Building New Political Actors A Model for the Emergence of New Political Actors

The question of the aggregation and disaggregation of political actors is essential for the understanding of the future of global politics, both in terms of international security affairs and international political economy. A model based upon tribute is presented to show how new political actors can emerge from an aggregation of smaller political actors. The tribute model provides an existence proof that it is possible to use simple local rules to generate higher levels of organization from elementary actors. In particular it shows that a dynamics of "pay or else" combined with mechanisms to increase and decrease commitments can lead to clusters of actors that behave largely according to the criteria for independent political states. ============================================================ Introduction How can new political actors emerge from an aggregation of smaller political actors? This paper presents a simulation model that provides one answer. In its broadest perspective, the work can be seen as part of the study of emergent organization through