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… read about the war of printed words being waged over libraries in Ukraine.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he set Russia at war not just against the nation of Ukraine but the concept of Ukrainian identity. “Beyond the widespread looting of Ukrainian artifacts by Russians, the Ministry of Culture has reported that more than 528 of the country’s fifteen thousand public libraries have been damaged or destroyed,” reports Carol Schaeffer [[link removed]]. “Even small institutions, like the museum in the sleepy hamlet of Skovorodynivka dedicated to the eighteenth-century Ukrainian poet and philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda, whose face is on the five-hundred hryvnia bill, have been targeted by rockets.” Schaeffer’s story, reported across many small libraries and cultural institutions in Ukraine, is about the durability of Ukrainian identity, and it is about books. Widespread literacy in Ukraine was expanded and promoted under the USSR, which for a time meant parallel learning in Ukrainian and Russian, before a hard pivot to exclusively teaching in Moscow’s Russian. Now, people are volunteering Russian-language books, old and new alike, to be pulped and recycled, turned into material of different cultural heft. Aleksandr Kabanov, a Ukrainian writer based in Kyiv, maintained that Russia does not have a monopoly over the Russian language and told Schaeffer, “Language is never to blame for anything. People are always to blame. Specific people.”

force perspective

A painting is a concentrated form of information transference and the how and why of its composition reveal a lot about the painter’s intended message and audience. At Medium, art historian Mary Rose examines “ The Battle Map Landscapes of Lambert de Hondt [[link removed]],” a trio of paintings depicting events in the Franco-Dutch war of the 1670s, where King Louis XIV led an invasion of the Netherlands until suing for peace in 1676. What stands out in the paintings, and are worthy of revisit in a modern eye, is how de Hondt portrays both the expected figures of battle, kings, and entourage against a landscape rich in overhead detail and unlike any ground-level perspective.

“The easy identification of Louis XIV and the clear, diagrammatic nature of the image due to De Hondt’s unusual perspective invites us to imagine a seventeenth century audience treating the paintings like enlarged battle maps… They reflect on the war, imagining how it might continue should the treaty fall through,” writes Rose.

It is a useful reference point for how graphics, built to reflect a war in real time, may endure through history, the way a Google Earth collage of trench lines and changing fronts may be paired with anthropomorphized war machines in modern videos of ongoing conflict.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Against Empires, Plural

Hegemonic though its power may be, the United States is but one nation among many that author evil in the world. Resisting those harms, from accountability to policy changes to wars averted, can mean a whole host of actions by people foreign and domestic. But an honest critique and response to the American empire never needs to turn to the valorization of other countries who have conducted their own internal oppressions and intrusive actions abroad.

“It is undeniable that the United States does interfere in the affairs of sovereign states around the world. But to believe, for instance, that the mass protests in Iran that followed the murder of Mahsa Amini in a Tehran police station were somehow cooked up by the boys in Langley would be akin to believing that the Haitian Revolution was a ‘Spanish psyop’ on the grounds that Toussaint Louverture had accepted a commission in the army of His Most Catholic Majesty King Charles IV,” writes [[link removed]] Djene Rhys Bajalan at Compact Magazine.

Bajalan’s piece is a useful corrective to those who would see anti-imperial salvation in the other actions of unaccountable states. It can also mean, in part, examining empires not just as actions of a country, but as the longstanding built infrastructure for action abroad within a country. Empire is as empire does, and anyone seeking to lessen the power of Empire should look not just at policy choices, but inherited infrastructure of future policy.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE States At Dawn: Part II

People are creatures of geography. From the moment we are born into the world, the shape of the land that surrounds us guides, to greater and lesser degrees, who we meet, what resources we have available, and what our baseline relation is to people nearby who we have yet to meet. This, also, is true for states.

In “ The Fractured-Land Hypothesis [[link removed]],” authors Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Mark Koyama, Youhong Lin, and Tuan-Hwee Sng specifically look at the way various geographies have guided state formation. The researchers start with a spectrum set out between the many medium-sized states of Europe, and the tendency toward a unified central state in China, though these are more anchoring points for the research than a binary set of possibilities.

