About Us
The MESO Lab (Modeling Emergent Social Order) is a team of social scientists studying international order and conflict. We work at the intersection of social science, computational network modeling, and history.
Our goal is to combine social-scientific rigor with historical nuance and insight. For example, one project uses historically-informed and validated simulations that isolate the mechanisms that produce international order. It also allows the researcher to explore how policy interventions might produce different results. These approaches help overcome the limits of current statistical approaches to studying international order. Lab members are committed to pushing the boundaries of our scientific knowledge about social organization while also translating the results for a general audience.
The MESO Lab is currently being funded by the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Lab members are exploring questions on a broad array of topics related to international order, including:
Understanding the relationship between international order and international conflict
Articulating different logics of order
Creating empirical measures that enable the statistical study of international orders
Forecasting future international orders based on historical data
Measuring systemic uncertainty
Modeling origins of order and the connections between international and domestic order
Exploring historical and modern Chinese understandings of international order
Insights from the MESO Lab’s works have been presented at academic and policy conferences and to government agencies and have been summarized in the Presidential Daily Brief.
MESO Lab members have published their research in top social-science and general-science journals.