Read about the need to stop defaulting to military intervention in times of crisis. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about the need to stop defaulting to military intervention in times of crisis.

Writing in the Nation, Nanjala Nyabola describes [[link removed]] a “crisis of imagination in international relations.” “The words ‘do something’ are invoked repeatedly,” Nyabola writes, “but the nature of the ‘something’ is rarely defined. And when faced with threats to human life, the tendency is to invoke military intervention. But soldiers are trained to fight, and when placed among civilians, reports of all kinds of abuses arise with alarming regularity.” Nyabola looks at Haiti, which has been “the site of these interventions enough times that the promise that the US military ‘will fix things’ is almost laughable.” But Nyabola goes a step further than analyzing the past, arguing that “Military intervention is lazy international relations. Its proponents ask superficial questions about the crises at hand and respond with what is often the only tool that has guaranteed funding and ideological support.” More nuance is needed. And more imagination is, too. “These changes would have to start as far back as changing what we teach about governments and politics at schools and universities. It is not small or easy work, and these are unashamedly utopian appeals. But utopias can be road maps, guiding history away from destruction.”

Next in Nigeria

“Buharism is dead,” declares [[link removed]] the headline in Sa’eed Husaini’s piece in Africa Is a Country. Husaini argues that outgoing Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and his administration’s “attempted challenge to neoliberalism has been as ineffective as it has been fraught with contradictions — both those inherent to the nature of the ruling party’s coalition and driven by exogenous economic and political events.”

Husaini makes the case that while it seemed as though Buhari’s All Party Congress (APC) “seemed to represent change in more fundamental ways,” the truth is that “accounting for the Buhari administration’s economic impulse in terms of a progressive inclination within the APC overstates the party’s ideological coherence.” The party is actually a “fragile coalition” within which the self-described “progressives” have historically had less power.

The ideology of the stronger faction, helmed by Buhari, is actually associated with culturally conservative politics. And “while emerging at a moment of global optimism about an alternative to neoliberalism, Buharism sought not a path to an alternative economic order, but Nigeria’s gradual acceptance of the seemingly inevitable fate of economic globalization.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Claiming Chinese Civilization

What we think of as “Chinese civilization” wasn’t really Chinese civilization at all, writes [[link removed]] Inho Choi in Noema. And the real “Chinese civilization” has lessons for the wider world.

“When people refer to a Chinese civilization, they are implicitly making at least one of three related statements about how such a civilization was created: that there was an identifiable group of ancient Chinese people who produced a civilization; or, if not, that it was produced by multiple groups of people who occupied the Chinese heartland; or that there must have existed a fixed set of cultural essences shared among various groups, whoever their original creators were,” Choi writes. But none of those things, per Choi, is historically true. The groups were diverse and varied, the tradition goes beyond Chinese borders, and a “fixed set of Chinese cultural essences” is difficult to name.

“Strictly speaking, the singular ‘Chinese’ civilization consists of plural ‘Chinese’ civilizations, including Korean, Japanese, American, and many other claimants to this constructed tradition,” Choi writes. And Choi suggests making claims might help “to close the gap between the planetary effects of human action and the national and individual mode of organizing such actions.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE An Elephant Never Forgets, Sometimes Sheds Insight

New research suggests [[link removed]] that elephants may be self-domesticated, which could tell us not only about the similarity between elephants and humans but also about why humans evolved the way we did.

A theory known as the human self-domestication hypothesis suggests part of what is unique about human behavior — our development of cultures, tools, and languages — came about because of an evolutionary process that did not favor aggression. But that theory is hard to test as so few living beings are self-domesticated.

Enter the elephant, joining bonobos as another species that may also be self-domesticated, as suggested by Limor Raviv, Sarah L. Jacobson, Joshua M. Plotnik, Jacob Bowman, Vincent Lynch, and Antonio Benítez-Burraco, writing in a new article [[link removed]] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They write that “elephants indeed exhibit many of the features associated with self-domestication (e.g., reduced aggression, increased prosociality, extended juvenile period, increased playfulness, socially regulated cortisol levels, and complex vocal behavior.” This, they say, is reinforced by genetic evidence, insofar as “genes positively selected in elephants are enriched in pathways associated with domestication traits and include several candidate genes previously associated with domestication.”

