Despite the near-absence of studies of the Caribbean within the mainstream of international relations (IR) theory and foreign policy analysis (FPA), as well as a tendency to subsume this diverse and unique region within the larger Latin America, a focus on Caribbean international relations offers several interesting implications for the wider fields of both IR and FPA. Realist, liberalist, constructivist, and critical approaches all can be incorporated into the study of Caribbean foreign policy in unique ways, and the subfield of foreign policy analysis can also be enriched by focusing on the particular domestic sources of foreign policy in small, culturally diverse, developing countries such as the Caribbean states. Among the unique characteristics of foreign policy in these states is the important role played by external forces in both the economy and the polity, leading to constraints on decision-making autonomy. The external factor also explains why the idea of “inter-American relations” has long been viewed as providing the necessary backdrop for explaining Caribbean foreign policy. Related to this is the important role played by the main regional actors, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), as well as the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), which has thinned the boundary between state and region. As for the prioritization of military-security issues seen in the more powerful countries of the globe, these Caribbean states (apart from Cuba) have eschewed military adventures and traditionally defined their foreign policies in terms of the prioritization of economic development. Finally, to study Caribbean foreign policy means that the scholar must exercise creativity in borrowing from perspectives not normally included in traditional foreign policy studies. Sociology, anthropology, historiography, political economy, and public policy are complementary tools for understanding the Caribbean. Moreover, situating the study of foreign policy within general currents of thought on the role of small states and global south states is also recommended.
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Caribbean Foreign Policy
Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner
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Regime Type, Foreign Policy, and International Relations
Joe D. Hagan
One of the most prevalent ideas in the literature of international relations (IR) is that domestic political patterns are linked to foreign policy via the concept of political regime (democracy, anocracy, and autocracy). Since the beginning of the 21st century, the regime-type foreign policy nexus has gained ample theoretical and empirical credibility in IR theory. There are four areas of research on regime type and foreign policy: the first considers democratic peace literature focused on authoritarian and democratic foreign policies; the second deals with democratization and war literature that highlights the foreign policies of anocracies; the third uses the common large-N data sets and research design and unpacks democratic and authoritarian regimes (separately) to identify subtypes of each regime type; and the fourth is the so-called politics and war literature. The politics and war literature is fragmented, with authors pursuing separate and evidently incomplete lines of argument. There are three steps for integrating the key insights of the politics and war literature: First is the intensification of domestic opposition to established elites; second, the adoption of new ruling strategies as a means for leaders to cope with rising domestic political crises and to control their hold over the regime; and third, the occurrence of international crises, in which larger aspects of domestic politics persist or emerge and affect decisions involving the threat of war.
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Energy, Security, and Foreign Policy
Özgür Özdamar
Next to national defense, energy security has become a primary issue for the survival and wellbeing of both developed and developing nations. A review of the literature shows how concerns for energy security acquired a new dimension after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the Western powers and a weakened Russia competed for the control of the Eurasia region and its energy resources. Research has also focused on how different countries have developed a variety of strategies for securing their energy supply. Energy security literature can be split into three general sections: neoclassical economics and public choice, bureaucratic politics and public administration, and political economy. Scholars have also explored regime theory, resource conflict, and the relationship between national energy security and foreign policy. In the case of the United States, four major challenges in foreign policy issues related to energy security can be identified: “building alliances, strengthening collective energy security, asserting its interests with energy suppliers, and addressing the rise of state control in energy.” These challenges require eight specific foreign policy responses from the U.S. government, two of which constitute the core relationship between energy security and foreign policy making: “candor and respect” for the producer countries, and foreign policies that promote the stability and security of suppliers.
Article
Middle Powers
Marion Laurence
Formal diplomatic recognition of “middle powers” began with the Congress of Vienna, but the concept gained increasing currency after World War II because medium-sized countries like Canada used it to distinguish themselves from smaller states and secure a relatively favorable position in the postwar order. Early definitions of middle powers focused on states that lacked the system-wide influence of great powers but whose resources and capacities were recognized as being more significant than those of small states. The term’s exact meaning remains contested, but early definitions capture three important dimensions of the concept. First, it is inherently relational, from both a material perspective and a social perspective, and often used as a residual category. Some scholars define middle-power status using material factors like geographic size or population, while others emphasize social roles and recognition, but all of these approaches focus on a state’s position, roles, and status relative to other states. Second, the middle-power concept is both state-centric and practitioner-adjacent. National policymakers invoke, reify, and continually reinvent the concept to achieve specific foreign policy objectives. Third, the middle-power concept is bound up with wider debates about global order. Middle powers were long conceptualized as good international citizens and champions of the liberal world order. The rise of “emerging” middle powers raises questions about their orientation toward existing global institutions. Going forward, the most pressing questions about middle powers and their foreign policy behavior will be linked to broader conversations about geopolitical change and the future of contemporary global governance arrangements.
