University of Warsaw

Okay, if there's this one normal and this one normal, well, maybe we can invert the different kind of normal, right? And I think this opens up the possibility of invention systems change, uh, I went on, I'm actually a second generation IT computers person.

My father was the first class of computer science at the University of Warsaw.

But I got a degree in computer science only to kind of discover that, well, first of all, whilst I do love tech, at the same time, really the kinds of problems that I'm interested in are much more on the human side, right? So of course there is some hard science problem in technology, but overall the human side is much harder.

So what drew me or how I kind of ended up in this space is on the one side, so I was like, okay, tech, interesting, but I want to get another degree.

Against this backdrop, the role of civil society and nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, merits reconsideration, both in terms of their historical contribution to shaping the multilateral order and their potential role in addressing the current volatile dynamics of global governance.

To help us explore these complex issues and deepen our understanding of the role of civil society and NGOs within the framework of the multilateral order, we are delighted to welcome a distinguished scholar to today's episode, Associate Professor Dr. Dorota Heidrich from the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Warsaw.

Welcome, professor.

Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, I'd like to start with asking your academic background.

So my, my academic background is international relations, and I am a professor in the discipline of international relations at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw, as you have already presented, and I am mostly researching at the intersection of international law and international relations, or rather, I would say, international law, international norms, not only legal norms, but norms that propose certain ways of behavior, codes of conduct, guidelines, practices, and how these operate in the international arena, in international relations, predominantly looking at them from the perspective of how norms emerge and how they are contested.

So the theory of norm contestation is something very close to my research.

In 2015, two researchers, I hope I'm not going to butcher their names here, Katarzyna Sampson and Patrik Sus Kostysin published an experiment in the journal PLOS One.

90 students at the University of Warsaw.

They played something called a trust game.

In a trust game, you decide how much money to hand the partner, hoping the partner sends some of it back.

Um, just starting to work on the, the journal articles now, so people can, uh, can, um, look out for those in, in the coming months.

But, um, there's one book that was written by, uh, uh, my, my supervisor from here at University of Warsaw, but it's in Polish, so if there's any Polish speakers here, it's called, uh, Traumaland.

Um, so he wrote about trauma over the generations, uh, I mean, over the centuries in Poland.

Um, but yeah, there's, it's, it's more about going out and, um, you, you know.

During the Greek and Roman periods, over 1,000 years after the pharaoh was actually laid to rest, this tomb became a major travel destination for tourists across the Mediterranean.

Archeologists from the University of Warsaw have cataloged nearly 1,000 individual pieces of ancient tourist graffiti inside KV9 alone.

And the ancient tourist comments read exactly like modern TripAdvisor entries.

One Greek visitor named Epiphanius walked down into the dimly lit subterranean corridor, looked around at the ceiling paintings, and scratched into the stone, "I, Epiphanius, visited, and I did not like anything except the sarcophagus." Imagine walking into a 3,000-year-old Egyptian royal tomb and leaving a two-star review because only the stone coffin met your high standards.

[laughs]

And he was also a food sciences professor at the University of Warsaw.

So I told him what we were trying to do, and, uh, to, to revive the style on this side of the Atlantic, and he says, "Yeah, I can get you a couple slants.

Uh, how do I, uh, how do I get them to Oklahoma?" And I said, "Well, where do you live?" He said, "Well, I'm in Warsaw." I said, "Well, I'll be there next Friday."

Police arrested demonstrators, and the dispute moved on to university campuses, where resentment had already been building over censorship and government interference in intellectual life.

Two University of Warsaw students, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer, were expelled after informing foreign journalists about the protests.

On March eighth, students gathered in the university courtyard to demand their reinstatement and greater freedom.

Police, militia units, and government-backed worker activists moved into the crowd and beat demonstrators.

These referenda cemented Slovenia's strategic orientation toward the West, but left a legacy of public unease about NATO membership, a skepticism now resurfacing amid debates over military spending and compulsory service.

I'm Alicja Curanović from University of Warsaw Faculty of Political Science International Studies and I'm a researcher mostly of Russian foreign policy and basically how they understand things in international relations.

I'm also a fan of Slovenia and I have done some research

about it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

And I was talking to Alicja Suranovic, professor of political sciences at the University of Warsaw.

That's all in this week's edition of Q&A.