This article deals with empirical research on poverty in Czechoslovakia from the interwar period to the present in terms of three distinct phases. First, between 1918 and 1948, considerable attention was devoted to poverty, but research possibilities modest, so that a complex mapping of the problem was not feasible. Second, during the 1948 to 1989 period, the communist regime allowed "examinations" of poverty for the purpose of depicting pre-war capitalist Czechoslovakia as an impoverished, class-divided society. A similar approach was applied to studies of Western countries during the Cold War period. Research on poverty within the socialist regime was not allowed, even after the rehabilitation of sociology as a social science. Detailed analysis of household surveys was either forbidden or the results were embargoed; only simple cross-tabulations were ever published. Third, after 1989, the opportunities for undertaking research on poverty increased dramatically due to stimulus in both the national and international arenas. Important projects were fielded leading to many studies and published articles. Statistical surveys were used to map poverty primarily in terms of income; while sociological, ethnographic and anthropological approaches were used to examine key groups affected by poverty in Czech society. Within the literature there has been to date no synthesis of the study of the nature and origins of poverty in the Czech Republic., Jiří Večerník., and Obsahuje bibliografii a bibliografické odkazy
While gender has gained serious credit on the international development research and policy agenda, this is not reflected in Czech development studies. Likewise, the situation of women living in the developing world has been tackled by Czech gender studies only occasionally. This lack of attention from both Czech academia and Czech civil society is owing to the slow reconstruction of both interdisciplines during the transition and to the prevailing liberalism of Czech society. Even though links between gender and poverty are reflected in the mainstream discourse of international organizations, the author criticizes their underlying liberal assumptions from the viewpoint of feminist economics without acknowledging the capacity of post-modern feminists to tackle lived poverty. While grassroots women’s movements in the South reveal diverse theoretical backgrounds, in Czech development cooperation gender is only formally reflected in policy and operational documents. The author demonstrates this strong gender blindness through the example of a presumably gender neutral project on agricultural education in Angola. Czech development cooperation has supported only a few gender projects, which were intended especially for at risk women. In conclusion, the author advocates mainstreaming the gender perspective into Czech development cooperation and, by extending the scope of feminist standpoint theory, argues that the development constituency cannot be genuinely pro-poor without paying special attention to women and the gender constituency cannot pretend to defend women’s rights without paying attention to the poor living in the South., Ondřej Horký., and Obsahuje bibliografii