〈複雑適応系〉国際政治学の可能性

――〈自己組織化〉と〈創発〉を組み込んだ国際関係理解へのパラダイム・シフトを求めて――

抄録

In fields ranging from physics to biology, there has been an increasing realization that the exploration into the self-organizing process of the interactive agents will give us a new understanding of the world. Adopting a new Complex Adaptive Systems perspective, we can shed light upon the patterns and processes of international relations which has been considered to be incomprehensible and unpredictable, or overlooked and undervalued.

In this article, we propose two simple models using agent-based methodologies that focus on alliance formation and conflict generation in international politics. The interactions among the virtual states in the models result in the skewed distribution of the sizes of alliances and conflicts which contain both exceptionally large ones and unusually large amounts of small ones. Such distributions with long tails of alliance and conflict are empirically observable in the real world. The results show that the models have the possibility to give a new explanation of the pattern and processes of state behavior in the international system.

The performance of the models presented in this article, which is formalized with the simplest rules, shows us that the research program from the CAS perspective with agent-based methodology is a useful and promising strategy for the exploration in explanation and understanding of international politics.