Abstract
An alliance is a formal contingent commitment by two or more states to some future action. Alliances have been widely discussed in the international relations community because hundreds or perhaps thousands of interactions may take place between states in any given year, but few interactions create the impact intended by alliance formation. In this paper, we investigate the historical dynamics of international alliances from a hypernetwork science perspective. Exploring the Formal Alliances dataset from the Correlates of War Project, we focus on three time periods: pre-World War I, pre-World War II, and current day. By using centrality measures such as the notions of s-closeness, s-betweenness, s-eccentricity, and s-local clustering coefficient, we provide a rating benchmark to classify the impact of an alliance.
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Acknowledgment
The first author would like to thank the Network Science Center at the United States Military Academy for their support during the project. The second author would like to thank the Intelligent Cyber-Systems and Analytics Research Lab (ICSARL) at the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) in West Point, NY for their hospitality. Most of the work was done during his summer research stay at the institute.
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© 2022 This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply
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Alhajjar, E., Friar, R. (2022). A Historical Perspective on International Treaties via Hypernetwork Science. In: Ribeiro, P., Silva, F., Mendes, J.F., Laureano, R. (eds) Network Science. NetSci-X 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13197. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97240-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97240-0_2
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