Carl Von Clausewitz famously claimed that “war is a continuation of state policy by other means”. During our stay at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), we had the pleasure to prove the controversial point that humanitarian intervention, on the other hand, can be regarded as the continuation of war by other means.
Our project (whose presentation you can download here in .pdf format) was part of the ESF-funded QMSS2 (Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences) program. We tinkered a little with Pajek, with the substantive help of Raphael Wittek (University of Groningen) and the enlightening suggestions of Aleš Žiberna (University of Ljubljana).
The result turned out to be pretty mean. After tailoring a worldwide network of countries, we were able to perform an exploratory analysis that allowed us to detect a few geopolitical hot-spots where interventions by hegemonic countries can either take the form of armed conflicts or of foreign aid. Countries like Afghanistan or Iraq, who by now seem to be taken into an endless spiral of destruction/reconstruction, are the main targets of both bombs and bread coming from richer countries. For some of us, that’s just common sense. But it feels so good when you can hype it up with a nice graph 😛
AA Casilli , W Doerner, M Oubenal & P Rozbicka (2009) “Blockmodeling geopolitical interventions”, QMSS2 Summer School on Social Interactions and Social networks, Social Network Analysis using Pajek, University of Ljubljana, July 7th