Advocacy Coalitions in Foreign Policy
Jonathan Pierce and Katherine Hicks
The advocacy coalition framework (ACF) was developed to explain policy processes where contentious coalitions of actors seek to translate competing belief systems into public policy. ...
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African Agency in International Politics
Jonathan Fisher
International Relations theory has tended to overlook the role of Africa and Africans in the international system. Traditionally, the discipline’s most influential theorists have focused ...
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The Aftermaths of Civil Conflicts
Jaclyn M. Johnson and Clayton L. Thyne
The devastating Syrian civil war that began after the Arab Spring in 2011 has reminded the international community of the many consequences of civil war. However, this conflict is simply ...
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Agency and Structure in Foreign Policy Analysis
Jarrod Hayes
For much of the history of the study of international relations, and of foreign policy as a distinctive subfield, scholars have debated the relative weight of agency and structure in ...
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Agent-Based Computational Modeling and International Relations Theory: Quo Vadis?
Claudio Cioffi-Revilla
Agent-based computational modeling (ABM, for short) is a formal and supplementary methodological approach used in international relations (IR) theory and research, based on the general ABM ...
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The Age-Structural Theory of State Behavior
Richard Cincotta
Over the past three decades, economic and political demographers, using various measures, have discerned that increased age-structural maturity makes significant statistical contributions ...
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Akamatsu Waves
Arno Tausch, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev
In 1937, the Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu discovered specific links between the rise and decline of the global peripheries. Akamatsu’s theory of development describes certain ...
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American Grand Strategy and Political Economy Theory
Kevin Narizny
Nearly everything a state does has distributional consequences, including grand strategy. Societal groups with different stakes in the international economy and defense spending often have ...
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American Pragmatism in Foreign Policy Analysis
Ulrich Franke and Gunther Hellmann
This article examines scholarship in the field of foreign policy analysis inspired by the philosophy and social theory of American Pragmatism. Pragmatism is reconstructed as a unified ...
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Analogies and Metaphors and Foreign Policy Decision Making
William Flanik
Like all decision making, foreign policy decision making (FPDM) requires transferring meaning from one representation to another. Since the end of the Cold War, students of FPDM have ...
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Analytical Liberalism, Neoclassical Realism, and the Need for Empirical Analyses
Mark R. Brawley
Two approaches currently enjoy widespread popularity among foreign policy analysts: Analytical Liberalism and Neoclassical Realism. On the surface, they seem remarkably similar. Both ...
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Approaches to Explaining Regional Conflict and Peace
Kentaro Sakuwa
The pattern of international conflict and peace differs from region to region. Regions differ from each other not only in terms of the simple presence or absence of war but also the degree ...
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Archival Research in Foreign Policy
Deborah Welch Larson
Although more scholars have used archival evidence to analyze foreign policy in recent years, relatively little has been written on the methods involved in using archives as well as the ...
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Arms Buildups and the Use of Military Force
David F. Mitchell and Jeffrey Pickering
The empirical literature on arms buildups and the use of interstate military force has advanced considerably over the last half century. Research has largely confirmed that a relationship ...
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Arms Control and Arms Reductions in Foreign Policy
Harald Mueller
Arms control is a strategy by governments to overcome the security dilemma with institutionalized cooperation. It comes in three versions, arms control proper, with stability as the main ...
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Arms Races: An Assessment of Conceptual and Theoretical Challenges
Toby J. Rider
An “arms race” is a competition over the quality or quantity of military capabilities between states in the international system. The arms race phenomenon has received considerable ...
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A Unified Analysis of the Diversionary and Constraint Accounts of Crisis Initiation
Lisa J. Carlson and Raymond Dacey
The major empirical frameworks for understanding crisis initiation are the diversionary account and the constraint account. Both accounts deal with the influences that domestic audiences ...
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Austria and the European Union
Paul Luif
Austria was occupied at the end of World War II by the four Allies, but in contrast to Germany the four powers left in 1955—the condition being its declaration of permanent neutrality, on ...
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Autocratic Regimes and Foreign Policy
Marianne Kneuer
The foreign policy of autocratic regimes reflects the research interest in the international behavior and decision making of domestic actors in nondemocratic regimes. The regime type (its ...
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The Balance of Power in World Politics
Randall L. Schweller
The balance of power—a notoriously slippery, murky, and protean term, endlessly debated and variously defined—is the core theory of international politics within the realist perspective. A ...
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