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The Ties that Bind: War Histories and Online Social Networks in Postwar Societies

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Christophe Lesschaeve and Josip Glaurdić show that online social connections are substantially related to people’s war experiences of combat, victimhood, and forced migration, as well as to their views of the wars’ causes, conduct, and consequences.

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 11, 2023

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This video video discusses the concept of political homophily, which is the tendency of individuals to associate with others who share similar political preferences and backgrounds. This video video idea extends into the domain of social media, particularly platforms like Facebook, which can amplify existing political divides by tailoring content based on user profiles and interests.

The authors conducted research to explore whether political homophily in Southeast Europe relates to individuals' experiences of war, examining social networks and how people's views on the war influence their social connections. Their findings suggest that individuals are more likely to form ties with others who share similar perspectives on war, and that experiences of trauma from war affect social interactions. Veterans tend to have larger networks compared to civilians, while refugees often experience social isolation due to the disconnection from their communities.

The study utilized a novel approach, combining qualitative and quantitative research methods, including an online survey administered through Facebook to gather detailed data on demographics, political opinions, and war experiences. While the research sheds light on the impact of historical conflicts on contemporary social networks, it acknowledges limitations, such as relying on self-reported data and the challenges of establishing causality.

The key implications highlight that opinions about historical conflicts shape present social relations and that understanding these dynamics is crucial for fostering reconciliation in post-conflict societies. The research emphasizes the significance of shared historical narratives in influencing current social connections and underlines the challenges and potential for building empathy between diverse communities in post-war environments.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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Homophily is sort of the idea

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that people naturally gravitate to others

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that look like them.

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And this also extends to politics.

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We like to surround ourselves, with people

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that share our political preferences that,

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that think like, we do.

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Uh, and obviously social media, like Facebook in particular,

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plays an important role in this.

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It's not a neutral platform, like it's, it's algorithms.

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It's, offers people, content on the base

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of their profile, their interest, and their preferences.

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And this can entrench existing, patterns

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of political, homophily.

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Um, now in, in our research, we, we wanted

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to see whether this, political homophily in post

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for Southeast Europe, extends to, the war past.

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Do people, gravitate to each other on the base

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of war experiences

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and how they, look back, on the war?

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We, so, so a lot of literature on social networks,

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focus on this indeed, this concept of,

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homophily political, homophily.

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And, essentially there are two ways, in which sort

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of this it's surrounding ourselves with,

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with like-minded people, happens.

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First, we select people on the basis of, you know,

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similarities that we have.

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Like we, when we discover

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that someone we know has a different opinion, we choose not

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to maintain that connection or sever it altogether.

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Um, and also we try to achieve similarity,

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by sort of converging, like changing our own opinion.

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We adjust our preferences so that we bridge the gap

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with our environment, and we do so

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because, our surrounding ourselves

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with like-minded people makes cooperation, communication,

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and trust a lot easier, to achieve.

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And also, it's an important psychological aspect,

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like we like having our own opinions, confirmed.

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Uh, so yeah,

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When it comes to the literatures on war, social networks

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and social ties, there are a lot of, obviously,

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contributions across different disciplines.

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But, I would say that arguably the best contributions

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that actually come from qualitative studies

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of post-conflict societies,

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and histories, for example, of refugee populations.

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Um, and this is obviously understandable

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because there are serious problems with data availability

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and access in most post-conflict, societies.

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Um, so for our study, we actually rely on

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literatures on social networks in general,

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plus literatures in psychology and politics and history

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and sociology of post-conflict societies to sort

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of generate our, empirical expectations.

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Um, so to give you an example, guided

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by the growing literature on the nature of a Yugoslav wars,

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and the efforts that, political parties

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and entrepreneurs have made in sort

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of politicizing the memories of those wars,

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we hypothesize that social ties are more likely to occur

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between people who hold similar views of the Yugoslav wars.

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Um, then we rely on the literatures,

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on the psychology of post-traumatic stress disorder

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and post-conflict societies to propose that

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people suffering from more trauma are probably more likely

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to form ties with those who suffer from,

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war trauma as well.

