Relationships in the Middle East
Source: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-middle-east-key-players-notable-relationships/
The above visualization examines the relationships between various parties concerning the Middle East, with the nodes as key players in the events and the connections representing strong positive ties, weak positive ties, strong negative ties, and weak negative ties. The edges in the graph surpass the ones covered in class in complexity, as they combine the ideas of “strong” and “weak” with “positive” and “negative”. Nevertheless, the Strong Triadic Closure Property and the idea of structural balance can be very easily visualized in the graph.
By switching on only the “love” and “good” ties, we can see that many (though not all) nodes satisfy the Strong Triadic Closure Property. Consider, for example, Turkey, who shares strong ties with Kuwait and Pakistan. Kuwait, in turn, share a weak positive relation. It makes sense that many of these nodes would share mutual allies, taking a certain “side” in conflicts or agreeing upon some perspective. However, there are also some who violate this property; Iran shares strong ties with Syria and Islamic Jihad, who do not share any tie at all.
Similarly, while there are many instances of structural balance, the network overall is unbalanced. Especially when including the weak positive ties, there are many instances where three parties are all friendly with each other, as in the case of Pakistan, China, and Turkey. Yet there also exist unbalanced triangles; Kuwait has strong positive ties with both Turkey and Egypt, but those two countries “hate” each other.
It makes sense that, while the nodes in this network loosely follow the principles covered in the class, they do not conform exactly to them. Real-life politics, especially in an area as complex as this, cannot be so easily reduced to ideas like triadic closure and structural balance.