Connecting with Complexity

We live in an ever-changing world. Everything is shifting, connecting and disconnecting and interconnecting. The world is becoming more and more complex. The most important change being felt by our societies and our environment stems from a cascading networked complexity – deep, dense, nonlinear and unpredictable. The acceleration of interconnection and communication helped drive a vast increase in productivity, which combined with the more recent shift from industry to information and service, means that economies grow exponentially. Mutated viruses (i.e bird flu) the revolutions (i.e Arab Spring), the financial crisis, terrorists networks, the manias, the fashion, the latest loves and hates, the spreading of cyber-crime are all manifestations of our ever more connected world. The current pace of technological change, particularly in ICT, is getting a “hockey stick” curve – it starts slowly and then very quickly speeds up. Sometimes we might feel as if we’re stuck in the middle of chaos, that high technology is outstripping our capacity to manage it. The interconnectedness of global phenomena, and in particular the interactions (and communication linkages) between individuals, groups and institutions, give a new perspective to events and structures. This paper is a theoretical approach and shows how some of ideas from the science of complexity and network analysis can be applied to the study of political and social phenomena. This is an illustration how concepts from complexity science combined with network analysis can be adapted to increase not only our understanding of global politics but also predict social behavior.