Networked Politics

Agency, Power, and Governance

Miles Kahler

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801474767
• eBook ISBN: 9780801457647
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

The concept of network has emerged as an intellectual centerpiece for our era. Network analysis also occupies a growing place in many of the social sciences. In international relations, however, network has too often remained a metaphor rather than a powerful theoretical perspective. In Networked Politics, a team of political scientists investigates networks in important sectors of international relations, including human rights, security agreements, terrorist and criminal groups, international inequality, and governance of the Internet. They treat networks as either structures that shape behavior or important collective actors. In their hands, familiar concepts, such as structure, power, and governance, are awarded new meaning.

Contributors: Peter Cowhey, University of California, San Diego; Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, University of Cambridge and Sidney Sussex College;
Zachary Elkins, University of Texas at Austin; Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Princeton University; Miles Kahler, University of California, San Diego; Michael Kenney, Pennsylvania State University; David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego; Alexander H. Montgomery, Reed College; Milton Mueller, Syracuse University School of Information Studies and Delft University of Technology; Kathryn Sikkink, University of Minnesota; Janice Gross Stein, University of Toronto; Wendy H. Wong, University of Toronto; Helen Yanacopulos, Open University

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Networked Politics

AGENCY, POWER, AND GOVERNANCE

Miles Kahler

A century ago, during an earlier era of globalization, large hierarchical organizations dominated the international landscape. Nation-states hardened their borders, built up vast militaries, and extended their rule over far-flung territories. The earliest transnational corporations extracted oil and other natural resources, processed their products, and marketed them across the globe. Even the adversaries of these dominant powers accepted their hierarchical view of politics: the Bolsheviks broke with more moderate social democrats and forged an organizational model for revolution and rule that would influence most of the coming century.

Although those hierarchical organizations have hardly disappeared from contemporary international politics, networks now challenge their central place. Cross-border networks are hardly new: traders, bankers, and political activists deployed networked organizations more than a century ago. Technological change, economic openness, and demands for transnational political collaboration, however, have created conditions for network proliferation in recent decades. Well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, open networks of nongovernmental organizations had been joined by diasporic networks and dark networks or clandestine transnational actors (CTAs), made up of criminal and terrorist groups.1 Transgovernmental networks—international collaboration among agencies of national governments—are promoted as a form of international governance that is more efficient and adaptable than the bureaucracies of international organizations.2 Networked regional organization in Asia is contrasted with other regional models dominated by more conventional institutions (Katzenstein and Shiraishi 1997). Cross-border production networks have come to dominate the most dynamic sectors of the international economy, such as consumer electronics and information technology (Borrus, Ernst, and Haggard 2000).

This new international landscape is reflected in a vocabulary of networks that is broader than international politics. Networks have become the intellectual centerpiece for our era. If the contest between markets and state hierarchies was an organizing feature of the 1980s, network has emerged as the dominant social and economic metaphor in subsequent decades. The scope of networks expanded to include economic organization and trade (Powell 1996; Rauch 1998; Rauch and Casella 2001), society as a whole (Castells 1996), as well as widening applications in the natural sciences (Barabási 2002; Newman, Barabási, and Watts 2006).

The widespread discovery of networks has also imposed costs. In contemporary international relations, network has too often remained a familiar metaphor rather than an instrument of analysis. This book introduces two approaches to network analysis and applies them to international politics: networks-as-structures and networks-as-actors. The first approach embraces a broad definition of networks, concentrates on their structural characteristics, and assesses the effects of network structure. The second discriminates between networks and other modes of organization, evaluating network success or failure in achieving collective ends. In deploying these two approaches, the authors emphasize the empirical leverage and new understandings generated by more systematic use of network analysis. Their research illuminates important sectors of international relations: international inequality, the emergence of the human rights movement, governance of the Internet, terrorist and criminal networks, and normative change.

Network analysis also contributes to a second aim of this book, which is to reexamine three theoretical debates in international politics: the relationship between structure and agency, competing definitions of power, and the efficacy of emerging forms of international governance. Agency and its exercise within international structures have been a perennial interest of theorists in international relations. Kenneth Waltz attempted to build a neorealist theory of international politics by abstracting a particular structural feature—the distribution of capabilities—from the domestic attributes of states (Waltz 1979). Constructivists, often influenced by sociological theory, have placed agent and structure, and particularly the relationship between states and their environment, at the center of their concerns (Katzenstein 1996; Wendt 1999). Network analysis delimits a field of international structures that shape and constrain agents. Most important, it also enables their empirical investigation. The characteristics and capabilities of new agents in international politics—networks defined as actors—can also be defined more precisely.

