#statebuilding

[thekingofwinterblog]

Why Arnor Failed as a State

So in lord of the rings, Aragorn, the titular returning king of the Third book/film, is the last descendant of Elendil, the first High King of Arnor and Gondor.

The entire plot is about how the royal family finaly, after all these years comes home to Gondor in the south from the cold, hard north, where the other realm of the Dunedain failed.

That said we are never really given a particularily detailed breakdown of why Arnor ultimately failed beyond the obvious military one(It was defeated by the rising power of Angmar before that too crashed and burned), the geographics one(the population never really managed to reach the level it could have, and that was before the plague), and the political one(the realm split into 3 lesser realms that squabbled).

On paper these seems easy enough reasons for why the northern realm crashed and burned, but once you actually start digging into it, it becomes pretty obvious that unlike Gondor, Arnor had some very serious fundamental problems that it never really managed to fix, which brought it down in the end.

1. It mishandled it's amazing geopgraphy

Looking at Arnor from above, it seems to have ALL the advantages. It has mazsive, open fertile plains, 2 great rivers, mild climate except for the far borth, clear, easy to defend natural boundaries, with the only open pathway into the realm being the hard to pass through corridor feom forodwaith.

Politically apeaking it was also set for success as the realm had managed to unify all the local peoples within it's borders underneath its banner, which they were content with for a very long time.

So with all of this in mind, where did Arnor go wrong?

It failed to harness it's rivers, that's how.

When choosing the place for capital for the new realm, one would expect it to be on one of the rivers, either at the mouth, or at an important spot.

The Dunedain chose to build the capital Annuminas at the great lake from whoch the Baranfuin/brandywine river originates from.

This isnt a... A terrible choice for a capital.

It allows the royal family to dominate the trade flowing up and down the river by controlling the spot where you can build ships, and have a massive riverrine fleet stationed in case of conflict.

So whats the problem?

The Dunedain never dredged either of their rivers, thats the problem.

Rather than wideding the bottom, to allow bigger, more usefull ships to pass up and down the river for transport of food, trade goods, and troops, Arnor instead did the exact opposite, and not only let natural fords stand, but built bridges that would prevent any trading river network from flourishing.

As far as i can tell, Arnor didnt have any particular noteworthy ocean navy, but even if Arnor was never going to invest into one such, the fact that they never did the work to make their rivers into a fountain of wealth, trade was one of the major reasons for their big decline.

But if they didn't invest into making their rivers more navigable, at the very least they would invest in horse power, in order for their people to travel quickly across the plain, allowing a caravan based trade netowork to do what rivers did not, right?

Well, no, and that leads me into my next point.

2. They Failed to turn into a cavalry based military, economic force, or political one

When the last king of Gondor(then prince) before Aragorns coming near a millennia later, came to destroy Angmar with a truly stunningly large relief force at the end of Angmar's power, he noted to his surprise just how perfect Arnor's plains would be for his cavalry in the task ahead of him.

And he was right. While it was the overhwelming numbers that won the day, it was the cavalry that was the main star, and allowed the army of the west to sweep over Angmar and end it forever with such ease.

With this in mind, it brings the question of why didnt the Arnorian Dunedain switch over to a completely horse based army, or at the very least make knights the shocktroops of the military the way Gondor did?

The reason seems simple enough.

Gondor was forced to fight endless wars against all of its neighbors and had to constantly adapt and change and improved, while Arnor was at peace for the better part of a millenium before it broke.

When the successor state of Arthedain had to adopt to new warfare, it always found itself outnumbered, and from the accounts of it's wars with Angmar, what they ended up doing was simply rely on powerful fortifications to fight defensive wara, and it's alliance networks to rally addiational troops.

Not strategies withouth merrit, but it's clear that Arthedain never managed to become a particularily great military powerhouse... But it could have if it had changed over to cavalry as the main feature of the army.

Instead they relied on what the numenoreans of old did. Arrow, sword and shield.

They no doubt had mounted troops of some sort, but it was clearly not their speciality just looking at how their successors, the rangers of the north prefer fighting.

But the fact is, Arnor should have had Cavalry centered armies from the very start, leaving behind the old Numenorean way of fighting the moment they realised all their future fighting would be on open plains.

However, this lack of focus on horses had another side effect. One that along with their squandering their rivers would contribute to another problem.

