Projects and Activities

Liberté! e-monthly

Since 2007, Liberté! used to be a quarterly magazine in print, which, in 2018, was transformed into an e-monthly.

Our credo is to reflect on the reality in a critical manner, remain skeptical of all ideologies, take the world around us and ourselves with caution and a bit of irony, to treat freedom of an individual as the key principle guiding the politics, focusing on both European and global perspective for Poland, to bravely promote the seemingly unpopular ideas that we believe to be important, at the same time remaining open-minded towards other points of view, to be open for a debate, exchanging reasonable arguments.

Our Editorial Team consist of journalists and contributors from around Poland.

Editor-in-Chief: Leszek Jażdżewski

Deputy Editor-in-Chief: Magdalena M. Baran

Translations and International Cooperation: Olga Łabendowicz

Social Media and Office Coordination: Joanna Głodek

Freedom Games (since 2014, ongoing)

Freedom Games are a meeting of people curious about the world and hungry for new ideas. A discussion about the key challenges the Western societies must face in the 21st century. Freedom Games are a unique interdisciplinary forum held in Poland, the aim of which is to offer a creative space for individuals from the sectors of culture, business, and public affairs, among others.

Freedom Games are a leading intellectual and educational event in Poland. We hosted renowned speakers from the United States, Russia, China, France, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and United Kingdom, among others. The Organizer has proved that within four years it was possible to gather in Łódź outstanding intellectuals, representatives of culture and public life from around the globe – including lecturers from the Universities of Cambridge,

Freedom Games are a meeting of people curious about the world and hungry for new ideas. A discussion about the key challenges the Western societies must face in the 21^st century. Freedom Games are a unique interdisciplinary forum held annually in Lodz, Poland, and online (since 2020), the aim of which is to offer a creative space for individuals from the sectors of culture, business, and public affairs, among others.

Freedom Games are a leading intellectual and educational event in Poland. We hosted renowned speakers from the United States, Russia, China, France, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and United Kingdom, among others. The Organizer has proved that within four years it was possible to gather in Lodz outstanding intellectuals, representatives of culture and public life from around the globe – including lecturers from the Universities of Cambridge, Berkeley, Lodz, and Paris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lodz University of Technology, a former prime minister of Russia, dissidents, writers, poets, and the leaders of influential non-governmental organizations such as National Endowment for Democracy or European Liberal Forum.

The partners of the event included: Open Society Foundations, Atlas Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, the City of Lodz Office, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Orange, among others.

Among hundreds of speakers who took part in Freedom Games we may find: Robert Cooper, Adam Michnik, Agnieszka Holland, Maria Peszek, Marek Belka, Leszek Balcerowicz, Peter Gloor, Brendan Simms, Angana Chatterji, Andrzej Stasiuk, Marcin Świetlicki, Liao Ywiu, Robert Biedroń, Borys Budka, Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz, Maria Asenius, Karim Jebari, Jacek Dukaj, Sławomir Lachowski, Mariusz Szczygieł, Nilüfer Göle, Oksana Zabuzhko, Carl Gershman, Adam Bodnar, Jan-Werner Mueller, and Viktor Eerofyev, among others.

The eight edition (2021) of the forum titled “New Social Contract” was made possible thanks to the participation of leaders and renowned thinkers who engaged in a debate on the most important challenges that local and global communities must face in the age of the coronavirus pandemics.

During 2.5 days and with 75 sessions organized, the event gave a platform to 280 speakers from Poland and abroad – with activists, NGO representatives, European Commissioners, MEPs, MPs, politicians, scholars, authors, high-profile filmmakers, journalists, economists, among others, enabling them to share with audiences online their insights and views on the most pressing areas affected by the ongoing crisis – such as economy, freedom, human rights, politics, culture, education, etc.

Once again, Freedom Games became an intellectually stimulating cultural event with an educational value. Participants had a unique opportunity to meet in Lodz and online with leading intellectuals, representatives of culture, academia, and public life from around the globe. An ambitious program was combined with openness and availability to each and every participant – in person and online. The edition gathered over 2,100,000 online viewers and 1,750 in-person attendees.