The Fractured Land hypothesis, the authors note, was largely popularized by author and ornithologist-by-training Jared Diamond. Diamond’s specific arguments have been roundly critiqued; just as one example, agrarian China is at higher elevation and more mountainous than agrarian Europe. In order to test if it is not the overall terrain itself but obstacles between productive regions that matter most, the researchers divided the populated continents (all but Antarctica) into 65,641 regions, each with a radius of 28 km.

“This radius corresponds to the distance a healthy adult travels by foot per day on flat terrain. As a result, a 28-km hexagon roughly represents the surface that the simplest polities can monitor and defend with rudimentary Bronze Age technologies,” the authors write, allowing them to place a human context within usable geographic limits.

The authors then calculated a range of variables, such as change in elevation over a hexagon and temperature extremes. On top of this model is then added a model of the highest possible caloric yield from available agriculture within a cell. With the world modeled, the researchers then let statelets engage in competition. Over time, the simulation creates a map that, while not mapping exactly to the flow of history, consolidates states on the scale and limits familiarity to how we understand the past.

It “is insufficient to compare average levels of ruggedness between China and Europe. Instead, what matters is the distribution of mountains and other geographical obstacles. While China is, indeed, more rugged than Europe, the location of geographical barriers promoted faster political unification in China,” write the authors. “Take away topography, and we continue to observe more rapid unification in China. Only removing both geographical barriers and land productivity ensures that China and Europe unify at a comparable pace.”

The authors go into detail highlighting its limits in modeling both African and American state formation, where finer calibration or different methods are needed to spark state consolidation where it actually happened. Getting to model the whole of the world, and not just parts of it, will take time and effort to incorporate other variables, like military or agricultural technology, state capacity, epidemic diseases, climate change, migration, and even cultural attitudes toward statehood or religion.

Ultimately, the authors note, the model developed was able to reproduce the two variants in state consolidation theorized at the start. For now, the model can simulate some fractured lands. It remains to be seen if more accurately modeling the rest of the world will allow the same rules to produce the initial hypothesized results.

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Gerry Hadden trekked [[link removed]] to the Well of Tears, on a mountain ten miles from Granada, in Spain. The well is an enduring part of a long-established and still somewhat functional irrigation system, built by the Moors in Spain during their 800-year rule over the area. It’s a gravity-fed watering system, where canals known as acequia passively distribute flow, sustaining orchards and fields. Archaeologist Elena Correa from the University of Granada and her team, along with hundreds of volunteers, spent the last year restoring and cleaning this acequia, wrote Hadden, and the water now flows almost back to Granada itself.

Rosie Berman researched [[link removed]] American support for accountability in security state institutions. Berman served as lead researcher for the Accountable Security Project, jointly undertaken by the Center for Civilians in Conflict and the Stimson Center. “Americans believe that accountability for harm is critical for achieving US domestic and foreign policy priorities, including strengthening democracy,” wrote Berman. This research found that the majority of Americans support accountability across both domestic law enforcement and military operations abroad. “A further 73% agreed or strongly agreed that the strength of American democracy depends on holding law enforcement officers accountable for their actions,” Berman wrote.

Halima Gikandi reported [[link removed]] on the collapsing medical situation in Sudan, as the violent rift between the country’s armed forces leaves a hollow state and civilians in the lurch. "We are right now approaching a complete shutdown of the health system because of continuous firing and bombing in the streets in Khartoum,” Dr. Alaa Eldin Awad Nogud, a surgeon in Khartoum and spokesperson for the Sudanese Professionals Organization, told Gikandi. The situation is unsafe for ambulances to retrieve the wounded from the streets, leading to tragic deaths that then become disease-exacerbating uncleared corpses. Without a ceasefire, getting care to civilians will remain extremely fraught.

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

Automobile provokes a constitutional crisis [[link removed]].

Intentionally or not, the long Enlightenment created an unchecked papacy [[link removed]].

The right to arm oneself against metaphorical bears [[link removed]].

The snooker table was transformed through protest to the color of a dead planet [[link removed]].

The market for manmade horrors beyond comprehension [[link removed]] never ceases.

Twitter is dying, but its truest champion is here [[link removed]] to bring billionaires and ocean water together.

When it comes to documenting the Poster’s Disease of Eastern European autocrats [[link removed]], it’s hard to beat Critical State guest author Emily Tamkin’s tweets.

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton 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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