Read about the Polish woman whom activist Justyna Wydrzyńska helped to have an abortion. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about the Polish woman whom activist Justyna Wydrzyńska helped to have an abortion.

Polish abortion rights activist Justyna Wydrzyńska was convicted last month of “intent to aid” an abortion. Wydrzyńska had a pack of abortion pills sent to an anonymous woman’s home. This week, that anonymous woman told [[link removed]] her story to the Nation, in “her own words, for the first time.” The woman, whom the Nation calls Ania, wanted her pregnancy but her symptoms were severe. On visiting her doctor, she learned she was pregnant with twins. She said, “in my previous pregnancy, a singular pregnancy, I was hospitalized three times with the diagnosis of hyperemesis gravidarum — an uncontrollable severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy — and spent about a month in the hospital. This time…I was quite sure that the symptoms would be even more severe to the point where I was fearing for my life.” In the following weeks, she was violently ill, hospitalized, and became depressed. She decided to terminate the pregnancy. And so she sought out abortion pills and, eventually, Wydrzyńska entered the story and sent her the pills, which were discovered by her now-ex partner before Ania could ingest them. She ended up inducing a miscarriage, but not with pills, and less safely. Even though she ended up in the hospital again, she felt she had saved her own life. Ania concluded, “if it had been me who found out that there was a woman in an unwanted pregnancy who was simply begging for abortion pills, I would have given the tablets to this woman, regardless of and no matter what criminal liability is attached to it, because I know that an unwanted pregnancy is torture.”

we are star stuff

Within Earth sciences, some are pushing to rethink humans’ relationships to one another and our planet — and the wider universe.

Writing in Noema, science studies scholar Boris Shoshitaishvili describes [[link removed]] three visions of planetary humankind: the noosphere (“this vision of humankind as an expansive and potentially mindful world-embracing layer provides more than a spatial description of how humans have spread around much of the Earth’s surface”); the “Anthropocene” (“officially proposed as the new geological epoch we inhabit, a time when human activity is pushing the Earth toward potentially catastrophic planetary disruption. Humankind in the Anthropocene is not a sphere but a geological force destabilizing an ancient system”); and “Gaia theory” (which, per Shoshitaishvili, “offers a third planetary vision, one in which human beings are ambivalent members of an immense living body, a self-regulating planet-sized superorganism called Gaia, after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth”).

Shoshitaishvili writes that each of these theories has something to offer in how we humans think of ourselves in relation to the planets because: “Each positions human beings in a specific planetary context underpinned by an ancient metaphor and its poetry: the cosmic sphere, the world force, the collective body. Their poetics may be the first hints of the planet’s growing symbolic presence in human life.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Straining Relations

Israel’s violence toward Muslims at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is testing the strength of Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel, which many in Jordanian civil society oppose, Dalia Hatuqa writes [[link removed]] in Jewish Currents.

Hatuqa notes that the “increase in tensions comes as the actions of Israel’s new right-wing governing coalition are already putting pressure on relations with Jordan.” She uses Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s speech in Paris on Mar. 20, 2023, where he claimed that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people,” from a podium draped in a map of Israel that included the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and most of Jordan as an example of the vision of the country that the far-right government holds. And that vision has negative historical connotations to many Jordanians, as Hatuqa explains.

Jordan’s working relationship with Israel was “deeply unpopular” to begin with. Hauqa writes, “80% of respondents in Jordan said the issue of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories was of critical importance to them. Palestinians compose 60% of the population in Jordan, having been driven across the Jordan River in the 1948 and 1967 wars.” And, “While the Smotrich incident hit one nerve in Jordan, the recent violence against worshipers at Al-Aqsa hit another. Israel’s repeated violations of the fragile status quo that governs Jerusalem’s holy sites is a longtime point of tension.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Winning the Peace

Ukraine is locked in a war it did not choose with Russia in order to preserve its national sovereignty. But a new paper makes the case that, long before that war began, Ukraine was trying to assert its independence internationally: not with war, but through peacekeeping.

Writing in Foreign Policy Analysis, Madalina Dobrescu argues [[link removed]] “that states’ contributions to peace operations can be related to attempts at acquiring a positive identity in the international arena through membership in highly ranked groups.”

