NEWS FLASH: TAYLOR AND FRANCIS TO REPUBLISH (what should have been a) CLASSIC WORK OF GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

The Taylor and Francis Group announced today that it will be reissuing Food Fights: International Regimes and the Politics of Agricultural Trade Disputes by Renee Marlin-Bennett. Food Fights was originally published in 1993 by Gordon and Breach, a firm acquired by Taylor and Francis. The reissue will be in the Routledge Revivals Series. The book will be available in hardback and eBook formats, with paperback forthcoming.

The richly theoretical and empirical study of overlapping and interpenetrating trade regimes and the manifestation of norm conflicts among those regimes in agricultural trade disputes is widely held (by Marlin-Bennett) to be the best early example of what later came to be termed "constructivism." Marlin-Bennett's work is most closely aligned with the Onufian approach to rule-based constructivism.

Shamefully ignored by the scholarly community when it was initially released, Food Fights is now expected to appear on every doctoral general examination reading list in political science and international relations. This will be the "must know" book that every scholar will have read or will have pretended to read.

It might be rumored that Taylor and Francis is in negotiation with Spark Notes, which might be expressing interest in producing a study guide version of Food Fights. (Or then maybe not.)

International relations scholars should watch for the forthcoming August 2009 release of Food Fights: International Regimes and the Politics of Agricultural Trade Disputes. An anonymous source (probably Marlin-Bennett) confirms that the last one to read the book will be a rotten egg.

(But the anonymous source agrees that it's OK to skip the inferential statistics chapter.)

Asked for a comment, Marlin-Bennett said that she was pleased that her book once again has a chance of being noticed by the scholarly community. (Of course, hell might also freeze over.) Questioned about the asterisk that appeared above her head as she made this reply, the author heaved a somewhat histrionic sigh. "Taylor & Francis's reissue means that I can't just give it away on the Internet. If I could just scan it and post it on line, then more scholars would end up reading bits (so to speak) of Food Fights in their students' plagiarized term papers. Some non-zero proportion of their profs would Google text strings from the term paper and -- oila! -- they would discover this absolutely brilliant (if I say so myself) text."

Informa PLC, the parent company of Taylor and Francis, declined 1.89% today on the London Stock Exchange. It is rumored that proceeds from sales of the soon-to-be reissued Marlin-Bennett classic will increase Informa's profitability significantly (or marginally, or not at all, or might actually lose them a few cents).

Marlin-Bennett's second book, Knowlege Power: Intellectual Property, Information, and Privacy (Lynne Reinner Publishers), actually deals with copyright, the public domain, and how information might be sequestered rather than made more available by intellectual property rules.