Complexity in World Politics: Concepts and Methods of a New Paradigm

10.Complex Systems and the Practice of World Politics

183 C H A P T E R 10 Complex Systems and the Practice of World Politics Neil E. Harrison The study and practice of world politics has for too long been distorted by rational choice. This conveniently simple model has misled generations of scholars and policy-makers (Smith 2004). Like a cancer it changes minds and institutions until its simpleminded rationality seems utterly human: “Taking a preference for the maximization of self-interest or even utility as a given begets both a cognitive and a political reality in which individuals and political leaders alike come to view such behavior as normatively acceptable and as the standard by which government should operate. . . . Rational choice preserves the status quo. . . . Thus, public policy as is becomes the public policy interest as it ought to be” (Petracca 1991, emphasis in the original). This book has proposed a better way of understanding world politics. Chapter 1 described the complexity paradigm built on an understanding of the characteristics of complex systems and shows how ideas from complexity can be adapted to world politics. Chapter 2 compared general and complex systems taxonomies and, thereby, further elaborated the complexity concepts and ideas that may be used to construct complex systems theories of issue-areas in world politics. Chapters 3 through 6 illustrated complexity and its benefits by applying complexity concepts and sketching complex systems theories for specific issue-areas. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 debated the epistemology and methods of complex systems. In this chapter, I first show how complex systems concepts can improve how we think about and understand world politics. In the next section, I consider Earnest and Rosenau’s epistemological critique of complex systems theory in chapter 8. In the third section, I show how complexity could reform policy in world politics. In a short coda, I summarize the many benefits of the complexity paradigm and the theories it can spawn. Throughout this chapter I indicate several paths for further development and application of the complexity paradigm. A BETTER WAY TO UNDERSTAND WORLD POLITICS This book has outlined the concepts of a complex systems taxonomy for world politics and offered four cases that demonstrate their application. Complex systems concepts can improve current theory, generate novel insights, and allow exploration of new possibilities. Improving Current Theory Complex systems concepts can extend or elaborate current knowledge, a critical measure of a new taxonomy (see chapter 2). For example, Hoffmann shows how a complex systems theory can provide the microfoundations to international negotiations and agreements. Constructivism argues that interests and identity are constructed through interaction between states. Structure does not determine agent choices, because “agents and structures are produced or reproduced by what actors do” (Wendt 1994, 390). Thus, agents have a degree of freedom that introduces potential for dynamic system change. But as states are treated as units (Wendt 1994, 385), constructivism cannot explain how states exercise this freedom of choice. Thus, there is no explanation of the microfoundation of macroprocesses (and so of the sources of change in the international system). Conceptualizing the state as a complex system that is an agent in the international system (a meta-agent), Hoffmann fills this gap in constructivist theory . He treats international negotiations as the coevolution of adaptive states, which fixes attention on the internal processes by which states exercise their freedom in choosing their identity and interests and thereby influence international processes and other states’ choices. Constructivists describe identity as “grounded in the theories which actors hold about themselves and one another and which constitute the structure of the social world” (Wendt 1992, 397). This language is close to complexity concepts of internal models. Constructivism sees identity as formed and changed through socialization in the international system , but complexity expands behavior to include both the emergent domestic processes and international coevolution, much as suggested, though more statically , in Putnam’s two-level games (1988). Bhavnani’s analysis of the Rwanda genocide also uses complexity concepts as an adjunct to conventional theories. He does not deny the usual explanations of the causes of the violence. The ethnic hatreds, government propaganda, and 184 NEIL E. HARRISON the death of the Hutu president are well recognized. He uses complexity concepts to answer a puzzle that conventional theories cannot touch: the initial conditions of the Rwanda conflict, however reasonable, cannot explain the rapidity and magnitude of the killing. However, the dynamic evolution of the killing can be captured by...