Rightsizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders

This is a well-written book overall, but I shouldn't comment on it until I've finished all its chapters. I have to write in here, though, that anyone who appreciates standup comedian Eddie Izzard's humor will love professor Brendan O'Leary's introductory contributions. For example (these moderately funny quips are the only excerpts I can find on Google Books, and my copy is at home), he writes: "Agraria...is typically severely caste-ridden; people are hunted and gathered, shepherded and 'domesticated', ranked and sorted, generally tied to the land by force and dependency, and, not least, by ignorance. Stocks in slavery and serfdom do well." "The most extreme 'solutions' to ethnic difference are the most abhorrent: genocide and expulson. Regrettably they have NOT proven sufficiently abhorrent to prevent some power elites from engaging in these extreme modes of right-peopling." I was able to take notes very easily on his chapter and, once I had taken my notes, realized that I could go back and label his 8 types of right-sizing & right-peopling strategies (I used "A1-A4" & "B1-B4")--and then go through the subsequent detail pages and write in those labels as headers. O'Leary doesn't explain anything significant about the strategy of genocide in the passage on assimilation. He may mention it for comparison, but no new information about genocide will appear in anything but the genocide passage. As I said, the rest of the book is also well-written and will contribute greatly to your understanding of small parts of our world. I paired it with "Herding Cats: Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World," and they both quickly followed a reading of "Politics of Language in the Ex-Soviet Muslim States: Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan." Those books both helped me enjoy this one.