The hidden backbone of International Relations
Isabella Loaiza, Morgan Frank, Sandy Pentland
*Presented as poster at the International Conference for Computational Social Science (2018)
How to prevent the outbreak of war and all of its devastating e ects? How to incentivize cooperation between nations to mitigate climate change? These perennial questions at the heart of international relations have puzzled scholars and policymakers alike. Many strategies have been devised to this end with varying levels of success. Perhaps one of the oldest and most widely used, is the creation of supranational institutions that, through membership criteria, scope of action and economic bene ts, help forge alliances and shape the international outlook. This approach has given way to organizations like United Nations, NATO, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, Mercosur, and the Paris Agreement just to name a few.
However, relationships between countries, like relationships between people, change in time and area reaction of complex hierarchies, power dynamics and political or economic interests. Even between members of an international institution there are clear asymmetries in country's abilities to influence the decision-making process.Thus, binary attributes like membership in formal government institutions does not allow us to capture the richness of nations' behavior. In other domains, like organization studies it is common knowledge that formal organizational structures -like organizational charts- provide a limited picture of organizational behavior. The 'informal' organization is what truly drives company dynamics and outcomes. One of the most known articles on this topic was published in 1993 in the Harvard Business Review by David Krackhardt and Jeffrey Henton. In their article titled 'Informal Networks: the company behind the chart', Krackhardt and Henton argued that the network of relationships between employees across divisions and ranks can help or hinder management's most carefully designed plans. Thus, learning to map these unobserved connections can help managers 'harness the real power' in their companies by designing formal structures that channel or build on the existing informal structures.If this is true for organizations -which can be larger than entire villages or towns-, could the same logic be scaled up to international institutions? Is there an 'informal' backbone in international relations that drives dynamics of conflict and cooperation? Luckily, network science can help uncover this structure while providing a more detailed account of how and with who do nations relate with.
Network science has been applied in a variety of domains to solve social problems like the spread of disease, outages in energy grids, and understand phenomena like the uptake of innovative products.
A networked view of international relations can help inform future policies by creating maps that go beyond the traditional bilateral or multilateral ways of thinking about international agreements.
Networks can also prove to be useful in the study of the spread of conflict and as it can detect which are the main avenues through which it travels.
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