Are there Limits to Financing Culture through the Market? Evidence from the U.S. Museum Field

The commercialization of nonprofit organizations has recently taken center stage as one of the pivotal policy issues facing this sector in the United States and elsewhere. In many ways, American museums have long been at the forefront of the trend with the operation of retail activities in the form of museum stores, mail-order catalogues and, most recently, web-based virtual shops. While museums in other parts of the world have begun to follow the American example, there has been relatively little scrutiny of the viability of this commercialization strategy. This article examines US tax and census data to chart the development of museum merchandising revenues from the 1980s to the 1990s.     

Can foreign direct investment help Poland catch up with the EU?

The paper examines the extent to which the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) helps Poland to catch up with the EU.FDI can facilitate the process of catching up mainly through transfer and diffusion of technology, which leads to upgrading of technological and innovative potential of a host country. The paper is aimed at assessing whether FDI is correlated with the innovation processes in different branches of the Polish industry. A regression analysis conducted in this paper has confirmed that, except for low-technology industries, FDI impacts Poland’s innovation efforts and thus helps Poland to catch up with the EU.     

Fighting Al Qaeda in Yemen? Rethinking the Nature of the Islamist Threat and the Effectiveness of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy

This article evaluates U.S. perception of and response to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) operating in Yemen. It evaluates the empirical evidence on which the present understanding of the group is based, the implications of the sociopolitical context in which it operates, and the uneasy position of the Yemeni government in the War against Terror as it has been affected by U.S. policy from the early 1990s to the present. In the contested Yemeni state, AQAP is competing for political legitimacy and is increasingly dependent on public support. The U.S. kill-or-capture response, the “on–off” nature of its support that has made Yemen vulnerable to the influence of Al Qaeda in the past, and the actions of the Yemeni government itself, which depends on the continued existence of the threat to secure financial support vital for political survival, means that none of the measures being taken has the potential to defeat AQAP.     

Coping with U.S. and EU's challenges? Strategic confusion in the Czech foreign and security policy

This article traces developments in the Czech political elite's thinking about structural changes that the region and the country have experienced during the last several years. It is argued that two parallel, external structural constraints have significantly shaped decisions of the Czech political elite as the country has, once again, proven to be an ostensibly “reactive state”. These structural constraints have been the ongoing U.S. recalibration of its grand strategy as well as the financial crisis with a systemic challenge to the European political project in which fiscal and monetary issues have largely replaced previous criticism of the Constitutional Treaty and then the Reform Treaty. It is argued that these developments have posed a notable problem for two predominant ideological convictions present in the Czech political thinking – Atlantism and Europeanism, as neither of them has offered readily answers to deal with such a challenge. As will be shown, this mutually reinforcing dual challenge has further exacerbated previously existing Czech government's lack of political vision, and resorted to a political mentality which has contained elements of denial, rationalization, and political resignation.