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I am reading a book where I find some sentences like
... how international actors impact civil wars
... being a 'player' in regional politics
... further study of each of the six actors' policies towards Syria
I'm not familiar with the meaning of "actors" and "player" in this perspective.
How can I understand it clearly?
These terms don't have a specific political meaning. Both player and actor can be used to refer to people, groups or organizations who have some influence in a (political) process or event.
According to Cambridge Business English Dictionary, one of the definitions for player is:
a company, organization, or person that has influence within a particular activity, industry, or type of work:
According to Merriam Webster, actor has the following definition (among others):
one that takes part in any affair : PARTICIPANT
For example, Merriam Webster gives the following example sentence of a political actor:
Benjamin Franklin was a major actor in many of the events leading up to the founding of our nation.
In political or policy network studies an actor is a primary variable used to measure power and influence based on the number and type of relationships they have with other actors.
The second primary variable is "ties" or "connections."
Often, actor traits (race, gender, ideology, nationality etc.) and structural traits (distribution of ties, tie strength etc.) are used to understand how the people involved in a particular political theatre influence others inside the network.
Methods in network analysis can be either qualitative (close examination of who knows who and why the relationships exist) or quantitative such as counts of ties (degree) or variations of these counts (brokerage, eigenvectors etc.).
Player gets used in game theory studies, to similar effect. Game theory studies typically explore various potential decisions of two or more players in a 'game' (for example, members of a cartel attempting to set a high oil price) and how much they will gain or lose given how each player acts.
In general, 'player' and 'actor' can be exchanged for each other. Network studies sometimes refer to players and game studies sometime refer to actors, although most political scientists like to keep terms consistent where ever possible. They basically mean the same thing, although player implies some form of competition is involved.
Actors and players, in a political context mean more or less the same thing. In fact, players once meant actors. This would seem a little old-fashioned now.
Today, actors tend to be used in more formal amd sober political analysis, day by political scientists or scholars of politics. Whereas playets temd to be used more colloquially, say by political journalists.
