Hello and welcome back again to Riley doing a solo thing because that's right, It's time for one of Riley's book clubs,

but we're doing it a bit different this week because it's Riley's festive book club.

And rather than talk about a piece of writing that I like, that it deals with sort of leftist

thought or theory, or sort of describes many of the problems that

we might be seeing existing in our society in which we live blah blah blah blah blah

fucking hell mylo's in the studio with me mylo's in the studio with me doing something else

he's being going to be happily throughout this book club.

God damn it.

This is going to be very hard.

And the worst thing is that I'm doing a subject that's very easily parodyable because I'm not, like I said, I'm not talking about one of these books that I might recommend.

I'm actually talking about an academic paper called The End of

the Transition Paradigm, which you might say, what the hell is that? Well, it's a piece of

international relations theory because I wanted to talk about the absolute sort of decrepit

nonsense that is international relations theory in this one paper

by this guy, Thomas Carruthers, that, and he's like a Carnegie endowment goon.

Like, he was like literally involved in quote unquote democracy promotion in Latin

America in the 1980s. Like, he is one of the worst people. But he's written this article that actually, like,

is a rare moment of honesty for the discipline of international relations. So we're going to go.

We're going to get into it. So international relations is the subject that produces just the most

incredible titles for articles in journals like foreign policy or foreign affairs or whatever.

So it can be titled something like, you know, norms in retreat, changing paradigms of global governance in the WTO and beyond.

Or obstinate or obsolete, the fate of the nation state in the case of Western Europe, or something like the honor of dignity.

...