Neutrality has played a pivotal, but under-examined, role in international relations, new research shows

Researchers have developed a new way of understanding international relations by analysing almost 200 years of alliances, hostilities and neutrality between countries.

The research team, led by Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, concludes that neutrality has played a far greater role in global stability than previously thought – but has been under-explored and often mislabelled.

The study analysed 192 years of data between 1816 and 2007 from the Correlates of War (CoW) project, which collects and shares data on international relations.

Lead author Dr David Dekker, a Research Fellow at Edinburgh Business School, explained: “Our findings show that that neutral ties were more prevalent over a long period than alliances and hostilities, and played a pivotal, but previously unquantified role, in international stability.”

Neutrality has largely been ignored or under-analysed in previous research, which has tended to categorise international relations as either positive or negative. Within this binary system, neutrality is often incorrectly categorised as negative or ignored, which is even more problematic. For example, if your friend has an alliance with one of your enemies, it can put huge stress on the relationship with your friend – and be a source of conflict.

“In other words, international relations aren’t just black and white, they’re multi-layered.”

By introducing neutrality as a third category in their analysis, alongside positive and negative international relations, the team identified 26 new types of relation groupings between countries.  They define this new, more granular, measure of relational structure as "balance correlations" – and argue that this new way of exploring relationships between countries – and other parts of society – has profound implications for policymakers.

“Policymakers can benefit from this because we’ve been able to quantify types of behaviour and that were not identified before,” Dr Dekker said. “As well as helping us understand the dynamics between countries, it’s an approach that could be used, for example, to develop strategies for supply chains or to build stable learning environments in schools by understanding the relationships between students.”

The study, titled ‘Balance Correlations, Agentic Zeros, and Networks: The Structure of 192 Years of War and Peace,’ has been published in the journal, PLOS ONE. The co-authors of the research are David Krackhardt from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the United States; Patrick Doreian from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and Pavel N. Krivitsky from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

The researchers also found that neutrality can have dramatic effects on the formation and dissolution of social ties. It can lead to more conflict in periods when this behaviour is adopted widely. For example, they identify the 69 years between 1867 and 1936 as a particularly turbulent period when ‘neutrality behaviour’ dominated.

“If a country chooses to be neutral to another country, that can really tip the balance in the whole system,” Dr Dekker explained. “And we saw that during this turbulent period, which included World War I and all kinds of other disputes around the world. It’s only after the Second World War that we see a much more stable pattern arising again.”

The study extends a theory of interpersonal relations, called balance theory, which was developed during World War II by Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider.

By analysing groupings of three people, countries, or other actors, this theory for example predicts that 'a friend of a friend is a friend.' Other predicted relationship groupings include ‘a friend of an enemy is an enemy’ and ‘the enemy of a friend is an enemy.’ All of these have different impacts on the balance of sentiment in a three-party relationship.

Dr Dekker is an expert in social network theory, a science which merges mathematics and sociology. Originally from The Netherlands, he has a PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam and, alongside his academic work, advises businesses on green investments. 

Edinburgh Business School is one of the world's largest providers of postgraduate business education, with 49,000 alumni across 158 countries.