About This Blog

This is one of my (Nader Elhefnawy's) two personal blogs. (The other is Raritania.)

While Raritania is where I post about books and literature, film and television, and contemporary culture more generally (with, I might add, no connection whatsoever to the made-up countries named "Raritania" to which the web's search engines direct so many searches), this particular blog is principally concerned with my areas of interest in the social sciences, economics, technology and current events.

I personally would prefer to leave the matter at that, but as the artificial intelligences and algorithms that determine whether you are likely to see this at all now seem to demand it if they are to treat anyone online as anything but part of the "cesspool" to which one Big Tech executive sneeringly relegated the "non-branded," a word about myself and whether I have any business writing about these subjects seems in order. In the past I simply identified myself as an author with some two dozen books behind me, but in line with these new "rules" I will also explain, for whatever it may be worth, that I have four college degrees, including a Ph.d in Literature and a B.A. in International Relations. I taught for two decades at a number of institutions (among them the University of Miami, where I got the doctorate), and have published a dozen peer-reviewed articles in scholarly publications. If the teaching was all done for those schools' English departments, the tilt of my research has been toward my interest in matters of international security, political economy, and political science generally. Where these are concerned my earlier pieces appeared in such publications as the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Belfer Center's International Security and the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Survival. However, for many years now I have been content to simply publish through the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), for two reasons:

1. Getting a piece of research into a journal is a lengthy, tedious, time-consuming, stressful process, the more in as it so often ends up a waste of time with everything falling through close to the end (of which such experiences I probably had more than my share in the early days). Making a piece submittable to, never mind publishable in, such a journal also often involves mutilating your work--cutting a piece to fit the thematic requirements and length limitations of a journal, possibly at the expense of the quality and even original intent behind the item. And then after all that the published piece is likely to end up behind a paywall, so that very few can see it, with those barred from seeing it likely to include many of exactly the sort of credentialed researchers whom you would have hoped to reach but who may for any number of reasons simply not have access. All told it is a high price to pay simply to say that one's work has been "peer-reviewed"--especially given how, if (having experienced the process as a reviewer as well as a producer of such material) the peer review process does permit some filtration of unworthy work and allow for opportunities to improve that work which is worthy, and that this is all to the good, it is very, very far from perfect, such that the reader of the journal article's simply being told that an item did make it through the process may not be all that informative or meaningful, failing to guarantee quality, while the mere absence of peer review is no proof that a piece may not be deserving of attention. (Indeed, the process is so difficult and so imperfect that much work that is valuable or even necessary will fail to find its place in any such publication--especially where the specialists in the field as a whole may be biased against its appearance, such that those who seriously care about learning something about the world had better be ready to look beyond the beaten path.)

2. Frankly I dislike what academic publishing has become--specifically its ultra-commercialization in ways absolutely inconsistent with its realization of its proper mission, not least the demand of so many journals that scholars pay large fees to have their work considered, and published. The appalling quality of the work which so often makes it through the system today (we live in an age in which published, "peer-reviewed" scholarship is now often just so much AI slop) makes the sacrifices involved in getting the rubber stamp of "peer-reviewed" even less worthwhile.

By contrast, at SSRN the scholar can, at something likely to get at least a little more respect than their personal web site, promptly make their item public with relatively little hassle, with the biases of academic priesthoods and the allotment of finite numbers of pages very unlikely to be an issue, and, should you go this route, neither the writer nor the reader having to pay a penny for it--all as, again, I personally see the disadvantage of its not having the claim of having passing passed peer review on its side as less and less meaningful with the system showing so many signs of being so badly broken. For my part I am content with the trade-off--and certainly with what it has permitted me to do, namely to spend more time actually engaged in research, and less time worrying about how it could possibly reach an interested public--while anyone who does not recognize these hard facts of the situation sufficiently as to be somewhat open-minded about this is in my opinion simply not worth bothering about.

Having established who I am let us get on with the information of a more utilitarian nature, specifically the policies regarding comments and contacts.

Comments Policy
Reader comments are welcome, with this going even for comments on older posts, but they are moderated (with the help of a spam filter). Where these are concerned I reserve the right not to post and/or delete any comment for reasons including but not necessarily limited to their looking like spam (typically a result of the comment's marginal or nonexistent relevance to the subject of the post, inclusion of suspect links, etc.), or their being of an abusive or incoherent nature. (The final judgment about these matters, of course, rests with me.)

I generally endeavor to post those comments consistent with these necessary rules as quickly as possible, and to respond to every one of them as quickly as possible, but because of the moderation process it may take some time for comments to go up, and still longer for me to respond to them.

Your patience and understanding in the meantime are appreciated, and I look forward to your feedback.

Other Contacts
Should the reader need to contact me in a manner other than leaving a comment they can use the Contact Form on the right side of the page.