Chris Boehm: USC Dept. of Anthropology

Chimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers are taken as models which help to explain our troubled world of nations, which in many ways is like a chimpanzee community with dominant alpha nations that throw their weight around—but in others is like a hunter-gatherer band, in which the group sees to it that no one individual is permitted to be too “alpha.” In the latter sense, the United Nations is set up politically so that no single nation can dominate it because of the veto, and the resultant world of nations looks nothing like a single nation, which has sufficient coercive force at the political center to prevent most internecine conflict. Turning to the chimpanzee model again, there, too, coercive force is used within the society to control conflict, with alpha males displaying at combatants and separating them until they have cooled off. Distinctively, the alpha male mediation role is an even-handed one, even if the combatants are respectively allies and enemies of the alpha. Practical lessons to be learned come in the form of insights into problems and possibilities for creating a more effective world government, and in informing the world’s superpowers that conflict resolution, to be effective, should be even-handed. The Israeli-Palestinian case is taken briefly as an example.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Boehm_1-12-04.rtf