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Randy Forsberg: A tribute to an inspiration
2007-11-21 15:21:00
Dr Randall Forsberg1943-2007I first met Randy Forsberg in Brookline Massachusetts in 1987. Famous for having been the leading light behind the Nuclear Freeze initiative in the 1980s, she was a major name with a major reputation to my impressionable 30 year-old self. Visiting the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies with my colleagues from the newly-formed VERTIC, I was more than a little in awe of this Grand Dame of Disarmament. There was no need of course. Randy was not only down to earth and practical, she was respectful of all and, most importantly, she cared about what you had to bring to the debate. So if you were engaged, she was engaged with you. That did not mean agreement however. In fact, the greatest compliment Randy could pay you was to disagree with you. That meant that you had got her attention; that meant that she thought you were worth listening to and disagreeing with.Randy was one of our Greats. She married academia with activism. She saw the connections ...
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The Hub, a ?YouTube for human rights?
2007-11-19 09:46:00
The international human rights organization Witness , founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, recently launched a project called The Hub.Witness is a non-profit organization that provides video cameras, technical and strategic training to people in the field so that they can capture evidence of human rights violations.The collected footage is used in different ways: as education and mobilization tools, as evidence in justice courts or to catalyze policy change. For example:The arrest for war crimes in March 2006 in Democratic Republic of Congo of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo by the International Criminal Court resulted from an advocacy campaign by Witness? partner AJEDI-Ka/PES, which included video distribution and screenings to key officials of the International Criminal Court.Following the preview of a video by a Witness? partner organization on the atrocities caused by landmines, the Senegalese Minister of Women?s and Family Affairs ...
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Reflecting on First Committee: What was achieved?
2007-11-16 09:17:00
Since Tuesday, the commotion surrounding the CCW and cluster munitions has died down, leaving in its wake a deep sense of puzzlement over what actually was agreed (see our last three postings for more details). But more on that later. The December Vienna Conference on Cluster Munitions, which forms part of the Oslo Process, will give us a chance to reflect on the outcome with a bit more distance, both geographical and temporal.In the meantime, I would like to return to a theme I took up in a previous posting on the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, the one that deals with disarmament and international security. This annual month-long maelstrom of debate, lobbying, arm twisting and resolution drafting ended on November 2. What, then, does the First Committee have to show for its considerable exertion?On the face of it, it was very productive indeed. Three hundred and fifteen official statements were delivered and 52 draft resolutions adopted on issues ranging from the ...

Cluster munitions: a CCW mandate
2007-11-13 18:33:00
The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) agreed a mandate on cluster munitions today after a difficult week of talks in Geneva , as foreshadowed in our preceding posts.The text agreed by consensus is as follows:"The Meeting of the High Contracting Parties to the CCW decided that the GGE [Group of Governmental Experts] will negotiate a proposal to address urgently the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions, while striking a balance between military and humanitarian considerations."The GGE should make every effort to negotiate this proposal as rapidly as possible and report on the progress made to the next meeting of the High Contracting Parties in November 2008."The work of the GGE will be supported by military and technical experts. The GGE will meet in 2008 not less than three times for a total of up to seven weeks, as follows:- 14-18 January- 7-31 July- 1-5 September- 3-7 November. "When set alongside the Oslo Declaration, this text is weaker. It lacks a firm commitme...
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CCW: More scenes from a play
2007-11-12 18:30:00
On Friday, Patrick Mc Carthy reported on the state of efforts of the member countries of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to achieve a mandate to negotiate on cluster munitions. Ambassador Janis Karklins of Latvia presented the Meeting of States Parties with his shot at a draft mandate, then waved adieu.As Patrick suggested, the draft mandate Ambassador Karklins offered may have been too strong. Today, the Meeting of States Parties only gathered briefly - most of it spent instead by the Chair (Greece) in informal side consultations with 'key' players (that is, the stickiest). The rest (exhorted by the Chair not to leave the building) sat around and waited, drinking vast amounts of coffee in the process and looking wistfully out the window at a beautiful autumn day they could not experience.Word is that a least one large cluster munition user state (Russia) doesn't want to see "negotiate" in the mandate, and would prefer a weaker formulation "to elaborate pro...