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Um, then we also rely on sociological literature on the

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reintegration of war veterans into post-conflict societies,

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particularly in Southeast Europe, where a lot

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of these veteran populations have sort of, become,

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let's say a socially privileged groups in some contexts.

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Um, and there we propose that war veterans,

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have a larger social network than non-veterans,

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and that veterans are more likely to form ties

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with other veterans.

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Um, and then finally guided

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by the literatures on the politics

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and sociology of war related migration

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and the lives of refugees.

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We hypothesize that people with experiences

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of forced displacement caused

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by war have a smaller social network.

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In other words, we hypothesize that former refugees face,

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social isolation, even decades

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after the conflicts that are pr to them actually ended.

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Um, so to sum it up,

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I guess we bring together disparate

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and, interdisciplinary, literatures to sort

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of bring them together and say something, I believe unique

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and important about post-conflict social networks.

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So we, employed a very unique, innovative,

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approach to collecting, collecting our, our data.

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We conducted a large scale,

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online survey using Facebook's, online platform

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to recruit, respondents for this, for the survey.

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The survey features, of course, questions on people's,

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demographics, their political preferences,

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but also extended batteries on their war experiences

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and their views on the war past their opinions on

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the origins, the conduct, and the outcome of, the wars.

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Um, and by using, Facebook as a platform to recruit,

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participants, we were able

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to gather information about social networks

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between those participants getting a very, detailed view

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of, social connections in our survey, sample.

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And this is really one of the like,

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innovative aspects of our data.

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We've had studies before that had, high quality,

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network data, and we've had studies

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before that had high quality survey data,

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but rarely have studies been able to combine both in,

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one data set.

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Often people rely on, asking respondents

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who is in their social network,

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and you essentially rely on their memory.

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And, you know, people often yeah, make mistakes,

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and that's something all these problems that we avoid,

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in, our dataset,

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to model the, to model the data.

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We used, the exponential random graph, a model,

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which is a complicated, term,

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but it's essentially a model that is built

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to analyze social networks

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and help you answer the question

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why some people are connected and why others, are not.

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And whether these connections depend on similarities in

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people's, education in their region

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and in their political, views.

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Uh, also importantly, the model allows you to account for,

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interdependencies in, the data.

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What does this mean? For instance,

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when two people are connected,

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this might seem like this is the result of them being

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of a similar age or from a similar region,

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while in fact there is a third mutual friend

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that allow them to meet each other.

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So it's more a friend of a friend kind

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of situation than anything else.

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If you don't account for this, your data

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or your results can be extremely biased.

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And this is what we, can avoid using, ERGM models.

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I think it's important to also to,

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to mention obviously the limitations of,

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of our research design and of the,

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and of the data that we have.

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Um, obviously no study's perfect

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and ours has its share of limitations.

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Um, for starters, if one wants to say something,

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about network connections in general,

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in post conflict societies,

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we obviously focus on online connections,

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which obviously might not fully represent

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offline social networks.

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Obviously in today's world, it's very difficult

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to say if it's possible to separate online

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and offline lives.

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Yeah. Um,

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and there's obviously the fact that we are using Facebook

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data, which brings in potential biases related to

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how people behave on social media,

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the platform's own algorithms.

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Um, this can actually also be a good thing

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because offline relations obviously cause time and energy

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and online platforms like Facebook kind

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of remove those obstacles.

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Um, this kind of allows people to pursue the social network

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that want to have,

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and this makes it easier for us as scholars to discover

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and identify the drivers

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and mechanisms behind people's social networks.

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Um, yeah, obviously also we relied on,

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self-reported data, which means we had

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to consider subjective nature of,

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people's recollections and perceptions.

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Um, we also could not really answer the whole

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convergence versus selection puzzle.

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In other words, whether people are connected

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with like-minded individuals

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because they held these similar views, prior

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to meeting each other, or

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because their views sort of converged over time.

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Um, we also focus on southeast Europe, so there's a question

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of how much we can generalize these findings

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to other post-conflict regions.

