Network modelling as a tool for cyber diplomacy

Visual representations of votes at the UN can assist cyber diplomacy practitioners, researchers and stakeholders in communicating and interpreting voting behaviour. The colour-coded maps that were first used to represent key votes now struggle to capture the complexity and nuances of the cumulative voting record. This article critically examines visualisation methods that have been used in the past. It introduces the advantages of a network model approach and demonstrates how it can be used to visualise a series of diplomacy votes at the UN. Finally, it describes how community detection algorithms can be applied to the network models to identify and better understand middle ground countries in cyber diplomacy.