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Dr. John P. Sullivan Contributed to Unraveling Covert Networks: Analysis of Mexican Cartel Alliances

Dr. John P. Sullivan, C/O Futures LLC, Associate participated in a working group organized through the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The working collaborated to write a series of papers analyzing the alliance structure of Mexican organized crime. The latest product is a commentary, Unraveling Covert Networks: Analysis of Mexican Cartel Alliances, that summarizes the working group’s research. The commentary summarizes two Baker Institute research papers: 1) Mexico’s 2021 Dark Network Alliance Structure: An Exploratory Social Network Analysis of Lantia Consultores' Illicit Network Alliance and Subgroup Data and 2) The Use of Similarity-Based Algorithms to Predict Links in Mexican Criminal Networks. The first paper examined the overall bipolar structure of cartel alliances in Mexico; while second paper used four separate predictive algorithms to forecast potential alliances among illicit networks (described in the following figure).

In addition to these papers, the research team produced a peer-reviewed article, “A Social Network Analysis of Mexico’s Dark Network Alliance Structure” in the Journal of Strategic Security.


Source: Nathan P. Jones, Oscar Contreras Velasco, John P. Sullivan, Chris Callaghan, Irina Chindea, and Daniel Weisz Argomedo. 2023. Unraveling Covert Networks: Analysis of Mexican Cartel Alliances. Commentary no. 10.18.23. Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Houston, Texas. https://doi.org/10.25613/643d-ka47.

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