If you haven’t already, go subscribe immediately to this blog. I’ve been dropping in on it now and again for a few months, and can’t recommend it enough. The authors post pseudonymously as Diodotus, Empedocles, and Cleitus the Black, who are, according to Elected Swineherd’s self-description: “A political scientist, a conflict analyst and a soldier of misfortune arguing about the gap between national and human security.” More about this hard-hitting brain crew here. I’ve also added it to the COIN-LAB page on CT-NET.

Gents: Drop me a line – consider this an open invitation to guest post at The Complex Terrain Laboratory any time you like, under your aliases or otherwise, on subjects of your choice.

H/T to Charli for reminding me.

I remember once sitting in a cafe in a Sarajevo suburb (of sorts), chatting with a British Army officer about a brilliant piece of travel writing by a lunatic young Scotsman who’d got it into his head to walk across Afghanistan. Actually, he’d walked from Istanbul to Nepal, but what he wrote about and published in a wonderfully clear and austere narrative called The Places in Between, was the Afghanistan portion of the jaunt.

The really interesting fact about that was that he did it in the first half of 2002, when US and Allied forces were relatively new on the ground and still piledriving Al Qa’ida into near oblivion. My British Army colleague had served in Afghanistan around then, and had actually run into Stewart during his walk.  There he was, he commented, "and he had this mangy old dog with him." Stewart had few accoutrements – a walking staff that could double as a latter-day mace, should the need arise for self-defence, and a tired and sorely abused fighting dog, Babur, that he picked up along the way.

For anyone interested in exploring the subtler nuances of refuge, The Places in Between is simply essential. Stewart’s books, too, represent something more substantial than first-hand accounts fit for war junkies and foolhardy romantics. After Afghanistan, Stewart has variously held an academic post at Harvard, served in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and established the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul. For all these accomplishments, it’s his writing that’s especially striking – offering frequently cynical insights into the local dynamics of foreign intervention and the value of cultural knowledge.  I suppose the argument should be that it’s his experiences that elevate the writing, but I know the writing, so that’s what hooks my attention.

In this week’s issue of Time, Stewart takes a sensible poke at How to Save Afghanistan. It’s sure to draw fire. Perhaps this is his entree into the world of US public intellectual life, since the bio sketch appended to the article indicates that "He was recently appointed the Ryan Professor and the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University." Nothing yet posted at the Carr Centre website about this, but if it’s true, then it’s a big deal. The Carr Centre is home to a certain impassioned, redheaded, Irish-American Pulitzer-winning writer, among other luminaries. It was also where David Petraeus took his incubating counterinsurgency doctrine for human rights vetting before officially releasing it in 2006.

More on ungoverned spaces toothpaste silliness: check out Barnett Rubin’s sense of frustrated irony.

Question: Do Taliban in Waziristan confiscate oversized toothpaste tubes from travelers crossing the Durand Line from parts west? 

Geoff Manaugh has a fascinating piece over at BLDGBLOG on the "Akwizgran Discrepancy", a sovereignty-seam at the confluence of Belgium, Holland, and Germany. Picking up on an article in the London Review of Books that was published way way back in 2001, he surveys its discussion of gaps in the international order:

In a subscriber-only article published back in 2001 by the London Review of Books, author Neal Ascherson describes "the Akwizgran Discrepancy." There "may or may not have been," he writes, "something called the ‘Akwizgran Discrepancy’." It’s now just "a forgotten thread of diplomatic folklore." Before we get there, though – and before I sidetrack myself pointing out that "diplomatic folklore" would be an amazingly interesting literary sub-genre – Ascherson’s paper is about the fluid nature of "international space." He focuses particularly on the changing natures of both terrain and sovereignty – and how the definition of one always affects the definition of the other.

Amen.

Ascherson’s geography is, for the most part, European; he discusses nation-states from the early 20th century through to the end of the Cold War. During that time, we read, there were a number of "less durable spaces" – for instance, the "parallel but unlicensed institutions" of Solidarity-era Poland. He points out that, "in the early 20th century, there were a number of spaces which were not absolutely unpopulated but whose allocation to empires or nation-states was undecided."

Shades of… well, you know.

From an imperial standpoint, these unofficially recognized lands and institutions – mostly rural and almost always located near borders – represented "a dangerous breach in space." They were "intercellular spaces," we’re told, and they functioned more like "gaps, crevices, interstices, [and] oversights" within much larger systems of sovereign power.  In fact, these "unlicensed" spaces "appear whenever some new international system attempts to demarcate everything sharply, menacingly and in a hurry."

 There’s more. Go read it.

Holy smokes. Opinio Juris upgraded its web platform over the weekend, and along with rolling out its new look today, has publicized a couple of additional features/programs. This sets a standard for blogging that we all should aspire to (though I shudder – that’s right, shudder – at the probable cost involved).

At the risk of repeating myself: wow.