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Cluster Munitions Proving Hard Nut to Crack for CCW
2007-11-09 17:03:00
States Parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) - also known as the 'Inhumane Weapons Convention' - have just ended day three of their five-day annual meeting in Geneva with an anticlimax on cluster munitions.Following days of intensive consultations - and rumours this morning that an agreed CCW negotiating mandate on cluster munitions was imminent - the Coordinator of the Group of Governmental Experts, Ambassador Janis Karklins of Latvia, was only able to transmit to States Parties a note containing his sense of what the meeting might be able to agree before it adjourns next Tuesday. The Coordinator's note, which has no official status, reads as follows:The High Contracting Parties to the CCW decided that the GGE, without preconditions and prejudice to the outcome, will negotiate an instrument of the Convention to address urgently the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions, while striking a balance between military and humanitarian considerations.The GG...
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A registry for predictions
2007-11-07 09:27:00
As part of our research, UNIDIR?s Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project has been exploring why it?s difficult to accurately predict future events in the political field (see John Borrie?s recent post ?Putting Predict ions to the Test?). On the same topic, I recently saw David Brin, a physics professor, NASA consultant and science fiction novelist, talk about the idea of a ?prediction registry?.Although making predictions about the future is an extremely difficult task?especially in the political field?this is something that humans have always done. (Brin noted that our prefrontal lobes, which appeared perhaps a few hundred thousand years ago and which are specific to the human brain, play a significant role in exploring potential outcomes and making predictions.)Today, we?ve developed tools and techniques to help us make forecasts. Computer simulations, and agent-based modelling in particular, are used to analyze complex phenomena. Although very sophisticated, these new techn...
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Action on cluster bombs
2007-11-05 09:39:00
This week looks set to be a busy one for matters related to cluster munitions.Today, campaigners in 40 countries around the world are calling on their governments to attend an international conference next month in Vienna, Austria, and to support a global treaty banning cluster bombs. To draw attention to their calls, they've declared the 5th of November a "Global Day of Action to Ban Cluster Bombs " with events around the world.Events have already taken place in places as far a field as Wellington, New Zealand. A couple more will be held later today in Geneva, Switzerland; one by the 'Broken Chair' sculpture outside the United Nations' Palais des Nations, along with a photo exhibition by Stuart Freedman on Lebanon called 'Clearing for Peace'.Today also marks a rare joint appeal by the United Nations, the NGO Cluster Munition Coalition, and UK-based Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund in support of the ban treaty with an advertising campaign featured in several newspapers wo...

Putting Predictions to the Test
2007-11-02 08:53:00
As part of it's work, UNIDIR's Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project is currently working on a publication looking at some constraints on multilateral negotiations, and how some of these might be overcome or at least potentially mitigated.One conundrum for policy makers in general is that it's very difficult to accurately predict outcomes of complex political and economic processes, and this has implications for their work. Multilateral practitioners are no exception.Meanwhile, it's often very difficult to get a handle on how good "expert" political judgment is. But not impossible. A recent book by Philip E. Tetlock, an American psychologist, has revealed through a careful decade-long study that people who make prediction their business - people who appear as experts on television, for instance, or who are quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses - are, on average, no better than the rest of us.Tetlock's research team asked various specialists to jud...
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Missile Crises?
2007-10-31 15:50:00
On Friday, the world's media reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin - speaking after a summit with European Union leaders in Portugal - said that U.S. plans for a missile shield with bases in Europe could precipitate a situation similar to the 1962 Cuban Missi le Cris is:"Analogous actions by the Soviet Union when it deployed rockets on Cuba provoked the Cuban missile crisis," he said."For us, technologically, the situation is very similar."He added that current tensions had not reached the pitch attained during the Cuban crisis."Thank goodness for that. Let's hope that policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic don't really believe they're living through a historical parallel of the "thirteen days".There are signs that the Russians don't really think so. In a Moscow Times op-ed about President Putin's "rather audacious comparison" with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Alexander Golts opined that:"It is clear that Moscow has no desire to reach a compromise on the missile defen...