3. A lack of integration of the kingdom's ethnicities.

When Arnor broke off into 3 different realms, while the impetous was 3 sons fighting for control, when you look at the bigger picture, its clear that what actually happened here is that the 3 realms broke off very neatly along the kingdoms 3 main ethnicities, who each backed their own prefered candidate.

Arthedain, the biggest and strongest, centered around the heartland was populated by mostly ethnic dunedain, along with breemen as a smaller ethnicity.

Cardolan was ruled by a dunedain elite, but the ethnicity that dominated was the natice, pre numenorean population who were centered around the barrow tombs they would later be buried in(and would be corrupted by the witch king).

And finally Rhudar was also ruled by a dunedain elite, but the real power behind their revolt against the capital was the natice hillmen, who, being dissatiafied with Dunedain rule, and fueled by ambition decided to ally with Angmar in a bid for supremacy(only to later be exterminated by angmar once they no longer served their purpose).

What we see here is a very clear breakdown of the kingdoms, caused by a failed integration policy.

Clearly Annumias and later Fornost failed to bring these minorities into the fold successfully the way Gondor did eith its minorities, who became proud gondorians.

And we can in large part blame this on the capitals inability to project a sense of unity across the land. Which would have been easy to do if they had successfully tamed and harnessed their rivers, making all 3 corners part of a connected riverrine network, or had used horse based travel and trade as a matter of course to ensure everyone was connected into one economic and political policy.

Its very telling that the only people the Dunedain successfully integrated into their realm were the two minorities who lived right by the capital of Fornost(The hobbits and Breemen). Because these were the people who lived close enough that you could actually get there by foot at a reasonable time.

So with all of this in mind, there is a question to be raised. Why did Arnor squander all of it's natural advantages so badly?

Well i've gone over the military one. A stupily long amount of peace made the realm unprepared for innovation that allowed Gondor to become a powerhouse.

But no the real reason why the Arnorians would have seen no need to make changes to bolster trade, in and outside the kingdom, is due to a factor i have not gone over yet.

4. Trade mistakes.

Arnor and Arthedain both sit on an ancienct road used by the dwarves, both from across the misty mountains in the direction of rivendel, but also from gondor, and far more importantly for this dissection, during both Arnor and Arthedain's lifetimes, this road systwm would have been used by Khazad-Dum, Moria, at it's height.

All 3 directions heading to the Dwarves mines in the blue mountains and the great harbors of the Elven realm of Lindon.

It would in short, be one of the most lucrative trade routes of the age.

But, and this is critical, it was not a network Arnor actually had to do some work to take a advantage of.

They did not need to make caravans, or build trade fleets, ocean or riverrine. Hell, they didn't even need dedicated traders of their own.

They were middle men, who by virtue of sitting right on this route got to toll and harness the wealth this route generated withouth hacing to do any real work.

And that, ultimately was the problem. They didnt need to innovate. They didnt need to adapt and improve and put their land to full use, because all the wealth they could possibly use was there withouth work.

And that sucks, because clearly Arnor had A LOT of products they could have sold abroad. We can tell that just by looking at it's most prosperous successor state(the shire) and looking at what sort of technology they inherited from their original overlords.

The hobbits of the shire has paper mills, clockmakers, dye industry, matches, bound books, door knobs, integrated locks and latches, and on and on. Compare it to rohan, and they are centuries ahead in tech by our standards.

It's often easy to forget(give tolkien was clear that hobbits just did not move past a certain point in techonology) that by the standards of the day, the Hobbits are very technologically advanced compared to most... And ALL of that is things they inherited from their overlords.

Wheter Arthedain and by extension Arnor invented all of these technologies themselves(as there are a number of things clearly not found in gondor it cant all have been inherited from numenor), or they adapted it through Trade with Khazad Dum or Lindon, improved upon such foreign concepts, or kore likely a mixture of all of these, it's clear that Arnor had the capacity to make these, and by extension the fact they are still around after the kingdom fell, in the form of the hobbits being self sufficcient(otger than presumably the raw metal materials they trade for with the dwarves) means this was not some exceptional level of tech for the kingdom.

It was the kingdom's standard, and if they had been interested in actually exporting these things abroad, Arnor would probably have been more wealthy than Gondor by a far margin.

