The relations between countries can be considered as a network, where the countries are nodes and the thickness of links is the indicator of their attraction or repulsion (depending on the sense of relation). In our project, we consider the relations between countries-members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which was built as a result of the USSR collapse. These countries are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The data is taken from the project “Integration Barometer”, implemented by the Eurasian Development Bank Centre for Integration Studies in partnership with the International Research Agency Eurasian Monitor. Since 2012, six waves of measurement of the public mood in the post-Soviet space were conducted. The focus of research was attitudes towards integration shown by citizens of Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) member states and other countries. The amount of countries varies from 12 (2013) to 7 (2017). Each year in each country at least 1,000 people were included into representative national samples. Among others, the questionnaire contains questions about people`s integration preferences in different spheres of life – social, economic and political. Respondents are asked about the countries from the CIS where they have close contacts (relatives, friends), would like to travel, send their children to study, or migrate; which country they think their country should have trade relations with, which one would support their country in political sense, etc. Such information is presented in the form of integrative matrixes on issues of communication, migration and general attraction (which is average-weighted numbers of references), out of which networks can be constructed. We can compute various metrics for individual nodes (countries) and network as a whole. We identify the most central countries, which were selected by the largest number of respondents in the other countries (in-degree centrality), or where the largest number of respondents selected the other countries more frequently (out-degree centrality). The analysis also includes clustering, which allows us to get information on mostly connected countries of post-Soviet space, oriented to each other. The data in different waves help us to trace the dynamics of attraction changing.
