Disinformation alumnus Roy Christopher kindly included me in his annual Summer Reading List. It’s become a kind of snapshot over the past 15 years of different periods of my life. What else I’m reading at the moment:
Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory by Mike Davis (New York: Verso, 2018). 21C and World Art former publisher and editor Ashley Crawford turned me onto Davis in the mid-1990s. I’m just into this new book and Davis already frames Karl Marx’s political economy theories and 19th century reportage in new ways.
Turning To Political Violence: The Emergence of Terrorism by Marc Sageman (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist and an incisive critic of terrorism studies research. In this book he uses process tracing to document the social identity formation of terrorists in the late 19th and early 20th century. I’m reading this book as a model of how to do process tracing in terrorism studies: the research methodology of my in-progress PhD dissertation.
Return Of The Barbarians: Confronting Non-State Actors from Ancient Rome to the Present by Jakub J. Grygiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). One of the major themes to what I call (post-2002) fourth generation scholarship on strategic culture is the re-emergence in a multipolar world of violent and persistent non-state actors. Although not strictly part of the strategic culture camp Grygiel has emerged as an important scholar on emerging security threats.
Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself And What Comes Next by Richard Denniss (Carlton, Australia: Black Inc, 2018). An incisive long-form essay on the troubled state of Australia’s political economy in 2018.