In the past year at milcol my direction of study (i.e. next year’s thesis proposal) has been surprisingly unwavering. That is until I ran into the likes of Arquilla and Ronfeldt, which sorta hit me simultaneously from different angles earlier in this semester, and basically blew my plans for next year out of the water. Well, better to know now than halfway through next year. Now I am onto bigger and better things; though my underlying thesis hasn’t really changed, my focus has.
One recent influence (of the many) on my new direction is John Robb of Global Guerrillas. Currently I am up to my elbows in emergence and the GG-recommended Barabási’ book Linked which so far is brilliant. GG is pure gold, but most people don’t realize that John maintains a parallel blog which he updates with impunity. Both are in Coming Anarchy’s blogroll. I am really looking forward to John’s upcoming (?) book on Global Guerillas. Hopefully it will be helpful in my research, without blowing my thesis completely out of the water (_knock on wood_).
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
mark safranski added these pithy words on 12 Mar 06 at 2:34 amI too am very much looking forward to reading Robb’s book and seeing him lay out his case systematically – if his blogs are any indication of the quality it will be an important work of military theory.
If you are really getting into emergence and network behavior YH, dig into the ideas of Dr. Luis Amaral.
http://amaral.chem-eng.northwestern.edu/
http://www.chem-biol-eng.northwestern.edu/Faculty/amaral.php
John Robb added these pithy words on 12 Mar 06 at 12:59 pmThanks guys. It’s coming. My editor at Wiley is working on it right now.
Outlandish Josh added these pithy words on 13 Mar 06 at 9:21 pmDoes anyone know if anyone’s doing anything about how to reconfigure/rehabilitate Public Governance (e.g. the State) with a networked analysis. I’ve read all the books and been playing professionally in the margins of politics for about three years. People are starting to digest how this translates into winning (or loosing) elections, but no one I know if is talking about how to utilize these principles in overhauling our notions of the State.
