Evolution Meets International Relations

I had been planning to write about building online communities this week, but events got in the way. I’ll get there next week.

I got pulled back into rethinking global peacebuilding which has been at the heart of my work since I cut my political teeth in the anti-war movements of the 1960s and then a political scientist turned peacebuilder.

As regular readers know, I’ve been focusing on American domestic issues for the last decade or so. Then, my new friend David Sloan Wilson met Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the two of them decided to host a two-day workshop in which evolutionary scientists like David would work with international relations experts like Stewart to explore how evolutionary thinking could help (re)shape the way foreign policy makers think about peace. I was invited because I have intellectual feet in both camps amd .

And, because Stewart’s office is directly across the street from mine at the Alliance for Peacebuilding, David suggested that the two of us get together. We already knew that we had friends in common, including two of my friends from grad school, one of whom had been Stewart’s mentor as an undergrad and another with whom he has worked here in DC policy circles.

Then, in preparation for our meeting, I read his latest book, The Sovereignty Wars, which brought me back to my earliest days as a political scientist turned peacebuilder and helped me see why our planned event could be both challenging and productive—and fun.

So, I decided to use this blog post to think through the questions we might talk about in the fall.  They fall into six categories, half of which deal with the questions that brought the two of them together, while the other half might be of interest to the people I typically work with who are neither evolutionary thinkers like Wilson nor mainstream foreign policy makers/intellectuals like Patrick.

Evolutionary Approaches to International Relations

As a student and in my sixteen years teaching at Colby College, I largely stayed away from international relations. I knew that the firewall that separated it from my specialty–comparative politics—made no sense. However, though I hadn’t yet crystallized my thinking, I sensed that many premises underlying IR didn’t ring true—especially the importance of rationality, the assumption that the state had to be the only actor that mattered, and the largely ahistorical nature of cutting edge research in the field.

Those qualms were only deepened when I was asked to teach IR courses at George Mason and Reading (in the UK), got more deeply in peacebuilding professionally, and abandoned a planned IR textbook I was asked to write because so much of the field just felt off target. Even after I left the classroom, I kept up with the best policy related writing in the field.

Still, I hadn’t fully realized how far scholars like Stewart had moved toward asking some of the same questions I had, three of which I hope we put at the heart of our workshop.

Are we in a dramatically new historical period?  Any serious scholar acknowledges that the modern state system is relatively new and a product of the modern era. Strangely enough, they don’t ask if the new historical realities of globalization and the transnational challenges that come with it (climate change, immigration) could take us beyond state-centered schemes and their focus on national interests defined largely in geopolitical terms. No evolutionary analyst would argue that the entire international system could replaced in the clichéd blink of an eye, but it seems foolish to assume that we can’t imagine and/or create alternatives.

I particularly enjoyed listening to my wife and Stewart discuss foreign policy. He has spent his career in policy making circles, while Gretchen spent hers in the open source intelligence community. Both had reached the conclusion that it was time to consider paradigm-shift level changes in the way global issues are dealt with. It’s not just the two of them. In other words, one of our goals should be to help mainstream international relations experts see the “big picture items” that so worry people like Wilson and me while also helping the people he and I work with develop a better sense of the realities of foreign policy making and how they constrain responses to those very same “big picture items.”

Is the commons so tragic? Much of social science—and not just international relations—revolves around what Garrett Hardin referred to as the Tragedy of the Commons. He basically argued that economic logic and even human nature were such that it would never be anyone’s self (or national) interest to manage a commonly held resource like a fishery or the earth’s environment for the good of a whole. That logic also holds for international relations—at least as most mainstream theorists argue.

David and ProSocial World, however, draw on Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for managing shared resources which won her the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (even though she was a political scientist). I’m intrigued by how the disparate group of thinkers we will be gathering deals with her ideas about developing new cultural norms and institutions that make the international system more cooperative without dramatically threatening things like national sovereignty.

