Hybrid Conflicts in Modern Geopolitics

The chapter provides an analysis of ethnic, cultural, and religious confrontations in modern geopolitical hybrid conflicts. The methodological basis of the present research is the concept of hybrid geopolitical 3D conflicts. The data of sociological surveys carried out by Ukrainian and Russian research centres as well as the Center for Countering Information Aggression AM&РM are used. The main subject of study is the specifics of interethnic, intercultural, and interreligious conflicts that are part of the hybrid Russian-Ukrainian War (2014-2021). The authors of the chapter conclude that modern Russian-Ukrainian interethnic, intercultural, and interreligious conflicts can be considered as an example of hybrid geopolitical 3D conflicts: it started like military-political aggression and continued at other levels and areas. The conflicts of the sort demonstrate a hybrid nature and are a new phenomenon in international and domestic geopolitics.

Analysis of the foreign malign influence in Montenegro 2019-2021

For many years now, the Republic of Montenegro has been facing numerous threats of a hybrid nature that are aggressively attacking its national and state-building identity. The level and intensity of malicious activities has changed over the years, from assassination attempts to inciting (and violent) protests in the streets to influence the election process. This analysis will show how operations of influence, planned and conducted by various actors from Russia and Serbia, with the use of internal freedoms and vulnerabilities, have led to a strong polarization of society and the state.

The Governance of Charities in China

The passage of the Charity Law signals the beginning of a new era in the legal regulation of charities in China. Its provisions reflect the increasing autonomy of charitable actors in exercising their management rights and the reduced control of the government over the use of charity resources. The shift of the state's attitude towards its relationship with the charitable sector brings new insights into the governance of charities in China. This article highlights the public-private law hybrid nature of the new legislative arrangement for charities and outlines the policy dynamics underlying its operation and development. It argues that the hybrid nature of the Charity Law was intentionally created by legislators, and the design of the governance framework for charities should therefore be responsive to this new legislative arrangement. Following on this reasoning, the article explores the implications that analysis of the hybrid nature of the Charity Law has for the governance of charities in China. It identifies the parties relevant to charity governance, the way in which they interact, and the governance principles that can be applied to charities.

Human Synchronization Maps—The Hybrid Consciousness of the Embodied Mind

We examine the theoretical implications of empirical studies developed over recent years. These experiments have explored the biosemiotic nature of communication streams from emotional neuroscience and embodied mind perspectives. Information combinatorics analysis enabled a deeper understanding of the coupling and decoupling dynamics of biosemiotics streams. We investigated intraindividual and interpersonal relations as coevolution dynamics of hybrid couplings, synchronizations, and desynchronizations. Cluster analysis and Markov chains produced evidence of chimaera states and phase transitions. A probabilistic and nondeterministic approach clarified the properties of these hybrid dynamics. Thus, multidimensional theoretical models can represent the hybrid nature of human interactions.

DECISION-MAKING IN THE EU COUNCIL OF MINISTERS AFTER BREXIT

The EU Council of Ministers is different from other EU institutions because it is both an intergovernmental and supranational authority. This hybrid nature has motivated many authors to focus their research on it. The Council is an intergovernmental institution if we look at who is part of it (representatives of the Member States) while the elements of supranationality are most visible in the deci-sion-making area. The central decision-making institutions, the Council of Ministers can take decisions by qualified majority to be applied even to those countries that have not voted for decision. This decision-making procedure is what makes the Council recognizable, and at the same time this is an area that will be significantly affected by the UK's departure from the Union. Therefore, the subject of this paper is the analysis of decision-making in the Council after Brexit. The aim is to present future changes in this area, bearing in mind the current Lisbon model of qualified decision-making by a double majority. In addition, the paper provides projections on what coalitions in the Council might look like after the departure of one of the larg-est and most influential states.

Mujer que sabe viajar: autorrepresentación y subjetividad femenina en Cartas a Ricardo, de Rosario Castellanos

This paper reflects on the relationship between the female traveling experience and the epistolary genre through a reading of Rosario Castellanos’s Cartas a Ricardo as travel literature. The aim is to analyse the hybrid nature of the letter as a genre that allows the exploration of ideas and confessing or revealing affects during particular processes of constructing female subjectivities. Different than conventional travel chronicles, it is argued that the travel accounts transmitted through the female epistolary genre can throw light on physical and emotional displacement, but also on the intellectual and creative work of women in (self)censored or repressed environments. It is concluded that for Castellanos both traveling and writing are conscious acts of intellectual and gender freedom.

Downward accountability to beneficiaries in social enterprises: do partnerships with nonprofits boost it without undermining accountability to other stakeholders?

The hybrid nature of social enterprises gives them a high potential for developing social innovations, but at the same time leads to tensions within these organizations. The barriers they face to gain access to traditional sources of funding are pushing social enterprises to reinforce their business models and rely more on commercial activities, and this fact increases the risk of mission drift and can weaken accountability towards beneficiaries of the social mission in favor of dominant stakeholders such as funders or clients of the commercial activities. Our research attempts to analyze whether partnerships between social enterprises and nonprofits strengthen accountability to beneficiaries without hindering accountability to other stakeholders, thus allowing both social and economic objectives to operate together. Based on a survey with a sample of social enterprises partnering with nonprofits, results reveal that as the partnership moves along a collaboration continuum to a transformational stage, accountability to beneficiaries is encouraged, whereas accountability to other types of stakeholders is also improved or, at least, not affected.

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES AS STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES IN HYBRID WARFARE

The current and future war is of hybrid nature, in which military actions are complementary to actions of economical, political, ideological and diplomatic nature. In this communication, I refer to the domains in which we encounter critical infrastructures and I demonstrate that these critical infrastructures are objectives of strategic importance for both the defender and the attacker.

Conceptualizing social media sub-platforms: The case of mourning and memorialization practices on Facebook

This article offers a conceptual framework of Facebook’s sub-platforms: Profiles, Groups, and Pages. We demonstrate the crucially different affordances that these sub-platforms possess, and the various resulting social practices and dynamics that they enable. With mourning and memorialization as a case study, our findings point at emergent practices ranging along a personal-to-public spectrum of communicative functions and media uses: Profiles offer a personal quality, albeit differently for the bereaved’s Profile and the deceased’s Profile; Groups possess a hybrid nature, combining self-expression alongside public aspects, reviving thus premodern bereaved communities; and Pages possess a distinctly public quality, serving as online memorialization centers where the deceased becomes an icon and a resource for mobilizing broad social change. This comparative and integrated approach may be applied productively to other contexts and other social media (sub-)platforms.