Kacper Szulecki

Norwegian Institute of International Affairs | NUPI · Climate and Energy

The “Energy Union” can be seen as the most significant policy idea that seeks to reform European energy governance, policy and regional cooperation. However, so far the concept is mostly an empty box in which every stakeholder tries to put whatever is on the top of their priority list. This paper reviews three major theoretical approaches to the an...

This edited collection highlights the different meanings that have been attached to the notion of energy security and how it is taken to refer to different objects. Official policy definitions of energy security are broadly similar across countries and emphasize the reliability and affordability of access to sufficient energy resources for a commun...

This monograph traces the history of the dissident as a transnational phenomenon, exploring Soviet dissidents in Communist Central Europe from the mid-1960s until 1989. It argues that our understanding of the transnational activist would not be what it is today without the input of Central European oppositionists and ties the term to the global eme...

While political environmentalism played an important role in social mobilization against communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe before 1989, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s conservationism appeared to be in decline across the region, and external pressure from European institutions and Western donors influenced environmental policy. W...

‘Energy democracy’ epitomizes hopes in energy transformation, but remains under-defined, a political buzzword rather than a real concept. After presenting its activist roots and mapping its usage, ‘energy democracy’ is positioned in relation to similar normatively derived concepts: environmental, climate, and energy justice, and environmental democ...

The European Commission has announced far-reaching reforms to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Among the proposals constituting the European Green Deal is the adoption of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to prevent carbon leakage. In practice, however, CBAM will not only act as a shield for the European Emissions Tra...

The digitalisation of the energy system brings out the question of cyber threats. How this area is perceived and how cyber-security policy in the energy sector develops is driven by the most spectacular cyber-incidents. How do these events shape public perceptions about the dangers of digitalisation? To understand this, we look at the 2016 CrashOve...

Migration may affect migrants’ ideas as they become exposed to different contexts over time. But how does such exposure and opportunities for comparative evaluation of origin and settlement contexts, translate into content for potential political remittances? To answer this question, we analyse 80 interviews with Polish and Romanian migrants living...

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the risk of a prolonged physical supply shortage of natural gas is higher than ever before. While European Union (EU) institutions and member states are discussing the possibility of imposing an embargo or a gradual phase-out in this sector, an abrupt shortage may result from a political decision on the suppl...

Decentralization of the electricity sector has mainly been studied in relation to its infrastructural aspect, particularly location and size of the generation units, and only recently more attention has been paid to the governance aspects. This article examines power sector (de)centralization operationalized along three functional dimensions: polit...

Non-resident citizens’ participation in national elections is known as external voting. This report presents the first comparative dataset of external voting, both in parliamentary and presidential elections. We gathered voting results among migrants from nine Central and Eastern European countries, with the main analysis focusing on six where most...

The oil and gas (O&G) sector is a major source of Norway’s national wealth and a pillar of its robust welfare state. At the same time, it makes a significant contribution to the global climate crisis. The oil and gas industry makes up 28% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions, the second-highest source after transport, and this is only co...

Highlights •This paper comments on Krzykowski and Zięty (2021) article. •It critically evaluates their arguments and approaches. •The paper discusses challenges connected to review process. •It scrutinizes quality control mechanism in interdisciplinary research.

External voting by nonresident citizens has become an important feature of contemporary democratic politics. However, compared to the average voter in domestic elections, we still know significantly less about migrants' motivations to vote or not. Whereas analyses of external voting patterns offer insights into the results of external voting compar...

In this report, we present insights from interviews with Polish and Romanian migrants living in Barcelona and Oslo. These interviews were conducted as part of the DIASPOlitic project “Understanding the Political Dynamics of Émigré Communities in an Era of European Democratic Backsliding”. The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway and...

Despite the burgeoning literature, evidence on how right-wing populists frame and act on energy and climate issues is limited and even more scarce for other types of populist parties. We address this gap by exploring the policy discourses, positions and actions of six European populist parties from Austria, Czechia, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain...

Kiedy w mediach pojawia się temat spalania biomasy drzewnej, obraz, który maluje się przed oczami większości czytelników, to zapewne wycinka pięknego drzewa o wymiarach niemal pomnikowych, które jest dalej cięte w kawałki i wrzucane do pieca elektrociepłowni. Taka wizja z oczywistych względów oburza, a jej następstwem są pytania: ile potrzeba lat,...

The scant but growing literature on populism in the context of energy transitions and climate policy almost entirely focuses on right-wing populists. However, evidence on how right-wing populist parties frame and act on energy and climate issues is limited and even more scarce for other types of populist parties. We address this gap by exploring th...

