A Network Approach to Geopolitics

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

No 35951, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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

JEL-codes: C72 D85 F15 F52 F68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-int and nep-mic
Note: ITI
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35951.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:35951

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35951
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().