Richard Norman

richard1.jpgI’ll make my introduction brief. I’m originally from eastern Canada, where I studied for a degree in literature and philosophy at Dalhousie University and the University of King’s College. After this I traveled extensively in eastern Asia, throughout Russia, and in the Middle East. I spent a couple of years teaching in Japan and Korea.

Following these travels I spent a few months in the Balkans, specifically Vukovar, Croatia, a town razed to the ground in 1991 at the outset of the wars that then consumed the region. My internship in Vukovar, with a small NGO, involved writing an evaluation of the UN mission that had administered eastern Croatia after the Dayton Accords. I became interested in the roots and consequences of violent conflict, and studied at the University of Kent in Brussels for an MA in International Conflict Analysis, writing a thesis on the origins of the recent wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Currently I’m back in Halifax studying journalism at the University of King’s College.

Otto and I have worked on a couple of blogs, most recently 1948, along with another old friend, Nick, who I studied with in high school. Invisible College is not a new version of these older blogs, although it will have some of the same characteristics–it is a whole new blog. We have joined forces with bloggers from the Core to create a site with a deeper bench of knowledge and a profoundly international bent.

I’m not much of a fan of political theory, so my posts will be more driven by events and personalities. I’ll focus largely on war and politics–continuations of each other by other means (TM).