Find out more: www.igrzyskawolnosci.pl/en

4liberty.eu Network

The Foundation coordinates the project on behalf of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. The 4liberty.eu network is a group of 17 think tanks from CEE (including members from Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, and Germany). The goals of the network include: to make the Central European perspective accessible to international audience, to be a reliable source of information on regional issues, and the voice of the region.

The 4liberty.eu website has been designed to become a platform where experts and intellectuals representing liberal environment from Central and Eastern Europe can share their opinions and ideas. Our website contributors are experts, intellectuals, and researchers from CEE. We publish high quality analyses, polemics, and articles exclusively in English, building bridges between nations to help in better understanding between experts from particular countries.

As part of our activities we publish the 4liberty.eu Review half-yearly. The magazine is devoted to discussing various political, social, and economic issues from a liberal CEE perspective. Dr Olga Łabendowicz is the Editor-in-Chief of the publication.

Find out more: www.4liberty.eu

See all issues of the 4liberty.eu Review: http://4liberty.eu/category/review/ 

Books (ongoing)

The Foundation operates partly as a publishing house – we publish our own original books devoted to the topics that are close to our heart and follow our credo. So far, we released two books penned by Marek Migalski – Naród Urojony (2017), Budowanie narodu. Przypadek Polski w latach 2015-2017 (2018), and Znaczenie wojny. Pytając o wojnę sprawiedliwą (2018) by Magdalena M. Baran.

We also published: Antropocen dla początkujących: Klimat, środowisko, pandemie w epoce człowieka (Anthropocene for Beginners: Climate, Environment, Pandemics in the Age of Man) by Dawid Juraszek (Biblioteka Liberte!, 2020), Nieludzki ustrój (Unhuman Regime) by Marek Migalski (Biblioteka Liberte!, 2020), Kościół w czasach dobrej zmiany (The Church in the Times of the Good Change; Biblioteka Liberte!, 2021) by Jarosław Makowski, and Był sobie kraj. Rozmowy o Polsce” (There Once Was a Country. Conversations about Poland) by Magdalena M. Baran (June 2021).

The Foundation also publishes translations: How Democracies Die (2018), written by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard University, Polski kryzys konstytucyjny (Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown; Biblioteka Liberte!, 2020) by Professor Wojciech Sadurski, an eminent Polish constitutional scholar, a licensed Polish translation.

LATO Festival (since 2020, ongoing)

LATO is a special weekend cultural and ideological event series organized in the 6. Dzielnica club held annually in Lodz, Poland. It involves meetings, workshops, and cultural activities taking place at the meeting point of various fields of art – from literature, film, and performance to music and visual arts, held in June-July 2020.

The first edition of the Festival, held in the summer of 2020, involved participation of representatives of contemporary art and culture and was organized as part of the summer stage of the 6. Dzielnica club. For five weekends the venue became the scenery for an interdisciplinary performance, an egalitarian, and, at the same time, creative platform for the exchange of ideas and dialogue.

Voter-Turnout Campaign before the Second Round of the 2020 Presidential Election in Poland (2020)

In the eve of the second round of the 2020 presidential election (held in Poland on June 12), we developed a online, social, and traditional media campaign promoting voter turnout – especially among the youth. The campaign was based on producing a short videoclip (in cooperation with the MotionPikczer studio) titled Nie chcę tańczyć, jak mi zagrają (I Do Not Want to Dance to Somebody Else’s Tune), which became wildly popular, gathering in total 583.5K Views on Facebook and 85,951 views on YouTube. It was also broadcasted by major private TV stations (e.g. TVN).

The rationale behind the campaign was to mobilize the youth to vote in order to raise awareness of the importance of exercising one’s right to vote in the democratic system – especially in light of the recent developments in Poland. This experience has proven that the Foundation is capable of creating an effective campaign tool and the gained expertise shall help improve any future endeavors.

The videoclip is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01HNRFq_Zew