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Um, establishing causalities also difficult due to lack

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of pre-war data, but here we did not only rely on sort of

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variable rich models that, arguably controlled for

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most possible confounders.

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Um, we also conducted different sorts

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of sensitivity analysis

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that confirmed the robustness of our findings.

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Um, and from the standpoint of the societies that are sort

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of moving forward and sort of hopefully healing in any form

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of post-conflict reconciliation, this question

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arguably doesn't really matter.

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What matters in our view is

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that social relations right now are actually defined by

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and imbued sort of with meaning that is derived from

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this recent history of violence.

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Um, so in a nutshell, while our study sort

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of offers some groundbreaking insights into the intersection

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of war histories and online social networks,

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it also has its fair share of limitations.

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And these limitations I think, remind us

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that we should be cautious in interpreting the findings,

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but also they point us in the

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exciting directions for future research.

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The results that we found were pretty, eye-opening.

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We very much found that,

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the war passed in the region has a very strong shaping

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influence on people's, social lives.

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Uh, today, we saw that, views on the war,

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and, shape social connections.

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People are more likely to be connected to others

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who view the war in a similar light.

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We believe this is due to the fact

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that the war is still an important issue in the region.

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For instance, many,

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politicians regularly reference the war in their speeches

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and in their campaigns.

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This makes the war important

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and a relevant criterion when evaluating,

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social connections.

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Do I want to be friends with someone

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who thinks differently about the war,

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that took place in my region?

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Uh, we also see that, people

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who suffer from war trauma today are more likely

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to seek each other out on, social media.

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We think that this is because they seek sort of a, a sense

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of understanding, a connection with other people

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who understand what they're going through

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that get their suffering.

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Um, and in that sense they want to, they, they're looking

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for a sort of mutually support group, online.

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Um, we also see that,

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war veterans have larger social networks in general.

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They obviously connect also more with other war veterans due

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to some of them, you know,

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having spent time in the military together

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and many of the war federal organizations in the region.

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But their overall larger, social network

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is most likely the case

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because in the region, they're viewed by many as heroes.

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You know, the, the war heroes that,

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risk their lives in defense of, donation

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and this increased social standing naturally enlarges their,

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social, social circle.

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Um, and we also see that, we displaced people.

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War migrants have a smaller social circle.

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They have fewer social connections.

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Uh, and this is most likely the case that their,

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they were essentially ripped very, abruptly from their,

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home communities,

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and had to flee to their host countries.

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Many of the social connections that they had were severed

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and, few have been able to be repaired

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or maintained afterwards.

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It's also one of the possibilities is

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that while in some cases the initial welcome was a warm one,

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as is the case for some war migrants, sooner

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or later, like in many instances, war refugees are seen

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as a burden on the host's society, not at least financially.

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So this might contribute to their overall,

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social, isolation.

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Well, if I had to sum up the takeaways from our study,

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sort of in, in three words, I would say opinions,

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experiences and time, when it comes to opinions,

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we've basically shown that, political homophily

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that is based on war views.

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This is our key finding was, really strong.

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People are really sort

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of connecting based on their views about the Yugo law wars

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in many instances, these were young people

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who did not actually live, live through these wars.

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Obviously these wars took place more than two decades ago.

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Um, showing us just how influential these,

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historical events in the creation of narratives

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that essentially are all

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of these wars in Southeast Europe were nation building wars.

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So the extent to which these narratives are really powerful

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and the extent to which opinions

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of them actually shape social connections

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to this day when it comes to the experience

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that we've also shown that, yeah, real experiences

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of conflict, whether as a refugee or a veteran

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or a victim actually makes a difference

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in post-conflict.

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Uh, social relations wars are in many ways sort

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of the great social reshuffles, right?

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Um, obviously people participate in war and,

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and, based on their pre-war,

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social position or social views or ideological views.

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Um, but more often than not,

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people are unwillingly thrust into violence,

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and that violence decisively impacts the quality

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and the nature of their, of their lives

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after the conflict.