This article analyses how, in Poland, the populist political orientation of the ruling party (Law and Justice—PiS) has coloured the historical discourse of the government and has affected, in turn, its foreign policy and diplomatic relations. We argue that the historical discourse of the PiS government is a reflection of the party’s reliance on pop...

Challenging one-eyed technology-focused accounts of renewables policy, this book provides a ground-breaking, deep-diving and genre-crossing longitudinal study of policy development. The book develops a multi-field explanatory approach, capturing inter-relationships between actors often analyzed in isolation. It provides empirically rich and system...

This chapter explains why Poland has changed its renewables support scheme very often and why in 2016 it ended up with a highly technology-specific renewables support mix. The European environment is shown to be crucial in pushing for establishment as well as changes in Polish renewables support schemes, whereas much of the legislative volatility –...

Energy democracy' has evolved from a slogan used by activists demanding a greater say in energy-related decision-making to a term used in policy documents and scholarly literature on energy governance and energy transitions. This article reviews the academic literature using a combination of three methodological elements: (1) keyword searches of ma...

Energy democracy' has evolved from a slogan used by activists demanding a greater say in energy-related decision-making to a term used in policy documents and scholarly literature on energy governance and energy transitions. This article reviews the academic literature using a combination of three methodological elements: (1) keyword searches of ma...

States have increasingly become linked through regional energy-related institutions, mar kets, infrastructure, and politics. ASEAN, EU, SADC, ECOWAS, Eurasian Union, NAFTA, and UNASUR, inter alia, have formal agreements and institutions covering energy. Re newable, nuclear, and fossil fuel energy sources, as well as pipelines and electricity grids,...

If we agree that the oil price is a social institution, embedded in socio-economic and political practices (Belyi 2016), this means that it is not only the outcome of these practices, but also a causal factor, shaping actions and events. From an interpretivist perspective, however, there is yet another distinction to be drawn: that between the pric...

Freedom of movement—particularly to travel and work in the “West”—was something Central Europeans dreamed of behind the Iron Curtain, and used to be given as the number one rationale for joining the EU. What if mass migration and democratic backsliding are not just coincidental? Are we overlooking the impact of personal experiences of the ‘West’ on...

Is populist politics a threat to ambitious climate action and decarbonisation of energy systems? With the coinciding challenges of an alleged global ‘populist wave,’ and the growing visibility of a planetary climate crisis, this issue has gained relevance. While theoretical literature on the links between populism and climate action is growing, the...

As energy security becomes a key topic of policy debates, not least in Central and Eastern European states, which are vulnerable to gas supply disruptions from Russia, it has been suggested that EU energy policy becomes 'securitized'. However, full securitization attempts, which not only identify threats but also call for exceptional measures to de...

Was societal dissent to authoritarian regimes always an important point of academic interest? Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the Cold War mindset’s preoccupation with warheads and state leaders, domestic dissent in Eastern Europe attracted Western attention quite late. This introductory chapter reviews the literature on societal opposition to Commun...

What is it that unites and defines a variety of people that are called “dissidents”—in the media, political debates or academic literature? This chapter provides a compendium of five definitions, gathered through a board literature review and interviews with former human rights activists and political oppositionists. It then traces the evolution of...

To become transnationally functioning personas and to gain recognition, the dissidents needed to be individualized—and known by name. While Stalinist propaganda tended to bundle opponents together under broad categories of enemies, in the 1960s Communist media opted for individual condemnation of defiant acts. That gave dissenters, particularly aft...

Dissidentism combines open, nonviolent acts of domestic political dissent with transnational circulation, which gives the defiant opponents of authoritarian regimes an international audience and potential support. However, Stalinist regimes used repression and denunciation as tools that thwarted dissent, and closed borders blocked transnational cir...

Following the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in 1974 and the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, the transnational political conditions became increasingly favorable for political opposition behind the Iron Curtain. Two Central European initiatives became pivotal in establishing dissidence as a new object of Western attention:...

The first half of the 1970s was a time of soul-searching for the opposition, but by 1975 open political dissent reemerged, beginning a new chapter in the struggle with Communist authoritarianism. Three elements had to be in place before the transnational figure of the dissident in the form that we now know it could emerge. Firstly, the massive wave...

The Eastern European opposition quickly noticed the “dissident” label as one imposed on them by the West. But by whom precisely? Drawing on the concept of Orientalism, this chapter describes how Western experts—“Sovietologists” and media correspondents in particular—helped to create the dissident figure and shape it into something not necessarily r...

