Of blogs and links

This is a quick and dirty post to highlight some additions to the blogroll, posts you should read, and a shameless self-promotion.

New Blogs to Read

• The Complex Terrain Laboratory is a work in progress (official launch is 1 September 2008) based in the U.K. and with contributions from both sides of the pond.
• Insurgency Research Group is exactly what its name says and is a spin-off from the Kings of War. In addition to its regular posts, it provides a good wrap-up of UK-specific COIN news. KCL seems to have really adopted this blogging thing…
• Ubiwar (“conflict in n dimensions”) is Tim Stevens’ blog, one of an increasingly visible cadre of PhD students from King’s College.
• Don Vandergriff has a namesake blog focusing on the human elements of modern conflict.
• Arabic Media Shack is on because, well, I don’t read Arabic and even if I did, it’s nice to have an aggregator that gives comments.
• In Harmonium is friend Marc Tyrrell’s blog. Marc’s an anthropologist who posts infrequently, but he said he’ll increase the frequency (maybe this will help encourage him).
• Avuncular American where Gerry Loftus, a retired Foreign Service Officer (24 years), comments on world events as seen by an expatriate in Europe.

Recent Posts (of others) to Note

• READ: Pat Kushlis’s Radio Free What?
• Winds of Change linked to the Task Force 134 Strategic Communications plan. 
• Marc’s post Rhetoric vs. Reality is a comment on the Anthro v Mil debates noted recently in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency: to some, a natural pairing, to others, not so much (I’ve had Marcus Griffin’s blog, From an Anthropological Perspective, linked for a while, but he went dark, so Marc fills a void.)

Not posts, but you should still read from Military Review:

• The Al-Qaeda Media Machine by Philip Seib, USC Annenberg professor of Journalism and Public Diplomacy.
• The Story Behind the National Security Act of 1947 by Charles A. Stevenson, an expert on American civil-military relations, Secretaries of Defense, and the NSA of 1947.
• The Most Important Thing: Legislative Reform of the National Security System by James R. Locher III. (Both Charlie and Jim are at PNSR and work on NSA 1947.)

And lastly, a shout out to myself:

MountainRunner is not just on the short blogroll of the U.S. State Department, but also on the Swedish Institute’s blogroll. SI is, by the way, Sweden’s public diplomacy agency. If you’re interested in public diplomacy, I suggest you visit SI’s webpage on public diplomacy and read their operational focus and definition of public diplomacy. More on Swedish public diplomacy to appear in the blog sooner than later (which fits in with their purpose to increase awareness of Sweden).