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Abstract

International cooperation and conflict has long been studied through formal institutions, namely, membership in international organizations and participation in bilateral or multilateral treaties. This hardly grasps the informal and contingent relationships and the tacit and pragmatic alliances reflected in countries’ joint positions on multilateral issues. While most theories of alliances were preoccupied with why such formal alliances were formed, this article offers a reconceptualization of international cooperation based on empirical data. It proposes “creeping alliances,” tentatively defined as gradual and often informal cooperation that develops over time characterized by increasing mutual foreign policy alignment, to explain an undertheorized domain of informal foreign policy clustering by using the UN data from over two decades of UNGA voting. This is done by (i) employing an L1 distance metric (also known as a Manhattan distance) that calculates the sum of absolute differences between two countries’ votes across UNGA resolutions between 2000–2025; (ii) applying a novel Bayesian approach that adds “pseudo-counts” to the data to account for the uncertainty when two countries have limited overlapping votes; and (iii) applying a K-means clustering to group countries into clusters based on their voting similarities, with a modification using custom distance measurements. The findings demonstrate that the world is divided into six foreign policy clusters based on shared positions of multilateral issues. Such alliances are often tacit and informal, which justifies both novel conceptualization and the resort to “creeping alliances” for description. (from author)

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