Sunday, September 14, 2014

David McCandless' network of states and groups in the Middle East




Mother Jones highlighted David McCandless' illustration of relationships between various states, armed groups, and power players in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.  His network shows the level of friendship or animosity between states and groups and also identifies whether these nodes are Sunni, Shia, or non-muslim.

The interactive version on McCandless' own site is interesting to play with and helps to tease out the complexity of relationships in the region. Clicking on each node, for instance, takes you to that specific node's connections and is sometimes accompanied by a small description of each relationship in the network.

You can even check out the data he used through a link to a public Google spreadsheet.

This network visualization sent me down a rabbit hole of other analysis of relationships in the Middle East, including this relatively bizarre one from Slate.

Best,
Emma Fredieu


1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

This is great, Emma. Thanks for posting. Even better is that the data is available on his website. Anyone interested in doing a project on confessional or sectarian relationships in the ME--take note.