How quickly can we move toward adopting the norms and institutions she uncovered in her empirical research? How can we adapt and adopt them in international relations for which there is no equivalent of a national state that can set binding rules?

How does evolution fit in? Finally, I’m wondering how we can apply the core principles that David and his colleagues stress about evolution. I’ve been convinced that the patterns he discusses—introducing variation, selecting the fittest responses, and then replicating them—could be made to apply in lots of settings. Research done by Stuart Kauffman and popularized by Stephen Johnson about the “adjacent possible” has shown that paradigm shifts can happen through a series of cumulative incremental changes. Similarly, Dave Snowden has done pathbreaking research on how you start by “probing” complex systems, sense what works, and respond accordingly, which is a slightly different way of thinking in terms of variation, selection, and replication.

But how do you do any of this in international relations where, again, there is no overarching authority? And where the stakes are so high as we see today in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and more? And when we really do need to act quickly on such issues as climate change or migration?

Work done by David and his colleagues who will be coming to the workshop suggest that we can give positive answers to questions like the ones I’ve posed in this section and that social or cultural evolution can happen more quickly than our stereotypical impressions of physical evolution might suggest.

And My Tribe

I don’t think David realized that policy makers like Stewart Patrick and most people in the AfP orbit think and act quite differently.

The hundred feet or so between our offices on Massachusetts Avenue sometimes feels like a chasm. I’ve been a peacebuilding practitioner and political scientist for half a century, and I’m shocked at how far apart the two communities can be.

To cite but one specific example, I’ve never been happy that professional peacebuilders in academia and in civil society organizations rarely know much about the mainstream international relations analyses that people like Stewart Patrick use. We may end up rejecting those paradigms, but unless and until we are comfortable speaking their language, we will remain on the intellectual and political outside looking in on the “rooms where it happens.”

So, I’m delighted that ProSocial World and David have given us an opportunity to work people like Stewart who see that conventional paradigms are running out of steam.

Shouldn’t we think in evolutionary terms, too? When I’m being honest with myself, I have to admit that my peacebuilding colleagues can be at least as ahistorical as the IR community. More importantly, even those ofus who have read the work of evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker have the evolutionary side of their work short shrift.

Indeed, one of the main reasons I was drawn to Wilson’s work was the need to bring evolutionary thinking in general and the fact that we could be charting the next phase in our social or cultural evolution as we face the challenges for the twenty-first century. In fact, when Stewart and David asked Gretchen and me for names of academic peacebuilders who incorporated evolutionary thinking, systems thinking whether through Ostrom’s principles or not, and complexity science into their work, we were hard pressed to identify more than a handful.

Why don’t we experiment with the new paradigm? At the same time, because our work tends to be locally based and rarely has national let along global implications, we could experiment with tools that allow us to experiment, select promising outcomes, and then replicate them in ways that national level policy makers cannot. Similarly, our work lends itself more easily to projects that stress spreading new cultural norms, adopting new modes of thinking, self-awareness, flexibility, and the like.

Can we get into the “rooms where it happens?” David was also surprised when I told him that we don’t regularly hang out with policy wonks (a term I see as a compliment) like Stewart. Sure, we come together at meetings and often work together on projects like the passage of the Global Fragility Act in 2020. More generally, I’ve seen our influence over the policy making process expand dramatically since I joined AfP’s board twenty years ago. Still, we aren’t invited in the Hamiltonian “room where it happens” anywhere near as often or as routinely as analysts like Stewart. So, I see this workshop and the work that stems from it as a major step forward for peacebuilding as we continue shrinking the chasm that is Massachusetts Ave NW.

Next Steps

We won’t hold the workshop until mid-October, so a lot can change between now and then. Still, it’s hard to imagine how it could be anything but stimulating and enjoyable. I also don’t think that there is any chance that we won’t continue working together.

So, check back here in mid-October for an update on what happens when evolutionary scientists meet international relations experts.

NEXT TIME: Building constructive communities for social change on line.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.