INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSAt the most macro-global level of analysis, economic, political, and cultural activities may now be more structurally integrated than in any earlier historical periods. Far-flung networks of public, private, and nonprofit organizations weave together local communities, nation-states, IGOs, and transnational entities.

Major theoretical and empirical tasks are to explain these emerging organizational and network forms, their global diffusion, and the impacts of diverse trends on persons, nations, and civil societies.

Globalization among nation-states proceeding by fits-and-jerks along economic, political, and cultural dimensions

World city networks and transnational advocacy networks add several layers of complexity to the international system

The Globalization Trifecta

Globalization refers to processes that increase connectivity among societies & their people, institutions, organizations. Globalization intertwines cultural, political, and economic interdependencies that challenge traditional arrangements.

“The growing extensity, intensity, and velocity of global interactions can be associated with their deepening impact such that the effects of distant events can be highly significant else-where and specific local developments can come to have considerable global consequences.” (Held et al. 1999)

Communication & transportation technologies compress and decouple time, geographic spaces, social distances (“global village”)

National & regional boundaries grow increasingly permeable Cultural / identity groups become detached from their traditional

territorial bases (the diffusion of supraterritoriality)How can SNA concepts & methods capture these changes?

World-System AnalysisWorld-system analysis, formulated by Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, draws from neo-Marxist development theory & Fernand Braudel’s Annales School. “A system is defined as a unit with single division of labor and multiple cultural systems” (Wallerstein 1974).

The modern world-system is the only fully capitalist world-economy to emerge, around 1450-1550, and it had expanded across the entire planet by about 1900.

This world-economy consists of a tripartite division of labor into core, semiperipheral, and peripheral countries.

Core businesses, with support of the states where they operate, monopolize the most profitable activities (~80% of world wealth).

Semiperiphery countries are dominated (usually by the core countries) but they also dominate some other nations

Periphery countries are dominated by both other positions

Structural Position in the W-S

They regressed the 118 nations’ economic growth (change in GNP per capita from 1955 to 1970) onto dummy variables for the set of 10 W-S block positions, while controlling for 1955 GNP/capita.

Core block C nations had highest net GNP growth rates, about $500 per capita more than others. Although, semi- and peripheral blocks did not have distinctly different growth rates, they concluded the effects were “entirely consistent with world-system/dependency theories.”

For 1960s, Snyder & Kick (1979) block-modeled four relationships: trade flows, military intervention, diplomatic relations, and joint treaty memberships. The result was a four 10-block images.

Multiple-network analyses test world-system/dependence theory hypotheses that nations’ positions in the tripartite W-S affect trade and investment imbalances (foreign penetration & control).

core

semiperiph

periphery

periphery

Role Equivalence in the W-S

W-S role only weakly explained dependency & economic performance:

► A nation’s role was determined more by its absolute economic and population size than by its development level (tiny nations occupy the peripheral roles)

► National GDP growth from 1980 to 1989 was explained slightly better by dependency than by positions in the W-S role structure

► Have W-S positions stagnated or evolved over past 20-40 years?

Rossem (1993) argued that Snyder & Kick’s application of structural equivalence methods misspecified the world system’s role relations, due to substantial geographic clustering of international relations.

His SNA analyses used five international networks: imports & exports of economic goods; major conventional weapons trade; foreign troop presence; diplomatic ties.

A role equivalence partition uncovered four W-S structural positions (see next slide).

Role Equivalence Model of World System

SOURCE: Van Rossem (1996: Fig 2 & Table 2)

CoreUSA, France, Germany, UK,

Japan, Soviet Union, Canada, Brazil, China, Saudi Arabia

SemiperipherySweden, India, Egypt, Austria,

Czech, Iran, Pakistan, Mexico, Iraq, Poland, Turkey, Greece, Indonesia

Periphery 2Singapore, Jamaica, Yemen, Laos,

Uganda, Cyprus, Nepal, Mali, Iceland, Rwanda, Benin, Guyana, Fiji, Belize,

Taiwan, Chad, Grenada, Brunei

Periphery 1Venezuela, Denmark, Kenya, Morocco, Korea, Peru, Cuba, Hungary, Sudan,

Jordan, Israel, Ghana, Zambia, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Congo

Imports

Exports

Diplomatic ties

Arms trade

Troops

World Cities Network

The World-System can also be examined as an urban network comprised of intercity movements of people, goods, information.

Global processes are geographically grounded: “Globalization can be deconstructed in terms of the strategic sites where global processes materialize and the linkages that bind them.” (Saskia Sassen 1998:392)

Air passenger traffic for pairs of cities is widely available for measuring social distances in WCN. Geographic proximity also constrains the volumes flowing between the urban dyads.

WCN forms a hierarchy of core primary (NYC, LA, London), semi- and peripheral cities – how closely resembling the W-S tripartition?

SOURCE: Derudder & Witlox (2005)

Transnational Advocacy NetworksIn Activists Beyond Borders (1998), Margaret Keck & Kathryn Sikkink argued that transnational advocacy networks (TANs) reshape international relations by generating information, using symbolic elements, pressuring states and international orgs, and seeking to hold them accountable to international norms.

“Boomerang effect” occurs when human rights groups inside a country can channel information about human rights violations to transnational actors, who in turn, generate international pressures.

Activists in Argentina & Mexico mobilized pressures from INGOs & foreign governments to stop those nations’ human rights abuses.

A transnational advocacy network is nonstate actors “working together on an international issue that are bound together by shared values, common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services.”

Can TAN be analyzed as a transnational policy domain network?

References

Bergesen, Albert and John Sonnett. 2001. “The Global 500: Mapping the World Economy at Century’s End.” American Behavioral Scientist 44:1602-1615.

Derudder, B. and F. Witlox. 2005. “An Appraisal of the Use of Airline Data in Assessing the World City Network: A Research Note on Data.” Urban Studies 42:2371-88.

Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Johnathan Perraton. 1999. Global Transformations: Politics, Economic and Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists Beyond Borders. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink. 1999. “Transnational Advocacy Networks in International and Regional Politics.” International Social Science Journal 159:89-101.

Sassen, Saskia. 1998. “The Impact of New Technologies and Globalization on Cities.” Pp. 391-409 in Globalization of the World of Large Cities, edited by F.-C. Lo & Y.-M. Yeung. Tokyo: United Nations University Press.

Snyder, David and Edward L. Kick. 1979. “Structural Position in the World System and Economic Growth, 1955-1970: A Multiple-Network Analysis of Transnational Interactions.” American Journal of Sociology 84:1096-1126.

Van Rossem, Ronan. 1996. “The World System Paradigm as General Theory of Development: A Cross-National Test.” American Sociological Review 61:508-527.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.