One particularly interesting point of potential proof is “an extended juvenile period and enhanced play behaviors have been hypothesized to be a crucial outcome of self-domestication, contributing in turn to the behavioral changes associated with self-domestication, particularly to cultural niche construction, in a sort of positive feedback loop.” Elephants take longer to develop, and more of what they learn is taught, as opposed to innately known. They also note that “enhanced playfulness in adulthood can counteract tendencies toward dominance, promoting more egalitarian and cooperative behaviors and thus contributing to the sophistication of culture.” Every playful adult elephant is (maybe) a sign of evolutionary success.

The socialization patterns of elephants, the authors argue, “parallel what we find in humans.”

Human self-domestication is thought to have been “triggered by several (potentially interacting) factors, including the reliance on more variable and nonlocal food sources that require more cooperation to obtain, and the adaptation to harsh environmental conditions like those resulting from the Last Glaciation, which increase the need for resource sharing.” They theorize that there were also several potential triggers for elephants, too.

The point isn’t just that we now know more about elephants, though, for pachyderm fans, that is exciting, too. It’s that we might know more about ourselves and how we humans came to be as we are. “If elephants have undergone self-domestication, one can expect to see at least some of human’s unique social and cognitive abilities in elephants as well, especially those associated with cultural niche construction and cultural evolution,” they write. “Our hypothesis for self-domestication in elephants thus has important implications for studying the process and outcomes of cultural evolution, which is seen as one of the most prominent and powerful hallmarks of humanity.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Anna Romandash wrote [[link removed]] about Anastasiya Blyshchyk, whose fiancé, Oleksandr Makhov, was killed in action in Ukraine on May 4, 2022. Makhov had volunteered to serve on the first day of Russia’s all-out assault on Ukraine. Though the two were both journalists, Makhov had experience in war, having served in Donbas in 2015. Blyshchyk went with him to sign up. After his death in July 2022, Blyshchyk went back to the conscription office. This time, she wasn’t accompanying anyone but signing up for war herself. “I did not come to the frontline to die,” she told Romandash. “There is war in my country. We cannot win if we all sit and wait for others to protect us. As we speak, someone is getting a phone call that their loved ones have been killed in action while protecting their country heroically. This is hell.”

Yameen Huq argued [[link removed]] that a lack of restraint is evident in President Joe Biden’s documented cybersecurity strategy. “From a restraint perspective,” Huq wrote, the National Cybersecurity Strategy (NCS) is potentially promising, “recommending investments to improve security without raising tensions while working with states on things like sharing intelligence. But that’s where the good news ends.” Huq warned that since the NCS would use offense to communicate resolve, meaning, “While the NCS overall shows promise for restrainers, its approach to threat disruption needs to be clarified and limited to prevent escalation and blowback.”

Theo Merz shared [[link removed]] a story that is positively cheesy. While a Taste Atlas list of the world’s top 10 cheeses did not include any of France’s offerings but did mention a Polish cheese known as bundz. “The accolade comes amid something of a renaissance for Polish cuisine,” writes Merz. “Bundz, a light, creamy sheep-milk cheese, has been produced in the mountainous south of the country for hundreds of years.” According to one 72-year-old shepherd quoted for the piece, the secret to bundz’s success is that the sheep from which it gets its milk are noshing on high-quality mountain grasses.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Well? Would you [[link removed]]?

Raiders of the lost plot arc [[link removed]].

‘Til death did [[link removed]] these four part.

That time Einstein ethered [[link removed]] Princeton.

Transatlantic tipping truth [[link removed]].

What’s in a name [[link removed]]?

Curb your apathy [[link removed]].

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

Critical State this week is written by guest author Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]