But they didnt. Because they didnt see any need to innovate their trade capacity in such a manner. Which in turn led to them not harnessing their lands capacity for cheap, easy transportations, which in turn led to them not integrating their people the way gondor(who's people are all connected through the sea and Anduin, and what comes with them), which led to them being far more divided than they should have been.

And while their long period of peace allowed them to overtake Gondor in so many things, when it came to military advancements, they were not only voefully behind, but when it came time to innovate, they lacked both the resources, and the spark to truly overhaul their military and tactics, instead relying on the same old classics until it brought the kingdom crashing down.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Today, the PA lacks any political legitimacy to mask its role as a second South Lebanon Army for Israel. The continued theft of land and the denial of rights of the refugees of the Gaza Strip, as well as the rest of the Palestinians, bestowed a duty upon Hamas and the resistance factions to launch the attack to break the status-quo. Oslo failed to free the Palestinian prisoners as promised by PLO officials, and the right of return was similarly sidelined; the Great March of Return in 2018 was crushed by the kneecapping of protestors in their hundreds. The international community cheered on, hoping to trap both Gaza and the West Bank with its own standards of passive resistance, statebuilding, and individualist economic prosperity that hides itself behind the veil of a collective effort to produce the New Palestinian to the world. The significance of the October 7th assault thus becomes clearer: it was an attack not only against Israeli settler colonialism, but also against the fundamental discourse that underlies the PA. It broke the taboo on centering Palestinian rights through the lens of decolonial and revolutionary armed struggle. More importantly, it scathed the colonial hubris of a nuclear-armed beast that boasts of its weaponry and supposed military superiority to the world when ‘mowing the lawn’ in Gaza. No wonder, then, why the international community is cheering on the destruction of Gaza and the elimination of resistance. Out of fear that Hamas would break the perpetual stalemate that the PLO signed on to in 1993, the US wants to quench the Zionist bloodthirst that ensued after October 7th through JDAMS, Delta Force squadrons, and a media clergy that parrots every Israeli army claim that demonises not only the Resistance, but the entire population of Gaza. The entire Israeli political spectrum is united around portraying Palestinians as Nazis, ISIS members, ‘children of darkness’, as well as human animals in order to manufacture worldwide consent for the continuous bombardment of the Gaza Strip. It is already clear that October 7th will become a landmark moment in the history of Palestinian resistance against Zionism, its benefactors, and its local agents. The PA, US, and Europe are encouraging the massacre and total siege of the Gaza Strip, not only because of their inherent interest in the continued existence of Israel on Arab land, but also because of their frenzied desire to try and restore the status quo, an imagined reality that existed before October 7th. Attempts to soften Hamas’ position on liberation via the Quartet and Qatar never bore fruit, as evidenced by what has transpired since. The failure of the peace dividends to thwart the Palestinian people, the collapse of the political discourse that masks securitisation behind a national goal, and the continued will of the resistance groups in Gaza to fight despite an international siege and soft power tactics to entice them to stay silent – all of this will pave the way for a more revolutionary discourse with regards to liberation. The era of pseudo-statebuilding is finally behind us, and an age of liberation is coming.

[germiyahu]

It’s quite obvious that “A People without a Land for a Land without a People” is not a call to displace a population that Zionists denied existing or thought “didn’t deserve” to be there.

It either means, as many claim, that Zionists preferred to create new settlements such as Tel Aviv, as opposed to gentrifying Arab neighborhoods in (surprisingly) small urban centers. The land was underpopulated, dilapidated, and the environment was eroded. There was a unique opportunity to reverse a centuries long process of economic and demographic decay. The Levant was the Rust Belt of the Ottoman Empire. Jews and Arabs started moving there by the tens of thousands when economic opportunities started springing up again. This was in part thanks to Zionist… settlers? Immigrants? Whatever you call them.

Or that phrase means that the Land did not have an independent national identity. The Zionists perhaps naively thought that the local Arabs, Druze, Armenians, Circassians, and everyone in between would more or less be content to let Jews show up and statebuild and that all would come together to identify as something new. Not Ottoman, not Syrian, not any individual clan or tribe or ethnic or religious identity. That returning the Jewish spirit and character to the land the land itself would flourish and everyone living on it would thrive. And that does sound a little haughty and arrogant but it’s hardly a call to depopulate a region. Nor is it a shoddy attempt at covering up ethnic cleansing by saying “what do you mean no one was here to begin with 🤭”

But when a Jew/Israeli/Zionist speaks, the Rule of course is to proceed with the worst possible interpretation. Jews do love pissing on the poor I heard.

