Related papers: Triangulating War: Network Structure and the Democ…
Understanding how reliable information emerges in interconnected populations is a challenge in social science, network theory and data analysis. Many existing approaches model treat truth as an external reference or a property of individual…
It is not uncommon for certain social networks to divide into two opposing camps in response to stress. This happens, for example, in networks of political parties during winner-takes-all elections, in networks of companies competing to…
Online social networks have become primary means of communication. As they often exhibit undesirable effects such as hostility, polarisation or echo chambers, it is crucial to develop analytical tools that help us better understand them. In…
Triadic relationships are accepted to play a key role in the dynamics of social and political networks. Building on insights gleaned from balance theory in social network studies and from Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical physics, we propose a…
This paper proposes a way to effectively compare the potential of processes to cause conflict. In discrete event systems theory, two concurrent systems are said to be in conflict if they can get trapped in a situation where they are both…
Peace means order, and war brings disorder and chaos to any society. But order and disorder are not only observed in wars, in many systems they are the dominant property. Understanding order and disorder enables us to understand the…
We analyze the database prepared by Brecke (Brecke 2011) for violent conflict, covering some 600 years of human history. After normalizing the data for the global human population, we find that the number of casualties tends to follow a…
Recent empirical work highlights the heterogeneity of social competitions such as political campaigns: proponents of some ideologies seek debate and conversation, others create echo chambers. While symmetric and static network structure is…
The deterrent effect of military alliances is well documented and widely accepted. However, such work has typically assumed that alliances are exogenous. This is problematic as alliances may simultaneously influence the probability of…
Social network extensions of Heider's balance theory have not always been consistent. Structural balance theory primarily focuses on graph partitioning, thereby assuming, homogeneity in balance-driven behavior of nodes. We present a general…
Structural balance in social network theory starts from signed networks with active relationships (friendly or hostile) to establish a hierarchy between four different types of triadic relationships. The lack of an active link also provides…
We investigate the dynamical systems modeling conflict processes between a pair of opponents. We assume that opponents are given on a common space by distributions (probability measures) having the similar or self-similar structure. Our…
The dynamics of networks on Heider balance theory moves toward reducing the tension by constantly reevaluating the interactions to achieve a state of balance. Conflict of interest, however, is inherent in most complex systems; frequently,…
How do social networks evolve when both friendly and unfriendly relations exist? Here we propose a simple dynamics for social networks in which the sense of a relationship can change so as to eliminate imbalanced triads--relationship…
Many real systems can be described by a set of interacting entities forming a complex network. To some surprise, these have been shown to share a number of structural properties regardless of their type or origin. It is thus of vital…
We study the connections between network structure, opinion dynamics, and an adversary's power to artificially induce disagreements. We approach these questions by extending models of opinion formation in the social sciences to represent…
In this work we study the dynamical features of editorial wars in Wikipedia (WP). Based on our previously established algorithm, we build up samples of controversial and peaceful articles and analyze the temporal characteristics of the…
How do networks of relationships evolve over time? We analyse a dataset tracking the social interactions of 900 individuals over four years. Despite continuous shifts in individual relationships, the macroscopic structural properties of the…
Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…
Advances in community detection reveal new insights into multiplex and multilayer networks. Less work, however, investigates the relationship between these communities and outcomes in social systems. We leverage these advances to shed light…