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Conflict and cooperation do not result from isolated individual actions. In settings such as insurgency, interstate conflict, protest mobilization, and informal governance, actors are highly interdependent. The study of networks aims to identify what the relevant interdependencies are and, crucially, how they shape conflict and cooperation outcomes. Although this is a relatively new research area, its early results convincingly establish that networks matter. Social networks provide information, transmit peer pressure, and structure interactions in ways that help groups overcome social dilemmas. With much research documenting the importance of particular outcomes in particular areas, the next major step will be putting the pieces together. Which connections between actors matter in which circumstances and how? The groundwork has been well laid for this large future research endeavor.

Settlers flocking to boomtowns on the American western frontier were faced with the same task that communities in weak states across the globe face in contemporary times: self-governance. Peer sanctions can enforce cooperation in these environments, but their efficacy depends on the social networks that transmit information from peer to peer. The author uses a game-theoretic model to show that peripheral network positions can generate such strong incentives to misbehave that persistent cheating occurs in equilibrium. The model reveals that groups maintaining high levels of cooperation that face shocks to their strategic environment or to their network can ratchet down into less cooperative equilibria in which the most peripheral become ostracized. Furthermore, population change that features rapid growth, high turnover, and enclave settlements can undermine cooperation. The insights from this article help to explain the trajectory of cooperation in the mining towns of the Wild West in which high levels of cooperation deteriorated as the population surged, and help to make sense of why only certain nonwhite settlers were targets of hostility and racism.

Bridging social ties is thought to reduce the likelihood of interethnic violence. This logic has motivated countless development projects and international programs seeking to forge cross-group ties between groups with a conflictual history. However, this article identifies an important mechanism by which certain cross-group ties can make interethnic peace strictly less likely. The results stem from a game-theoretic model which formalizes civil society as a network and relates intergroup cooperation to the particular networks that transmit information from person to person in each group. The model reveals that, first, groups are capable of enforcing cross-group cooperation, even when no cross-group ties are present and the networks within each group are missing links, using peer-enforcement strategies, and their ability to do so depends on the structure of these networks. Second, when attempting to enforce intergroup cooperation, groups with sparse networks may be at risk of a long-lasting series of back-and-forth retaliation that groups with denser networks would avoid. Finally, there exists a mechanism by which some cross-group ties make intergroup cooperation strictly less likely. When interethnic cooperation is enforced by threatening coordinated retaliation for any misbehavior, success depends on expectations about how quickly retaliation can be coordinated and how many will participate in it. Some individuals in a network are in a position to send news to many others quickly; others are not. The latter therefore coordinate retaliation more slowly and would be relatively vulnerable to cross-group defections if they could be identified. Cross-group ties expose the vulnerability and generate incentives to disrupt interethnic peace; cross-group ties between the least embedded individuals in each ethnic group are the most dangerous. Programs seeking to impose ties should avoid exposing this vulnerability without taking steps to mitigate its danger.

To answer questions about the origins and outcomes of collective action, political scientists increasingly turn to datasets with social network information culled from online sources. However, a fundamental question of external validity remains untested: are the relationships measured between a person and her online peers informative of the kind of offline, "real-world" relationships to which network theories typically speak? This article offers the first direct comparison of the nature and consequences of online and offline social ties, using data collected via a novel network elicitation technique in an experimental setting. We document strong, robust similarity between online and offline relationships. This parity is not driven by sharedidentityof online and offline ties, but a shared nature of relationships in both domains. Our results affirm that online social tie data offer great promise for testing long-standing theories in the social sciences about the role of social networks.