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And then when it comes to time, I think we've shown

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that this is a really long lasting effect

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of violence on post war societies.

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Um, these wars, once again, ended more than two decades ago.

14:43.725 --> 14:47.825
And, they still to this day, have a, have a,

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have a massive impact on how people live their lives

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and who do they connect with, on a day-to-day basis.

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So when it comes to implications, I would say that,

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we have sort of helped, the academic,

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scholarly community to understand better post or societies.

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I mean, nothing that we have, demonstrated

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is particularly surprising, let's say.

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Um, though it is obviously I think wonderful

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that we were able to show it in sort

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of a methodologically rigorous kind of way.

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Um, when it comes to informing policy makers,

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regarding the reconciliation efforts,

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there are really big implications here.

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Um, because we need to understand that

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we live not only in the bubbles of the, like-minded related

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to, you know, our attitudes towards,

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our contemporary societies,

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but we also live in the bubbles of the,

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like-minded when it comes to experiencing history.

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That's why, all social efforts,

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by NGOs or governmental organizations

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or international, non-governmental organizations,

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that bring communities together in order disparate

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communities together in order to increase

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and improve, their level of just mutual empathy.

16:16.355 --> 16:20.805
Yeah. Um, are critical if reconciliation is to take place.

16:21.585 --> 16:25.765
Um, so I would say that we've sort

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of opened up, a lot,

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of questions related to

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how deeply historical conflicts can affect social networks

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and provided sort of a blend of history,

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psychology, and digital technology, showing

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how the past really continues to shape our present

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and obviously future sort of social landscape.

00:00 - Homophily is sort of the idea that people naturally gravitate to others that look like them. And this also extends to politics. We like to surround ourselves, with people that share our political preferences that,

00:13 - that think like, we do. and obviously social media, like Facebook in particular, plays an important role in this. It's not a neutral platform, like it's, it's algorithms. It's, offers people, content on the base of their profile, their interest, and their preferences. And this can entrench existing, patterns of political, homophily. now in, in our research, we, we wanted to see whether this, political homophily in post

00:41 - for Southeast Europe, extends to, the war past. Do people, gravitate to each other on the base of war experiences and how they, look back, on the war? We, so, so a lot of literature on social networks, focus on this indeed, this concept of, homophily political, homophily. And, essentially there are two ways, in which sort of this it's surrounding ourselves with, with like-minded people, happens.

01:09 - First, we select people on the basis of, you know, similarities that we have. Like we, when we discover that someone we know has a different opinion, we choose not to maintain that connection or sever it altogether. and also we try to achieve similarity, by sort of converging, like changing our own opinion. We adjust our preferences so that we bridge the gap with our environment, and we do so because, our surrounding ourselves

01:39 - with like-minded people makes cooperation, communication, and trust a lot easier, to achieve. And also, it's an important psychological aspect, like we like having our own opinions, confirmed. so yeah, When it comes to the literatures on war, social networks and social ties, there are a lot of, obviously, contributions across different disciplines. But, I would say that arguably the best contributions that actually come from qualitative studies

02:08 - of post-conflict societies, and histories, for example, of refugee populations. and this is obviously understandable because there are serious problems with data availability and access in most post-conflict, societies. so for our study, we actually rely on literatures on social networks in general, plus literatures in psychology and politics and history and sociology of post-conflict societies to sort of generate our, empirical expectations.

02:41 - so to give you an example, guided by the growing literature on the nature of a Yugoslav wars, and the efforts that, political parties and entrepreneurs have made in sort of politicizing the memories of those wars, we hypothesize that social ties are more likely to occur between people who hold similar views of the Yugoslav wars. then we rely on the literatures, on the psychology of post-traumatic stress disorder and post-conflict societies to propose that

03:15 - people suffering from more trauma are probably more likely to form ties with those who suffer from, war trauma as well. then we also rely on sociological literature on the reintegration of war veterans into post-conflict societies, particularly in Southeast Europe, where a lot of these veteran populations have sort of, become, let's say a socially privileged groups in some contexts. and there we propose that war veterans, have a larger social network than non-veterans,

