Networks, Governance, and Cooperation

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel brings together a group of scholars applying novel network theories and models in the studies of armed conflict and national security from the perspective of international relations and comparative politics. Each of the papers develops new theoretical arguments and applies state-of-the-art empirical tools to explore a range of down-network political effects of relevance to the study of security and governance. The findings have important policy implications and also shed new light on the field of political networks and conflict and security issues.

The first project draws the rare connection between religious ideology and social unrest to examine their joint impact on interstate cooperative behaviors, using a novel Bayesian factor model and the context of Middle Eastern politics to empirically validate the theoretical insight. The second project uses network analysis and a newly coded cross-national dataset to explore intergroup cooperation in the context of civil war by taking into account dyadic cooperative histories, emphasizing conflict resolution as a dynamic process with roots long predating the start of formal negotiations. The third project investigates the creation of coercive institutions and within-group cooperation. The authors stress the importance of inter-group conflict that facilitates the existence of such institutions and use computational models coupled with a networked public goods game experiment to test this argument. The fourth project addresses the challenge in containing Covid-19, using a network model and daily Covid-19 data in the context of the US to understand how we can reduce contagion by disabling the transmission of most connected actors and prioritizing these people for vaccination. This research shows important policy implications in states’ response to the threat of national security events.

Sub Unit

• Division 50: Political Networks

Individual Presentations

• Ideology, Networks, and International Security: Evidence from the Middle East - Peter Shane Henne, University of Vermont; Howard Liu, University of South Carolina; Shahryar Minhas, Michigan State University

• Cooperation in Multi-Dyadic Conflicts - Elizabeth J. Menninga, University of Iowa; Alyssa Prorok, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Warring Leviathans: Intergroup Conflict, Hierarchy, and Public Goods Provision - Mael van Beek, Ohio State University; David Peterson, Ohio State University; Bear F. Braumoeller, Ohio State University

• How to Stop Contagion: Applying Network Sci. to Evaluate COVID-19 Vaccine Plans - Olga Chyzh, University of Toronto

Chair

• Kyle Beardsley Duke University

Discussants

• Kyle Beardsley Duke University

• Howard Liu University of South Carolina