Covering Earth

Think worlds; reckon systems.

  • Prometheus Settled

    On Monday, 4 January 2026, US vice president JD Vance tweeted issued a lengthy missive on Elon Musk’s X Dot Com, The Everything App (Blaze Your Glory!™): You see a lot claims that Venezuela has nothing to do with drugs because most of the fentanyl comes from elsewhere. I want to address this: First off,…

  • Can ASEAN play a greater role in mitigating subnational conflicts?

    As evidenced by Southeast Asia’s enduring peace, ASEAN’s mission statement of “one vision, one identity, one community” clearly resonates with its member states. The gradual spread of enthusiasm for co-operation among nations and the adoption of localised forms of regionalism is an unambiguous good, particularly so as the formal obligations and responsibilities of ASEAN membership…

  • Pipelines and Pathways I: Antecedents

    This piece follows on from the introductory post on this topic I previously shared. Please read that first if you haven’t already. 1: On Qi Popular representations of “Chinese religion” imagine a landscape populated by strands of belief easily categorisable under the headers of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. To represent, though, is necessarily to simplify,…

  • Pipelines and Pathways: Prologue

    0: The Centre Sixty kilometres north of New York City, in the sparsely populated rural town of Deerpark, there is a compound that looks something like a fortified university campus. Behind its gates lies an array of dormitories, classrooms, and libraries, all situated in manicured grounds along the margin of an artificial lake. The standout…

About the writer

SJ Lamb holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Nottingham.

This site is intended as a repository of long- and short-form writing on borders, governance, ideology, extraction, international capital, and the movement of people and ideas.