Site Guide

War in Context started as a news aggregation site and has become a blog. Text from other sources appears in block quotes (light gray background, slightly indented). The rest of the material is written by the editor/author of this site, Paul Woodward.

Readers are welcome to add their own comments. (Please first read the commenting guidelines.)

There are several ways of digging into the material here:

1. Using Site Search in the right sidebar.
This is for specific queries. For instance, if you’re looking for posts making reference to drone attacks in Pakistan, a suitable querie would be drone pakistan. If you used the exact phrase “drone attacks in Pakistan” (words within quotation marks are treated as a phrase) then the search results will only include occurrences of that exact phrase. For the best results choose unambiguous terms or phrases. Queries are not case sensitive.

2. Using Categories in the left sidebar and under each post.
Every post is “tagged” with one or more categories. Clicking a category link will return a list of all the posts in that category. The categorization system used here has five top-level categories:

a. Context — Topics that resonate with the global perspective of this site, but are not directly related to primary focus of the site.
b. Editor’s comments — Up until February 2010, these comments were labeled “Editor’s comment”. Now, pretty much everything that appears outside block quotes is my commentary.
c. Entities — organizations including some of their leading actors
d. Issues — from Christian Zionism to the war on terrorism
e. Lands — territorial areas without distinction between those that do or don’t possess internationally recognized sovereignty.

Although some categories may seem redundant these are helpful for search engines indexing the site.

3. Links to recent posts and recent comments appear in the left sidebar.