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The Arms Trade Treaty that States Want
2007-10-29 09:46:00
I've just arrived back to Geneva from an eventful week spent in New York at the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, the one that deals with disarmament and international security. In my last posting, I described the First Committee as a "carnival," and it certainly lived up to expectations. Imagine representatives of almost 200 States crammed into a conference-room, each trying to persuade the others to support draft resolutions on some aspect of arms control that they are preparing. And that's just what happens on the margins! Only when one puts on an ear-piece does it become apparent that, somewhere in the cacophony of noise, a delegate is actually making an official statement or participating in a thematic debate.Last week was the week for thematic debates on such issues as conventional weapons, regional disarmament and security, and the "disarmament machinery." This week, States will be voting on all draft resolutions before the First Committee wraps up its work o...
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The ICRC and cluster munitions: Great Expectations
2007-10-26 11:07:00
Yesterday, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Dr. Jakob Kellenberger, briefed Geneva-based diplomatic Missions and others on his humanitarian organisation's expectations for international efforts to tackle the effects of cluster munitions on civilians.Briefly, by way of background, rumours are afoot that the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) may, after years of inertia, actually achieve a procedural negotiating mandate on cluster munitions at its next Meeting of States Parties this November. The catalyst for this has been the emergence of a new, free-standing international Oslo Process of at least 80 - perhaps by now 90 - states. The Oslo Process is avowedly ambitious in humanitarian terms. Miraculously, fears that small and medium-sized countries (many of them in the developing world) are "doing an Ottawa" - in reference to the achievement of the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention - have resulted in new flexibility among so...
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Worldmapper
2007-10-24 09:33:00
Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom reckons, ?you can say it, you can prove it, you can tabulate it, but it is only when you show it that it hits home.?Dorling and his colleagues are backing up this claim. Their research group on Social and Spatial Inequalities (SASI) has established the Worldmapper project in collaboration with Mark Newman at the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan in the United States.Worldmapper is a collection of some 366 world maps, in which territories are re-sized according to a chosen variable of interest. Indicators they?ve mapped range from wealth, education and health to population movements, goods production and natural disaster casualties.The Worldmapper database also includes cartograms depicting military spending as well as violence and war statistics. I was particularly interested in a map representing territory size as the proportion of worldwide landmine casualties from 20...
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What do survivors think of cluster munitions?
2007-10-22 09:21:00
Did you ever wonder what a cluster munition survivor thinks of cluster munitions? We found out a few weeks ago during training in Belgrade, Serbia, for individuals from communities affected by cluster munitions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Serbia and Tajikistan. Their answers were stunning, and touched on devastation, the death of parents and relatives, babies torn apart, terror, trauma, blindness, horror and poverty. There was also guilt and uncertainty - why am I the only survivor of the family? Why did ?they? kill my little brother, my mother, even our sheep? What should I do now? And, what do I have to live for, since cluster munitions have killed my family and neighbours?Over two days, my colleagues Patrizia, Jelena, Firoz, Loren and I heard these moving stories from a small group of rather amazing people. We expected something strong to come out of the meeting but were not prepared for something as strong as that.The main goal of this pilot project is to enable individuals from af...
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Satellites of Love?
2007-10-19 11:48:00
"Satellite's gone up to the skyThings like that drive me out of my mindI watched it for a little while I like to watch things on TVSatellite of love ..."In our third volume of research, Andreas Persbo and Michael Crowley from the London-based Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC) looked at the roles Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) play in the monitoring and verification of international arms control and disarmament agreements. They observed that:"one area of NGO activity that has not been adequately studied has been the crucial role played by the NGO community in monitoring, and in some cases verifying, international agreements. Indeed, non-governmental monitoring, sometimes referred to as "citizens' reporting", "inspection by the people" or "civil society monitoring", has become an important element in the international community's evaluation of how effectively states implement their treaty obligations on a wide range of issues."Once upon a time, ...
