This paper provides a philosophical reflection of the crisis of democracy. Its central research focus is on what is referred to as “the world of artificial images and the lost truth” (or phantasmagoria), where the West European society experiences a sequence of distorted perceptions of reality (simulacra) broken down between various social movements, and the effect of those on the conflict-settling function of democracy, which less and less observable in contemporary societies of Western Europe. Starting from this very brief description, the article elaborates the issue of lost truth and meaning as well as the resurrection of myth based on a multitude of sub-realities or simulacra, which deprive democracy of its conflict settling mechanism and prevent social groups/movements in an atomized society from discursive consensus building.

Liberal democracy is far from being the ideal form of democracy. In liberal democracies, every aspect of the individual’s life is heteronomous to the forces of the state and capitalism. From biopolitics to necropolitics, the cycle of people’s lives in contemporary liberal democracies is administered and controlled constantly, from beginning to end. This essay examines the works of Giorgio Agamben, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin to find an inspiration for a radical form of democracy. After engaging with the three intellectuals, the essay proposes a different conception of democracy as a possible form of messianic life/existence that interrupts the predominant flow of life. This possible democratic life/existence deactivates and suspends the structures of domination in the contemporary world, i.e. the laws of sovereignty and capital. The essay starts by providing a critique of liberal democracy and exemplifies the impossibility of a genuine democracy in this form of governance by using Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, Agamben’s bare life, and Adorno’s administered society. After this critique, the essay conceptualizes a democratic state of existence to potentially negate the domination of the status quo through Adorno’s philosophical reflection on the “wrong life”, Agamben’s ideas (particularly his messianism and form of life), and Benjamin’s messianic politics.

The article evaluates the possibilities of classifying the Czech party system after the election of 2021, considering the presence of two electoral alliances comprised of five political parties. Based on Canadian political scientist Steven Wolinetz’s conceptualization of electoral alliances as blocs of parties, we conclude that the presence of a higher number of relevant entities does not imply a transformation of the party system towards bipolarity and one-dimensional competition, since the constituent parties of alliances do not compete with one another. For this reason, we classify the Czech party system after the 2021 parliamentary election as a case of bipolar extended multipartism in Wolinetz’s typology.

The paper seeks to offer a Hegelian-inspired normative explanation of the utilization of postcolonial arguments by authoritarian states to challenge Western norms. In the last decades, several authoritarian politicians like Modi and Erdoğan have used postcolonial concepts to justify a range of questionable essentialist and nationalistic policies of new imperialism. Whereas scholars and policymakers have identified this phenomenon as pragmatic manoeuvring by politicians, they have failed to either incorporate the role of the West in their analysis or explain the efficiency of this rhetoric within national contexts. The previously successful practice of retreating to universal Western norms has become impractical due to the overall lack of consensus on existing social hierarchies and Western values. Since the increasingly popular practice appears as a contextual epiphenomenon of a globalized issue, broader frameworks are required to make sense of these increasing distortions of postcoloniality. As such, the paper argues for a Hegelian approach that positions the West/Europe and the populist authoritarian states in a master–slave dialectic. The dialectic offers a normative and rational reading of this problematic postcolonial phenomenon, one that not only shows the past and contemporary circumstances of its formulation but also helps us eliminate or, more realistically, understand the phenomenon. It also incorporates in the analysis the role of domestic factors and the inter-subjective influence of the West/Europe on the formulation of a postcolonial identity and discourse. Furthermore, the paper argues that populist and authoritarian governments do not manage to overcome the master–slave dialectic but instead exploit it to maximize their political gains. Hence, after placing Hegel’s master–slave dialectic in the international relation corpus, the paper uses a dialogical model to examine the Turkish Justice and Development Party’s postcolonialist colonialism and show the benefits of the master–slave dialectic in analysing the phenomenon.

The current international system finds itself at a stage where foreign relations are being formed by the official governments of individual states and also by other, often diverse, actors. In particular, non-state actors have been establishing, far more than ever, foreign contacts with other actors in areas such as trade, investment, technology exchange, and others. However, the current academic field suffers from a gap in the conceptualization and research of foreign activities by non-state armed actors. This study presents a new conceptual approach to foreign activities by non-state armed actors and presents two questions for a debate in international relations: Can we grasp such foreign activities by non-state armed actors that are close to diplomacy? And, if so, how can this be achieved?

This article aims to provide a deeper context of the Poland-Belarus crisis, which is interpreted through the lens of hybrid threats and hybrid warfare. A multilevel analysis of the crisis assesses four dimensions: political, strategic, tactical, and operational. Emphasis is put on the executive (operational and tactical) dimensions, which are well suitable for analysing the effects of hybrid threats and hybrid warfare. The author argues that the crisis per se may be considered a hybrid threat, but in a broader context, it is a part and one of the tools of hybrid warfare. A DIMEFIL classification is proposed for analysing and designing tools for addressing hybrid threats and warfare.