Effects of balance and imbalanced networks on gang violence
Gang rivalries and alliances pop up in urban landscapes as a natural consequence of interactions among gangs. There isn’t always violence between rival gangs, because gangs’ actions are influenced by their relationships to other, third-party gangs. Here, because gangs are social phenomena in which individuals adhere to their gang’s creed and actions, we can assume a gang operates as a single unit and then examine intergang conflict.
We can represent a set of gangs as nodes in a network. There can be negative ties between two gangs that are enemies, positive ties between gangs that are allies, and no ties between gangs that have a neutral or lack of a relationship. The Structural Balance Property states that there shouldn’t be any trio of distinct nodes where (case 1) exactly 2 of the links among them are positive and 1 link negative, or (2) none of the links are positive and 3 links negative; otherwise, there will be structural imbalance that creates tension within nodes to change the sign of the links. This is akin to saying that if there are two enemy gangs who have a mutual ally (case 1), the ally will be torn between its allegiance to the rival gangs; and if there are three gangs that are all enemies, there will be pressure for two of them to, ahem, gang up on the other. These kinds of imbalances can lead to violence.
Nakamura, Tita, and Krackhardt studied Long Beach, CA gangs and found, with statistical significance, that structural imbalance is positively correlated with gang violence, and specifically violence around the imbalanced nodes. This corresponds with the Structural Balance Theory, which implies that some form of stress, in this case violence, would result from and cure the imbalance of the triad.
However, even within a balanced network, there is opportunity for violence. If two allies have a mutual enemy, either of the two allies would have backup if they try to assert dominance over the mutual enemy.