[somerabbitholes]

Books you would recommend on this topic? Colonial, post colonial, and Cold War Asia are topics that really interest me. (Essentially all of the 1900s)

Hello! An entire century is huge and I don't quite know what exactly you're looking for, but here we are, with a few books I like. I've tried organising them, but so many of these things bleed into each other so it's a bit of a jumble

Cold War

1971 by Srinath Raghavan: about the Bangladesh Liberation War within the context of the Cold War, US-Soviet rivalry, and the US-China axis in South Asia

Cold War in South Asia by Paul McGarr: largely focuses on India and Pakistan, and how the Cold War aggravated this rivalry; also how the existing tension added to the Cold War; also the transition from British dominance to US-Soviet contest

Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World by Robert B. Rakove: on the US' ties with the Nonaligned countries during decolonisation and in the early years of the Cold War; how US policy dealt with containment, other strategic choices etc

South Asia's Cold War by Rajesh Basrur: specifically about nuclear buildup, armament and the Indo-Pak rivalry within the larger context of the Cold War, arms race, and disarmament movements

Colonialism

India's War by Srinath Raghavan: about India's involvement in World War II and generally what the war meant for South Asia politically, economically and in terms of defense strategies

The Coolie's Great War by Radhika Singha: about coolie labour (non-combatant forces) in the first World War that was transported from India to battlefronts in Europe, Asia and Africa

Unruly Waters by Sunil Amrith: an environmental history of South Asia through British colonial attempts of organising the flow of rivers and the region's coastlines

Underground Revolutionaries by Tim Harper: about revolutionary freedom fighters in Asia and how they met, encountered and borrowed from each other

Imperial Connections by Thomas R. Metcalf: about how the British Empire in the Indian Ocean was mapped out and governed from the Indian peninsula

Decolonisation/Postcolonial Asia

Army and Nation by Steven Wilkinson: a comparative look at civilian-army relations in post-Independence India and Pakistan; it tries to excavate why Pakistan went the way it did with an overwhelmingly powerful Army and a coup-prone democracy while India didn't, even though they inherited basically the same military structure

Muslim Zion by Faisal Devji: a history of the idea of Pakistan and its bearing on the nation-building project in the country

The South Asian Century by Joya Chatterji: it's a huge book on 20th century South Asia; looks at how the subcontinental landmass became three/four separate countries, and what means for history and culture and the people on the landmass

India Against Itself by Sanjib Baruah: about insurgency and statebuilding in Assam and the erstwhile NEFA in India's Northeast. Also see his In the Name of the Nation.

I hope this helps!

[approximateknowledge]

Please share some of your partner's insights. MLP x 40k is a fantastic moral crossover, both show the failacy of reliance on supposedly all-powerful god emperors for a "highly structured stable society"

also the similarities between celestia and big E, as well as just the *place* of ponies in their world being weirdly similar to humans in 40k

to paraphrase: "If I had a nickel for every time ive seen a near-deific immortal ruler that saved their kind from certain doom and brought them into a new age of 'grandness' but was so busy statebuilding they create a schism against their own family that almost wipes out their entire species and is only barely won at the cost of ending scarred for life (and leaving the society they built a mangled caricature of the original intention), I'd have two nickels."

that's right the ponies had a horus heresy

[dasha-aibo]

Look, I love 4X with competition and conquest, but I wish there was, like, a "world peace" or "statebuilding" mode, where you just expand, do diplomacy and deal with random events without needing to conquer your neighbors, you know. Just as a relaxation thing.

Like how in Stellaris all the galaxy unites to deal with late-game emergencies, but without the super-tough battles that come with it.

[sethshead]

I categorically reject the Netanyahu and Likud position of Israeli control from the Jordan west. Palestinian statehood and sovereignty are necessary from a human rights perspective, as well as for long-term Israeli security. I recognize that many Israeli acts have been in bad faith, or had ulterior motives. Sharon disengaged from Gaza in order to secure a permanent Israeli presence in the West Bank. His separation barrier did not hew to the Green Line, but took significant chunks out of the West Bank. Peres continued to develop settlements in order to create favorable “facts on the ground” when bargaining over final borders. Rabin, after Oslo, admitted that he did not envision full sovereignty for Palestine. Israel has repeatedly collaborated with the Palestinian Authority to undermine and sideline pragmatic Palestinian statebuilders like Salam Fayyad and Bashir al-Masri, who would have been effective partners for peace. Israel has played a part in bringing us to where we are today.

