The objective of this paper is to analyse the political activity of the local community of the Opolskie Province in the local government elections in 2018 and to identify the characteristic features determining its specificity. The attempt to identify the electoral specificity of the region will consist in presenting a characterization of the region in terms of its size and population as well as its administrative and social aspects. An analysis of the elements inseparably connected with the election process, such as geography, voting turnout, the number of electoral registers and candidates, the types of electoral committees, is equally important. And finally, comments on the election results are significant as well. The local government elections of 2018 were held in a specific atmosphere, largely related to the amendment of the election law. Undoubtedly, the most characteristic aspect for the Opolskie Region is its last position among other provinces with regard to size and population, but it should not be forgotten that it is a borderland region inhabited by a high percentage of the German national minority, which actively shapes the image of not only the local communities at every level, but also the entire Opolskie Region as such.

Through a democratically set system of state functioning, political parties are given space for their establishment and subsequent functioning. Nowadays, registering new parties is not an issue in Slovakia, but another issue arises - most political parties cannot attract voters, and as a result they lose general sympathy and also necessary votes in elections. For a political party to become known to its voters, it needs to address and subsequently implement techniques of political marketing. Reaching and gaining voters is essential for a political party to continue to exist. By using marketing communication in its election campaign, a political party can succeed more than the one that has not used them. Therefore to adequately address its voters, a political party has to know their social, cultural, economic as well as religious background. The political party must also pay attention to the creation of an election program that appeals to voters. However, a political party should choose such proper communication channels through which it will be able to attract its supporters. The presented paper deals with the issue of using / not using marketing communication before the parliamentary elections in 2020 in selected Slovak conservatively and liberally oriented political parties in the Trenčín region. The authors present their findings on the basis of the analysis of marketing communication tools, as well as formuate research questions that helped them meet the research goal, in particular, whether selected political parties used/did not use specific marketing communication tools in their election campaign in 2020.

The article focuses on the characteristics of regional policy, regional development, regional marketing and regional marketing communication from a theoretical perspective. Subsequently, we characterize research that was realized in 2019 and included V4 countries - Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, along with Serbia. Its aim was to characterize the main reasons of the failure of small and medium-sized enterprises and approach the current challenges of small and medium entrepreneurships, the main question we tried to answer was- How to prevent SMEs from failure? The activities related to the project led to the clarification of different aspects of business activities that can lead to successful and/or unsuccessful entrepreneurial activities. For the purpose of this article, we have selected eight research questions from Slovakia that are currently relevant to the topic of the article. We outline the main obstacles to business success in Slovakia, we characterize external factors that created business difficulties and three questions deal with marketing and marketing communication, because standing in a strong competitive environment requires, among other things, the ability to sell one´s business to customers. The aim of the article is to point out the factors that influence business and success in the market of small and medium enterprises in Slovakia.

The article focuses on the characteristics of circular economy, supporters of the concept of circular economy, legislation and marketing communication in the process of circular economy from theoretical perspective. In the practical part of the paper the results of marketing research are presented. Marketing research is divided into 3 phases and focused on whether the respondents from the sample follow the individual communication tools during the process of shopping for clothes. The aim of the paper is to analyze waste legislation by the means of marketing communication tools in the implementation of the cirucular economy in Slovakia.

The biggest threats to contemporary economic order were chronologically the bipolarity of the world after 1945, in which one of the poles despised money and the other based its prosperity on money. An attempt to create a unipolar world already dominated by the US dollar, practically was hardly acceptable. The US showed its strength when Japan in 1995 became a pretender to be No. 1 in the global economy. Also in 2008, American banks triggered a global financial crisis by creating bubbles of toxic real estate loans. The 2008 financial crisis also started a crisis of liberal democracy. China was much more powerful than Japan as the next pretender to become No. 1 in the global economy. About it can be seen as the beginning of a global conflict between the United States and China. In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has stopped globalization and is causing a global crisis.

Recent narratives on terrorism have focused on the definitions. Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, but the problem resides in its definition and who is defining it. Conceptualizing terrorism depends on which framework one utilizes. The use of different lenses to define the term has contributed to the lack of global acceptance of what constitutes terrorism, hence the difficulty of gathering data for analysis. It is also a conundrum when powerful nations legitimize their terrorist activities against weaker ones. This, unfortunately, has led to the subjectiveness of every attempt in the literature to objectively provide a globally acceptable definition. Using meta-analysis as the methodological approach for the study a number of definitions were scrutinised. This article provides a brief examination of the intersection between right-wing terrorism and ethnic nationalism, and how accelerationism escalates ideology into violence. The paper compares two acts of violence, one traditionally viewed as terrorism and the other labelled solely as a mass shooting. It concludes with a comparative analysis of the definitions provided, utilizing a case study to examine how labels of a terrorist or a freedom fighter impact on one’s view of a group’s motivation. This is pertinent when analysing ideologically motivated violence.