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The First Committee Carnival Begins
2007-10-17 11:02:00
This week, the UN General Assembly 's First Committee , which deals with disarmament and international security, began its annual 4-week marathon of arm-twisting and horse trading that will result, at the end of the month, in a crop of draft resolutions on almost every conceivable aspect of disarmament, arms control and international security. From guns, mines and missiles; through chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; to preventing an arms race in outer space; all this, and much more, will be discussed, debated and voted on in New York over the these four weeks.It is difficult, to say the least, for a casual observer to get an overview of what goes on at First Committee (not to mention understanding it all). We can be very grateful, therefore, for the excellent reporting provided by the First Committee Monitor produced by the Reaching Critical Will project. Even so, there is a lot of information to keep abreast of. 192 States (yes, all UN Member States are also members of the Fi...
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Let?s polish up the crystal ball
2007-10-15 08:53:00
The World Future Society recently released the Outlook 2008 Report as part of the November-December 2007 issue of its magazine ?The Futurist?.This report includes some 70 forecasts covering developments and breakthroughs in technology, energy and the environment, international relations and society in general.Among the thinkers who have contributed to ?The Futurist? magazine in the past years are current climate change activist (and just-announced Nobel Peace prize co-winner) Al Gore, former United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.So, what should we expect in the coming years? Here are the top 10 forecasts of the Outlook 2008 Report, some of which are directly relevant to human security and multilateral disarmament diplomacy:1. ?The world will have a billion millionaires by 2025?, as a result of globalization and technology innovations.2. ?Fashion will go wired as technologies and tastes converge to revolutionize the textile indu...
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New podcast - the physics of social behaviour
2007-10-11 13:49:00
How groups of people make decisions, form opinions, and determine social norms has traditionally been the focus of sociology, anthropology and political science. But physics too has a long tradition of studying systems of many interacting components and has developed tools for understanding how such systems can generate collective social behaviours that can't be anticipated by studying their components or their interactions in isolation.One recent book exploring this topic, and how physical understanding of the world is relevant to social problem-solving, is 'Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another'. Its author, Dr. Philip Ball, is a science writer and broadcaster, and consultant editor at the science journal Nature. Critical Mass has inspired our work on the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project, especially two chapters of our third volume of research discussing a "physics of diplomacy" and examining the mechanisms involved in demand for small arms. Quite simply, ...
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30% less pupils in Helmand province
2007-10-10 09:28:00
According to IRIN (the Integrated Regional Information Networks of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)), more than 30,000 pupils attending school in the Helm and province in southern Afghanistan last year were absent in 2007. This represents a reduction of more than 30% in school attendance:?This year we have 70,000 students in 90 functioning schools in Helmand province,? said Saeed Ibrar Agha, head of the provincial education department.[]In 2002, less than a year after the Taliban were toppled, there were 224 functioning schools all over the province [].?Insecurity explains why most schools are shuttered in the Helmand province. In the past 15 months, according to Saeed Ibrar Agha, Taliban insurgents and other armed groups targeting schools as symbols of the government have burned down more than 20 schools and killed 17 students, teachers and other staff.The deterioration of security conditions has led to a flow of children to Lashkar Gah, the capita...
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Announcement: New Oslo Process resource website
2007-10-08 09:13:00
There is a new website specifically dedicated to documents and other resources about the Oslo Process to address the humanitarian effects of cluster munitions. You can find it at:http://www.clusterprocess.orgThe idea behind the website is to act as a gateway for information about the cluster munition humanitarian process for participants and interested actors. It's meant to be fact-oriented, up-to-date, and easy to access and navigate even for slower internet connections - eschewing photos, animations and other bandwidth-heavy attributes.On this site we've gathered two main categories of information. The first category concerns information produced for the Oslo Process such as the Oslo Declaration, the Lima Discussion Text and a calendar of events.The cluster process website also contains broader information on the cluster problem and efforts to tackle it, with links to other meetings, publications, organisations and initiatives of interest - including Disarmament Insight.The webs...
