External publications

The evolution of human cooperation: lessons learned for the future of global governance

Messner, Dirk / Silke Weinlich
External Publications (2016)

in: Dirk Messner / Silke Weinlich (eds.), Global cooperation and the human factor in international relations, London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 3-46

ISBN: 978-1-13891-299-1
Information

In this article we first describe the various crises in world politics that, despite a pressing need for cooperation, are mostly characterized by logjams. We show that many scholars from the discipline of International Relations deem these crises as durable and unchangeable. We then contrast this rather gloomy finding with the optimism concerning cooperation that can be gleaned from the latest knowledge from other academic disciplines on the fundamentals of human behavior and the dynamics of human civilization. At the heart of this article is the question of what we can learn from disciplines such as neuroscience, evolutionary anthropology, cognitive psychology, or evolutionary biology that will be of benefit to global cooperation.