This article focuses on the leadership roles of Millennials in politics and the public sphere. This group is a potentially influential political force, yet its members do not pursue traditional forms of civic engagement – they are reluctant voters and are widely considered to be neither ideologically aligned nor politically knowledgeable. The empowerment of the new generation provides a platform for analysing several dimensions of leadership, especially with a focus on the nature of the challenges embedded in political leadership in liberal democracies and the intergenerational leadership transfer in politics. In the initial part of the text a brief review of the literature on the Millennial generation and its political orientations is presented. It reveals the analytical potential of the theme for providing new findings on the nature of leadership. Next, the categories of sacredness in leadership are used to understand how political leadership in Western societies evolved. Finally, theoretical and empirical findings connecting generational identity and changing notions of political leadership are combined in order to identify their implications for the further development of political leadership in Western democracies.

This article investigates the economic orientations of the members of the Millennial generation, so as to assess possible shifts towards their adoption of degrowth philosophy and practice. The text provides a general literature review oriented towards indicating the link between the Millennial generation’s economic standpoints and possible directions of evolution of the economic system in the Western world. An orientation towards the market and its economic system has become one of the distinctive features embedded in the portrait of the Millennials, who not only create the dominant social force of the Western world but also represent the first generation in which the majority question well-established market philosophies. The article considers the potential contribution of the Millennial generation to the further development of alternatives to traditional notions of growth. Until now, the evolution of the economic framework has been pushed forward mainly by policymakers and government representatives. System designers have shaped the desired outcomes via international agreements, internal policies, and the empowerment of different economic actors, driven by a belief in the long-term benefits of the capitalism–democracy nexus. However, this moment in history, in which such principles are being seriously questioned, creates a space for bottom-up processes and the reconfiguration of economic realities with a potentially transformative effect on the whole framework.

The article focuses both on account technology as a factor in the twentieth-century relations of the United States and Europe and a view of transatlantic history through the lens of technology. It describes the trajectory of modernization through technology in certain characteristically transatlantic contexts – including the Cold War role, the advancement in military technologies and the international political competition. It demonstrates that technology development in many ways, provides structure for transatlantic cooperation and acting as a force reshaping political relations.

This article focuses on the notion of heroic leadership as it has been applied as an analytical framework to Volodymyr Zelensky’s leadership during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It presents an overview of Zelensky’s leadership strategies and their domestic and international reception and puts them in the wider context of the ways in which power is exercised in the global arena. It is argued that the authority and influence of Zelensky – the hero-leader – is the result of a reciprocal relationship between leader and followers, constructed out of the fear and desperation of warfare. One of the fundamental analytical tools in International Relations studies – the notion of soft and hard power – has been applied to Zelensky’s way of affecting the behaviors of others in order to shape their preferences and obtain his desired options. The perception of him as heroic has become the main instrument of the country’s power of attraction, which in turn enabled the president to expand his leadership. In this context the article reveals the mechanisms employed to build international recognition for Ukraine and build support for its resistance to the Russian invasion.

The authors would like to make the following corrections about the published paper [...]