Community Detection and Scottish Independence

A few years ago, I read a very interesting paper that is rather topical when it comes to the issue of Scottish independence.

The final sentence of the abstract reads as follows: We also quantify the effects of partitioning, showing for instance that the effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive for the human network than that of Scotland.

The methodology in the paper is "community detection" --- a type of clustering --- applied to networks constructed from mobile phone data.