Complex Systems Research, And International Relations

The dissertation intends to review the application of complex system in international relations studies, including research subject, science philosophy, method, and relevant works. Complex system research replaces the stability and linear model with nonlinear and emergent model. It also encourages innovative methods for understanding political reality and offers a novel perspective on world politics: Firstly, research subject transfers from simple system to complex system. Different from stability oriented simple system, complex systems are always dynamic and emphasize the relationships between factors in the system. Secondly, science philosophy changes from positivism, post-positivism to evolutionary realism. Since the death of positivism in the 1970s, philosophers have turned to scientific realism, evolutionary epistemology, and the semantic conception of theories. Building on these trends, complexity science offers a new normal science epistemology—evolutionary realism. It combines scientific realism with semantic relativism, focusing on order creation by self-organizing heterogeneous agents and agent-based model, not requiring the mathematical assumptions of agent homogeneity and equilibrium conditions. In the Semantic Conception, the quality of a science is measured by how well it explains the dynamics of phase-spaces—not by reduction back to axioms. Thirdly, formal model transfers from rational choice model to agent-based model. As a kind of dynamic formal model, the unifying goal of this method is to simulate and understand processes through which macro or social patterns emerge from the actions and interactions of agents (and their context), and in many applications agents are heterogeneous and adaptive, rather than homogeneous and rational.Scholars of international politics have embraced the idea of complexity and methods of complex system theory, and yet have little agreement over the role of complex systems in our thinking about global politics. Their researches can be classified into three kinds: Firstly, as a metaphor or heuristic, turbulence paradigm, complex system effect and world society borrows some ideas from complexity system theory to analyze international politics. Secondly, as a method, Thomas C. Shelling and Robert Axelrod are considered as the pioneers of complex-systems modeling. Some researchers applied this method in democratic peace studies. Moreover, viewed as a complement to qualitative theoretical and historical work, complexity modeling are useful in assisting the scholar in disentangling thorny conceptual puzzles and in keeping track of involved spatiotemporal processes, as advocated by constructivist scholars; thirdly, as a tool of critical inquiry, Paul Cilliers explores the notion of complexity in light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science, and reinterpret postmodern theory in order to argue that a postmodern perspective does not necessarily imply relativism. Complexity science sets the limit for research, which orients toward objective and scientific research rather than philosophical and purely narrative construction.The scientific studies of international relations were initiated by Edward H. Carr switching to realism, followed first by the quantitative analysis of behaviorism and then by the anti-scientific stance of post positivism. Science in this process was left in an embarrassing position due to conventional science being static, mechanistic and linear. Complexity science intends to move beyond the orthodoxy of conventional science and continue effective scientific research. Researchers of complex system have largely eschewed the grand theoretical debates between various'isms'. In other words, complex system is not a substantive theory of international relations (or anything else, for that matter). It is an analytical tool with which the implications of particular substantive assumptions about the real world can be hammered out. Despite these advantages, scholars of international politics remain skeptical about complex system's method. While complexity is a meaningful metaphor, complex systems differ in important ways from social and political systems. Although they may behave in complicated and confusing ways, political systems have structures of authority that may be inconsistent with the definition of complex system. Moreover, the methods of complex systems theory alone cannot prove or disprove hypotheses about global politics—although it is a theory of process, it cannot be a theory of politics. To make sense of the intricacies of global politics, then, researches who use simulations of complex systems must supplement these efforts with empirical investigations.