Hong Kong is known for its specific political model composed by a hybrid system balancing democracy and authoritarianism. This work investigates the hegemonic nature of the interactions between the 2019’s democracy movement and the pro-Beijing actors and how they affected this systemic balance. Based on a case study, this essay mixes the hegemony, social movements and authoritarianism theories to carry out this research. The findings show a change of the systemic paradigm through the domination of the Chinese authoritarian system. This mainlandisation has occurred from a soft and hard power interactions between the two actors to reach a domestic hegemony. From a soft power lens, the collective action theory highlights a rising unbalance of power within the political and media institutions with the rising control of China, however, the movement through its ideas, capabilities and political opportunities formed a counter-hegemony. From a hard power lens, those interactions evolved in an escalation of symbolic and physical violence in terms of repertoires of actions and policing. This radicalization of the movement offered an opportunity to strengthen the control of China. This hybrid regime case shows that democracy movements have fueled an “authoritarianisation’ instead of a democratization.

The thesis aims to describe how was the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, which began in June 2019 in response to the proposed extradition law, perceived. In its theoretical part, the thesis will focus on a detailed description of the historical development of Hong Kong and the formation of an independent Hong Kong identity. Major events will be presented, from the times of colonial administration to the description of pro-democracy protests in 2019, which affected the current state of Hong Kong. Subsequently the theoretical framework of the processes of hegemony and visual representation will be introduced, which will be further presented in the context of Hong Kong. Last but not least, the topic of journalistic photography and its significance in the current journalistic field will be defined. The practical part of the thesis will offer an analysis of how the direct participants perceived the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, and whether their perceptions of events correspond not only with each other but also with the journalistic visual material that mapped four months of protests. A photo essay from the author's set of photographs was created to be also analysed in this work, part of which was subjected to a socio-semiotic analysis. Last but not least, there will be a comparison of results...

The aim of this diploma thesis is to discuss new political parties in the context of the Czech party system. Movement ANO 2011 and Dawn of Direct Democracy are the researched subjects which broke through elections to the Chamber of Deputies in the Czech Republic in 2013. This multiple case study proceeds from the basic and ambiguously gripped notion political party to diverse theoretical aspects of newness, trying to briefly define the Czech party system in the context of new political parties. It is done in terms of legislative rules for (not only new) political parties and also from a developmental view. Afterwards the empirical part works with particular characteristics of two chosen subjects - it gradually focuses on their emergence and development, programme, the leader and members, electoral campaign and their participation in elections. The task of the individual characteristics is to introduce both subjects accurately so their common and different traits are obvious. The gained findings are later assessed by the view of the chosen Sikk's theory of newness. There is examined if ANO and Dawn fall into some of the categories defined by this theory. The diploma thesis tries to shift the state of knowledge of new Czech political parties and refers to the positives and negatives of the chosen...