Nevertheless, it is Israel that has put forth concrete proposals for a Palestinian state. It was Zionists who accepted less-than-ideal partition plans in order to have something. It is the Palestinians who have always said “no”, offering no solution in return except effective Arab conquest from river to sea. Even Palestinian de facto acceptance of a two-state paradigm at Oslo was predicated on their believe in a “right of return” that would have resulted in two Palestinian-majority states and no self-determination for Jews anywhere.

So now leadership of both peoples is equally inflexible. This merely indicates that both peoples need new leadership desperately. As it stands, only 15% of Israelis want Netanyahu to remain prime minister after the Gaza campaign is completed, and there are mechanisms to enable his removal. How are Palestinians to be granted a new, reformist administration from the rubble of their failed rejectionism? We will see.

[gormfullray]

I was hopeless, but the revolution was inevitable since before I was born.

The Zapatistas have always been legend in my heart. Somewhere, far beyond the horizon to the south, the embers of resistance still burn hot in that place, in that place the red star flies free. In September of 1997 the venerable Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas penned The Fourth World War Has Begun, a brief treatise which has wholly shifted my perspective on the global socialist resistance. In this work, which can be read in full here, the Subcomandante lays bare the necessarily incomplete seven-piece puzzle of the material condition of the world under neoliberal subjugation.

The seventh piece of the global puzzle, the pockets of resistance, was I think the piece I was missing most dearly, caught up in my delusions of old-world revolution and the hopelessness I felt in the struggle. As we live and breathe in the twenty-first century, the predictions of Marcos made in 1997 prove themselves more true by the day, and I see now that, as Che likewise postulated, the material conditions of resistance are created by resistance.

The American politic is fracturing. Cracks now form in the great stone visage of the empire, liberal politics of old prove themselves a sickly old man in the face of the radicalization of liberation and reaction. Since before our births the revolution has been inevitable, for the lifespans of every socialist to come before us, the countless who lived and died seeing not one free day in their lives, but I see now that the inevitability of the revolution is contingent upon the organization of resistance. Over the past decade we have seen in our nation huge upswells of unorganized resistance, countless of the downtrodden marching in the streets and disrupting the modes of commerce, and this precedent now enables us to preform the unprecedented. The time has come for the workers and the outcast to pry apart the fractures in the face of neoliberalism, and to establish organized pockets of resistance within the United States.

It is a peculiarity of our time and place that the pockets of resistance we Americans are to form are to be nonmilitant; the fact of the matter is that no effective resistance can be presented through the use of violent means in this nation at this time. Rather, a pocket of American resistance must be a focal point of revolutionary agitation, not wholly dissimilar to the theory of foca proposed by Che, and perhaps best precedented by groups such as the Black Panther Party of the anti-war movement. A pocket of resistance can be formed in any place and at any scale, and indeed the constant boiling of unorganized resistance is a necessary precursor to what I shall today propose: the establishment of a new precedent of organized socialist resistance.

The first and foremost requisite factor of resistance organization is the acquisition of land and means of production into the hands of the resistance. A non-militant pocket of resistance is afforded the unique opportunity to operate openly and accumulate resources within the free market. The long term objective of the organized resistance, before revolution even comes onto the table, must be the establishment of dual power independent of the neoliberal capitalist order; nothing less than the establishment of a resistance market and a resistance economy within the United States, a process which has already begun with the perpetuation-in-earnest of worker cooperatives, will allow the resistance to begin the process of statebuilding while remaining in the good graces (or atleast the apathetic dismissal) of those who hold the reigns of power.

