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143 C H A P T E R 8 Signifying Nothing? What Complex Systems Theory Can and Cannot Tell Us about Global Politics David C. Earnest James N. Rosenau Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour on the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. —The Tragedy of Macbeth, act 5, scene 5 So laments Shakespeare’s tragic protagonist at the news of his wife’s death. While one may forgive the Scottish king for his pessimistic metaphor, “life” for most of us connotes roseate meanings: dynamism, growth, learning, evolution, and adaptation. So perhaps it is no surprise that the complexity sciences—explicitly concerned with these properties of a variety of systems, from physical to social —not only invoke the metaphor of life but also have postulated the idea of “artificial” life (Langton et al. 1991; Langton 1994, 1995; Kauffman 1995; Langton and Shimohara 1997). It is unremarkable, furthermore, that social scientists observe in human societies the dynamism, adaptability, and unpredictability of organisms and ecological systems. Corning (2002), for one, argues that human societies are “superorganisms” and global politics are becoming a “super-superorganism .” Johnson’s “myth of the ant queen” (2001) explicitly postulates that human cities organize themselves much like colonies of insects do: without the centralized authority of an “ant queen.” Smith and Stevens (1997) reduce social organization to the attachment behavior regulated by the brain’s cyclic production of neurotransmitters known as “opioids.” More provocatively, Corning notes that the biologist Edward O. Wilson argues “the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology” (Wilson 1975, 547, quoted in Corning 2000, 103). Indeed, there is a growing field of “biopolitics” (see Somit and Peterson 1997). Rather than a walking shadow in our analyses, then, life and its connotations of dynamism are central to an important line of contemporary thought about social systems. This includes the many IR theorists today who accept complexity and nonlinearity as a metaphor for the inordinate intricacy of global and international politics. The proliferation and influence of supra- and subnational actors, surprising cascading events like the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 or the current crisis of multilateralism, the transformative effects of global information technologies; the seemingly chronic inability of existing theories to provide reliable predictions—all these facts understandably make many students of politics and societies sympathetic to theoretical approaches that posit instability, unpredictability , and change in the international system. Complexity appears at first glance to be precisely the paradigm we need to understand global politics today. Furthermore, the simulation techniques and computer skills necessary for the application of complex systems theories are within the grasp of international relations scholars who have mastered more-conventional statistical or formal methods . Yet, by and large, international relations scholars who use complex systems theories—not to mention complex systems theorists who study international politics —are few and far between. Clearly, international relations theory has been slow to embrace complex systems for reasons other than the barriers to learning its methods for investigating the intricacies of global politics. Why? Macbeth might claim complex systems theories are tales told by an idiot, though we are more optimistic about complexity’s prospects. In this chapter we argue that those who study international relations have failed to use complexity as a general theory of complex systems (“complex systems theory”) because, while complexity is a meaningful metaphor, complex adaptive systems —at least as conventionally formulated by theorists like Holland (1992, 1995, 1998) and, in political science, Jervis (1997), Axelrod (1997), and Axelrod and Cohen (1999)—differ in important ways from social and political systems. Although they may behave in complicated and confusing ways, social systems have structures of authority that may be inconsistent with the definition of complex adaptive systems. These differences are more than mere definitional or typological differences; we argue that in social systems, authority serves to minimize complexity . One therefore cannot use complex systems theory to model even partly centralized or hierarchical systems—precisely those types of systems that proliferate in the world of politics. We argue, furthermore, that by construction the simulation methods of complex systems theory cause the researcher to make assumptions about those issues that are of most interest to international relations scholars in particular and to political science in general: who the actors are and 144 DAVID C. EARNEST AND JAMES N. ROSENAU [3.17.28.48] Project MUSE (2024...

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