Month: October 2018

I was honored to be Thanassis Cambanis’ guest on The Century Foundation’s TCF World Podcast, discussing my Lawfare piece on the limits of “liberal international order” as a concept and historical guide.

1. Ashley Tellis provides valuable background on the US-India tensions that have emerged from India’s purchase of the S-400 air defense system.
2. ThePrint gives a really fascinating historical overview of the 1967 India-China clash at Nathu La.
3. The Wire has been running a great nine-part series on the historical evolution of political violence in Bengal, both before and after colonialism. Here’s the first article. This part jumped out at me for my ongoing project on leftist insurgencies in democracies, where I’m finding much (though far from all) of the action comes in intra-left feuds and spiraling rivalries:
   “The political system – bourgeois democracy, as it was in Naxalite and Marxist parlance – was seen to be the biggest impediment to any kind of meaningful social change. Food shortages, rampant unemployment and grinding poverty – nothing seemed to matter to those in power. The young revolutionaries even began to perceive in the formation of United Front governments, where the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (the parent party Naxalites had broken away from) was the dominant partner, as a betrayal of ‘the people’. To them, being part of the government meant becoming a part of that corrupt and decrepit system.”