Treaties of the World

One of my favorite blogs, Computational Legal Studies, just posted a link to an extensive database containing all world treaties between countries. In a spare moment, I downloaded the entire database of more than 58,000 treaties, loaded it into UCINET and was able to produce this graphic through NetDraw. The countries are arranged in k-cores, that is groups where the members all have a similar number of treaties between each other. Not surprisingly, countries which share borders tend to have a large number of treaties between each other, hence the clumping of countries. Note the bottom clump which contains mostly European countries. Also, not surprising is that the US, France, Germany and the UK all have large numbers of treaties with other countries. The US has a whopping 4,165 treaties that it has recognized in the past, and is the most important in connecting countries together. That is, a large number of countries may not have treaties directly with each other, but have mutual treaties with the United States, leading to at least some level of connection (one could assume).