Dobrescu focuses on Ukraine in particular because “Ukraine's significant peacekeeping engagement in the first two decades following independence represents an intriguing case of an emerging state positioning itself in the international and regional systems, which makes it a relevant case study to explore.”

“Ukraine became independent in an international system that initially discouraged its emergence as a new state and subsequently questioned its permanence as a new international actor,” explains Dobrescu. “Therefore, the main preoccupation of Ukraine’s foreign policy in the years following independence” was to define and assert its sovereignty. “Specifically, Ukraine sought to pursue this goal through a two-fold strategy: gaining recognition for its newly acquired independent status and achieving separateness from Russia…Thus, Ukraine’s first foreign policy doctrine stated that the young country attached ‘primary importance to the peacekeeping activities of UN bodies,’ which it regarded as ‘increasing the role and influence of the Ukrainian state in the world.’” Per Dobrescu, Ukrainian decision-makers in the early 1990s saw UN peacekeeping contributions as a way for Ukraine to bolster its self-image both internally and externally.

That is not to say that this has been without challenges. As Dobrescu writes, “it is precisely the reference to Ukraine’s national identity and its unsettled nature, oscillating between — and trying to reconcile — east and west, that has rendered NATO and US-led multinational operations highly controversial among domestic elites and the public.” However, a reader might note that both are decidedly less controversial now that the country is engulfed in all-out war with Russia.

Dobrescu acknowledges that peacekeeping participation wasn’t Ukraine’s only or even main method for building such status, “nor was achieving status the exclusive motivation for engaging in peacekeeping.”

Still, she concludes, “This article has sought to show that states engage in peacekeeping for reputational reasons not merely because ‘status matters,’ but in order to achieve a positive social identity in the international system.” Dobrescu observes something else, too: “the potential for peacekeeping policies to disrupt the international order and change the status hierarchy is an important finding and should be explored further, as it goes against the common understanding of peacekeeping as supporting the status quo.”

Ukraine wasn’t just helping to keep the peace. It was changing it.

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Sam Fouad argued [[link removed]] that China is proving a counterweight to the United States in part through BRICS, its partnership with Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa. “The bloc has been making moves to establish itself as an alternative choice in the global economy, pitting itself against current global financial institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the United Nations — the reigning, though perhaps declining, multilateral institutions, which are all dominated by the United States and the West,” Fouad explained. China, Fouad wrote, has been supplementing these efforts with bilateral engagements. Still, Fouad cautioned, China “has plenty of work to do with current BRICS members if it is to succeed in building this coalition of the Global South to counterbalance the United States and the West.”

John Isaacs looked [[link removed]] at the return of nuclear hawks. “Since the beginning of the nuclear age, nuclear hawks and US government agencies that build and maintain nuclear weapons have issued study after study ‘justifying’ continued arsenal modernization and growth, even as other government offices have issued grim outlooks for the consequences of a nuclear war,” he wrote. Now, per Isaacs, the nuclear warriors are using challenges from Russia and China to push for their cause: more nuclear weapons, even as “nongovernmental organizations continue to detail the gravest consequences of a nuclear exchange for global health, the climate, and the fate of humanity.”

Durrie Bouscaren took [[link removed]] readers to Antakya, which had been leveled by the earthquakes that hit southern Turkey. According to Bouscaren, two months later, “Though many residents have left the city to escape the risk of aftershocks, many remain to mourn, offer support and rebuild.” Almost everyone there is living in a tent or converted shipping container, Bouscaren reported. In tent camps, children can go to school for one hour a day. Still, some are beginning to put the city back together again.” Throughout the daylight hours, debris is cleared and packed onto trucks, which are driven out of town and dumped along the highway. Tall mechanical lifts, which spent the first weeks of the disaster pressed into service to rescue survivors, now line up to the rickety husks of apartment buildings as people salvage furniture from their damaged homes,” Bouscaren wrote, adding, “Climbing up into these apartment blocks is dangerous work, but it pays well.”

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

We are Barbie girls, destroyers of worlds [[link removed]].

Whale skull [[link removed]]? For spring? Groundbreaking.

Must love [[link removed]] medieval dogs.

A danger [[link removed]] to all rat tsars.

Where’s the lie [[link removed]]?

Say what you will about Gerry Adams and Joe Biden…they found [[link removed]] their angles under soft lighting.

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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.

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