Jacek Kurczewski Libri

This book analyzes how people settle disputes in and outside of Polish courts. The preference for courts against informal settlements increased with the consolidation of the democratic legal state. Still, the compromise settlement remains the cultural ideal. The authors evaluate these circumstances in their extensive study of private disputes in the courts and of different types of individual settlements. They observed that the role of power behind these choices proved to be significant as people in better social positions are more inclined to use the courts and in worse social positions more inclined to deal informally with opponents in power. The ethnic factor surveyed in other former Communist countries is also related to the relative power of the different ethnic groups. The book investigates how institutional, social and cultural factors interact in shaping the dispute settlement patterns.

Central-Eastern Europe, in the mid-20th century, was a scene of Holocaust, mass killings, war, deportations and forced resettlements under the competing totalitarian invasions and afterwards. It was also the area where churches, politicians and citizens were engaged in reconciliation between antagonized religions and nations. This book presents several attempts to heal relations between Poles, Jews, Germans, Czechs, Ukrainians, Russians and Latvians as well as between Catholics, Protestants and Mariavites. Re-conciliatory practices of John Paul II and other Catholic leaders as well as Protestant churches are analysed in the first part of the book. Most of the remaining studies are focused on particular localities in Upper Silesia, Cieszyn Silesia, former Polish Livland and on the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. These detailed contributions combine sociological methods with anthropological insight and historical context. The authors are sociologists, psychologists and theologians and this leads to a fully interdisciplinary approach in the assessment of the recent state of inter-group relations in the region as well as in the proposed theory of peacebuilding and reconciliation.