As readers have noticed, I haven’t been very active blogging the past few months. This is because I’ve been preparing for a major change which has involved a great deal of work, planning and preparation. What is this secret you may ask? Why, it’s a masters degree in Defense and Strategic Studies.

In order to give you some quick background, although I originally intended to attend school here in Germany, the difference between the US and German systems was ultimately too much for me. Whereas in the US a master’s would have taken two years to complete, here in Germany, the system does not allow you to have different undergraduate and graduate majors meaning I wasn’t allowed to change or I had to start from the very beginning as a freshman! Needless to say, I ultimately gave up on that option and decided to work and travel a bit longer before going to back to America with Mrs. Chirol which brings us to now.

After nearly four and a half years in Germany and having visited over a dozen countries in that time, I’ll be moving back to the U.S. tomorrow, specifically to Washington D.C. I’m excited both to live in my home country again and to move forward into a field which will soon provide me with rewarding and endlessly fascinating work. I’ll be busy finding an apartment, getting ready for school and so forth but I invite anyone in the greater D.C. to leave a comment or shoot me an email and we can meet up for a beer and geopolitics.

Was tagged by Eddie for the meme of 7, or Better Know A Victorian. Younghusband went first, so here I go. According to the ‘rules’ here are 7 random facts about yours truly.

1. I collect handmade brass coffee pots, known as djezvas (or cezves)

2. Despite being a conservative and staunchly anti-hippie, one of my favorite bands is Phish.

3. The only sports team I’ve ever been on was competitive shooting in high school.

4. I used to own three llamas…and I miss them.

5. As a Southerner, I feel a great affinity with southern Germans and southern Italians and regularly diss northerners of various nationalities.

6. I won a Ford Mustang convertible several years before I could legally drive.

7. Although I’ve now visited around 30 countries and lived abroad for around 7 years, when I was a teenager, I had little interest in travel and tried to opt out of any and all trips by asking for the money that would have been spent on me instead.

While many people use the words state and nation-state interchangeably, there is an important difference between the two responsible for increasing tension and domestic turbulence all over the globe. Nationalism has been the source of countless conflicts around the world yet the current political makeup of the globe is fairly new, historically speaking. Despite the prejudices some have today, empires were actually the norm through much of history. Only since the Treaty of Westphalia 1648 have certain groups of people believed in their absolute right to a specific piece of land. As time went on, the idea caught on and ultimately led to the splintering of the great empires (English, Dutch, Spanish, Ottoman, German, Russian, French etc) into smaller states whose geographical borders closely represented the ethnic makeup of the territory.

From giant conglomerations of peoples to tiny states with just a few thousand people,today, people the world over find themselves facing another variation of this age old problem. With the ease and increase of international travel, communications and commerce, the peoples of the world have again began to mix while the borders of their states remain static. As many settle down, learn the local language and gain residence or citizenship, the question arises: Who is Swiss? Who is German? Who is Turkish?

Ironically, this is one major problem that both Europe and Turkey share. While Germans debate whether German-speaking Turks born and raised in Germany are really German, Turks debate what it means to be Turkish. According to the Turkish constitution for example, Turkey is a Turkish state whose language is Turkish. Where then, does this leave the Kurds, who’ve lived in the region thousands of years longer than the Turks?

An article in Today’s Zaman on Turkish and Kurdish nationalism notes:

The MHP needs to reevaluate these ideologies and principles and generate new ideas. Bahçeli referred to Oct. 29 1923 when explaining the basic rules of living under the roof of a united Turkish Republic and coexisting in a Turkish national identity. But the date is wrong, most of the sensitive concepts and descriptions we debate today date back to after 1923. Are we going to describe Turkishness according to the more enclosed description in the 1924 Constitution or, the more limiting description in the 1982 Constitution? Also Bahçeli needs to elaborate on what he means by “one state, one nation, one flag, one language,”? which he listed as the principles of “national unity and solidarity.”? How will we place the Kurds, whom it is believed to come from a different ethnic root, within this “one nation”? conception?

Nowadays, the most successful states are arguably those who born from settler colonies, specifically British ones. To be American, Australian or Canadian isn’t to be a certain race or religion. While white Anglo-Saxons are clearly the majority at the moment, everyone else has been and is just as welcome and not seen as less Canadian, American or Australian. Indeed, for countries based on an idea and where no group “owns” the land, the freedom to change, adapt and grow is far greater than in those based on ethnicity and religion with far older cultures and traditions. While some people advance the idea of so-called Market-States, one if the biggest and most overlooked questions of our century is that of identity. Will we see more melting together? More nationalist backlash?