The appearance of Poland’s trade union “Solidarity” marks a new phase in the evolution of the dissident figure. Following the military backlash and another wave of migration, the “dissident” label could be generalized and applied not to dozens, but hundreds and even thousands of rank-and-file unionists, new independent groups and much younger, ofte...

The chapter sums up the book’s empirical findings and proposes an ideal-typical model of transnational dissidentism and the emergence of new transnational actors—a “dissident triangle.” It is composed of open, nonviolent political dissent, domestic renown, and notoriety amplified by domestic official and unofficial media and transnational channels...

From the moment the word “dissident” began to gain international currency and the transnational dissident figure began to have a looping effect on them, Central European opposition intellectuals began reflecting on it, resisting it, but also performing it and using the new source of visible transnational empowerment for their purposes. The chapter...

Czy katastrofa w Czarnobylu przyczyniła się do upadku komunizmu? Skąd wziął się polski ruch ekologiczny i dlaczego po 1989 roku nie stworzył silnej politycznej reprezentacji? Niniejsza monografia umiejscawia anty-atomowe protesty, które przetoczyły się przez Polskę w latach 1985-90, w szerszym kontekście. Energetyka jądrowa była przez kilka dekad s...

In climate and energy studies, it is not only the continuous rise of global average annual temperatures that is apparent. The temperature of the discussions on policy, governance and technology solutions has also reached a boiling point in many areas. This is most visible in the case of controversial energy generation technologies. Controversial he...

This editorial introduces the thematic issue "EU Energy Policy: Towards a Clean Energy Transition?", nesting it in broader discussion on European Union's (EU) energy policy. For over a decade, the EU has displayed an interest and political motivation to integrate climate policy priorities into its energy governance. However, the history of European...

This thematic issue looks at the most recent changes in the European Union's energy governance, particularly the 2015 Energy Union and 2016 Clean Energy Package. It is divided into three sections. The first investigates the EU Energy Union, its governance and decarbonization ambitions. The second section looks at the increasing overlaps between ene...

The impact of renewables on the energy markets-falling wholesale electricity prices and lower investment stability-are apparently creating a shortage of energy project financing, which in future could lead to power supply shortages. Governments have responded by introducing payments for capacity, alongside payments for energy being sold. The increa...

In this article, we respond to a number of points raised by Dominik Smyrgała in his recent piece “Fukushima and Energiewende.” We believe his piece, although timely and taking on an important topic, suffers from three important issues. Smyrgała makes selective use of statistical data and opinions, and bends some facts and the spirit of certain docu...

Our chapter brings together four Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) scholars into a conversation about their research and policy engagements, working within History, Political Science, Sociology, and Science and Technology Studies. We develop a socio-technical perspective and turn that into a conceptual tool pack, to interrogate and explore the e...

Speaking truth to powers-that-be and overthrowing a “regime of lies” were both dissident trademarks during the Cold War era. But what if overreliance on such an idealized and static notion of Truth can be a problem in an age of post-factual politics and information warfare? In this essay, I first problematize the idea that “truth will set us free”...

Michał Krzykowski and Karolina Krzykowska (2017) in an article published in this journal entitled “Will the European Commission's policy hinder gas supplies to Central and Eastern European countries? OPAL case decision” discuss the consequences of European Commission's (EC) exemption from internal energy market rules (especially the third party acc...

Why has the Polish government decided to give in to environmental protesters in the widely publicised case of the Rospuda River (2006-2007) but chooses to ignore both EU pressure and domestic activism the ongoing protests against the logging of the Białowieża forest? It is difficult to understand the difference without an in-depth analysis of domes...

The chapter looks at the electricity sector, which is very rarely the object of interest in Security Studies and political science, despite its clear importance as a vital energy sector sustaining vital functions and values of (post)modern societies. We trace security debates in two sub-sectors – renewables and nuclear energy and in two neighbourin...

This introductory chapter begins with a review of the academic discussion on the way 'energy security' should be understood. After presenting the most conventional definition, I distinguish between three main approaches to elaborating and (re)defining that notion, and argue for the importance of an analytical concept of 'energy security', allowing...

In this chapter we identify some key areas for future research on “energy securitization” through both an examination of what Securitization Studies could learn from the study of energy issues and what insights could be drawn from theoretical developments within Securitization Studies for the study of energy security. After a brief overview of the...

Drawing on Buzan, Wæver and Wilde—central to the so-called Copenhagen School in Security Studies—the chapter proposes a way of applying the classic formulation of the securitisation model to energy security. Signalling some important critique that the Copenhagen School model picked up over the last two decades, we propose some reformulations. This...

