Complexity and Global Affairs

GSF Fact Sheet 2: Complexity and Global Affairs

Ongoing technological advances continue to shrink the effects of distance, to expand the interaction capacity of states and non-state actors, and to increase the dynamism of the international system. In addition to encouraging us to extend our horizons toward longer-term, shared global concerns, this thickening web of interactivity magnifies the effects of seemingly local events and drives the international system toward the critical state -- poised between order and chaos, with both centripetal forces for integration and centrifugal forces for fragmentation. This critical state appears to be a natural attractor in complex systems, as multiple, interactive agents organize themselves by following simple rules, schematically anticipating the future, processing feedback from their environment, and adapting their strategies and behavior to fit changing conditions. In self-organizing systems, such changes can take on a life of their own and generate dramatic, even catastrophic events, like wars, stock market crashes, natural disasters, and pandemics. While often appearing random, such developments can be explained by the emergent field of complexity, which offers an accessible and widely applicable lens for understanding how the world works.

Rather than obsessing with reductionism or focusing on parts, complexity theory emphasizes how the individual parts interact and work together as a complex adaptive system (CAS), with the whole greater than the sum of the parts. While such systems are relatively robust and may appear static for a while, temporarily "locked in" at potentially suboptimal equilibria, they are inherently dynamic and in a continual state of becoming; they are emergent. Other properties of complex systems include sensitivity to initial and changing conditions (also known as the "Butterfly Effect"); path dependence; bottom-up organization and top-down influences, as micro agents interact to generate the macro structure, which, in turn, constrains the agents; and unpredictable, nonlinear change, occasionally in the form of surprising punctuations.  Perhaps most surprising is that across numerous fields these punctuations tend to follow a power law distribution, with its negative exponential relationship between the frequency and the magnitude of events. Consider, for instance, the following illustrative list of events that seem to demonstrate self-organized criticality (SOC) and power law patterns:

 
Military:  Outbreak, duration, and severity of interstate and civil wars; battle size and duration; terrorist networks and attacks

Political:  Ideological shifts; community formation; ethnopolitical mobilization; revolutions; coups; city size; rise and fall of states, empires, and civilizations; international and non-governmental organizations  

Economic:  Firm size and location; stock market trades, volatility, and returns;  income distribution; land ownership; commodity prices; power grids; labor strikes; corporate board membership; technological revolutions

Ecological:  Landscape formation; mountains; coastlines; river systems; earthquakes; avalanches; mudslides; forest fires, as well as tree trunks, branches, and density; temperature change; cloud size; rainfall and droughts; hurricanes; tornados; sedimentary deposits; oil field percolations; solar flares and pulsar glitches; grass hopper outbreaks

Biological:  Population distribution; genomic occurrence; protein family size; cardiac ventricular fibrillation; perceptions, consciousness, and neural networks; morphological changes; drug resistance in bacteria; spread of cancer; disease outbreaks (measles, mumps, whooping cough, E. coli, Ebola, AIDS, syphilis, SARS, etc.); species formation, mutation, and extinction

Socio-cultural:  Group formation; neighborhoods; scientific collaboration, revolutions, and citations; traffic jams; crime waves; sexual partners; Hollywood connections; Internet routers and traffic; word usage; cultural fads (movies, books, clothes, games, toys, etc.)

Signs of a paradigm shift already are evident in the physical, atmospheric, biological, behavioral, and social sciences, with significant implications for how we should think, plan, act, and organize ourselves. More than a few studies have effectively examined self-organized critical and complex systems, finding power laws across widely divergent phenomena. The underlying system dynamics that generate such patterns, however, are remarkably similar and relatively simple. While adapting our mental maps and conceptual models may be challenging, analysts, policymakers, educators, and concerned citizens should explore the potential utility of complexity theory to illuminate causality in global affairs. We may find that this lens not only sheds light on past events (like the end of the Cold War), but also helps us to appreciate the inherent dynamism of their international system; to recognize that fluctuations and catastrophes are inevitable and unpredictable, but also exhibit probabilistic patterns; and to understand that while we can and should prepare for such events and try to adapt our strategies and behaviors to best fit the emergent landscape, our actions might not have their intended effects because of internal system dynamics and the interplay of order and chaos, which animates global affairs like the rest of nature.