You are cordially invited to the premiere of the
13th Annual Kosciuszko Chair Spring Symposium: Narrative Warfare in the Intermarium
by the Kościuszko Chair of Polish Studies and the Center for Intermarium Studies.
Premieres via YouTube
Tuesday, May 19th, 2026
12:00 PM EST
The Life and Fate of Paweł Z. Woś. Methodology of Research on the Polish War Generation
with Dr. Sebastian Bojemski
About the lecture: The memoirs of Paweł Z. Woś highlight the significant research challenges encountered by historians of the Intermarium area. Polish conspiracy during the German occupation, participation in the Warsaw Uprising, and operating a small business were all, in reality, acts of anti-communist resistance. The many omissions and instances of imprecision stem not only from the passage of time, but also from the carefully cultivated discretion imposed by the all-powerful communist secret police. For scholars, this represents a major challenge in the reconstruction of events and the discovery of historical truth.
About the speaker: Dr. Sebastian Bojemski Graduated from the Institute of History of Warsaw University and gained his doctoral degree at The Cardinal Wyszyński University in Warsaw. At the Institute of World Politics (Washington, DC) he attended individual courses in geography and strategy, geoeconomy, strategic influence and propaganda. He was awarded scholarships by the Kosciuszko Foundation (USA) and the M. Grabowski Fund (UK). Mr Bojemski also has extensive experience in strategic communication, marketing, sales and management. For over 15 years (2003-2018) he had owned a Warsaw-based consulting firm. Between 2018-2024 he was an executive director for marketing at PKN Orlen – the largest oil company in Central Europe, a vice chairman at Lotos Fuels, the second largest oil company in Poland and a vice chairman at PERN, the largest fuel and logistics company in the region and critical infrastructure operator. He is currently affiliated with the University College of Professional Education as a member of the Center for Research on Disinformation and Cybersecurity and a senior fellow at the Eastern Flank Institute, a Brussels-based think tank.
Remembered Homelands, Divided Lands: Ottoman Legacies and the Roots of Ethnic Conflict in Southeast Europe
with Dr. Csaba Horvath
About the lecture: This talk argues that the ethnic conflicts of Southeast Europe are not the result of “ancient hatreds,” but of a specific historical configuration shaped during the Ottoman period. Under Ottoman rule, earlier forms of statehood did not disappear but survived in memory and identity in a kind of “suspended animation,” while at the same time demographic structures were significantly reshaped. Conflict emerged where these two processes intersected. In regions such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Vojvodina, and Transylvania, one group could claim historical precedence based on earlier statehood, while another could claim legitimacy based on later demographic dominance. The Greek–Turkish case shows a similar pattern, where a Byzantine territorial memory and Turkish nationhood collided over territories that became ethnically mixed during the Ottoman rule. The result is a particular type of conflict: not between truth and falsehood, but between competing and internally coherent forms of historical legitimacy — where both sides can plausibly claim that the land is, in different senses, their own.
About the speaker: Csaba B. Horváth, PhD earned his PhD in International Relations at Corvinus University of Budapest after completing degrees in History and Political Science at Eötvös Loránd University. He is a member of the General Assembly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on geopolitics, with a particular emphasis on the Indo-Pacific as well as on Central and Eastern Europe. He has held visiting research fellowships at several universities in Australia, China and Taiwan, and earlier in his youth, spent two years living in Japan, where he acquired conversational proficiency in Japanese. He is also a regular participant in international conferences and held public talks across the Indo-Pacific, including in Australia, China, India, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore.
Why Poland Is Inconvenient for EU’s Left-Liberal Elites
with Marcin Romanowski, PhD, LL.M
About the lecture: This presentation examines the growing tension between the sovereignty of nation-states and the expanding ideological and institutional pressure exerted by dominant left-liberal circles in Europe. It begins with the question of why Poland—particularly during the conservative governments of 2015–2023—became one of the primary targets of political and economic pressure from the central institutions of the European Union. At the heart of this conflict lies a fundamental clash of visions of the state and the law. On one side stands the model of a sovereign state grounded in its constitution, democratic legitimacy within the nation-state, and the Christian roots of European civilization, committed to protecting the family and the welfare of children. On the other side is the project of an increasingly centralized Europe, in which law is used as a tool to advance a harmful ideological agenda—ranging from radical woke doctrines and coercive net-zero policies to the mass relocation of culturally incompatible migrants—while simultaneously serving as an instrument of political pressure on member states. This tension is particularly visible in disputes concerning family law and the protection of children, where Poland under previous conservative administration —in cooperation with Hungary—resisted attempts to ideologically reshape these areas of European law. The presentation also addresses the growing phenomenon of lawfare in Poland after 2023, namely the use of legal mechanisms and state institutions as instruments of political repression against the conservative opposition. To illustrate why Poland has been—and could become again, once the liberal Tusk administration is removed—inconvenient for the political and ideological project promoted by Brussels and Berlin, the presentation will examine several landmark international legal cases decided by the respected independent judge Dariusz Łubowski. Recently, Judge Łubowski himself became the target of repression after issuing a ruling that exposed profound violations of the rule of law by the current globalist government in Warsaw.
