Cooperation

"We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner....But the world is rarely like that.. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their co…

"Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into spears." Surely some mistake, I thought; shouldn’t it be the other way round? Swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks?…

My attention was drawn recently to a chart illustrating an article in the Financial Times, which showed higher levels of zero sum thinking among those whose early adult years corresponded to a slow…

I’m not really a fan of musicals so I was rather surprised to find myself responding to a friend’s recommendation and booking tickets for of ‘Hamilton’. Having taken the plunge I went further and…

A recent Scottish Universities Insight Institute project looking at regional innovation strategies featured a presentation by Peter Wostner from the Institute of Macroeconomic Analysis and…

  This is Part 2 of a two-part blogpost. Part 1 was published in January 2024. This blog explores what narrative means for us in the field of conflict resolution as we navigate an increasingly…

Tribalism is often referenced as a significant factor in much of the conflict we see around us at the moment. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising when we look back at the story of human evolution as…

Reframing is an important part of the mediator’s toolkit. It can help parties look at things from a different perspective to broaden their understanding and it can help put offers and options in a…

In their recent book ‘Power and Progress’ Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson analyse technological progress over the course of human history. They conclude that technological advances tend to initially…