Analyzing Political Relations from the Networks’ Perspective
link to the article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/25/montenegro-tensions-russia-joins-nato-member
One of the very interesting every day topics that can be analysed from the network’s’ point of view is definitely politics and international relations. In the article (link above), it is a story about the country I come from–Montenegro. Namely, in 2017 we officially entered NATO, which is for a developing country a very big political achievement. However, it cause a instability in our outside politics as well.
Throughout the history, Montenegro had very good relations with Russia. Even today, even though this bond mcuh weakened (because of the political reasons), we still indirectly depend on Russia (big percentages of tourists in Montenegro are Russian and tourism is biggest source of income for Montenegro). After Montenegro entered NATO, Russia cut off political relations with Montenegro and this cause a reaction from Montenegrin society (as briefly described in the article above).
Namely, this situation that happened on the relation NATO-Montenegro-Russia can very well analysed from the network’s point of view. Consider following picture:
So, on the graph above, we have three nodes (representing three actors mentioned above) and three edges, representing relations between them. We have negative relation between Russia and NATO (historical and ideological reasons). Since this is the graph of these relations before Montenegro entered NATO (maybe more precisely, before it started negotiations with NATO), we have positive relation between Russia and Montenegro and negative relations between NATO and Montenegro (since Montenegro wasn’t part of the NATO). According to Structural Balance Property, this network is stable (“two friend with mutual enemy”). However, situation changed after Montenegro joined NATO and we have this situation:
This kind of situation is not stable. In the politics, it is always tent to resolve instabilities on one way or another. Since the negative relation between NATO and Russia is long lasting problem which is really almost irreparable (thus that edge could not become positive), the relation between Montenegro and Russia got cut off:
And now again we have stable network. This way of analyzing can be applied on number of situations similar to this one, or even on the bigger picture. For instance, could explain how actually Cold War situation is stable: you have Eastern block including USSR and its partners (so they all have pluses between themselves) and NATO (all pluses as well). If you take any two from one block and one from the other, that triangle is still stable since we have one positive and two negative relations. That is why, from the standpoint of networks, armed conflict have never happened during Cold War.