The second requisite factor of resistance in the United States will be the militarization of our organization. Note here that I advocate not for militancy in my gesture towards militarism; rather, my suggestion is to adopt elements of military organizational theory into our nascant resistance; in particular regard recruitment, command, and apoliticality. Recruitment is of the foremost importance of these elements: an organized resistance must form the capability to accept, house, train, and put to work committed recruits; my vision is of pockets of openly-operating resistance, which make themselves impossible to miss and who have the capability to enlist all comers. Particular emphasis goes on the usage of "enlist" here; a standardized and methodical approach to recruitment must be developed, and in short order what shall be produced will itself be the better part of the material conditions necessary for revolution. Command and apoliticality go hand-in-hand in their counterintuitive presence: a democratic movement cannot hold a traditional relation to command, and a revolution can hardly be apolitical; rather, my feeling here is instead a desire to prepare in advance for the inevitable fracturing endemic to all socialist projects. The resistance movement must be apolitical in the sense that the specificity of it's politics must not extend beyond the sturdy bones of capitalist critique and faithful democracy: the purview of a pocket of resistance is the establishment of a power parallel to the state, but the organized resistance movement itself must be prevented from exerting political power in the new world it creates lest it become yet another bolshevik tyranny.

The forms of resistance which are most effective in the United States seem to me at this time unclear. Conventional protest has taken the center stage in the twenty-first century, from Wall Street to Seattle and everywhere inbetween, and while substantive change has yet to occur as a result of protest it has been instrumental in the radicalization of the left. Organized resistance's primary mission ought, I think, be in the execution of organized protest, to appear (in uniform or bearing shared symbols) and create highly visible obstructions of commercial activity. The obstructions should be neither insignificant nor indiscriminate: the mission should be the visible obstruction of opportunistically chosen targets with the objective of attracting recruits and accruing material support for the resistance organization (which will, atleast in our present stage, be necessarily local).

For all my talk of organizing, this has been a pretty unorganized ramble. The Fourth World War Has Begun has opened my eyes to resistance as a concept in a way I have failed to grasp before. It's the sort of paradigm I could see my entire life through, and for the first time in my life it feels as though a glimmer of light has reached my from the end of the tunnel. And so as Subcomandante Marcos concluded: "...it is necessary to build a new world. A world in which there is room for many worlds. A world capable of containing all the worlds."

[tiodolma]

If one thinks about it, Merlin the Elder's presence actually helps Merlin the Younger to grow from being merely a meat shield for Arthur.

Merlin: *points out flaws in evil plans*

Weekly villains: *furiously writing notes*

Younger Merlin: Will you stop!?

Starz Merlin: look... here's what you should do

BBC Merlin: grrgrrrr

Starz Merlin, handing him paper and a quill: Did you know that your Morgana bullet journals her notes? It's actually good! Mordred has his notes stored in magical voice recordings using druid technology. It's pretty neat actually. All you have is Gaius's old books. Do you even keep track of your spells? Look... i'd actually have Morgan personally tutor you tbh.

BBC Merlin: no way! she's evil! I don't need these!

Starz Merlin: (looks him long and hard in the eye)

BBC Merlin: WHAT?

Starz Merlin: You need serious intervention, boy.

.......................

BBC Merlin (the character) needs serious political science, philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, economics, warfare and statebuilding courses 101 tbh. I always hate that he defeats his enemies (who had been planning for months/years) just with brute force and prodigious talent alone.

In BBC Merlin, i think Balinor could have fulfilled that role tbh. Too bad Merlin was still stuck in the cult-ish and heavily reclusive mind conditionings of cockroach Gaius and master manipulator Kilgharrah. Because of that Morgana actually got ahead of him in terms of magic and diplomatic knowledge.

[asklordcaptaincastronova]

😡Philipe

Complete lack of proper statebuilding, a weird combination of over control and utter ambivelence.

[lightdancer1]

The Albigensian Crusade is one of the more important and the more neglected wars of the medieval era:

This book serves as a companion to the other book on the Occitan War (that conveniently skipped over the bits with the two French kings providing the first steps to the territorial linkage of what's now southern France with the northern part). That book opened and rightly so the idea of examining the concept of heresy based on actual evidence.....and yet even it has to concede that there was a select group of elites who had a kind of Gnostic aspect to their appeal and most bluntly rejected entirely the authority of the Pope and the bishops. This, more than anything else, was the real seed of the heresy and of the bloodthirsty war that followed.

In the annals of Crusading the Albigensian Crusade rivals that of the Northern Crusades for often being overlooked and yet for being one of the most revealing examples. In a sequence of bloody battles and sieges the so-called Cathars were brought to heel and then exterminated by the rise of the medieval Inquisition, which did not target witches but heretics and Jewish people at that time.

