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From Foreign Policy, an article by Daniel Drezner (professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, contributing editor to Foreign Policy, and author of the forthcoming Theories of International Politics and Zombies):

Night of the Living Wonks

Toward an international relations theory of zombies

There are many sources of fear in world politics — terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, it is striking how an unnatural problem has become one of the fastest-growing concerns in international relations. I speak, of course, of zombies.

For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse, with a strong desire to eat human flesh — the kind of ghoul that first appeared in George Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, and which has been rapidly proliferating in popular culture in recent years (far upstaging its more passive cousins, the reanimated corpses of traditional West African and Haitian voodoo rituals). Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.

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Read the full article– and a marvelously metaphorical article it is– here.

As we reassure ourselves that we with no brains needn’t fear their being eaten, we might recall that it is with this date in 622 that the Islamic calendar begins. As Wikipedia explains:

In 638, Abu-Musa al-Asha’ari, one of the officials of the second Caliph Umar in Basrah, complained about the absence of any dating system in the correspondence he received from Umar, making it difficult for him to determine which instructions were most recent. This report convinced Umar of the need to introduce a calendar system for Muslims. After debating the issue with his Counsellors, he decided to start the calendar with the date of Muhammad’s arrival at Madina tun Nabi (known as Yathrib, before Muhammad’s arrival).

The Islamic calendar numbering of the years thus began with the month of Muharram in the year of Muhammad’s arrival at the city of Medina. According to calculations, the first day of the first year corresponded to Friday, July 16, 622 (even though the actual emigration took place in September).

Because of the Hijra event, the calendar was named the Hijra calendar, and it’s dates distinguished by the suffix “AH.”

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