When applied to international politics, the lens of networks also forces a reevaluation of the concept of power. Power in networks depends on structural position in a field of connections to other agents as well as actor capabilities or attributes. Simple dyadic measures of international influence appear inadequate in a world of networked states. The power of networks also requires assessment. Networked collective action, whether transnational networks of activists or illicit combinations of criminals or terrorists, may demonstrate greater capacity than its organizational competitors.

Finally, networked politics points to new forms of governance in international relations, distinct from more familiar types of intergovernmental collaboration. The emergence of networks as a significant feature of global governance need not mean that they are substitutes for more familiar and formal intergovernmental institutions. Those formal institutions may themselves be embedded in networks. Governments may also choose to delegate to networks, bargain with them, or use them as a new means of collaboration. Networked governance incorporates and sustains older forms of governance as well as challenging them.

Insights from political analysis serve to enrich network analysis, a third aim of this examination of networked international politics. Politics asks how agents will behave if they are cognizant (or partially cognizant) of network structure and can act to manipulate that structure to their advantage. Network analysis has too often obscured or ignored questions of network power and power within networks, portraying networks as an antithesis of the hierarchical exercise of power that lies at the core of familiar political institutions. Under a political lens, networked governance, too often represented as inherently consensual, reveals distributional and status conflicts that are often resolved through the introduction of centralization and hierarchy, within or outside the network. These insights from political analysis serve to revise network approaches to international relations and to expand their scope.

Defining Networked Politics: Networks as Structures and Actors

Defined in simplest form, as any set of interconnected nodes, networks are ubiquitous. The nodes can be individuals, groups, organizations, or states (as well as cells or Internet users); the connections or links can consist of personal friendships, trade flows, or valued resources.3 For social scientists, network analysis employs “concepts of location, or nodes, and the relations among these positions—termed ties, connections, or links—to argue that the pattern of relationships shapes the behavior of the occupant of a post, as well as influences others” (Smith-Doerr and Powell 2005, 380).

Two approaches to network analysis have been applied to international politics. The first takes networks as structures that influence the behavior of their members, and, through them, produce consequential network effects. This approach accepts the broad definition of a network as interconnected nodes, a concept that can be applied at different levels of analysis. The nodes could be intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), national governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or individuals. In this approach, network design is not intentional on the part of any actor or set of actors.

The second approach concentrates on networks as actors, networks as a specific organizational form that can be contrasted with markets and hierarchies. Networks in this approach are, most often, intentional or consciously organized. Membership boundaries are clear rather than being determined by simple interaction over time. The success of networked actors at collective and collaborative action is typically the outcome of greatest interest. Through such action, these networks also influence significant international outcomes.

Networks as Structures

In the structural approach to international networks, relational structures within the network or emergent attributes of the network systematically influence the actions of its nodes (members) and produce identifiable outcomes. Hafner-Burton and Montgomery (2006), for example, examine the effect of networks of intergovernmental organizations on interstate conflict. Ingram, Robinson, and Busch (2005) claim that IGO networks have discernible effects on trade flows, even when the IGOs in question are not dedicated to lowering trade barriers. In defining structure, this approach to international networks often relies on social network analysis (a mainstay of sociological research), on network economics, and on a new science of networks that has been applied to subjects that range from the spread of contagious diseases to the growth of the Internet to the metabolism of cells.4

The nodes in social network analysis can include individual members of terrorist organizations or countries linked by trade and investment.5 Like the even broader notions of network deployed in the natural sciences—a set of interconnected nodes—social network analysis emphasizes interdependent actors and relational data rather than individual agents and their attributes. The ties or links among the actors (nodes) create a structure (a persistent pattern of relations) that in turn serves to constrain actors or provide opportunities for action (Wasserman and Faust 1994, 4; Scott 2000, 2–3). Social network analysis provides both a toolkit of concepts and a methodology for empirical research.

Network economics also emphasizes structural attributes of networks, such as scale or degrees of hierarchy, and the implications of those attributes for efficient operation and policy intervention. The new science of networks has introduced the dynamics of network development into an approach that has too often relied on static snapshots of network structure. Attention to network evolution and growth has directed attention to new structural variants, such as small-world and scale-free networks (Watts 1999; Newman, Barabási, and Watts 2006).

These approaches to networks and their structure rely on networks with relatively large numbers of nodes: states, for example, linked through IGOs or trade. Viewed as structure, networks are not the result of conscious design on the part of agents, even though they are sustained by interaction on the part of the nodes. An individual node (state, individual, or other agent) confronts the networks as a structural given, its behavior constrained by network ties.