I invite readers to share their views on the increasingly important role of identity on both the individual and state level and the effects thereof on states and their domestic and foreign policy.

Here at Coming Anarchy, we have occasionally pointed readers to podcasts, audio interviews and similar material related to geopolitics and travel. Having recently joined the ranks of those with iPod Nanos, I’ve began listening to a wider range of material since it is now so much easier. In the spirit of my recent reading list, the following are the English-language podcasts that I get and are easy to find by searching for them in iTunes.

Business Week – Global Outlook
Carnegie Council Podcast
Cato Institute Event Podcast
Center for Strategic and International Studies
CFR: Inside CFR Events (Audio)
Events of the American Enterprise Institute
German Marshall Fund Podcast Series (in English)
NPR: Foreign Dispatch
NPR: Talk of the Nation
On Point with Tom Ashbrook
Principles of War Seminar Series (by Johns Hopkins)
SALT - Seminars About Long Term Thinking
Stratfor Daily Podcast
TEDTalks (audio)
WAMU: The Diane Rehm Show

What podcasts and/or lectures do you listen to? With so many think tanks, news agencies and radio shows, readers and the bloggers here alike would be interested in knowing and sharing.

Cosby is widely recognized as a sage of modern family life. Many of his choice quotes have a lot of application to global politics, which are included below for your own amusement.

A word to the wise ain’t necessary—it’s the stupid ones that need the advice.

Anyone can dabble, but once you’ve made that commitment, your blood has that particular thing in it, and it’s very hard for people to stop you.

Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you’re telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.

I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I’m not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

And finally, you can find some real Bill Cosby wisdom in his Pound Cake Speech.

Over the past week, I’ve been working in conjunction with Michael Tanji of Haft of the Spear on a wiki with the various Security Studies programs for a Masters in the US. It has the dozen resident programs and a half dozen or so long distance programs that are available. The focus is is on security studies, security policy, intelligence and strategy programs as well as programs that offer a Masters in International Relations with a concentration in the aforementioned areas. Should any readers have tips, comments or additional information (including non-US programs), please feel free to leave them in the comments section here or at Haft of the Spear.

Our wiki can be found here.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and husband to the Queen of Great Britain, is well-known in Britain for cracking insensitive and racist jokes during public and royal visits. The recent film The Queen portrays Philip in much the same light, with inappropriate comments on homosexuals and Zulus. Wikipedia has a nice collection of these comments (with sources) excerpted below for your amusement:

• To a driving instructor in Scotland: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?”
• To British students in China: “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed”.
• After accepting a gift from a Kenyan citizen: “You are a woman, aren’t you?”
• To a British student in Papua New Guinea: “You managed not to get eaten then?”
• To a group of deaf children standing next to a Jamaican steel drum band, “Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.”
• To an indigenous Australian: “Still throwing spears?”
• When listening to a speech given by Cherie Blair, wife of Tony Blair: “you could post a letter through that mouth.”
• To the President of Nigeria, dressed in traditional African robes: “You look like you’re ready for bed!”
• Seeing a shoddily installed fuse box in a high-tech factory: “looks like it was put in by an Indian”.
• On Peking: “ghastly”.
• To an islander in the Cayman Islands: “Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?”
• During the height of the 1981 recession: “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.”
• To a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut: “You could do with losing a bit of weight.”
• On gun control: “If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?”

I would like to open a discussion on the qualities of a good leader, based upon my experiences over the past few years. I know readers don’t want to hear me drivel on about my “feelings” or band class or the family cat. They want hard opinions on hard issues. Forgive me this one since I think this is a valid issue, just one that happens to be very close to my personal situation at this moment. I have not taken any courses on ethics or leadership, the below is simply my opinion, and I am looking forward to input from the rest of the community here at Coming Anarchy.

First, a disclaimer: I am not talking about national leadership — which I think requires a different set of attributes — so please don’t drag the comments into discussions on presidents and prime ministers of the past and present. What I am really talking about is team leadership, involving a small group of people numbering no more than a dozen. In this scenario, what are the things required of a leader?

My current situation has me thinking a lot about personal characteristics, particularly leadership, and so far the attributes I have found to be necessary for a good leader are the following:

VISION — A leader should be able to see where the puck is going. He might not have a specific idea where it will be at a specific time, but he should have an idea and a strategy for what to do.

BOLDNESS — Sometimes there isn’t any easy answer. Some decisions hurt. The leader has to make those tough calls for the good of the mission.

