Achieving World Peace through International Trade

Abstract

Can e-collaboration technologies help achieve world peace by supporting international trade? At first glance, this seems like an unusual and somewhat nonsensical question. The variables involved, particularly international trade and world peace, may appear to be too broad and socially complex to be meaningfully influenced by e-collaboration technologies. Also, the connection between these variables, if it exists, seems at best counterintuitive. Yet, there is empirical evidence that humans might have evolved what could be called a trading instinct, with the fitness-enhancing goal of either reducing or eliminating the likelihood of violent conflict between trading groups. This would explain why so many people seem compelled to engage in trade interactions, even when they do not need the goods or services that are being traded. This chapter argues that such trading instinct might have evolved, and if it did, that the evolution of the trading instinct happened in the context of face-to-face interactions. Therefore, the same instinct in modern humans would require e-collaboration media of high naturalness (i.e., high face-to-face similarity) to properly play its conflict reduction role. In this sense, e-collaboration media naturalness may act as a moderator of the effect that trade may have on the trading parties’ predispositions to later engage in or support violent conflict, either with each other or with members of the trading parties’ national groups.