Revealing Higher-Order Interactions in Complex Networks: A U.S. Diplomacy Case Study

Although diplomatic communication has long been examined in the social sciences, its network structure remains underexplored. Using the U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010 as a case study, we adopt a network-science perspective. We represent diplomatic interactions as a hypergraph and develop a general, random-walk-based pipeline to evaluate this representation against traditional pairwise graphs. We further evaluate the pipeline on legislative co-sponsorship and organizational email data, finding improvements and empirical evidence that clarifies when hypergraph modeling is preferable to pairwise graphs. Overall, hypergraphs paired with appropriately specified random-walk dynamics more faithfully capture higher-order, group-based interactions, yielding a richer structural account of diplomacy and superior performance on interaction-prediction tasks that enables inferring new diplomatic relationships from existing patterns.