About the speaker: Marcin Romanowski is a Polish lawyer, academic, and Member of the Polish Parliament. He holds a PhD in law from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and an LL.M. from the University of Regensburg. He served as Director of the Institute of Justice (2016–2019) and Deputy Minister of Justice (2019–2023), where he worked on justice system reform, cybersecurity, victim support, and family law. In December 2024, following political persecution in Poland, he was granted political asylum in Hungary—the first Polish MP to receive asylum since 1947. He is the author of major legal reforms, including Poland’s child protection law Lex Kamilek(2023). In 2025, he became head of the Hungarian-Polish Institute of Freedom in Budapest.
Sacralized Narrative and State Power: The Deep Historical Roots of Russian Disinformation
with Amber DeWitt
About the lecture: “Russian disinformation” is not just a modern tactic but a long-standing structural feature of Russian political culture, rooted in the sacralized understanding of truth in Kievan Rus’ and reinforced by the security-driven governance of the Mongol period. These elements fused in Muscovy, where rulers used state narratives to legitimize power, often prioritizing political coherence over empirical truth. This pattern persisted across regimes—from Ivan IV to the Soviet and contemporary eras—where official narratives function as tests of loyalty. Western fact-based countermeasures often fail because they underestimate the role of narrative in identity and political survival, and that more effective responses require engaging with these deeper historical and cultural dynamics.
About the speaker: Amber DeWitt is a current PhD student at IWP. She graduated from the Naval Academy in 2009, and currently serves as the Director of Research for the Kościuszko Chair of Polish Studies and Center for Intermarium Studies at IWP.
The Ideological Origins of Deconstruction of the Passion of Christ
with Paweł Lisicki
About the lecture: The lecture is based on the book Who Killed Jesus?. In the lecture I’ll try to show why the classical descriptions of the Passion as we can find them in the Gospels are not perceived by the modern liberal critics as reliable. I’ll present the perennial Catholic truth and rebut the error-ridden modernist interpretations of our Lord’s Passion narratives. Here is the excerpt from the lecture: “The dispute over the Savior’s Passion is as significant in history as it is in the present. By re-evaluating their attitude toward Judaism, Catholic theologians had to accept a new understanding of what happened at Golgotha. And to avoid being accused of anti-Semitism, many of them have made, and are making, ever more radical reinterpretations of the Gospel texts. Their efforts have one goal only: to exonerate, as much as possible, the Jewish authorities as well as the Jewish people, and to incriminate the ancient Romans. Some of them are skillful and may even seem subtle in writing that the Evangelists “smeared the Jews,” or in pointing out an allegedly “positive depiction of Pilate;” others freely gloss over the inconvenient testimonies, shuffle them and change their meaning if need be. And there are even those who by juggling the testimonies and adding to them from later or unknown sources remake the whole Passion.”
About the speaker: Paweł Lisicki (b. 1966) is a publicist, essayist, writer, and editor-in-chief of Do Rzeczy weekly, the largest and most influential conservative magazine in Poland. He is the author of numerous collections of essays, historical and philosophical books, as well as novels. His political and theological commentaries have earned him enduring prominence and popularity in his home country.
In Jihad and the Self-Destruction of the West, he wrote about the threats posed by mass Muslim immigration. His book Blood on Our Hands? (2015), addressing the so called “religion of the Holocaust” and the new, false theology of Judaism, was awarded the top prize by the Polish Journalists’ Association (SDP) in 2017.
Ethnicity and Conflict in the Intermarium
with Dr. Dominik Smyrgała
About the lecture: The lecture presents two case studies of ethnic conflicts with deep historical roots that constitute a significant barrier to the construction of the Intermarium—namely the Polish-Ukrainian and the Serbian-Croatian conflicts. In its first part, the emergence of the concept of the Intermarium is defined as the effect of political and cultural influence of the Jagiellonian dynasty. The idea of “the price of freedom” as constituting the region’s identity, as described in the works of Piotr Wandycz, is also emphasized. Next, the two aforementioned ethnic conflicts are presented, along with their historical causes and their role in hindering regional integration. In the third part, an attempt is made to answer whether, and if so how, these differences can be overcome or their significance reduced—especially in the context of frequent attempts to exploit them as part of destabilizing activities by external actors.
About the speaker: Dominik Smyrgała, PhD Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Management of the Lazarski University, Warsaw, Poland. Former Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of National Defence, intelligence officer and career diplomat. He holds his MA in international relations, PhD in political science and PostDoc in security studies. His main fields of research interest include intelligence and security studies (including economic security and energy studies), history and information analysis.