Century-old alliances appear to be shifting, or are at least under strain. That is especially worrying for LUMEN, as we have members loyal to two different allied blocs. Traditionally, Caldari and Amarr work together in LUMEN towards common goals. A Minmatar-Caldari rapprochement could change that.
Psychologists and political scientists have been investigating how networks of relations between entities evolve over time. These could be networks of individuals, or networks of corporations in an economic market, or even networks of relations between nations. They have come up with a general description called 'Structural Balance Theory' which is now a workhorse for modelling these relations.
Like any widely applicable theory, it is a huge simplification of the real world, but which nonetheless captures a certain essential truth about it. So let's have a look.
The central object, the 'atom' of the theory, is the triad. These are groups of three interconnected nodes on the network. Depending on whether the connections are blue (good) or red (bad), there can be four cases:
When all are blue to each other, this is the best situation. Two allies fighting a common enemy is the next best one. All fighting all is a frustrating situation, but even more frustrating is when your two allies are fighting each other. Any network can be given a score based on the breakdown in triads.
Let's look at possible scenario's between the four core powers:
There are four triads: ACF, AFM, CFM, ACM. In the situation up till now (top left) each triad is of the 'weak balanced' type, so the stability score of the network is +4. That is good, but there can always be a shock, there is always a certain probability that one of these links will flip. Structural balance theory predicts that, as a result, the effects will cascade through the network and change alliances all over, as the network tries to adapt to restore stability.
The shock that we may be heading towards is the Caldari-Minmatar relations turning to blue. This leads to the lower right network in the figure above. It's now become very unstable: the stability score drops precipitously to -4, due to two strongly frustrated triads.
This will lead to a strong pressure for the Caldari and the Minmatar to resolve the frustration of choosing between allies. The most likely outcome, according to structural balance theory, is to break one of their alliances, as this turns the strongly frustrated triads in weak frustrated triads (upper right). The score is raised from -4 to 0. Now, there will arise a new pressure, this time on the Amarr and Gallente. If they flip their relation to blue, then the better score of +4 is achieved (lower right).
It is a very simple model - and there are many ways it can be made mode complete, for example by allowing also neutral standings rather than just blue and red. Yet even in this simplest version, it is clear that step by step the effects of the Caldari-Minmatar flip percolate through the network. We are indeed witnessing this theoretical model play out in today's realignments of the relations between the empires.
OOC source attributions:
Structural balance theory is not fictional, it has been around for a long time. The main sources are
Heider, F. (1946). Attitudes and cognitive organization. Journal
of Psychology, 21:107–122.
Cartwright, D. and Harary, F. (1956). Structural
balance: A generalization of heider’s theory. Psychological Review, 63(5):277–
293.
Harary, F. (1959). On the measurement of structural balance. Behavioral Science, 4(4):306–323.
