CTlab member Brian Glyn Williams, PhD, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, recently testified as an expert witness for the defence in the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, “Bin Laden’s Driver”, in the first US military tribunal since World War II. He has since been interviewed about the case on National [...]

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Years ago, when I was researching Western Magic, I came across a then-obscure book called the Kybalion (my copy is from the 1940’s).  It is a masterpiece of the esoteric genre; a genre designed to hide information in “plain sight”.  Reading the comments on Wired in response to Steve Featherstone’s recent Harpers article brought the [...]

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One of the more interesting ethical problems in the Anthropologists cannon is the question of when you are required to lie.  For me, it is not only three particular question of when you must lie but, in reality, the perceptual assumptions that structure that “ethical” injunction.  This wasn’t much of a problem for me in [...]

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For over a year, I have been using the term “Witch Hunts”to refer to the actions of some people who are violently opposed to the existence on the Human Terrain System. It is important that people realize that when I use that term, it is not being used in the normal meaning of political [...]

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[this is the final post in this series]
Topologies of competition
In the previous post, I identified two classes of battlespace topologies: perceptual and technological. While the two classes have common dimensions, it is analytically useful to treat them as if they were separate. Social groups (and individuals) operate across a multiplicity of battlespaces (”workspaces” [...]

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[Note: I am in the process of putting together a journal article on asymmetric warfare and I will be using the next few posts to help me think abut it.]
Competition appears to be an inevitable consequence of our natural (read biological) state. Darwin termed this “natural selection”. But, as with most species, we [...]

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The personal is political
Carol Hanish (?)
I don’t usually write about politics. This isn’t because I don’t have strong political beliefs (I do) but, rather, because I prefer to devote my time and energies to other things. This wasn’t always the case, as a few of my close friends know, and I like to [...]

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The word “theory” has an interesting effect on different people. I’ve noticed that many of my undergraduate students, upon hearing the word and learning that they are sitting in a course on “theory”, start to get the same look in their eyes as deer have caught in the headlights of a car. For [...]

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so when one dispassionately and accurately speaks of cluster bombing, depleted uranium, torture at Abu Ghraib, and laying siege to civilian population centres, the response is not that it is just “rhetoric.”
Max Forte at openanthropology (NB: there is something weird with the cascading style sheets which interferes with italic script so I have changed the [...]

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In a recent blog post, Max Forte dissected the Human Terrain System’s (HTS) Top Misconceptions page. Now, in general, I have not been very kind about most of the attacks on the HTS and Max’s post is definitely an attack. It is, however, qualitatively different, in my opinion, from the majority of other [...]

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