CGNK Participates in a Workshop on Peacemaking at Leiden University

The Center for Global Nonkilling was invited to participate in the “Aggression and Peacemaking in an Evolutionary Context” workshop, organized by the Lorentz Center at Leiden University, The Netherlands, October 18-22, 2010. CGNK Research Team Leader Joám Evans Pim delivered the final plenary speech discussing the nonkilling implications of evolutionary restraint mechanisms for physical aggression.

The workshop included perspectives from natural and social science fields such as archaeology, primatology, nomadic forager studies, human behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, bringing together over forty scholars from a dozen countries. Findings from these disciplines pertain to the study of conflict management within an evolutionary framework. The idea was to bring together primatologists who have researched aggression, reconciliation, or some aspect of conflict management in non-human or human primates; archaeologists who can speak to how the prehistoric record, especially prior to the development of agriculture, contributes to our understanding of human aggression and peacemaking; nomadic hunter-gatherer specialists who have knowledge about how topics like reciprocal sharing, cooperation and competition, and resource utilization relate to patterns of aggression and conflict resolution in nomadic band societies; and human behavior ecologists and evolutionary biologists who consider relevant topics such as evolutionary models of conflict, restraint, ritualization, cost-benefit models of aggression, territorial defense, and resource competition, and so forth. The workshop is focused on how knowledge from these natural and social science fields may be integrated to produce a more complete view of aggression and peacemaking.