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International Cooperation Against All Odds – The Ultrasocial World

February 3, 2024

Professor Mai’a K. Davis Cross, Author

Oxford University Press, 2024

International Cooperation Against All Odds: The Ultrasocial World recasts how we understand international relations through an examination of how the human evolutionary predisposition to be “ultrasocial” as a species impacts which political ideas succeed, transform, manipulate, and inspire on a global scale.

At a time when pessimism about our current world order is at an all-time high, this book overturns widespread assumptions that international relations is mainly about conflict, power, and national self-interest. In the last 10-20 years, scientists have discovered that as a species, we are biologically hard-wired, soft-wired, and pre-wired to be other-regarding and cooperative. Humans are an ultrasocial species, and yet this predisposition is completely ignored in governments across the world. Political leaders, experts, and the media have cultivated a myopic vision of global conflict, feeding an obsession on crises of the moment, rather than recognizing frequent and significant breakthroughs in peaceful cooperation and overall trends in the decline of violence.