Structural balance and relations in the Middle East
In lecture, we covered the notion of structural balance, which describes the tendency of relations between, in a simple form, three entities, and in a more complicated form, interconnected networks of entities. When three people (or for the purposes of this post, countries) have some mixture of positive and negative relations between them, in most settings, this tends to resolve to a stable setting of either positive relations between all three, or a positive relation between two people who each have a negative relation with the third.
In the modern-day political climate of the Middle East, in which there are many more than three stakeholders (countries and groups/alliances), relations between those countries are complicated and behave either as positive or negative relations depending on the setting, as depicted in the graph linked.
As an example, we can take the United States, the Islamic State (IS), and Iran. The graph shows all three of these parties having “hate” (negative) relations between them. The structural balance concepts we covered in class would consider this an unbalanced network – and that there would be a tendency for a positive relation to form between two of the three – that is, any two would, temporarily, “team up” in order to challenge their mutual “enemy”. In this particular example, that positive relation was formed between the United States and Iran, against IS (link 2).
Although simple when considering three countries in a complex political scene, considering structural balance in larger networks can be useful in understanding and predicting positive and negative relations between larger groups of people or countries.
MAIN LINK – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/middle-east-explained_n_6056786.html
LINK 2 – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raghida-dergham/iran-is-americas-de-facto_b_7466066.html