Networks as Actors

The second, and more familiar, approach to network analysis in international politics captures networks as actors, forms of coordinated or collective action aimed at changing international outcomes and national policies. Networks are not treated as an omnipresent feature of social life. Instead, they are a specific institutional form that stands in contrast to the hierarchical organization of states and to the temporally limited exchange relations of markets (Powell 1990; Thompson 2003). In the widely cited definition of Joel M. Podolny and Karen L. Page, a network is “any collection of actors (N 2) that pursue repeated, enduring exchange relations with one another and, at the same time, lack a legitimate organizational authority to arbitrate and resolve disputes that may arise during the exchange.” In contrast to markets, network relations are enduring; in contrast to hierarchies, recognized dispute settlement authority does not reside with any member of the network (Podolny and Page 1998, 59). This definition provides only ideal types; hybrid organizational forms can also emerge. For example, in corporate networks, hierarchies (individual corporations) that populate one level of analysis may be networked nodes at another level. Within those hierarchical corporate nodes, individuals also may be networked in ways that compete with formal organizational design.

Other efforts to distinguish networks from hierarchies offer less precision in defining the boundaries of networked politics: “fluidity” (Lin 2001, 38); “relative flatness, decentralization and delegation of decision making authority, and loose lateral ties among dispersed groups and individuals” (Zanini and Edwards 2001, 33); or “voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange” (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 8). As the contributions to this book demonstrate, such features may characterize some, but not all, of the networks that have emerged as actors in international relations.

The network-as-actor perspective differs from the structural approach in incorporating links defined by exchange and created by agents; structure (beyond the existence of a network) has been less central to the interests of investigators. Instead, the relative advantages and disadvantages of networked organization, when compared to its institutional competitors, occupy a more prominent place. The nodes of these networked actors may be government agencies (transgovernmental networks in chapter 10, this book), human rights activists (Amnesty International network in chapter 7), terrorist organizations (the al Qaeda network in chapter 6), or other international actors. The structural approach to networks abstracts structure from the characteristics of network nodes; for networked actors, however, agent characteristics may transform the aims and the effectiveness of these networks. The networks-as-actors approach lacks a common methodology, such as social network analysis. Its empirical methods have been eclectic and largely qualitative. Identifying the network as a network is the essential first step; assessing its organizational advantages and disadvantages, particularly in promoting collective ends, follows from that identification.

Distinguishing these two approaches to networked politics and their particular analytic and explanatory aims reduces, but does not eliminate, the confusion that has often surrounded the use of networks in international relations. Both approaches require careful definition of network nodes and links. Levels of analysis must be carefully separated: network actors may themselves become nodes in higher-level network structures. Each approach also challenges the other. The structural approach highlights an absence of both rigorous analysis and structural variables in many accounts of network actors. The ubiquity of networks in structural analysis may disguise an absence of theoretical content, an inability to relate network structure to international outcomes with a plausible causal account. In the chapters that follow, each approach contends with these challenges. Networks-as-structure derive structural consequences by drawing on existing international relations theory. Accounts of networks-as-actors take structure seriously as a possible determinant of the success or failure of collective action.

As several of the authors illustrate, however, both approaches may be required for a complete explanation of certain international outcomes. Zachary Elkins (chapter 3) examines both a network structure and a set of network actors—transnational human rights networks—that have influenced the international diffusion of constitutional models. Peter Cowhey and Milton Mueller (chapter 9) describe both a network with a particular structure (the Internet) and networked actors that participate in Internet governance. National governments contemplating Internet governance choices must deal with both.

Structure and Agency: A Network Perspective

Both approaches to networked politics, networks as structures and networks as actors, illuminate the relationship between structure and agency in international relations. A structural approach to international networks typically assumes that agents within the network are not aware of its overall structure and do not act to influence or change that structure. In other words, the actor nodes of the networks may behave in a purposive way, but their actions are not directed to altering the structure itself. Governments that negotiate preferential trade agreements (PTAs), in the account of Emilie Hafner-Burton and Alexander Montgomery (chapter 2), are likely to pursue relatively narrow economic gains or perhaps ancillary foreign policy goals. The social power that inheres in their network connections is unlikely to figure in their motivations. The physical infrastructure of the Internet, designed decades ago, has evolved to display the characteristics outlined by Cowhey and Mueller: network externalities, economies of scale and scope, and elements of hierarchy. Individuals linking to the Interne...

Table of contents

• Contributors
• 1 Networked Politics
• Part I Networks as Structure
• Part II Networks and Collective Action
• Part III Power and Accountability in Networks
• Part IV Networks and International Governance
• References