The DGLP invites you to attend our first event of the Spring 2025 semester: a talk by Dr. Mai'a Davis Cross of Northeastern University on her latest book that offers an optimistic global vision, despite it all: Cooperation Despite All Odds: The Ultrasocial World (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Cooperation Despite All Odds: The Ultrasocial World
Director of the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures; Dean's Professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Diplomacy, Northeastern University
Book Description from the Publisher:
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.
This book shows how time and time again our ultrasocial predisposition has pushed us towards big ideas that inspire and bring us together around the power of possibility. Featuring original research on international cooperation in outer-space exploration, European Union integration, nuclear weapons, and climate change, among other examples, Mai'a K. Davis Cross shows ultrasociality at work in a range of contexts. Tracing the path from social neuroscience and evolutionary biology (among others) to the power of ideas to international agreements, International Cooperation Against All Odds opens up an entirely new understanding of world politics. If we recognize our nature as a species and the potential we have to work together, we can start to transform institutions, and devise policies that take advantage of this. The book ends with a roadmap to promote more international cooperation, and eventually, a more stable, peaceful world order.
Short Speaker Bio:
Mai'a K. Davis Cross is the Dean's Professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Diplomacy and Director of the Center for International Affairs & World Cultures at Northeastern University. She served as Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs for the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern from 2021 to 2024. Professor Cross's research investigates the long-term driving forces behind breakthroughs in international cooperation at both the elite and societal levels. She focuses in particular on European Union and transatlantic security, international cooperation in outer space exploration (including space diplomacy), and public diplomacy. Her current research, supported by a major grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York, is Transnational Political Networks and the Future of Global Order, which will result in around 20 new case studies, including the global network catalyzed by the Polynesian Voyaging Society (Hokule'a). Professor Cross holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, and a bachelor's degree in Government from Harvard University. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She regularly engages in public-oriented commentary through interviews and op-eds in The Washington Post, Scientific American, Newsweek, NBC, BBC, The Independent, Vanity Fair, and Vox, among others.