This chapter provides a very broad overview of different energy policy and energy security issues that Europe faces, and those for which it needs to prepare itself for in the future. It asks whether EU energy governance has gained a new sense of direction since the Ukraine Crises erupted. We argue that the crisis was a bombshell moment for European...

Energy security rhetoric has a different flavour depending on where you stand. It carries different meanings and refers to different objects. Although official policy definitions of energy security are broadly similar across countries, emphasising the reliability and affordability of access to sufficient energy resources for a community to uphold i...

The surprising and perhaps even paradoxical demise of a mass environmental protest movement in Poland after its heyday in the late 1980s has already drawn significant scholarly attention (Gliński and Koziarek 2007; Szulecki et al. 2015; Van Eeden 2016). So has the wider process of the “NGO-ization” of civil society in post-communist contexts (cf. S...

Poland’s energy mix is dominated by indigenous coal, and since the country joined the European Union in 2004 it has been clear that it will do much to safeguard its domestic coal sector and resist pressures for ambitious harmonized decarbonization efforts. At the same time, Poland is meeting its renewable energy targets and its onshore wind capacit...

Poland’s energy mix is dominated by indigenous coal, and since the country joined the European Union in 2004 it has been clear that it will do much to safeguard its domestic coal sector and resist pressures for ambitious harmonized decarbonization efforts. At the same time, Poland is meeting its renewable energy targets and its onshore wind capacit...

W pierwszym roku przychody na rodzinę we wsi podwoiły się. Po 12 latach stanowiły dziesięciokrotność wyjściowych. Brzmi jak bajka. Ale tak naprawdę chodziło o bardzo proste kroki i przezwyciężenie starych przyzwyczajeń i niesnasek. Kluczem było namówienie chłopów, żeby obsiewali własne pola. Niby proste, ale czasem nie mieli czym, czasem nie wiedzi...

Das aktuelle Konzept einer europäischen »Energie-Union«, das auf eine Initiative des amtierenden Präsidenten des Europäischen Rates, Donald Tusk, in seiner Zeit als polnischer Ministerpräsident zurückgeht, betont die Bedeutung regionaler Kooperation für die europäische Energiepolitik und insbesondere auch die Versorgungssicherheit. Dieser Beitrag u...

The recently proposed overarching concept of a European " Energy Union " stresses the importance of regional cooperation, as it has become clear that absent increased coordination and cross-border cooperation, more obstacles than synergies may emerge. Looking at Germany and Poland, this policy brief examines how discrepancies between European Union...

Aktualne stężenie CO2 w atmosferze wynosi ponad 404 cząsteczki na milion, o 40 więcej niż w roku 2000. Średnia globalna temperatura roczna była w roku 2015 (najcieplejszym w historii, ale obecny się jeszcze nie skończył) o 1°C wyższa niż przed rewolucją przemysłową. Jak wygląda świat, który kryje się za tymi abstrakcyjnymi liczbami?

Mezi axiomy, na nichž se zakládá Havlova morální politická strategie, je jeden nejnápadnější. Není jeho vynálezem ani není výsadou jeho vlastního psaní. Co je to? Prosté přesvědčení: Pravda vítězí. A to nás osvobodí. Alespoň tak jsme si to mysleli.

In October 2014 the European Council agreed on the 2030 climate and energy framework, part of which was to create a ‘reliable and transparent governance system’ for the EU to meet its energy goals: to reduce GHG emissions by 40% relative to 1990 levels, to increase the share of renewables to 27% of energy consumption (with flexibility left to membe...

Why has it become so fashionable in Europe to think in terms of " geopolitics " ? Why is this tendency dangerous , and how do we defy it? As we face the disintegration of the European system built on the Helsinki Accords and the specter of a new Cold War, it is worth reexamining the forgotten legacy of Central European dissents who presented a bril...

Tschernobylkatastrophe bei der Entstehung und Entwicklung einer „grünen“ Opposition in Polen, insbesondere bei den öffentlichen Protesten von Wolność i Pokój spielte.3 Die Kernschmelze von Tschernobyl wird weithin als „Katalysator“ der zivilgesellschaftlichen Mobilisierung in Osteuropa angesehen. Ich werde versuchen zu präzisieren, was genau dieses...

Stability is at the core of every discussion of order, organization or institutionalization. From an »inside« perspective, the stability of each order-constituting element is assumed. In contrast, in critical discourses instability (e.g. through ambiguity or non-control) is located at the outside of the social order as its negative. By treating thi...

