The Past, Present and Future of International Cooperation

While war and conflict seem to characterize international politics today, cooperation is far more common. In fact, for thousands of years, humans have demonstrated an impressive (and destructive) capacity to cooperate on mass scales, unlike any other species on the planet. This course will explore this phenomenon by focusing on the following questions: Why do political actors cooperate? How do they cooperate? And under what conditions does cooperation breakdown? To make sense of these questions, this course will investigate historical and modern examples of cooperation between different kinds of political actors, such as states, NGOs and rebel groups. It will also try to peer into the future to see what the next few decades might hold for international cooperative efforts.