What kind of ‘world order’? An artificial neural networks approach to intensive data mining Massimo Buscema a,b , Guido Ferilli c , Pier Luigi Sacco c,d, ⁎ a Semeion Research Center, Via Sersale, 117, 00128 Rome, Italy b University of Colorado, Denver, United States c IULM University, Via Carlo Bo, 1, 20143 Milan, Italy d MetaLAB (at) Harvard, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States abstract article info Article history: Received 13 February 2015 Received in revised form 7 December 2016 Accepted 6 January 2017 Available online xxxx 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. © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: World order Global alliances Conflict Open society Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) Activation & Competition System (ACS) 1. Introduction The global scenario of today is more complex than ever. For the first time in its whole history, the US have recently been involved at the same time in three different war theaters in three different countries (Kurth, 2010), in the company of most other major Western nations, and the geography of conflict has been further escalating since then. The economic and cultural leadership of the West is openly challenged by once emerging countries which, despite what it was boldly claimed not long ago by influential thinkers such as Fukuyama (1992), far from adopting the market democracy ideology as their socio-organiza- tional paradigm, are on the contrary deploying alternative ones, based on their own traditions and schemes of thought. Global networks of al- liances and hostilities are becomingly increasingly blurred and deeply layered. In this multi-polar world with its ‘multiple modernities’ (Casanova, 2011), hard to predict discontinuities (van Notten et al., 2005), and collapsed decision-making timing (Comes et al., 2014), the famous and controversial thesis of Huntington (1996) that we are facing a ‘clash of civilizations’ is often read by non-Westerners as a conceptual shorthand, as a reflex of the West's hard-to-die attitude of thinking that any global narrative that challenges their own is, ipso facto, an opposi- tional one (Yije, 2010) – and thus ultimately as an instrumental theoretical construct which has been shaped up to serve specific ideo- logical purposes (Adib-Moghaddam, 2008), and which may be possibly supported only from a Western perspective serving Western interests (Fox, 2001). A common basis for a true dialogue in terms of cultural values is indispensable for future peaceful coexistence (Anthony, 2010), as the persistence of oppositional narratives on the Western side naturally paves the way to dialectic, and often armed counterparts (Aydin and Özen, 2010). Issues of cultural and value diversity at the global scale cannot be eluded any longer, and how they are tackled largely influences actual as well as future scenarios. A clear example of a much debated contribution in this vein is Sørensen (2006), who con- siders the current world order as transitional, with open-ended future developments whose unfolding basically depends on whether or not less privileged countries and populations will be given a possibility to take part in it more actively, and on fairer terms. The crucial role of value and cultural systems in this context is that they act as filters that allow a specific cataloging, reading and interpre- tation of events according to a coherent, meaningful structure, whose inclusionary vs. exclusionary implications in terms of intercultural dia- logue largely depend on their testimonials, and on the social support they manage to gather (Levine, 2011). Different systems may imply mu- tually incoherent and even oppositional renditions of the same events, and possibly feed ‘toxic narratives’ based on stereotypical attributions about the ‘other’ (Ringmar, 2006), and support prolonged, disruptive conflict, especially when combined with situations of poverty, fear and exclusion of either party (Sen, 2008). The approach of Democratic Technological Forecasting & Social Change xxx (2017) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author at: IULM University, Via Carlo Bo, 1, 20143 Milan, Italy E-mail addresses: m.buscema@semeion.it (M. Buscema), guido.ferilli@iulm.it (G. Ferilli), pierluigi.sacco@iulm.it, pierluigi@metalab.harvard.edu (P.L. Sacco). TFS-18824; No of Pages 11 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.01.010 0040-1625/© 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Technological Forecasting & Social Change Please cite this article as: Buscema, M., et al., What kind of ‘world order’? An artificial neural networks approach to intensive data mining, Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2017.01.010