More posts soon. Just a warning – many will probably be skewed to a certain subject for the foreseeable future.
I’m currently carrying out an internship for the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall. One of my tasks is to develop an editorial project on a subject in the field of defence and security – which is not specifically covered by RUSI’s research departments and programmes.
I’m considering ‘insurgency‘ – basically because I specialised in asymmetrical warfare to quite nerdish levels during IR305 Strategic Aspects of International Relations in my final year at LSE: enough to find all the jejune Newsweeky hyperventilation in the media about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and so on rather tiresome.
RUSI will also be concentrating its research on the future of the British armed forces this autumn and winter, in advance of the defence review that will be wending its way around Whitehall some time in 2010. In light of that, I think it’s a good time to also consider the UK’s most likely opponents in the near future.
Which is all a long way of saying that if I seem to be posting a lot of stuff on mega-cartels in Mexico and enviro-bandits in the Niger Delta, tier membership in the Taliban and inkspot strategies in the Hindu Kush – don’t worry, I’m not being morbid or (more) pretentious (than usual), it’s just really for my reference as I develop ideas for commissioning and so on.
I’ll also try to put up more cultural stuff on Memex from now on. Any suggestions, by the way?
Flickr/The U.S. Army
