1 This work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), United States Navy Grant No. N00014- 97-1-0037, NSF IRI9633 662, Army Research Labs, NSF ITR/IM IIS-0081219, NSF KDI IIS-9980109, NSF IGERT: CASOS, and the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance, a partnership of Carnegie Mellon, Lehigh University, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Department of Economic and Community Development. Additional support was provided by ICES (the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems) and CASOS – the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon Uni- versity (http://www.casos.ece.cmu.edu ). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation or the U.S. government. 2 Direct all correspondence to: Prof. Kathleen M. Carley, Dept. of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15143, Email: kathelen.carley@cmu.edu, Fax: 1-412-268-6938, Tel: 1-412-268-3225, URL: http://hss.cmu.edu/departments/sds/faculty/carley.html CONNECTIONS 24(3): 79-92 http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/Connections-Web/Volume24-3/Carley.web.pdf © 2002 INSNA Destabilizing Networks 1 Kathleen M. Carley 2 Ju-Sung Lee David Krackhardt Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA The world we live in is a complex socio-technical system. Although social, organizational and policy analysts have long recognized that groups, organizations, institutions and the societies in which they are embedded are com plex systems; it is only recently that we have had the tools for systematically thinking about, representing, modelling and analyzing these systems. These tools include multi-agent computer models and the body of statistical tools and measures in social networks. This paper uses social network analysis and multi-agent models to discuss how to destabilize networks. In addition, we illustrate the potential difficulty in destabilizing networks that are large, distributed, and composed of individuals linked on a number of socio-demographic dimensions. The specific results herein are generated, and our ability to think through such systems is enhanced, by using a multi-agent network approach to complex systems. Such an illustration is particularly salient in light of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. WHAT CAN OUR TOOLS DO? There are a number of ways in which our tools, both classical social network techniques and the combination of networks and multi-agent systems, can help us understand network destabilization. Before describing these, an important word of caution is needed. Network tools are clearly not a panacea and it is important that as a community we do not oversell these tools. That being said, there are at least two fundamental ways in which network statistics and measures can be brought to bear to address issues at the heart of destabilizing networks.