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No / This article traces the changes in Anglo-Hungarian relations during the Second World War. Both official and clandestine dealings with the Horthy regime are explored, and put in the wider context of the shifting British attitude towards small states. It is argued that British officials came to endorse the fatalistic view of Sir Stafford Cripps that `smaller countries must fall under the sway of highly industrialised and rigidly controlled major powers¿. The Foreign Office was no longer willing to champion national causes in Central Europe; Horthy¿s Hungary was a case in point. Although Britain declared war on Hungary as late as December 1941, and only under strong Soviet pressure, from April 1941 the BBC was explicitly instructed to treat Hungary as an `enemy state¿. This hostile attitude changed in the spring of 1943, when the British government entered into secret negotiations with Regent Horthy and the Kállay government. Paradoxically, the Foreign Office was far more appreciative of any signs of independence and neutrality in Hungarian foreign policy than two years earlier, when such a policy held some promise. Hungary may have been branded as `an enemy country which will have to work her passage home¿, but British agents still played a pivotal role in the attempts by the Horthy regime to change sides in the war. A similar dichotomy can be detected in the British attitude towards the Soviet occupation of the country. Whilst the head of the British Military Mission was instructed to follow the Soviet lead in the Allied Control Commission in Hungary, he was also ordered `to resist any attempt by the Soviet authorities to encroach on Hungarian sovereignty or independence¿. This contradiction was the result of negative memories from the interwar years, when Britain failed to capitalise on her prestige and influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

Yes / To identify, describe, and classify the cases of health corruption present in selected Western [the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (UK)] and Central-Eastern European (Poland and Slovakia) countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. A rapid review of the literature was conducted, evaluating data from 11 March 2020 to 15 April 2021. Information sources included MEDLINE via WoS, IBSS via ProQuest, Scopus, and gray literature. Thirteen cases were identified across the four countries. The primary type of health corruption in Western European countries was procurement corruption, while misuse of (high) level positions was the most prevalent in Central-Eastern European countries. Actors from central governments were most involved in cases. The rule of law and anti-corruption watchdogs reported most cases in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, while the media reported cases in Poland and Slovakia. The differences in types of corruption in WE and CEE countries emphasize the need to contextualize the approach to tackle corruption. Thus, further research in preventing and tackling corruption is a vital and necessary undertaking despite the inherent of conducting health corruption research.

This thesis examines factors that underscored higher education reforms in Central and Eastern Europe during the transition period from 1990 to 2005. The study explores higher education reforms in three national settings – Hungary, Romania and the Republic of Moldova, and presents a detailed analysis of the Moldovan case. Rooted in critical approaches to development, transition reforms and policy analysis in higher education, it addresses the new realities of global capitalism, inequitable distribution of power between the industrialized nations and the rest of the world, and the ways in which this power distribution impacts higher education systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Historical analyses, a qualitative cross-national analysis of HE systems in three nations, and interviews with Moldovan higher education policymakers provided rich data on higher education reforms in the region and selected nations. Higher education evolved from institutions serving very select elite in the Middle Ages to universities driving modernization in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, and to diverse institutional types - universities, colleges, institutes - underscoring the massification of higher education after WWII. Policies pursued by Hungarian, Romanian and Moldovan leaders to expand higher education were informed by the national socio-economic, political and demographic contexts, the dominant global development agenda, and international institutional practices. The capacity of national leaders to carry out higher education reforms was limited by the colonial and post-colonial relationships that were established over centuries between each of these nations and stronger regional powers, such as the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires, the Soviet Union, and the European Union. Major regional powers had a significant role in the formation of nation states, educational institutions and higher education politics. At the same time, national elites used language and ethnic policies to shape social and higher education developments and build national identities. By bringing an international perspective to the analysis of reforms in Central and Eastern Europe, by focusing on Hungary, Romania and Moldova, and by drawing on critical theory and post-colonial studies, this research study contributes to the international scholarly discussion of higher education and development reforms, enriches methodological developments in the field of higher education, and advances the discourse of comparative higher education.