In the annals, too, of medieval civilization the Albigensian Crusade marks like the Northern Crusades a point of transition, where older entities ground against the first steps of what history would show were new paths. The establishment of a French monarchy that ruled more of France than the King of England did, the first of the many steps to imploding the various languages and cultures in the soft genocidal policies of the French state that rendered those languages and cultures all but extinct.

This war also points to the reality that medieval Crusades were international enterprises by the standard of the time in theory but in practice in Europe itself were neatly folded into statebuilding in all its unholy and bloodstained paths. There is no bloodless rise of the state, only a set of choices of very specific horrors.

And it's almost an ironic afterthought that the most famous leader of this crusade would be overshadowed by his son Simon de Montfort of the same name, the man who was a prototype of Oliver Cromwell in the eyes of Whig historians and in reality every bit the avid empire and statebuilder his father was with shorter successes and mostly a bloodied speedbump in the career of Edward I Longshanks, the warrior-king who for a time virtually united Britain until his son took over and wrecked his successes by incompetence.

7/10.

[saxafimedianetwork]

Consider Somaliland: State-Building with Traditional Leaders and Institutions

Can traditional leaders & institutions play a key role in creating more legitimate, accountable & effective governments? Explore the Consider #Somaliland in Marleen Renders' '#StateBuilding with Traditional Leaders and Institutions'

Continue reading Consider Somaliland: State-Building with Traditional Leaders and Institutions

[peachandpineapple]

Flashback to last month when we welcomed friends of Banks & Bloom across two exclusive events at The Mark to sample the client’s new ready to drink range, indulge in delicious food and #DRINKFANCY with us! With special thanks to:

@statebuildings @omgbrandevents @naturalartflowers @nestleandporter @m_eventhire @spectaclemediaau @shotbythom @angela_tsun

[organisationskoval]

346) Taiwan Statebuilding Party, Tajwańska Partia Budownia Państwa (TSP; chiński: 台灣基進; pinyin: Táiwān Jījìn; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tâi-oân Ki-chìn) - partia polityczna na Tajwanie. Partia powstała w 2016 roku jako Taiwan Radical Wings. Partia jest uważana za bliskiego sojusznika Demokratycznej Partii Postępu. Od 2018 r. przewodniczącym był Chen Yi-chi. W wyborach parlamentarnych na Tajwanie w 2020 r. partia zdobyła jeden mandat, a Chen Po-wei został jej pierwszym członkiem Legislative Yuan. W październiku 2021 r. Chen został pierwszym członkiem Legislative Yuan, którego pomyślnie odwołano, kończąc swoją kadencję na mniej niż dwa lata po objęciu urzędu. Głosy za odwołaniem Chena wyniosły 77 899, wobec 73 433 sprzeciwiających się jego odwołaniu. Głosy popierające odwołanie przekroczyły 25% uprawnionego elektoratu (73 744), przy frekwencji wyborczej 51,72%. Zgodnie z art. 92 Ustawy o wyborach i odwołaniu urzędników służby cywilnej, Chen nie będzie mógł kandydować do Legislative Yuan w drugiej dzielnicy Taichung przez następne cztery lata. W dniu 28 października 2021 r. został oficjalnie odwołany z Legislative Yuan. TSP była kiedyś opisywana jako partia lewicowa, postępowa i niepodległościowa.

[mslorelina-blog]

Kievan Rus, the Duchy of Moscow, and the Mongol Empire were all Russia at some point What are you even talking about?.. Kievan Rus was not Russia. Nor Ukraine, nor Belarus. It was its own political entity, the modern state of Russia (as well as Ukraine and Belarus) was formed several centuries after Kievan Rus slipped into disunity in XI century. Great Duchy of Moscow was a state that united most of principalities of Rus (mind that "Rus" doesn't mean "Russia") around itself and established the state from which current Russia comes from. Saying GDM "was Russia" is a huge oversimplification of a complex historical process of statebuilding. The fact that the territory of Mongol Empire partly coincides with the territory of current Russia doesn't mean Russia is a descendant of Mongol Empire IN ANY WAY. If we follow this logic, then USA is the descendant of north american indian tribes, but i suppose you understand what is wrong with this reasoning. I think later in the fic it’s implied that he takes claim to the empire because it was powerful, similarly to how former Roman states take claim to the Roman Empire. In fact, Russian rulers claimed to be the descendants of Byzantine empires ("Moscow is a Third Rome" doctrine), never the descendants of Mongol empire, so the author could use this, but they chose not to.