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Re-humanize yourself: The Belgrade Conference of states affected by cluster
2007-10-05 13:26:00
Unexploded ordnance clearance experts are among the unsung humanitarian heroes. Their work is tricky, often tense and - because rendering unexploded munitions safe is an art rather than a science - also sometimes unavoidably dangerous. Disposing of unexploded submunitions is one of the worst jobs because these weapons are anything but "duds": they're unpredictable, difficult to locate (being small and hard to see), unreliable and yet often deployed in large numbers.These brave, ordinary people ultimately put themselves at risk to protect civilians. Bad things can and do happen to them.In 2000, Branislav Kapetanovic, a Serbian UXO clearance expert, was working to render an unexploded submunition safe when it detonated. Branislav was lucky: he lived. But he lost both legs and the ends of his arms and now gets around in a wheelchair. The rehabilitation process has been long and hard, especially in a country in which resources are scarce - as they are in all but the richest nations...
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When is it acceptable to harm civilians?
2007-10-03 09:16:00
My colleague John Borrie is in Belgrade this week participating in a meeting of States against whom cluster munitions have been used (he previewed the meeting in his last posting and will report back to this blog at the end of the week on how things went). The Belgrade meeting forms part of the so-called Olso Process on cluster munitions, which aims, by the end of 2008, to produce a new treaty banning cluster munitions that cause "unacceptable harm" to civilians.As I suggested in a previous posting entitled, "Facing the facts on cluster munitions," the crux of the Oslo Process negotiations will be defining what "unacceptable harm to civilians" actually means. The fault-lines of this debate are already being drawn.NGOs in the Cluster Munition Coalition claim that all cluster munitions cause unacceptable harm to civilians due to a combination of their wide-area affects at the time of use and to the fact that they leave behind unexploded duds that continue to kill civilians - a high pr...
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Discovering Geneva?s Peacebuilding Potential
2007-10-01 11:00:00
In 1995, when 50th anniversaries were everywhere, I was asked to give a speech on ?50 years of peace.? My first reaction was to think that I?d misunderstood the title.How could anyone look at the world in 1995 and describe the previous 50 years as having been peaceful? But then I began to think about the institutions, norms and treaties that existed in 1995 that could only have been imagined by the visionaries and pragmatists who sought to put in place the peace system that was intended by the founding of the United Nations. As I did so, I began to see the increasingly complex web that has been woven among peoples and nations to build security and overcome war.This web may be thin, or even absent, in many places, but it nevertheless represents a constant striving that, despite serious setbacks and dire threats, provides us with the means with which societies can function and sometimes thrive, rather than decline and perish.In 2005, the nations of the world took another tentative s...
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Cluster munitions: hearing the voices of the affected
2007-09-28 14:28:00
Some years ago, in 2003, I wrote a global survey of explosive remnants of war for the British non-governmental organization (NGO), Landmine Action, to feed into work in the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW).The survey was a fairly preliminary piece of desk-research. It simply aimed at pulling together existing bits of information about explosive munitions (apart from landmines) that had been abandoned or failed to function as intended, in order to produce a 'snapshot' of the ERW problem around the world for the year 2001.One of the survey's conclusions was that:"cluster submunitions appear to pose an especially severe risk to civilians in the limited set of conflicts in which they have been used. This trend, associated with the face that cluster munitions are being procured or manufactured by an increasing number of countries, means that their post-conflict threat to civilians can be expected to further increase given the high failure rates and high lethality of th...
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Complexity and Arms Control Diplomacy
2007-09-26 08:27:00
As part of its work, the Disarmament Insight initiative has hosted a sequence of workshops this year with Geneva disarmament practitioners to encourage them to think out of the box in their work. For example, previous visitors to our site may recall that on 25 May we held a workshop on 'human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiation' with speakers including the primatologist Frans de Waal, economist Paul Seabright and Robin Coupland from the International Committee of the Red Cross. (Podcasts of some of these talks are available by clicking on the podcast panel in the left column.)Yesterday, we hosted another workshop with multilateral practitioners, this time on the theme of 'complexity and diplomacy: Understanding the implications for multilateral arms control'.Diplomats love to talk about the complexity involved in their endeavours. But they usually do it in a rhetorical sense, without realizing that complexity is actually a domain of scientific research and t...
