Geopolitics
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Aaron had written this project idea, and it's fascinating: Construct an evolving international system out of boundedly rational agents, with the specific goal of understanding how changes in economic and military technologies and organization can alter the domestic/internal organization of agents (constitutional structure and logic), and the balance of power between them (international relations, trade, war, etc.).
I'd like to help think this through. What might the details look like? (Paul)
The details of what I'm thinking about remain covered in fog for me. However, I hope the following helps explain where I'm starting from, and where I think the research can go in the long-term.
My own intellectual heroes are Herbert Simon and William McNeill. Simon's famous works looked at bounded rationality, decision-making, and organizations. McNeill is a now retired world historian, and is almost singularly responsible creating the modern field of world history. Interestingly, Simon was heavily computational, quantitative, and focused on the individual human at the core of his research. Alternatively, McNeill is qualitative, and focused on the largest scale artifacts of human civilizations - cross cultural/civilizational trade networks, disease networks, empires, etc. Despite their differences, each developed highly consistent, almost identical views about science and civilization. In fact, a biographer of Simon noted that an article written by McNeill could have been mistaken for Simon if one didn't read the author's name.
The above is a slight digression, but establishes what I think a grand challenge in international relations is - 1) how does one understand polities as metastable structures that are the organizational artifacts of boundedly rational humans - people and groups that pursue devise and pursue their goals with limited memory, computational power, and ability to fully understand the consequences of their choices (agents designed in Simon's image); and 2) how do multiple states - none of which of entirely endogenously stable - interact to create a dynamic international system (McNeill's narrative of world history)?
In my opinion, political science is artificially divided - treating domestic and international politics as separate subfields. The domestic politics of the state, perhaps best summarized as its constitutional or internal order and logic, simultaneously enable and constrain its international politics. Yet, international politics selects what states, and therefore constitutional structures, survive as independent polities. Thus, states (more specifically their leadership) simultaneously shape and are shaped by the international system. In my opinion, it is nearly impossible to understand state failure - the collapse of a polity's international structure and established behavioral patterns - without international contextualization - the actions and non-actions of others in the system (think Darfur in Sudan). Likewise, I think any discussion of international politics is worthless without accounting for the heterogeneous nature and domestic interests of the states within the international system. In both cases, domestic and international politics contextualizes the understanding of each other, and are therefore inseparable.
While I'm not yet sure about is what the specific model formalism is (except that I'm biased towards agents for a variety of reasons that I can discuss elsewhere). I do know that the system should display many complex properties, such as path dependencies, evolution, learning, imitation, spatial variation, etc. Moreover, the political actors in the system need not be limited to states. There is no reason why under certain economic, technical, and sociological regimes that non-state actors, international organizations, etc. cannot operate, but I do suspect that the emergence and survival of non-state actors are contingent on the politics between states themselves - even the number of states in the system may affect the viability of these non-state actors to exist and operate, just as certain organisms cannot exist unless other organisms are above or below a particular population level.
My own modeling and theoretical interests for this effort have moved into trying to gain a better understanding of ecological theory and ecological analysis. I believe that just as ecosystems generate heterogeneous, dynamics structures based on resources constraints, competition, cooperation, and co-evolution, so does the international system. The key difference being that natural systems experience selection under a Darwinian (random) search and selection process, while social systems experience selection pressures under Lemarkian (guided/non-random) search and selection pressures.
I'm interested in such an approach to international relations because it could form the foundation for allowing researchers and policy-makers to gain a better understanding of the consequences of their choices, the value of the information in their possession (and what they do not, and cannot know), identify critical path dependencies that can inform strategic choices, and provide a mechanism for exploring counterfactuals - those paths that were possible but not taken, and therefore cannot be observed empirically. Given that policy and strategy is not about doing better tomorrow than we are doing today, but rather ensuring that the tomorrow we work towards is the best outcome of the many futures that could be. Existing international relations theory and policy/strategic analysis methods are simply incapable of doing this.
There's a specific model that I've been playing with in my head that incorporates a number of these features (interplay of intra and inter-group action, heterogeneous agents and interests), but may not get at others (path dependence may or may not be something you could look at in the system).
I'm interested in the question of the emergence of leaders in smallish groups and of big men, head men, and chiefs in previously egalitarian societies. Why do they emerge in some circumstances and not others?
I few months ago I thumbed through the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter Gatherers and for each entry (a h-g society) attempted to code how pronounced chief-like or leader-like positions were in that society. One of the more consistent associations that appeared was that more pronounced chiefs were more common in those societies that had greater contact with the outside world, e.g. modern state structures, missionaries.
There are a few explanations of what drives this, but I'm interested in following one in particular: What if the pressures of having to interact (in competition or cooperation) with other groups drives societies to take on a more hierarchical structure, with one or a few people doing something that makes the group fare better (more likely to win a war, more likely to convince the national government to preserve territorial rights) than it would operating acephalously? That seems like a nice thing, but it likely comes with a cost for most people in the group: once you've got a headman that can make the internal machine run more efficiently by issuing clear orders, by channeling the right information to those who need it, by being a clear representative in interaction with the outside, he can do all those things to his personal advantage. So a group member who might like the idea that a figure-head would give his group greater combined fighting power has to weigh the fact that he loses some autonomy, that resources will likely be more skewed toward those at the top than they were in the more disorganized, egalitarian setting.
ok, damn, got to run to class, so will return to this later.