A Network Approach to Geopolitics

Ernest Liu, Stephen Redding, Bennett Smith-Worthington and David Yang

No 22048, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We develop a tractable framework for analyzing geopolitics as a network of coordination and strategic influence. Countries choose geopolitical actions that trade off domestic interests against incentives to align with connected countries. They can exert costly bilateral influence to affect one another's actions. We characterize equilibrium actions and bilateral influence in closed form. Cross-country differences in domestic interests decompose into latent geopolitical cleavages, each of which the network transmits into geopolitical actions independently of the others. The cross-country covariance matrices of domestic interests and of geopolitical actions identify the cleavages and their importance, from which we recover the network. We implement the framework using data on United Nations voting and democratic orientation. The inferred network is well approximated by a few dimensions, aligns with external measures of geopolitical ties, and recovers well-known historical cleavages. We undertake counterfactuals for domestic interests and network connections and quantify three notions of geopolitical power.

Keywords: Networks; Coordination; Strategic Influence; Network games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D85 F15 F52 F68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP22048 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:22048

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP22048

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().