International Networks

Analysis of International Relations

Reflecting its highly generic and transdisciplinary nature, social network analysis has proven to be a formidable [Page 426]companion when analyzing various types of international relations. The provision of novel ways to formally depict and measure the properties of the somewhat elusive concepts of globalization makes it possible to address hypotheses concerned with different aspects of globalization and the structures and normative significance of international interactions. In addition, such studies also prepare the way for the formulation of novel theories and models of global dynamics and development, which is of particular relevance in disciplines such as economics, where formal quantitative methods are often seen as a prerequisite for addressing and highlighting certain ideas and theories.

Although the various manifestations and traces of globalization can be found in nearly every corner of the world, the role and perceived significance of international relations in different scholastic fields has shifted over time—as particularly evident within development thinking. In the modernization debate of the postwar era, endogenous factors took precedence over exogenous ones. The internal properties of nation states—capital formation, production structures, factor endowments, education levels, and so forth—were seen as determining the prospects for development. In the 1960s and onward, this view was contested with its inverse. Stemming from structuralist thinking in Latin America, dependency thinking subsequently transformed into the world-systems perspective, deeming the prospects for national development as almost solely determined by external relations, such as trade, colonialism, political allegiances, foreign investments, and so forth.

In the 1980s, the focus of the debate shifted back: even though export trade was seen as a possible engine of growth, the neoclassical resurgence implied a refocus on the internal properties as main determinants of national, and by extension global, dynamics. A similar phenomena occurred within economic geography: whereas many of the methods of its quantitative revolution in the 1960s and 1970s focused on relational structures between spatial points of economic agglomeration, a counterrevolution struck the discipline in the 1980s, once again shifting the pendulum back to a focus on local and regional properties as the main determinant of spatial economics. Today, remnants from this “structural era” in economic geography can be found within the sub-branch of transport geography, where many of the formal methods for measuring centrality are practically identical to methods used in contemporary social network analysis.

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