The first Masterclass Retreat of the the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research took place from 29 to 31 August 2013. The Masterclass is embedded in the attractive Ruhrtriennale – Festival of the Arts and was held in the Blowerhouse Complex in Duisburg.

Together with renowned scholars who usually do not focus on the global level we wanted to think about how global cooperation to tackle world problems such as climate change can be improved. What factors do we need to take into account if we take seriously the findings on the cognitive limits of human decision-making? Can there be a global we-identiy that makes it easier to cooperate across states and cultures? How do we need to reformulate our questions if we take seriously the rather successful human success story of cooperation from the perspective of evolutionary anthropology and biology?

Dr. Gianluca Grimalda, Prof. Elke Weber and Prof. Eric Johnson, both Columbia University, Prof. Martin Nowak, Harvard University, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kurths, PIKK, Prof. Alicia Melis, Warwick University, Prof. Iver Neumann, LSE und Prof. Dr. Martin Nowak, Harvard University, all of them highly renowned experts in their respective fields, ranging from biology to economics to international relations, will provide insights on the issues of scale, complexity and their impact on cooperation.

As the take-off event of the Masterclass the Ruhrtriennale – Käte Hamburger Kolleg -Symposium “Global Cooperation in the 21st Century” analyses automatic, unconscious, and unintentional forms of cooperation, ranging from market mechanisms to psychopathologies of daily life.