The Afghan nexus:
Anomie, neo-patrimonialism and the emergence of small-world networks

CPM Report No.: 07-179
By: Armando Geller and Scott Moss
Date: July 2007


Abstract

Power in Afghanistan can be explained by the notion of the qawm. Qawms denote opportunistic solidarity networks in Afghanistan. We computationally grow qawms by means of agent-based social simulation informed by real actor behaviour. Emerging from our simulation are social networks which bear important structural and functional resemblance with their target system when subsequently compared with networks which are independently generated from “real world” relational data describing Afghan power structures. Both, the model and the target system, exhibit small-world network characteristics as well as a comparable composition of the networks’ clusters in regard of agent/actor types and inter-agent/-actor relationships


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