To be honest you’re kinda stepping out of line here. A real person did research and wrote it, and this is unconstructive and pretty rude.

Do you find my comment under the first chapter of the fic constructive enough? Because tumblr is not the only platform where I expressed my opinion. Well, if a real person did the research, then clearly the research was not good enough. I can't imagine anyone who made enough effort writing what they wrote (Alexander III's assasination by the Narodnaya Volya and many other things that I mentioned in my comment on ao3). If saying that something clearly done poorly is done poorly is rude, then I'm okay with being rude.

It’s fair to discuss historical interpretations, but it’s really not to go about it this way especially when they can see what you have to say.

Cool, it was my intention to show them my opinion on ao3! I'm ready to discuss it with them when/if they answer me.

It’s one thing to conflate facts, but it’s another to say that one portrayal of something like significance is correct and another isn’t. Personally disagreeing with analysis doesn’t make it wrong. And considering the main characters you should know it’s gonna be an unreliable narrator and not an academic perspective on history

I'm not sure if I understood your first sentence correcly (English is not my first language). But I dont agree on "Personally disagreeing with analysis doesn’t make it wrong". We have objective facts (that Alexander III wasn't killed), scientific consensus in certain topics and we absolutely can and have right to make conclusions and have opinions about the veracity of particular POVs.

Reasons you should read A Century of Snow

Character study and relationship study with rusame

Basically a history lesson (1900-2000) in the form of gay romance

Beautifully written prose and symbolism

It’s so good it prompted me to write a thesis here’s the link again https://archiveofourown.org/works/50490520/chapters/127558534

[sethshead]

In theory I agree with Friedman, but his perspective is suffused with the arrogant naivety of so many Western commentators on the region. He has to ignore problematic, thorny aspects undergirding the conflict for generations, absolutist politics and promises that are evidently incomprehensible to the liberal humanists he wants to project onto a region he still barely comprehends.

I hold Salam Fayyad in the highest regard, higher than any Israeli retail politician. But his brand of institutionalist statebuilding is largely discredited among the Palestinian street, seen as an imposition that would forfeit a river-to-sea revolutionary birthright.

Let us not be mistaken about why a two-state solution was rejected almost a quarter-century ago: "right of return". Palestinians still believe that anything less than the repatriation of seven million "refugees" to Israel proper would be a betrayal of their ancestors and of God. It would be a shameful capitulation, a forfeit of a raison d'être more important than statehood and sovereignty. Westerners still do not understand the centrality of "right of return" to Palestinian demands.

Of course, "right of return" is a principle never invoked in any other conflict, ever. Further, seven million Palestinians, few of whom are actually refugees by any normal definition of the term, moving to Israel would negate Jewish self-determination and sovereignty, resulting in a two-state solution consisting of two Palestinian states and no guarantee of safety for Jews. This is unacceptable on its face, but that has not altered PA bargaining positions or Palestinian public opinion. Simply replacing Abbas and his cronies will not change this.

Secondly, why would Iran, Hamas, and Hizb'allah simply accept defeat should Israel and the PA, both under new management, make real progress toward a legitimate two-state solution? These are not cartoon villains who will shake their fists impotently If anything, such a development would result in an uptick in terrorism and military attacks on Israel. Does no one remember Hamas's bus bombing campaign in the mid-'90s that began shortly after Oslo? Arafat praised them in Arabic while talking peace in English. The inability of the PA or the Peres government to do anything to stop the carnage, the platitudes about not allowing these deadly attacks to derail the peace process, were a direct reason for Netanyahu's first Likud electoral victory.

Despite this first cynical outsourcing of violence by Arafat, the Israeli people quickly turned on Netanyahu when he failed to implement the Wye River Accord agreement to expand West Bank Areas A and B in PA control. Despite this clear show of popular good faith, both Arafat and Abbas would go on to reject one final settlement after another, not to mention an intifada disastrous to both Palestinians and to the Israeli peace camp.

Peace is not so easy as saying you want peace, or even elevating to power those who say they want peace. When will the Tom Friedmans of the world come to grips with this fact?