When someone wants to express how complex a subject is to someone else, they might say it is like "explaining geopolitics to ants". Yet, ants enact something structurally similar to geopolitics: territory, expansion, conflict, resource control. Indeed, ants are among the most successful species on Earth, at least by measure of biomass. Across the planet, ants build complex colonies, form logistics systems, and wage wars against one another. Indeed, Ant Colony Optimization ACO (Dorigo & Stützle, 2004), a class of algorithms used in routing and logistics, was explicitly inspired by how ants discover efficient paths using pheromone trails. Ants have been practicing agriculture and pest control for over 50.000.000 years (Currie et al., 1999), while humanity itself has existed for only approximately 300.000 years. What if humans have much more to learn from ants about geopolitics than the other way around?
Andrei Ranete (2026) studied this question.