Preventing Military Conflicts
In our current era of globalization, there are more links than ever before among nations. Massive quantities of goods are being traded around the world, military alliances span across oceans, and communication with other nations can be nearly instantaneous. An article in the MIT Technology Review, called “Network Theory Reveals The Hidden Link Between Trade and Military Alliances Than Leads to Conflict-Free Stability”, talks about a study done by Matthew Jackson and Stephen Nei at Stanford University about the relationship between military links, trade links, and political stability.
The study notes that there were 10 times as many wars per year on average between 1820 and 1959 than there were between 1960 and 2000, and that this is the result of the rapid increase in the number of trade links formed after World War II. When nations form strong trade links, they can become economically dependent on each other, which the study argues greatly reduces the probability of a military conflict. Additionally, countries have had an average of 4 times more military alliances now than they did before 1950. These alliances further benefit global stability. It makes sense that these two factors would reduce military conflict, as any time a conflict might start brewing between two nations, other connected nations will likely try to put out the fire, and the more connected nations there are, the stronger the force will be to mitigate the conflict. The article does note, however, that it is impossible for a network to be completely war stable, as this would require an empty network with no links.
This article is very pertinent to class material because it analyzes how a network is changing over time. In this case, the network is a graph with countries as nodes and edges representing varying strength connections between countries. Before 1950, this network was relatively sparsely connected. Now, the network has far more, and far stronger links between countries, and if we apply some simple principles from class, we can easily see how a denser network would lead to a reduction in military conflicts. For example, if nation A forms strong military and trade relations with nations B and C, it is B and C’s best interest to also form a connection so they don’t violate the strong triadic closure property. As nations continue to from more trading and military alliances, situations similar to the one above become more likely. Additionally, nations, naturally wanting to exist in a structurally balanced network, have formed large military and trading alliances such as NATO and the European Union in which all members of each alliance are “friends” with each other. As communication and transportation barriers have been broken, maintaining such alliances has become far easier. It is easy to watch the news and think that our world is wrought with conflict, but, thanks to our increasingly interconnected global network, we are actually living in a relatively conflict-free period.
source: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531736/network-theory-reveals-the-hidden-link-between-trade-and-military-alliances-that-leads/