Global Strategy Amidst the Globe’s Cultures: Cultures in Individual Cognition, States and the Global System
“Global Strategy Amidst the Globe’s Cultures: Cultures in Individual Cognition, States and the Global System”
Speaker: Wright, N. (Intelligent Biology)
Date: 5 December 2019
Speaker Session Preview
SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Nicholas Wright (Intelligent Biology) as a part of its Future of Global Competition & Conflict Speaker Series. Dr. Wright’s presentation focused on how the US can make global strategy in a world both vast and rich with cultural diversity. He first stated that ‘global strategy’ involves important activities and interests in all the continents that contain a significant fraction of the world’s population. He clarified that global strategy is not synonymous with grand strategy, and it is not just international strategy, as the global system differs from the sum of its nations. Dr. Wright explained that we can think about the global system through four different dimensions/lenses: a political lens (i.e., the ‘global order’), an economic lens (i.e., the ‘global economic order’), a social lens, and a cultural lens. Dr. Wright focused on the political lens as he discussed his examination of the history of ‘global confrontations’—conflicts that meaningfully involve all of the world’s continents on which significant fractions of the world’s population live. He presented four lessons learned from this examination: 1) Great power confrontations have been increasingly global, and that will likely continue; 2) Great power protagonists have been increasingly culturally non-European; 3) Global system effects matter, and the US must look out particularly for third parties that end up being the real winners of global confrontations; and 4) Whether or not a global dimension to strategy pays dividends depends on identifiable factors (e.g., third parties, self-restraint, loopholes in blockades). Ultimately, Dr. Wright determined that a nation can create a global strategy by 1) adopting a global mindset and 2) by using global system effects, not just actor-specific effects. Next, Dr. Wright discussed why strategy should consider global cultural diversity. He defined culture as the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a group of humans that reflects ‘how things are done around here.’ He then discussed the two deep dives that he conducted on culture, one of which examined culture in an individual’s mind and the other of which examined whether these cognitive differences relate to strategic thinking. To conclude, Dr. Wright stated that strategy should consider global cultural diversity by 1) applying a framework integrating cultural insights from multiple disciplines in order to anticipate competitors’ decision-making and how to influence the global swing states crucial to success in global grey zone competition; and 2) recognizing that cultural commonalties between the world’s humans greatly outweigh differences, but specific differences (e.g. context dependence) can provide operationalizable tools to cause intended, and avoid unintended, effects.
Dr. Wright’s report can also be found at https://www.intelligentbiology.co.uk/s/Wright2019_Glob_Strategy_cultures_v1.pdf
Dr. Nicholas D. Wright (Intelligent Biology)
Dr Nicholas Wright is an affiliated scholar at Georgetown University, honorary research associate at University College London (UCL), Consultant at Intelligent Biology and Fellow at New America. His work combines neuroscientific, behavioural and technological insights to understand decision-making in politics and international confrontations, in ways practically applicable to policy. He leads international, interdisciplinary projects with collaborators in countries including China, the U.S., Iran and the UK. He was an Associate in the Nuclear Policy Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC and a Senior Research Fellow in International Relations at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has conducted work for the UK Government and U.S. Department of Defense. Before this he examined decision-making using functional brain imaging at UCL and in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He was a clinical neurologist in Oxford and at the National Hospital for Neurology. He has published academically (some twenty publications, e.g. Proceedings of the Royal Society), in general publications such as the Atlantic and Foreign Affairs, with the Pentagon Joint Staff (see www.nicholasdwright.com/publications) and has appeared on the BBC and CNN.
Wright received a medical degree from UCL, a BSc in Health Policy from Imperial College London, has Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (UK), has an MSc in Neuroscience and a PhD in Neuroscience both from UCL.
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