If academic and policy writing had a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, I would probably be diagnosed with acute Graphomania Praecox—the compulsive urge to formalize every geopolitical tremor, energy shock, or philosophical puzzle into a 20-page working paper and upload it directly to ResearchGate before the ink of history has even dried.
Case in point: last spring, my co-author (an attentive AI interlocutor) and I published From Tension to Conflagration: The Middle East War and the Early Emergence of the Age of Tension. The ink was barely set on the PDF before shifts in maritime friction, maritime choke points, and multipolar realpolitik demanded an Annex C.
Looking across my drive on this quiet holiday, it is worth asking a candid question: What is structurally wrong with my publication strategy?
As it turns out, quite a lot. If you treat research as an iterative, living project rather than a static monument, you inevitably run into three classic flaws of the prolific self-publisher:
1. The Velocity Trap: Faster Than Peer Review, Slower Than a Tweet
Traditional academic peer review is famously glacial: submit today, get reviewer comments in nine months, see print in 2028 when the war you analyzed is already in the history textbooks.
The alternative—publishing open-access working drafts and rapid updates on ResearchGate—gives you agility. But it creates an awkward velocity paradox. You are analyzing deep, long-wave structural transformations (The Age of Tension, institutional trust architectures, civilizational narratives), yet you are constantly tempted to update them like a rolling newsroom blog. When the world shifts every week, when do you close the document and say: “This stands as a snapshot of its time”?
2. The Granularity Gap: Where Macro Meets the Strait
When you think in broad historical arcs—like our earlier Layered Futures: Thinking Through 2100—the temptation is to explain everything through grand structural dynamics: institutional decay, multipolarity, demographic tides.
The flaw in rapid follow-ups is that reality has a nasty habit of being stubbornly micro. A sweeping thesis about civilizational friction suddenly hinges on whether a specific container line will pay the war-risk insurance premium to transit the Bab-el-Mandeb, or whether a handful of precision interceptors in a naval battery are running low. Big-picture thinkers often risk floating too high above the plumbing, or diving so deep into the week’s tactical updates that they lose the horizon.
3. The “Unbundled Monograph” Syndrome
Prolific writers don’t actually write 50 disconnected papers. They write one gigantic book in 50 disconnected installments.
- On Monday, it’s an essay on democratic accountability architectures.
- On Wednesday, an analysis of oil price cycles and geopolitical shocks.
- On Friday, an update on maritime choke points and multipolar diplomacy.
The flaw isn’t the substance; it’s the distribution architecture. Readers encounter individual fragments floating on ResearchGate or LinkedIn, while the underlying, cohesive architecture—how energy volatility, institutional trust, and asymmetric warfare reinforce one another—remains trapped inside the author’s head (and their hard drive).
The Verdict: Flaw or Feature?
Could one streamline this? Absolutely. I could pause, withhold publication for three years, smooth over every evolving edge, and produce a polished, leather-bound volume that is immaculately peer-reviewed, pristinely formatted, and obsolete on arrival.
Or, one can treat writing in the Age of Tension as an open-source, iterative process: laying down hypotheses, testing them against breaking reality, openly adding Annexes when the world defies the model, and engaging with the argument in public.
It’s messy. It violates traditional academic etiquette. But in an era where the international order itself is being rewritten in real-time, perhaps an evolving working draft is the only honest way to think out loud.
