Midweek Mélange

8 May 2013, 0933 EDT

I don’t know whether to feel horribly manipulated, simply appreciate the nerd-fest humor, or both.

  • Andrew Philips on the new Australian Defense White Paper.
  • Dan Trombly on the efficacy of US intervention in Syria.
  • Jay Ulfelder wants to restrict our use of the term “state” to, as best as I can tell, sovereign-territorial entities. His intentions are good–break unilinear understandings of state (trans)formation–but his methods are wrong: they simply re-inscribe an association between “state” and the Weberian ideal type of the “modern state.”
  • Marc Lynch on anti-Americanism in the Arab world.
  • I’ve been generally appalled by the lack of a paperback release for Stacie Goddard’s excellent Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland. Amazon is currently selling the harback version for under $20, so I strongly suggest buying a copy.
  • Speaking of deals, Nick Kiersey and Iver B. Neumann (eds) Battlestar Galactica and International Relations has been discounted to $14.95 on Kindle. The occasion? Edward James Olmos discovering the book and tweeting Nick about it. The volume includes chapters by many Ducks, including PTJ, Charli Carpenter, and, well, me.
  • Crooked Timber‘s symposium on The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City is starting to appear. I wanted to provide a piece, but overcommitments prevented me from doing so. Go read.

And also: