…comes from Afghanistanica and is called “Imaginary Chechen Attacks”.

This is hilarious. Very reminiscent of this. Or this:

A friend of mine and I were just talking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and he showed me this comic which I think sums up quite nicely certain people’s attitude over a war that is more and more frequently been fought by ethnic minorities and those living on the margins of our societies.

Der Spiegel’s graphic designer Omar Sayami went to Tajikistan and made a podcast (German).

I added some photos to my photography section on this site. There are also Lensflare band photos in an album on Flickr, only visible to my friends.

I can’t really decide what to do after my Master’s degree will be over. Getting a job in business sounds great, but I am not sure whether that’s really what I want at this stage (although my bank account and my indebtedness are crying for it). Another opportunity would be to apply for a PhD here at Cambridge or another school in the UK.

I thought about “The Political Economy Privatisation in Russia and Kazakhstan” as a preliminary title. The best thing about a PhD would of course be the fieldwork. Learning Russian besides doing a proper degree here was somewhat wishful thinking, so a year-long stint in Russia/Kazakhstan would be great to finally make sense of Russkyi Yasyk.

I’ll be attending this year’s Global Voices conference – and unlike last year, this time around it won’t be next door in London, but in beautiful Delhi/India. Taking the opportunity to meet some friends in the South, I thought I’d extend my return flight until the 5th of January. So for the first time in five years, I won’t be spending Christmas and New Year with family and friends back home in Berlin. I will be in Berlin in the beginning of December, though. And I am wondering whether anyone is actually reading this blog since I rarely update it and most of my writing takes place either in the library or on neweurasia…

Like the second Berlin Festival of Lights…

This post is the first one to be written from my new temporary home, Downing College in Cambridge. I am about to enroll on my MPhil in Development Studies here, which will take me nine months to finish (fingers crossed!). This brief duration of the course implies that I’ll be working a lot, but I’ll be able to say more on that by next week or so. So, if anyone is going to be in Cambridge at some point, be sure to get in touch with me.