HUMILITY — Leaders that take the authoritarian route every time lose out in my experience. Leaders aren’t there to make friends, but they also don’t have all the answers. A leader must take care to listen to those below as well as above. This is related to the next characteristic:

TRUST — It is extremely important that a leader can trust those below him. This is reflected in the all-important leadership responsibility of delegating tasks. If a leader is distrustful he will fall into a pattern of micro-management which will disrupt the workflow in general.

The leadership at the company I am at leaves much to be desired. Having proper leaders may not determine whether your company is a failure or not, but it sure can contribute to success. In doing the research to transform my company I have come across countless examples of good leaders in business to add to my experiences in the private sector, academia and the military. So why do those outfits have good leaders and mine doesn’t? Luck of the draw? Then of course there is the ultimate question: Are leaders born or are they made?

When I first went to the Royal Military College I was surprised at the number of true leaders I found there. Some of the leaders I respect the most went through the system at RMC. One example is a boss I had while working as a researcher on base. This guy was great. He knew he was surrounded by a bunch of braniacs smarter than him, so he preferred not to get in the way of discussion and let them have at it. Yet he had a great sense of vision as to the direction we should be going, and would interrupt occasionally by asking the perfect question to get everyone back on track again. His simple questions kept everyone focussed and motivated. Rather than simply having a commanding presence, he facilitated the completion of the task at hand. Of course, not everyone that comes out of RMC is a leader. The concentration seems higher than regular society, but natural talent must play a role. Not everyone can make optimal use of lessons in leadership.

Thoughts?

Addendum

I just came up with another one: PATIENCE. I just finished watching Season 1 of The Wire which came highly recommended by Roy from Mutant Frog. In fact, this show might have been the catalyst for all this thinking on leadership. One of the themes in the show is rotten leadership and the character Lt. Daniels makes the transformation from a bad to a good leader. In the final episode he forgives a young underling. He doesn’t do this out of kindness, but recognizes that having patience with mistakes made by inferiors will often benefit your organization, rather than simply blowing up on them every time they make a slip. This is also key to developing a leadership persona that is APPROACHABLE. If you randomly blow up all the time, your men will stop approaching you for even the simplest stuff, for fear they might get their head ripped off. The worst kind of boss is the one that thinks his job is to be angry all the time.

Well, I am back. After spending 12 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week on oil tanker barges for the past three months I am finally moving to part-time work which means I can start concentrating on my thesis and regular blogging. I will write up a proper post tomorrow about my experience boarding over 140 different ships since early January. In the meantime here is a round-up of a few things that came across my desk to keep you entertained until then:

• Freelance journo Michael J. Totten writes about an intriguing encounter with armed revolutionary Kurdish-Iranian communists at a Komalah compound in northern Iraq. Komalah is a minor Marxist political movement in Iran with the goal of ending the oppression of Kurds. Mr. Totten also has some brilliant photos to go along with the interviews. Wot wot! to Lexington Green for the link.
• About the Chinese secret aircraft carrier, see James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara’s article “Mao Zedong, Meet Alfred Thayer Mahan: Strategic Theory and Chinese Sea Power” in the latest Australian Defence Force Journal for an interesting perspective on the future of Chinese naval strategy. Another Wot wot! to Lexington Green. (BONUS: See my post on Mahan from over a year ago).
• HBO’s Rome has finally come to an end. Showtime is unleasing its own historical drama The Tudors which I have yet to watch but am fearful as per this review Blazingly Gratuitous Sex. Though, you know what I think about Slate reviewers.
• Hey, remember 2006? Wot wot to Grendel.

Recently blogfriend Elizabeth was paid a visit by Tom Shelley who is an 11-month-old member of my favourite newspaper. Tom represents a group of Economist staffers that have gathered together for Project Redstripe. The group has been tasked with coming up with The Next Big Thing™: “to develop something that is innovative and web-based and bring it to market.” They are calling for ideas from the public and “winners” are to receive a 6-month subscription to The Economist.

I don’t get it. Can you really innovate just for the sake of innovation? Don’t you need a goal or a specific design problem? I not so sure about this, and neither is the Slashdot crowd. But, as someone pointed out this is exactly what venture capital firms do. Many good ideas are had everyday, but having the capital and resources to see these ideas through is a completely different matter.

Churchill said “We must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided by logic.” Then again, equally eminent Homer Simpson said “I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas!”

I wish Tom and his crew the best of luck. I encourage any CA readers to submit their ideas.