مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

The global scenario of today is more complex than ever. For the first time in its whole history, the US have recently been involved at the same time in three different war theaters in three different countries (Kurth, 2010), in the company of most other major Western nations, and the geography of conflict has been further escalating since then. The economic and cultural leadership of the West is openly challenged by once emerging countries which, despite what it was boldly claimed not long ago by influential thinkers such as Fukuyama (1992), far from adopting the market democracy ideology as their socio-organizational paradigm, are on the contrary deploying alternative ones, based on their own traditions and schemes of thought. Global networks of alliances and hostilities are becomingly increasingly blurred and deeply layered. In this multi-polar world with its ‘multiple modernities’ (Casanova, 2011), hard to predict discontinuities (van Notten et al., 2005), and collapsed decision-making timing (Comes et al., 2014), the famous and controversial thesis of Huntington (1996) that we are facing a ‘clash of civilizations’ is often read by non-Westerners as a conceptual shorthand, as a reflex of the West’s hard-to-die attitude of thinking that any global narrative that challenges their own is, ipso facto, an oppositional one (Yije, 2010) – and thus ultimately as an instrumental theoretical construct which has been shaped up to serve specific ideological purposes (Adib-Moghaddam, 2008), and which may be possibly supported only from a Western perspective serving Western interests (Fox, 2001). A common basis for a true dialogue in terms of cultural values is indispensable for future peaceful coexistence (Anthony, 2010), as the persistence of oppositional narratives on the Western side naturally paves the way to dialectic, and often armed counterparts (Aydin and Özen, 2010). Issues of cultural and value diversity at the global scale cannot be eluded any longer, and how they are tackled largely influences actual as well as future scenarios. A clear example of a much debated contribution in this vein is Sørensen (2006), who considers the current world order as transitional, with open-ended future developments whose unfolding basically depends on whether or not less privileged countries and populations will be given a possibility to take part in it more actively, and on fairer terms.

The crucial role of value and cultural systems in this context is that they act as filters that allow a specific cataloging, reading and interpretation of events according to a coherent, meaningful structure, whose inclusionary vs. exclusionary implications in terms of intercultural dialogue largely depend on their testimonials, and on the social support they manage to gather (Levine, 2011). Different systems may imply mutually incoherent and even oppositional renditions of the same events, and possibly feed ‘toxic narratives’ based on stereotypical attributions about the ‘other’ (Ringmar, 2006), and support prolonged, disruptive conflict, especially when combined with situations of poverty, fear and exclusion of either party (Sen, 2008). The approach of Democratic Peace Theory (Rummel, 1975-1981; Doyle, 2011; Huth and Allee, 2002) highlights the role of shared democratic values in curbing the escalation and violence of conflict, and in establishing a solid basis for peace. Although the theory has been at the center of lively debate and controversy (Henderson, 2002; Rosato, 2003), and although claims of reverse causality from peace to democracy have been equally supported (James et al., 1999), the role of democratic values and institutions in the construction of a more peaceful world order is hard to deny (Cederman, 2001; Gleditsch, 2002).

In this paper, we develop a methodologically innovative approach, in the spirit of the methodological proposal of Beck et al. (2000), who point out that the complexity of the world order can only be addressed through an entirely novel computational approach with respect to traditional statistical tools. To this purpose, we introduce an innovative artificial neural network tool, the Activation and Competition System (ACS) developed by Buscema (2014), Buscema et al. (2013), Buscema and Sacco (2013), and we apply it to the analysis of the structure of global alliances and conflicts in terms of relative differences in cultural and value orientations that may be publicly observed and measured. The main purpose of this paper is therefore to illustrate how the use of an innovative tool may generate, on the basis of publicly available information, valuable insights that improve our understanding of global world order patterns.