Back to the Future: Richardson’s Multilateral Arms Race Model

Abstract

AbstractLewis Fry Richardson was a groundbreaking scholar, not only in modern meteorology but also in world affairs. His two major books, both published posthumously in 1960, were harbingers for what was to follow in scholarly international relations. In one, he collected wide-ranging, detailed quantitative information on disaggregated conflict processes in a variety of historical contexts. In the other, he showed two basic innovations for the social sciences: (a) the power of mathematics for understanding complex social systems and (b) the importance of understanding the interdependence of things that are typically studied separately. That latter insight is the focus of this chapter wherein I show that the Richardsonian insight on coupled behaviors leads to a network perspective on social interactions at the global scale. We call these coupled interactions networks. I trace the development of Richardson’s thinking about coupled phenomena to the development of network thinking in the social sciences. I conclude with some recommendations for the arms race research program as applied to the current era.