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Children?s drawings describing Darfur atrocities
2007-09-24 09:53:00
Human Rights Watch (HRW): What's happening here? 13-year-old artist: These men in green are taking the women and the girls.HRW: What are they doing?Boy: They are forcing them to be wife. The houses are on fire.HRW: What's happening here?Boy: This is an Antonov. This is a helicopter. These here, at the bottom of the page, these are dead people.Last week, while looking for a picture to illustrate a post on systematic rape in DRC, I came across a series of drawings from children who were refugees in camps along the Chad-Darfur border.These pictures date from February 2005, when two Human Rights Watch researchers, Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault, visited refugee camps in Chad in order to assess issues of insecurity and sexual violence.The two researchers gave paper and crayons to children so that they could draw while their parents and caretakers were interviewed.Without any instructions or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the conflict in Sudan?s Dar...
More About: Children , Drawings , Atrocities , Human Rights Watch

Bulletproof Babies
2007-09-21 14:48:00
This week, a friend of mine sent me a link to the webpage of bulletproofbaby.net along with his commentary that "something is profoundly rotten in America." I can understand his exasperation, seeing as he is a researcher on the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons whose main goal in life is to find ways of reducing armed violence in the world.The company's homepage features the above video of a woman demonstrating the protective power of a bulletproof stroller by placing a baby (presumably her own) in it and then opening fire with an automatic weapon. The baby emerges unscathed and smiling from the episode.A few things made me question whether all of this was for real. The way the company's founder and CEO described how she came up with the idea for her products struck me as surreal. She explains, "When stray bullets hit the pram but narrowly missed my son, I realised there was a gap in the market for a range of products to protect babies in today's increasingly vio...
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Thinking Outside the Bomb: The Road From Oslo
2007-09-19 18:59:00
Negotiations on an international treaty to ban anti-personnel mines were successfully concluded ten years ago this week. A decade later, the Mine Ban Treaty has 155 state parties and, although substantial implementation challenges remain, is generally seen as a "success in progress" in destroying stockpiles, clearing mined land and assisting victims of anti-personnel mines.Perhaps more than any other disarmament-related treaty, the mine ban norm has retained focus on helping mine-affected people and their communities on the ground through its partnership between both mine-affected and donor governments and civil society. And the treaty has stigmatized mine use around the world to an impressive degree.This week, I've been participating in a round of events in Oslo to commemorate completion of the Mine Ban Treaty, all grouped around the theme of "clearing the path for a better future". It's been great to see so many familiar faces - of friends and colleagues who've come, gone and r...
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Do "non-lethal" weapons really exist?
2007-09-17 10:02:00
Last week, I spent a day with a very interesting mixture of people talking about so-called “non-lethal” weapons. It was quite the multi-stakeholder encounter.There was the demand side of the non-lethal equation; the police officers and soldiers who were interested in finding out what new technologies could provide in the way of enhanced capabilities to control riots, disperse crowds or otherwise apply force to sticky situations all the while minimising deaths and permanent injuries.The supply side of the non-lethal equation was also well represented – the arms manufacturers, ever eager to apply new technologies in ingenious ways to respond to the demands of their customers. At one point during the proceedings, we were even given demonstrations of some of the newest non-lethal innovations; e.g. a handgun that fires jets of chemical irritant at 430km/h, a trailer-mounted gas dispenser, and the mother of all paint-ball guns (complete with colour-coded slugs filled with a choice...
More About: Weapons , Exist , Ally

Facebook versus face to face
2007-09-14 09:20:00
I?ve recently jumped onto the Face book bandwagon. Currently, my profile shows 85 friends - a dismal number compared to some others linked into this networking site. One person I know boasts an incredible 881 friends. However, Dr Will Reader, an evolutionary psychologist at Sheffield Hallam University, cautions that such huge contact lists are not an accurate indication of a person?s real social status. According to the news reports, his research into the new types of friendships being fostered online shows that:Social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace aren?t expanding people?s circles of close friends, but they are creating plenty of meaningless relationships. His study showed that even though people may have hundreds or thousands of acquaintances, their core group of close friends is still unchanged at around five people. This research on social network sites could hold important insights for social organization in general.Reader believes there are ?good evolutionar...
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