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. 

Important, from Mark Dawson at Ethnography.com.

 

On 3 July, The New Republic‘s TNR Conversation with Josh Patashnik hosted the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes, author of the recently released Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in an Age of Terror (Penguin Press, 2008), and the New America Foundation’s Andrew McCarthy, author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

There’s a crisp transcript of the discussion that’s nice and readable, but for the full flavor, listen to the audio, which is much longer and captures much more of the respective authors’ responses and elaborations. It kicks off on the recent case of a Chinese Uighur Muslim held at Guantanamo, resolution of which revealed "no evidence that would qualify him as an enemy combatant."

Among other things, TNR’s three-way gets into the political context of and for jus ad bellum after 2001, and the politicization of the recent Boumediene Case on habeas corpus rights. The most telling line in the encounter, from Andrew McCarthy: "Rather than having what is probably a not-very-useful argument over what the parameters of the battlefield are, we probably should be much more focused on who it is that we’re fighting and under what circumstances they should be brought into the system."

Good on the complexity of battlespace parameters.  Bad on suggesting that defining it’s probably not useful. Tell it to those  who get caught in the "middle", wherever that might be these days. There’s a big difference between useless and difficult, the latter hardly a justification for not bothering. That’s not what either author’s arguing, but they miss an important implication of their own work: the spatial variables that shape and inform the physical disposition of insurgents and terrorists are central to battlespace regulatory regimes.