03:46 - and that veterans are more likely to form ties with other veterans. and then finally guided by the literatures on the politics and sociology of war related migration and the lives of refugees. We hypothesize that people with experiences of forced displacement caused by war have a smaller social network. In other words, we hypothesize that former refugees face,

04:10 - social isolation, even decades after the conflicts that are pr to them actually ended. so to sum it up, I guess we bring together disparate and, interdisciplinary, literatures to sort of bring them together and say something, I believe unique and important about post-conflict social networks. So we, employed a very unique, innovative, approach to collecting, collecting our, our data. We conducted a large scale,

04:43 - online survey using Facebook's, online platform to recruit, respondents for this, for the survey. The survey features, of course, questions on people's, demographics, their political preferences, but also extended batteries on their war experiences and their views on the war past their opinions on the origins, the conduct, and the outcome of, the wars. and by using, Facebook as a platform to recruit, participants, we were able to gather information about social networks

05:17 - between those participants getting a very, detailed view of, social connections in our survey, sample. And this is really one of the like, innovative aspects of our data. We've had studies before that had, high quality, network data, and we've had studies before that had high quality survey data, but rarely have studies been able to combine both in, one data set. Often people rely on, asking respondents

05:46 - who is in their social network, and you essentially rely on their memory. And, you know, people often yeah, make mistakes, and that's something all these problems that we avoid, in, our dataset, to model the, to model the data. We used, the exponential random graph, a model, which is a complicated, term, but it's essentially a model that is built to analyze social networks

06:11 - and help you answer the question why some people are connected and why others, are not. And whether these connections depend on similarities in people's, education in their region and in their political, views. also importantly, the model allows you to account for, interdependencies in, the data. What does this mean? For instance, when two people are connected, this might seem like this is the result of them being

06:40 - of a similar age or from a similar region, while in fact there is a third mutual friend that allow them to meet each other. So it's more a friend of a friend kind of situation than anything else. If you don't account for this, your data or your results can be extremely biased. And this is what we, can avoid using, ERGM models. I think it's important to also to, to mention obviously the limitations of,

07:05 - of our research design and of the, and of the data that we have. obviously no study's perfect and ours has its share of limitations. for starters, if one wants to say something, about network connections in general, in post conflict societies, we obviously focus on online connections, which obviously might not fully represent offline social networks.

07:31 - Obviously in today's world, it's very difficult to say if it's possible to separate online and offline lives. Yeah. and there's obviously the fact that we are using Facebook data, which brings in potential biases related to how people behave on social media, the platform's own algorithms. this can actually also be a good thing because offline relations obviously cause time and energy

07:55 - and online platforms like Facebook kind of remove those obstacles. this kind of allows people to pursue the social network that want to have, and this makes it easier for us as scholars to discover and identify the drivers and mechanisms behind people's social networks. yeah, obviously also we relied on, self-reported data, which means we had to consider subjective nature of,

08:21 - people's recollections and perceptions. we also could not really answer the whole convergence versus selection puzzle. In other words, whether people are connected with like-minded individuals because they held these similar views, prior to meeting each other, or because their views sort of converged over time. we also focus on southeast Europe, so there's a question of how much we can generalize these findings

08:45 - to other post-conflict regions. establishing causalities also difficult due to lack of pre-war data, but here we did not only rely on sort of variable rich models that, arguably controlled for most possible confounders. we also conducted different sorts of sensitivity analysis that confirmed the robustness of our findings. and from the standpoint of the societies that are sort of moving forward and sort of hopefully healing in any form

09:17 - of post-conflict reconciliation, this question arguably doesn't really matter. What matters in our view is that social relations right now are actually defined by and imbued sort of with meaning that is derived from this recent history of violence. so in a nutshell, while our study sort of offers some groundbreaking insights into the intersection of war histories and online social networks, it also has its fair share of limitations.