Soviet-era Communism was a project of emergence that failed to realise its Utopian ambition. Nevertheless, it created an unprecedented simulacrum whose visual language was appropriated by a number of artists as a readymade. This artistic response to everyday reality shaped an unofficial narrative of the Communist epoch. Operating beyond the official realm these artists were subject to varying degrees of censorship, and their activities led to what became known as ‘non-official’ art. Non-official artists suffered from inferior materials, lack of exposure, and were forced to radicalize their methods of production. Without official support the everyday domestic realm and a diverse range of outdoor sites became sites of production. The primary arena, however, and the one that would become the most politicized, was the artist's body that often acted as one or both material and surface. On the one hand the thesis takes the Communist context as a common platform from which to discuss time-based art practices in Eastern Europe while, on the other, it proposes that such a general view is worthless since it does not pay sufficient attention to the particular conditions within each bloc country. While the former serves as a reference for artistic response in a wide view, the latter provokes a deeper, more contextualised, understanding of the social, political, and cultural conditions that ultimately shaped non-official art. To understand fully the effect of the Communist past also involves analysing it through the lens of the present day. A number of works produced pre- and post-1989 are analysed that offer insights into the past, its disintegration, and the transition period. The theoretical and critical thrust is shaped from primary research material gathered from artists, intellectuals, and critics throughout the region, so as to most clearly reflect its own contemporaneous and unfolding discourse. It builds on these key sources and underscores the difficulties faced when trying to locate the works within existing art history canons. Together with this written element, a further two curatorial strands complete the form of the thesis. A website has been created that reflects the thesis enquiry, three re-enactments of historical works are undertaken as a strategy that allows for a more experiential understanding of context, and three new performances devised by the author in response to the contexts researched complete the work. The thesis was written throughout Eastern Europe, and primarily in Poland where the author lives and works.

Master of Science / Department of Geography / Douglas G. Goodin / Volyn Oblast in Western Ukraine has experienced substantial land use/land cover change over the last 25 years as a result of a change in political systems. Remote sensing provides a framework to quantify this change without extensive field work or historical land cover records. In this study, land change is quantified utilizing a post-classification change detection technique comparing Landsat imagery from 1986-2011(Post-Soviet era began 1991). A variety of remote sensing classification methods are explored to take advantage of spectral and spatial variation within this complex study area, and a hybrid scheme is ultimately utilized. Land cover from the CORINE classification scheme is then converted to the EUNIS habitat classification scheme to analyze how land cover change has affected habitat fragmentation. I found large scale agricultural abandonment, increases in forested areas, shifts towards smaller scale farming practices, shifts towards mixed forest structures, and increases in fragmentation of both forest and agricultural habitat types. These changes could have several positive and negative on biodiversity, ecosystems, and human well-being.

Beyond the half-lives, Exclusions Zones, and official imaginaries of nuclear risk, exists an informal geography of Chernobyl. This thesis explores what it is like to live with nuclear disaster. It reveals how people have developed informal coping tactics and local risk understandings that defy formal constructions of nuclear space, and help resist de facto state abandonment. This project involved in-depth ethnographic research with marginalised communities who live in the contaminated landscapes around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Qualitative approaches including participant observation, photographic methods and semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants including liquidators (cleanup workers), border guards, evacuees, returnees, ‘Chernobyl widows’, farmers and many other people impacted by the disaster’s contested nuclear geography. The thesis reveals how Chernobyl’s constructed landscape is produced through a negotiated process of ‘nuclearity’ (Hecht 2012). The research posits that alongside formal spatialisations of Chernobyl – such as its ‘Exclusion Zones’ - are a spectrum of unofficial understandings of space and risk that contest this top-down and ‘strategic’ geography of nuclear disaster (de Certeau 1984). It demonstrates that these alternative nuclear understandings help people assert agency and oppose the status of post-atomic ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998). Utilising theorisations of power and resistance offered by de Certeau (1984), the thesis uncovers the hidden geography of informality, local knowledge and place attachment that allow people to resist the ‘stealthy violence’ (Li 2009, 67) of abandonment and perform their own alternative narratives of nuclear space. This thesis contributes to discussions of Agamben within geographical discourses, and advances understandings of informality in the context of post-socialist marginalisation and landscapes of risk.