Böcker utgivna av Ceeol Press

Socialist prisons have always been associated with repression, violence and bullying of political prisoners. However, our book shows something very surprising. The Czechoslovak prison system had been undergoing radical changes since the 1950s. New tendencies were promoted in various periods that aligned with the social and political situation. The prison system as a whole was not an institution that would evolve separately, regardless of changes in the society. The way it was managed was clearly shaped by people who were making decisions about where Czechoslovakia was headed, as penal and penitentiary policy was created at the highest levels. These changes are described by means of master narratives in this book, by observing them on multiple levels. Changes in the prison system could be observed in not only the system itself, as organisational changes in the management of the institution as such, but also in the transformation of the thinking of those in top positions of the prison administration and in the lowest positions alike. We show that the narrative they adopted and that affected the interpretation of their experience and decisions had an effect on their treatment of different categories of prisoners. The book shows that the prison system reflects the character of the whole society and says a lot about it.

In this study, researchers analyse, from different perspectives, the challenges related to technology, language, culture, society, law, engineering, economics and physical education and sports, viewed from a cross-border perspective, with emphasis on similarities and dissimilarities between life quality in the Republic of Moldova and life quality in Romania. The study involves experienced, as well as young researchers (PhD students), in order to ensure the transfer of knowledge and good practices. The volume endeavors to tackle key aspects related to the quality of environmental factors, food quality, urbanization, communication, language, nutrition, health, education, economic conditions, security, social environment, leisure, all approached in an integrated manner. The transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach aims to mirror the complexity of contemporary life and to consider the variety of factors that influence the perception of life quality.

Since the dawn of modern history, maintaining a power balance as an underlying condition for international order has been one of the most constantly pursued endeavors of humanity. Starting with the ancient Trojan War and ending with the contemporary "war on terror", leaders all over the world, in isolation or alliance, have struggled to uphold power and play a determining role in keeping a power balance that would serve national and global interests and secure international peace and prosperity. The interpretation of international relations through the theory of balance of power involves a high degree of abstraction, reified into the visual representation of Powers, i.e., states holding the status of, as the weights in a pair of scales.This book examines the concept of power as a construct in communicative theories and the way in which it relates to and is constituted by NATO discourse. By way of extended example, it investigates the way in which the dynamics of various types of power (integrative, adversarial, and predominant) impact social, political, and military relationships between the members of the North Atlantic Organization and between the Alliance and external actors.

This diary was not meant to be presented originally to the wider public. Its author is a young man of Hungarian-Jewish background, who is writing about the events in his life and the world around him in the 1930s and early 1940s. Did he ever imagine that he was writing a veritable historical chronicle, reflecting on the complexities of his identity in the light of the gradual normalization of discriminatory politics and slide toward genocide? We shall never be able to find this out, because soon after the last diary entry, he is called up to forced labor service on the Russian front from where he would never return.

In this autobiographical book, Erica Wallach gives us a deep and personal insight into the experience of her five-year imprisonment. She was suspected of espionage and was sent to prisons in 1950 in the GDR and the Soviet Union as well as to the Workuta Soviet labor camp.Her husband, Robert R. Wallach, a soldier in the U.S. Army, and the their two children, waited in vain for her return to Paris, the Wallach family''s place of residence at that time. They had no information about the reasons for her sudden disappearance and about Erica''s whereabouts.The author describes the methods of totalitarian systems that are used to break prisoners in solitary confinement in order to obtain the desired confession from them. And she tells how she still managed to survive those years.This new, expanded edition has a German-English bilingual epilogue, written by Erica Wallach in the late 1970s and appearing here for the first time. 

Heinrich Renner's travelogue was published 14 years after Austria-Hungary had occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina based on the mandate of the Berlin Treaty of 1878. When Renner, in 1892, describes the effects of this annexation, he himself speaks of an "achievement unprecedented in colonial history" – a wording which classifies the annexation as one particular phenomenon of the political main-stream, as it shaped the entire epoch of European politics: the global competition of the European powers for colonial territories.