What You See Depends on How You Look: Global Governance Theory and Social Network Analysis Annelies Z. Kamran and Thomas G. Weiss Department of Political Science, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York Introduction

A Slice of Global Governance:

What do a slice of Emmental, a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan, and global governance have in common? Swiss cheese’s appearance changes by slicing in different directions—depending on the cut, the same holes appear different. An MRI takes detailed pictures of such heterogeneous structures as the human brain. Tiny two-dimensional slices are assembled to provide an extremely accurate three-dimensional depiction of complex reality, but any one slice provides only a partial picture, that is accurate but can be misleading. Finally, global governance provides a description of the heterogeneous structures of world politics, which can be studied by examining slices at different geographical, temporal, and issue junctures. This is in direct contrast to traditional International Relations (IR) theories such as realism and liberal institutionalism, which assume that the roles played by states and other transnational organizations are fixed.

The Humanitarian Aid Network of the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 26 December 2004

At present, social scientists have knives to slice Emmental, but are grasping for more precise tools such as social network analysis (SNA) to take MRI slides.

Global governance defined Global governance is “the complex of formal and informal institutions, mechanisms, relationships, and processes between and among states, markets, citizens and organizations, both inter- and non-governmental, through which collective interests on the global plane are articulated, rights and obligations are established, and differences are mediated.” Global governance is about understanding the structures created through repeated relationships, or patterns of authority. It allows us to pay attention to a range of activities and actors, such as intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in contemporary world politics. States remain the most important actors, but a host of other actors are increasingly crucial; and all of the actors in any case are interdependent. SNA is a way to rigorously study “slices” of global political structure. “Slices” of global governance help identify gaps. They illustrate how different actors work in tandem or at cross-purposes on the same problem. Global governance exists when gaps are at least partially filled, lest there be more hole than cheese. Not all MRI-like slices provide the same picture of the evolution in international society because the patterns of relationships and institutions vary by issue, geographic location, and historical period. For instance, calculations about international peace and security are not the same for major and minor powers, not similar for nuclear weapons and drugs, and not comparable before and after 9/11. There are five different types of gaps:  knowledge: is data available? how is it interpreted?  norms: is there a universal standard?  policy: how should the standard be translated into action?  institutions: by whom should the standard be translated?  compliance: how can standards be enforced?

On 26 December 2004, an earthquake that registered magnitude 9.0 (later adjusted to 9.3) on the Richter scale occurred just before 8 a.m. off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The epicenter was about 150 miles southeast of Banda Aceh. The Indian plate was subducted under the Eurasian plate and they moved several hundred kilometers at a depth of about thirty kilometers. This movement displaced billions of tons of overlying ocean water. The resulting tsunami traveled at speeds up to 500 miles per hour.

Figure 1. Countries affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami BBC News TheSource: earthquake and the resulting tsunamis spread unprecedented devastation across the Indian Ocean. The destruction to infrastructure was disastrous, and the tsunami killed more people than any other in history—estimates ranged up to 280,000—and displaced more than one million.

• Policy: The UN’s priorities in reaching the emergency goals of providing food, water, and medical care—and only afterwards assisting in recovery efforts such as rebuilding housing and infrastructure—were articulated clearly and generally followed. • Enforcement: The Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (TEC), provided an accounting of the more than $6.7 billion that was pledged for humanitarian aid. As of January 2007, TEC found that the funding was unusually transparent, generous, speedy, and from nongovernment sources.

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Institutions: Because the UN had standing operating agreements with almost all of the governments, civil society actors, and other organized groups, it was able to incorporate new actors when they came on the scene: thousands of individuals spontaneously created relief groups whose action needed to be directed usefully. The network thus created could be measured by flows of resources, and separated into principle components: donors of funds, aggregators of funds, and channels for funds into the region. The image below plots the transnational aid flows by type of actor. The data come from the OCHA Financial Tracking Service, which records the international humanitarian aid reported to it by donors or recipients. The arrows indicate the direction (sender to receiver) of aid flows as recorded in US dollars. The actors, which are colored according to a priori differences in organizational type (black for NGOs, dark blue for states, etc.) are grouped in a spring embedded layout. Significantly, actor positions in the network did not depend on their attributes: different types of actors played similar roles. Those that received money from one set of actors and gave money to another set of actors are approximately structurally equivalent: they performed similar functions in the network, even though they are different types of organizations. The roles of state and nonstate actors in the tsunami’s transnational humanitarian aid flows as of 11 July 2006

Conclusions Transnational humanitarian aid flows did not conform to expectations raised by traditional IR theories. Realism would assume states would take the lead; liberal institutionalism would focus on states and IGOs. However, both would miss the leading roles that are increasingly played by other actors. SNA methods would allow the simultaneous consideration of multiple relationships—a major insight for the analysis of international relations, even when considering states let alone the multiple types of actors and layers of relationships that characterize contemporary global governance in situations like the tsunami. Network terms can be translated into international relations via the measures of power in global governance. It seems natural to us to examine such power ties and relationships along the gaps in global governance. Mapping these ties would allow us to do several things: • examine them statistically and calculate the probabilities of the different distributions of ties • model the cooperation between individual actors in the framework of dynamic or evolutionary game theory • use eigenvector analysis to examine multiple dimensions These steps would serve the creation of a middle-range theory of global governance.

Literature cited Barnett, Michael and Raymond Duvall. 2005. Power in Global Governance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamran, Annelies Z. 2006. “Structure of a Transnational Human Security Network: The Response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 26 December 2004,” Proceedings of The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and ONCE-CS conference on Mathematics in the Science of Complex Systems, 18 – 21 September 2006, University of Warwick. Rosenau, James N. 1997. Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a Turbulent World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wasserman, Stanley and Katherine Faust. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Figure 2. The shoreline in Banda Aceh, Indonesia before and after the tsunamis. Source: Digital Globe

The responses by a constellation of relief organizations, national governments, militaries, and private individuals around the world illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of global governance. An overall response network (states, IGOs, and NGOs) was in place, but the creation of the tailored network for the tsunami required negotiating a structure among existing groups as well as procedures to incorporate others that joined later.

Acknowledgments This is the gene of interest!

• Knowledge: Through its ReliefWeb Internet site, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) was able to inform the world both what survivors’ immediate needs were, what was being done to meet those needs, and the help aid workers required. • Normative: The provision of emergency supplies to affected populations was available almost immediately, reflecting a long-standing moral commitment to react quickly and generously in the face of natural disasters.

We thank our colleagues at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies and in the CUNY Social and Political Theory Student Association, for their comments. Funding for this presentation was provided by the CUNY Doctoral Students Research Grant.

For further information Figure 3. The circled cluster of nodes acted as the main “aggregators” of aid. They collected or donated aid (both cash and in-kind), and funneled it to “channels”—those actors who distributed aid to the affected region. Note the importance of the node labeled private (individual donations) – at this time, donations from this source totaled over $3 billion.

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