Good morning, Duckaroos!  Here’s your Monday linkage from…

“Dixie”:

• The South will rise again – according to the UN.  No, not that South, the Global South.  For the first time in two centuries, Brazil, India, and China’s combined GDP is nearly equivalent to the combined GDP of the leading powers of North America and Europe.  What lessons can the US learn?
• Himadeep Muppidi’s “Reflections on Narrative Voice” in IR is a smart, “must read” article over at the Disorder of Things blog.  He writes,
  

  “After soaking oneself in the nuance and complexity of narratives, conventional accounts of IR appear lifeless and boringly schematic in their attempts to straddle (our) humanity. They perish, unseen and unmourned, on the classroom floor….  In the wasteland that is conventional IR, stories of any sort might appear, at first glance, to offer a welcome respite. But there is also, as some of our fellow disciplines can attest to, a politics of story telling: whose stories do we get to hear all the time; whose stories are generally inaudible; how do stories make us over; whose mansions do stories furnish with humanity in every remote room and whose huts do they deprive of life and dignity. Perhaps we need to explore these inequities of the political terrain more even as we take the narrative turn seriously.”

• Speaking of great narratives, the Africa is a Country blog reflects upon the life and magna opera of the great Chinualumogu Albert Achebe. RIP.

• Karzai appears to have scored a significant victory in the hand over of the detention facility at Bagram Airbase according the Afghan Analysts Network.  Hooray for sovereignty! Now Karzai just has to claw back sovereignty from the Brits…
• After a twist of their diplomatic testicles, the Italian government also learned the value of honoring their word and respecting Indian sovereign authority. Hooray for sovereignty! (Was it really a good idea for Italy to pick a fight with a country in which the most powerful person happens to be an Italian born woman?)
• Indian officials must also be happy this week to note that US Republicans and Democrats have nearly the same high opinion of India and nearly the same low regard for Pakistan.  More troubling though is the increasingly negative attitude toward Afghanistan.
• Finally, as if the Cultural Revolution wasn’t bad enough, now the Fracking Revolution is coming to China.

Image: “Peeps contemplating Africa,” by Susan Cohen.