How visas shape and make visible the geopolitical architecture of the planet

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how visa policies reflect and influence the geopolitical structure of the world, revealing community clusters and the importance of countries within a global network.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based approach to understanding geopolitical globalization through visa status data and identifies key community structures among countries.

Findings

Four main country communities identified via visa network analysis.

Developed countries form a highly clustered community with a clustering coefficient of 0.9.

China is an exceptional case within the global visa network.

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to provide a picture for geopolitical globalization: the role of all world countries together with their contribution towards globalization is highlighted. In the context of the present study, every country owes its efficiency and therefore its contribution towards structuring the world by the position it holds in a complex global network. The location in which a country is positioned on the network is shown to provide a measure of its "contribution" and "importance". As a matter of fact, the visa status conditions between countries reflect their contribution towards geopolitical globalization. Based on the visa status of all countries, community detection reveals the existence of 4+1 main communities. The community constituted by the developed countries has the highest clustering coefficient equal to 0.9. In contrast, the community constituted by the old eastern European blocks, the middle eastern countries, and the old Soviet Union has the lowest clustering coefficient approximately equal to 0.65. PR China is the exceptional case. Thus, the picture of the globe issued in this study contributes towards understanding "how the world works".