The national music scene
The article contains the analysis of lyrics created by bands associated with the "national music scene" in Poland, as well as the means of fascist propaganda used in music by far-right extremists. The article also shows the cultural and political similarities between the official right in Poland (PiS party) and extreme right wing movements. These environments are bridged by a similar cultural narrative, which is based on the cult of the nation an…
Capitalism after communism
Was neoliberal capitalism the only possible development path in Eastern Europe after the collapse of real socialism? How did the restoration of capitalism in the former Eastern bloc affect the economic and political situation in the world? Is the support of workers and lower classes for right-wing populists that has been observed in Eastern Europe for the past 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall a permanent phenomenon? By asking these ques…
One Leader, One Party, One Truth
The article analyses the way in which public television operates under the rule of right-wing populists in Poland. The author examines the content of the main mews programmes in the period preceding the parliamentary election in 2019 and defends the thesis that state-owned media in Poland have become a propaganda tool of the ruling party. The propaganda of the populist Right in the analysed programmes was based on two threads: the promise of soci…
Right-wing populism in Poland and anti-vaccine myths on YouTube
The article describes the growing anti-vaccine movements in the context of right-wing populism, which is also gaining popularity around the world. According to the authors, these two phenomena have a lot in common, and the activists of the anti-vaccine movements often intermingle with populist right-wing movements. The connection between anti-vaccine activists and populists is illustrated in the analysis of discourse and anti-vaccine arguments pr…
Spatial, ideological and economic limitations of gynaecological examinations in Poland
The authors of the article describe barriers in access to gynaecological care in Poland and compare them to problems of health care encountered by women in other developing countries. The authors defend the thesis that in periphery and semi-periphery societies, despite some local differences, women from rural areas have similar obstacles to access to care in health centers. At the same time, they emphasize that the spatial distance between women …
Unpacking the right-populist threat to climate action
On the role of utopia in social thought and social sciences
How can we understand the term ‘utopia’ and does the adjective ‘utopian’ discredit the social thought to which it refers? The author discusses the role of utopia in the emergence of social sciences and alludes to Immanuel Wallerstein and his analysis of utopistics. He also defends the hypothesis that in the times of political, economic and ecological crisis which is sweeping through Europe and the world in the first decades of the twenty-first ce…
Political science (44 works) · Politics (40 works) · Law (37 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Law (34 works) · Nationalism (18 works) · Political economy (18 works) · Democracy (15 works) · Ideology (13 works) · Populism, Right-Wing Movements (13 works)