In October 2014 the European Council agreed to create a “reliable and transparent governance system (…) to ensure that the EU meets its energy policy goals”. With the announcement of the Energy Union Package in February 2015, the Commission initiated a debate on how to make the European energy sector more secure, sustainable and competitive. The ke...

The Polish environmental movement is generally perceived as relatively weak, and mass mobilization on environmental issues is scarce. While this can arguably describe today’s Polish NGO scene, subjected to professionalization and grant-dependency, it is surely not the whole story. The second half of the 1980s and the brief period after the negotiat...

The ›problem of order‹ is certainly among the fundamental issues that social and cultural theory have been trying to tackle since their inception. From a historical perspective, Niklas Luhmann positioned the ›problem of order‹ as the catalyst that led to the crystallization of sociology as an independent academic discipline (Luhmann 1981; Luhmann 1...

Stability is at the core of every discussion of order, organization or institutionalization. From an »inside« perspective, the stability of each order-constituting element is assumed. In contrast, in critical discourses instability (e.g. through ambiguity or non-control) is located at the outside of the social order as its negative. By treating thi...

Stability is at the core of every discussion of order, organization or institutionalization. From an »inside« perspective, the stability of each order-constituting element is assumed. In contrast, in critical discourses instability (e.g. through ambiguity or non-control) is located at the outside of the social order as its negative. By treating thi...

Stability is at the core of every discussion of order, organization or institutionalization. From an »inside« perspective, the stability of each order-constituting element is assumed. In contrast, in critical discourses instability (e.g. through ambiguity or non-control) is located at the outside of the social order as its negative. By treating thi...

In 1981, during the heyday of the "Solidarity" movement in Poland, in a recreational suburb of Warsaw, an angry mob was about to lynch two policemen. A man tried to stop them, but to no avail, it seemed. Only when the man jumped onto the roof of a van and shouted: "Listen, I’m Adam Michnik, the anti-socialist element!" did the crowd calm down, and...

This paper analyses the emergence, spread and demise of a coherent program of radical geopolitical revision developed in East European dissident circles in the 1980s. Its foundation was the insistence on the need to completely overthrow the post-Yalta, bipolar division of Europe, combined with an emphasis on the priority of human rights in politica...

The “Energy Union” can be seen as the most significant policy idea that seeks to reform European energy governance, policy and regional cooperation. However, so far the concept is mostly an empty box in which every stakeholder tries to put whatever is on the top of their priority list. This paper tries to structure the discussion by first showing t...

Development of renewable sources of energy has not only a significant impact on the power system but also on society. It has the potential to replace the existing conventional sources of energy with never-ending renewable sources, while at the same time empowering the consumers of electricity and leading to the democratization of the power system....

The “Energy Union” can be seen as the most significant policy idea that seeks to reform European energy governance, policy and regional cooperation. However, so far the concept is mostly an empty box in which every stakeholder tries to put whatever is on the top of their priority list. This paper tries to structure the discussion by first showing t...

Certainly, there is more than one history of the Cold War. Students of International Relations (IR), security, and the heirs of ‘Sovietology’ can tell us one story, which is perhaps the dominant narrative in Western scholarship. But there are different, less prominent although surely not less valid or interesting narratives coming from other discip...

Researchers from various disciplines have built impressive but distinct compendia on climate change; the defining challenge for humanity. In the spirit of Lord Dahrendorf, this paper represents the output of interdisciplinary collaboration and integrates state-of-the-art academic expertise from the fields of philosophy, economics and governance. Ou...

Edward Gierek, former First Secretary of the Polish Communist Party, had energetic dreams about power. Back in the days of General Jaruzelski, work had begun on building an atomic power station in Żarnowiec. Recently, we have once again been hearing about a return to ideas dating back to Communist Poland. Meanwhile, all around us, new phenomena suc...

Our analysis proceeds as follows: In the first section of the report we briefly sketch out the context and history of the initiative, from the drafting stage to the current robust and complex institutional design, introduce the various types of stakeholders, including strategic governmental partners (donors and recipients), and provide a categoriza...

Recent years have seen some fundamental changes in the way the global energy sector and its governance function. All of these changes have a significant impact on the energy policy choices that are available for EU policy makers and should be incorporated in a proactive European strategy for the future. Instead, however, we witness a general stalem...

While the European Commission envisaged the creation of a ‘common European ener-gy market’ by 2014, it is quite clear that the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty protecting national sovereignty over energy policies and mixes are here to stay. We have, howev-er, seen some visible moves towards EU-wide energy governance coordination through regulation a...