09:46 - And these limitations I think, remind us that we should be cautious in interpreting the findings, but also they point us in the exciting directions for future research. The results that we found were pretty, eye-opening. We very much found that, the war passed in the region has a very strong shaping influence on people's, social lives. today, we saw that, views on the war, and, shape social connections.

10:15 - People are more likely to be connected to others who view the war in a similar light. We believe this is due to the fact that the war is still an important issue in the region. For instance, many, politicians regularly reference the war in their speeches and in their campaigns. This makes the war important and a relevant criterion when evaluating, social connections.

10:38 - Do I want to be friends with someone who thinks differently about the war, that took place in my region? we also see that, people who suffer from war trauma today are more likely to seek each other out on, social media. We think that this is because they seek sort of a, a sense of understanding, a connection with other people who understand what they're going through that get their suffering.

11:04 - and in that sense they want to, they, they're looking for a sort of mutually support group, online. we also see that, war veterans have larger social networks in general. They obviously connect also more with other war veterans due to some of them, you know, having spent time in the military together and many of the war federal organizations in the region. But their overall larger, social network is most likely the case

11:33 - because in the region, they're viewed by many as heroes. You know, the, the war heroes that, risk their lives in defense of, donation and this increased social standing naturally enlarges their, social, social circle. and we also see that, we displaced people. War migrants have a smaller social circle. They have fewer social connections. and this is most likely the case that their, they were essentially ripped very, abruptly from their,

12:06 - home communities, and had to flee to their host countries. Many of the social connections that they had were severed and, few have been able to be repaired or maintained afterwards. It's also one of the possibilities is that while in some cases the initial welcome was a warm one, as is the case for some war migrants, sooner or later, like in many instances, war refugees are seen as a burden on the host's society, not at least financially.

12:39 - So this might contribute to their overall, social, isolation. Well, if I had to sum up the takeaways from our study, sort of in, in three words, I would say opinions, experiences and time, when it comes to opinions, we've basically shown that, political homophily that is based on war views. This is our key finding was, really strong. People are really sort of connecting based on their views about the Yugo law wars

13:10 - in many instances, these were young people who did not actually live, live through these wars. Obviously these wars took place more than two decades ago. showing us just how influential these, historical events in the creation of narratives that essentially are all of these wars in Southeast Europe were nation building wars. So the extent to which these narratives are really powerful and the extent to which opinions of them actually shape social connections

13:39 - to this day when it comes to the experience that we've also shown that, yeah, real experiences of conflict, whether as a refugee or a veteran or a victim actually makes a difference in post-conflict. social relations wars are in many ways sort of the great social reshuffles, right? obviously people participate in war and, and, based on their pre-war, social position or social views or ideological views.

14:13 - but more often than not, people are unwillingly thrust into violence, and that violence decisively impacts the quality and the nature of their, of their lives after the conflict. And then when it comes to time, I think we've shown that this is a really long lasting effect of violence on post war societies. these wars, once again, ended more than two decades ago. And, they still to this day, have a, have a,

14:47 - have a massive impact on how people live their lives and who do they connect with, on a day-to-day basis. So when it comes to implications, I would say that, we have sort of helped, the academic, scholarly community to understand better post or societies. I mean, nothing that we have, demonstrated is particularly surprising, let's say. though it is obviously I think wonderful that we were able to show it in sort of a methodologically rigorous kind of way.

15:26 - when it comes to informing policy makers, regarding the reconciliation efforts, there are really big implications here. because we need to understand that we live not only in the bubbles of the, like-minded related to, you know, our attitudes towards, our contemporary societies, but we also live in the bubbles of the, like-minded when it comes to experiencing history. That's why, all social efforts,

15:58 - by NGOs or governmental organizations or international, non-governmental organizations, that bring communities together in order disparate communities together in order to increase and improve, their level of just mutual empathy. Yeah. are critical if reconciliation is to take place. so I would say that we've sort of opened up, a lot, of questions related to how deeply historical conflicts can affect social networks

16:37 - and provided sort of a blend of history, psychology, and digital technology, showing how the past really continues to shape our present and obviously future sort of social landscape.

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