Just as researchers in economics and physics have found common ground in recent years, so might experts in international relations and physics.
Although far from being a consensus, that’s the initial but optimistic thinking of a small group of participants in a late-August working group at SFI meant to explore international relations as a complex adaptive system.
The event, “International Affairs and Complexity,” involved 15 invited experts from the two seemingly disparate fields. SFI Science Board Co-chair Simon Levin co-organized the meeting with Joshua Cooper Ramo, Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, SFI Professor Doug Erwin, and SFI President and Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West.
Simon opened the event with a primer on complexity science, outlining key concepts − such as individual behaviors combining to form collective behaviors, phase shifts, and scaling laws − and suggested ways they might apply to international relations. The concept of path dependence, for example, might help explain how early policy decisions constrain later choices and lead to outcomes unwanted by all, he said.
He noted that the world is increasingly complex due to a rise in the number of actors and intentions, combined with a new degree of world interconnectedness. U.S.-China relations, for example, cannot be conceptualized without an understanding of U.S.-Russia and China-Russia relations, or without an understanding of world energy, economic growth, and security issues.
What this implies, he says, is that the existing tools of international relations, which tend to treat problems more linearly as sets of inputs and outputs or that define stability narrowly as prevention of conflict, are not sufficient to addresses today’s world problems.
Ramo addressed the group from the international relations (IR) perspective, describing a half- dozen widely accepted theories in foreign policy that guide decision makers. Although a few participants from the science side found some of the IR principles − such as the notion that democracies don’t fight each other − too anecdotal for scientific purposes, they found others to be a natural t with complexity principles.
The expectation that a nation’s foreign policy is largely determined by domestic concerns, for example, could potentially be addressed through scaling analysis.
Participants had an insightful discussion about the meaning of stability in IR and found potential common ground in the idea of system robustness, says Simon.
“As we listened to the different viewpoints, it becomes clear that in international relations, you really can’t view any one issue by itself,” he says. “Any decision you make is coupled to other decisions and issues. Altogether, the multitude of actors, issues, and intentions are part of a highly complex system.”
“I think we’ll move forward on various fronts,” he says. A lively post-working group email discussion is underway, as is planning for follow-up collaborations.
Simon already has visited Stockholm to discuss a similar meeting in 2009 to be hosted by the Tallberg Foundation (www.tallbergfoundation. org/).
Ultimately, he hopes, such collaborations will suggest promising methodologies for guiding foreign policy decisions.