Order Out of Chaos and Staple Security (S. 12, Ep. 15)

David Siddhartha Patel of Brandeis University joins Marc Lynch on this week's podcast to discuss his new book, Order out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and the Rise and Fall of Social Orders in Iraq. Combining rational choice approaches, ethnographic understanding, and GIS analysis, this book reveals the interconnectedness of the enduring problem of how societies create social order in a stateless environment, the origins and limits of political authority and leadership, and the social and political salience of collective identity. (Starts at 0:42) Jessica Barnes of the University of South Carolina discusses her book, Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt, which explores the process of sourcing domestic and foreign wheat for the production of bread and its consumption across urban and rural settings. (Starts at 38:15). Music for this season’s podcast was created by Myyuh. You can find more of her work on SoundCloud and Instagram. You can listen to this week’s podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or SoundCloud.