Welcome to the Daily Humanity Dispatch!

“The Middle Ages are coming back in many ways,” historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the Sapiens series, recently warned. Like many of us, he worries about this return to darker times. But the question remains: can we, as humans, do anything about it?

Covering wars, terrorism and human rights abuses in the field — from Ukraine to Iraq, from Russia to Turkey — I was often struck by how little people understood the initial decisions or events that triggered a crisis, and how this ignorance sometimes led to devastating consequences. Human bias often shields us from seeking out more information than we can handle. As we say in Eastern Europe: the less you know, the better you sleep.

As crises unfold, many people freeze, unable to think straight or act decisively. Again and again, I hear civic educators, analysts, and journalists — mostly intellectuals from the left and center-left — lament that, for some reason, “we are always two steps behind” a crisis: unprepared, defenseless, and with no exit strategy..

Years of reporting on crises and working with organizations and leaders on safety strategies and risk assessment taught me an important truth: you can’t win without action. Refusing to make a decision is often the worst decision of all. Falling two steps behind is precisely the result of avoiding informed choices and deliberate action. If we don’t want the mindset of the Middle Ages to dictate today’s world, we need to start figuring out what we can do — without waiting for governments, the United Nations, or someone we assume is braver than ourselves.

That’s why I am excited to introduce this newsletter, the Daily Humanity Dispatch. Its mission is to be your source of clarity in the age of anxiety — a weekly platform of intelligence and essays dedicated to war, defense, peace-building, and resilience. It has been created to help you navigate the most difficult and unsettling aspects of our world — the harsh realities where conflicts unfold in real time, and where it’s often unclear what can be done.

We are able to restore a sense of control over the world order by:

• Monitoring open and closed sources on defense, arms deals, resilience techniques, and peacebuilding solutions and signals, distilling the most interesting points to 
• bring you essays from both well-established and rising-star intellectuals and leaders.

• Sharing step-by-step guides, templates, and frameworks for assessing risks, as well as building actionable strategies and resilience techniques.

We believe that those navigating today’s geopolitical, humanitarian, and security challenges deserve more depth, relevance, and factfulness. 

The Dispatch is  made possible thanks to the supporters of the Daily Humanity Foundation — a frontline, mission-driven organization working across borders to strengthen resilience and strategic awareness — and by Maira, our contextual AI monitoring and intelligence engine. If you want to sponsor the publication, check out what we can offer you here.

That’s the gist — let’s get to it! Just make sure that you have ✉️ subscribed for weekly dispatches to help you think sharper, act wiser, and lead with context. We will always keep you informed and focused.

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Talk soon,
Katerina Sergatskova and the Daily Humanity Dispatch team