Books: September 2024

Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords, and Militias — Stephen D. Biddle

⭐⭐⭐ In Nonstate Warfare, Biddle wants to challenge the assumption that state and non-state armed groups fight in fundamentally different ways, with the former using conventional tactics and the latter guerrilla ones. He argues instead for thinking about armed actors (non-state and state) as falling along a Fabian-Napoleonic continuum.

The two poles correspond to the classic distinction between conventional (Napoleonic) and guerrilla warfare (the Fabian strategy, named for the Roman dictator Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus). Biddle’s first innovation is to argue for a continuum rather than distinct types: all groups live along it, none perfectly at one pole or the other. The second is to argue that style is not totally a function of actor type: states can use Fabian strategies, and rebels can rely on Napoleonic ones. The WW2 examples are interesting and convincing – Soviet reliance on irregular partisans, German/Allied use of coercive bombing, etc.

The final contribution is a theory predicting where actors land on this continuum, based on internal political makeup. This part feels less interesting and less convincing. Less interesting because his theory ends up generating predictions not so different from conventional wisdom: rebels use guerrilla tactics and states mostly use conventional tactics because of differences in relative strength. Less convincing because the theory starts to feel overdetermined, with too many categories.

Biddle is clearly very smart and a great writer. But the format of academic books is so dry and formulaic – here’s my DV, here are my IVs, here’s the scope condition – that it drags. This book would be much better as a popular press book.

A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War — Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Stranger in Your Own City is sort of a journalist’s diary, but more personal because the author is from Baghdad and has an incredible story of being swept up into journalism by the war. The book is expansive, beginning with the Iran-Iraq war and going through the US invasion, the civil wars, the rise of ISIS, and ending with the mass protests of the late 2010s.

Easily one of the best books about life in a war zone that I’ve read. The author is a talented writer who saw and immersed himself in events that are hard to believe. He captures so many elements of these conflicts, and then there are off-the-path chapters that are also incredible, like the one charting the migration of Syrians and Iraqis through Greece and into Germany.

Where the book is best is in how it captures the sectarian nature of the civil wars that followed the US invasion. Baghdad was a mixed city, where inter-sect relations were mundane. The war unleashes an almost textbook “ethnic security dilemma” where Shi’a and Sunni arm themselves and engage in tit-for-tat escalations that ultimately cleanse the city of Sunni inhabitants. Seeing ISIS emerge with this perspective in the background was very interesting.

Much respect to the author; this is incredible, inspiring work.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation — Ottessa Moshfegh

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rest and Relaxation follows a young woman who decides to take an insane concoction of pharmaceuticals every day to… it’s not exactly clear what for; she says it’s to sleep.

This is some of the best fiction I’ve read in years. It’s really funny. Moshfegh captures this kind of modern person who is an adult but reads like a “girl” and not a “woman.” The narrator feels like someone who has fallen out of the social fabric, and the sense I get is that Moshfegh is trying to say this is a generational thing – a kind of permanent adolescence, but also someone who is no longer inscribed in polite cultural norms, who says things that are offensive, thinks about beauty and weight in ways she’s not supposed to.

The edginess can feel empty at times, but Moshfegh is such a good writer that you let it slide.

Always impressed by writers who can entertain you with so little plot to lean on.