When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Welcome to Mid-Afternoon Map, our exclusive members-only newsletter that provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history from the Caucasus to the Carolinas. Subscribers can look forward to interesting takes on good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.***For the last century or two, the nation-state has been the global gold standard as far as stateliness was concerned. Almost every state claimed to embody the political aspirations of a particular nation: France was the state of the French nation, Turkey was the state of the Turkish nation, and so on. The reality, of course, was never this simple, and things get weird quickly when you scratch the surface. Scholars have churned out no end of books asking how peasants became Frenchmen and who, for that matter, is a Turk. Still, the theory was simple enough: Nation=state.Recently, however, there has been a rhetorical escalation. No longer content to be ordinary nation-states, some of the world’s most nationalist states have been elevating themselves to the status of civilizational states. For rising powers like India and China, or even smaller aspirants like Turkey and Egypt, claiming to embody a unique and ancient civilization apparently offers a sense of grandeur that the nation alone cannot.There’s an ideological stance here as well. For non-Western advocates of the civilizational state model, the idea of the nation itself is tainted by its European origins. In this view, civilizations are not just bigger but also more authentic cultural units for non-European states. Better yet, if you claim to be an entire civilization unto yourself, you can write off any supposedly universal values you don’t like as products of Western civilization. In India, members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party have argued their opponents’ socialism represents Western imports alien to Indian civilization. In China, the Chinese Communist Party