What kind of ‘world order’? An artificial neural networks approach to intensive data mining

In this paper, we present an innovative data processing architecture, the Activation & Competition System (ACS), and show how this methodology allows us to reconstruct in detail some aspects of the fine grained structure of global relationships in the world order perspective, on the basis of a minimal dataset only consisting of the values of five publicly available indicators for 2007 for the 118 countries for which they are jointly available. ACS seems in particular to qualify as a valuable tool for the analysis of inter-country patterns of conflict and alliances, which may prove of special interest in the current situation of global strategic uncertainty in international relations.