Balancing the Books and Staging Operas under Duress: Bolshoi Theater Management, Wartime Economy and State Sponsorship in 1941–1945

The article examines the financial history of the Bolshoi within USSR’s mobilized wartime cultural industry as an example of a cultural institution highly placed in the Stalinist establishment and symbolic canon. It explores the income-outcome flows, personnel management, the impact of evacuation, notably on Bolshoi’s hard capital, and relations with supervising authorities. The theater’s perceived importance within the war effort conditioned unshakable financial support, a non-market protective environment, and lenient administrative treatment, contrasting with logistical and personnel challenges which the house only partly mastered. This relative stability stands in contrast with the absence of strong leadership, as the director’s position was kept vacant in stark difference to most European opera theaters. The shock of 1941–1942 was absorbed with internal adjustment measures and external subventions, and the Bolshoi’s budgets swelled towards the end of the war, indicating inflation and the house’s “most-favored-opera status”. The stable and conservative management still showed shortcomings, which the state chose not to punish. The opera’s symbolic and prestige capital trumped quantitative efficiency, creating a haven in the war economy.

Common Management through Institutional Architecture – What is the Scope of the UNCLOS Deep Seabed Mining Regime and the Role of the ISA within it?

Chapter 4 evaluates the role of common management in securing a common heritage framework for deep seabed mining beyond national jurisdiction (in the Area). To this end, Chapter 4 assesses the common management system for deep seabed mining within the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). UNCLOS provides a system of common rules applicable to the Area, together with the regulatory flexibility for this system to be developed and enforced, in practice, by a unique, unprecedented form of institutional power, wielded by the International Seabed Authority (ISA). The chapter includes analysis of the ISA’s progress towards development of the Mining Code, and the functioning of its contract-based licensing process, in practice. Chapter 4 addresses the means by which corporations may become participants in the regime (through state sponsorship, nationality and effective control requirements) and the extent to which the regime filters down to apply to them directly.

Establishing the Campers’ Republic

Chapter 4 focuses on how federal agencies responded to the growth of recreational camping—popularized among the middle class by the mass production of the automobile—and the challenge of new waves of transients and protestors during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, recreational camping gained state sponsorship as an exercise of democracy spurred on by the design of the loop campground and its related social philosophy. As the New Deal rapidly solidified the terms of a new social contract, campers added their own set of expectations. The vast expansion of a public landscape for recreational camping emerged as counterpoint to the unsettled masses of the Great Depression and became an effective tool for national recovery. By the 1940s, citizens were claiming rights of access to or, in the case of African Americans, protesting exclusion from this public camping landscape.

CRITERIA FOR SOURCES OF TERRORISM FINANCING AND TYPES OF FUNDING SOURCES

Terrorism financing is required both to fund terrorist attacks and to develop and to maintain the terrorist organization and also to create an environment to sustain their activities. Terrorist organizations raise funds through a variety of sources around the world and move these funds between jurisdictions. These funds provide the interchangeable, easily transportable means to secure all other forms of material support. The variety of funding sources depends on the scale and centralization level of terrorist organizations. Selecting any of financing sources requires the consideration of advantages and disadvantages of them. The article describes the categories of terrorist funding sources and what criteria is considered to select the fund. Key words: terrorist funding, criteria to sources, funding types, legitimate sources, illegal activities, state sponsorship, popular support [attachment=1320:MƏQALƏNİ YÜKLƏ

Fifty Shades of Terrorist Credit-Taking: A Review of the Existing Scholarship on Terrorist Credit-Taking

The consistently low credit-taking rates, 16 percent in 2016 (Global Terrorism Database), continue to challenge the understanding of terrorism as “propaganda of the deed” twenty years after researchers initially pointed out the conundrum. While providing an overview and evaluation of the limited existing literature on credit-taking, this paper draws attention to three core problems in the current literature on terrorist credit-taking, which may have led the low credit-taking rates to appear more puzzling than is due. First, the available explanations struggle to find corroboration when empirically tested and many also show theoretical shortcomings with strong unspoken assumptions and unclear predictions of credit-taking behavior. Second, data structure and data availability unnecessarily narrow our academic understanding of credit-taking. Finally, theories focused on group characteristics such as religious motivation or state sponsorship suffer from severe issues of sample bias due to unintended selection on the dependent variable. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research less prone to the problematic issues identified in the article. A re-orientation toward a less restrictive and more fine-grained understanding of credit-taking is advised.

The Way to Mecca. Spanish State Sponsorship of Muslim Pilgrimage (1925-1972)

The sponsorship of pilgrimage to Mecca by European colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries contributed to transforming the hajj into the global phenomenon it is today. Spain also promoted Muslim pilgrimage from its zone of the Moroccan Protectorate, tentatively at first, and then more purposefully from 1937 onwards, continuing its sponsorship into the early 1970s, years after Morocco’s independence. Intensive study of administrative documentation from the Spanish Protectorate allows the reformulation of the sponsorship’s established chronology (from 1937 to 1956). It also shows the dual intent concealed behind its promotion: first, as propaganda aimed at the interior of the Moroccan territory being administered; and second, as a tool for the external promotion of a political regime in need of support to escape its international isolation. The pilgrimage’s sponsorship is seen as part of the general framework of managing Muslim rituals enacted by the Spanish government to deactivate their potential mobilising capacity.

Steps-to-War Theory and Interstate Wars in the Middle East: Is State-Sponsored Terrorism Another Escalating Step?

I employ Steps-to-War theory to analyze interstate wars in the Middle East by adding an additional escalating step: state sponsorship of non-state actors. Remarkably, however, the present scholarship completely overlooks a comprehensive assessment of the impacts and roles of state-sponsored terrorism on escalation of interstate militarized conflicts. None of the conflict studies focuses on state-sponsored terrorism and escalation of interstate conflict. This gap still exists despite a remarkable growth in the conflict literature. This article argues that the Steps-to-War thesis is a useful framework for understanding why states end up fighting wars by answering the questions: How does state-sponsored terrorism escalate interstate conflict? And how does each step intertwine with other steps and make war more likely? This paper’s primary argument is that state-sponsored terrorism increases the likelihood of war by providing another escalating step in conjunction with other steps and, therefore, aligns with Steps-to-War theory, and is one of the leading escalating factors. Ultimately, this article argues that this claim has a solid basis, and the Middle Eastern cases vividly demonstrate the escalatory ability of state-sponsored terrorism because state-sponsored terrorism interacts with and reinforces other escalating factors.

Flexible Corporate Nationality: Transforming Cathay Pacific for the Shifting Geopolitics of Hong Kong in the Closing Decades of British Colonial Rule

Cathay Pacific’s shifting shareholder base underscores the dynamic interactions between the state and the market in an ever-changing geopolitical landscape. Focusing on its later transformation from a British airline, this article explores how Cathay Pacific refashioned its shareholding to respond to the shifting political climate of Hong Kong. In the protracted process through which Britain yielded jurisdictional power of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, Cathay Pacific responded preemptively, first by enhancing its local profile, and then by appealing to economic nationalism of the sovereign state poised to take charge. The privately owned airline fashioned its corporate nationality in a bid to negotiate with political forces that affected its business development. The case of Cathay Pacific demonstrates how, in the absence of warfare, companies still need to mitigate political risks in a fluid geopolitical setting. By modifying its shareholding, Cathay Pacific crafted its corporate nationality, which proved instrumental in allaying political risks and managing business relationship with the state. The airline’s strategy attests to its dexterity as well as the pliability of the notion of “corporate nationality,” winning management the “license to operate”—legitimacy and state sponsorship—during a period of swift geopolitical shifts.