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Foreign Aid, Development Cooperation and International Relations
Bernabé Malacalza
Despite the dominance of development economics in the study of foreign aid and development cooperation since the 1950s, particularly with the emergence of modernization theory, an examination of academic contributions to the larger debates in international relations (IR) reveals something not extensively documented in the scholarly literature. It is that the study of foreign aid and development cooperation is inherently intertwined with IR, constituting an integral component thereof. Understanding the evolution of foreign aid and development cooperation studies, as well as its interaction with IR theories, is essential for deciphering the contemporary theoretical, normative, methodological, ontological, and epistemological challenges faced by the field.
Investigating the historical evolution of this field in relation to IR involves analyzing, in parallel, its development alongside shifts in the international order. The historical analysis highlights how foreign aid and development cooperation have been shaped by changing power structures, ideological shifts, and geopolitical events, underscoring its inseparable connection to broader IR dynamics and its theorization. The interconnected nature of these domains demonstrates how prevailing theoretical perspectives influence not only the methods employed but also the identification of underlying forces and the normative principles guiding research, as well as the design of foreign aid and development cooperation policies.
Analyzing how epistemological approaches, such as rationalism and reflectivism, have influenced the investigation of narratives and practices within the realms of foreign aid and development cooperation reveals potential elements of theoretical complementation. Beyond mere theoretical differentiation, there are elements that contribute significantly to fostering notions of dialogue, pluralism, and interdisciplinarity within the field of foreign aid and development cooperation studies. The prevailing trend is a movement toward theoretical eclecticism, wherein researchers increasingly draw upon a variety of theoretical frameworks to better grasp the intricate dynamics of foreign aid and development cooperation. This transformation stems from the evolving nature of global challenges and the recognition that a singular theoretical approach may fall short in capturing the multifaceted dimensions of foreign aid and development cooperation. Moreover, it underscores the dynamic and evolving nature of the field, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary approaches and theoretical flexibility to address the complex issues surrounding foreign aid and the discussion of the concept of development in times of global planetary crisis.
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Researching Modern Economic Sanctions
Menevis Cilizoglu and Bryan R. Early
Economic sanctions are an integral part of states’ foreign policy repertoire. Increasingly, major powers and international organizations rely on sanctions to address an incredibly diverse array of issues—from fighting corruption to the prevention of nuclear weapons. How policy makers employ economic sanctions evolved over time, especially over the past two decades. The recognition of the adverse humanitarian impact of economic sanctions in the late 1990s and the “War on Terrorism” following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks have led to major changes in the design and enforcement patterns of economic sanctions. Academics’ understanding of how these coercive tools work, when they are utilized, what consequences they create, and when they succeed are still heavily shaped by research findings based on observations from the latter half of the 20th century. Insights based on past sanctions episodes may not fully apply to how sanctions policies are being currently used.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the majority of sanctions cases were initiated by the United States, targeted governments, and involved restrictions on international trade. In the last two decades, however, additional actors, such as the European Union, the United Nations, and China, have emerged as major senders. Modern sanctions now most commonly involve targeted and financial sanctions and are imposed against individuals, organizations, and firms. The changing nature of the senders, targets, stakeholders, and economic tools associated with sanctions policies have important implications for their enforcement, effectiveness, and consequences. The legal-regulatory and bureaucratic infrastructure needed to implement and enforce modern economic sanctions has also become far more robust. This evolution of modern sanctions has provided the scholarly community with plenty of opportunities to explore new questions about economic coercion and revisit old ones. The research agenda on economic sanctions must evolve to remain relevant in understanding why and how modern sanctions are used and what their consequences are.
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International Relations (IR) in Colombia
Carolina Cepeda-Másmela and Arlene B. Tickner
Assessing the International Relations (IR) discipline in Colombia requires deep description of key aspects related to its genealogy, the nature of its scholars and research, and its community structure. IR in Colombia grew out of practical concerns about the creation of adequate human and institutional resources needed to analyze world affairs and Colombian foreign policy. As the field expanded and consolidated, the IR professoriate became more robust and diverse in terms of thematic and geographical trends in research and increased levels of integration at the national and international levels. Several factors have figured prominently in shaping the discipline in Colombia, including the academic training and professional focus of IR scholars, foreign policy interests of the Colombian state, internationalization processes in academia, financial and institutional constraints on research, and patterns of interaction between scholars and policy makers. IR studies in Colombia have not been thoroughly explored, and broad description both allows for a preliminary explanation of their general character and highlights the need for greater reflection about the field’s evolution, shape, and challenges.
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South–South Cooperation in the 21st Century: An Analysis From Latin America
Gladys Lechini and Carla Morasso
During the first decade of the 21st century, the international system underwent a process of transformation in which emerging actors gained prominence, promoting a new stage that enabled the resurgence of South–South cooperation (SSC). The field of international relations approached this phenomenon mainly through studies of international development cooperation, but also from a foreign policy analysis approach. Although at the beginning of the century attention was focused especially on emerging countries like China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, among others, the consolidation of SSC between middle-income countries, particularly in Latin America, gave rise to a broad debate on the distinct identities of the Southern partners. Considering the substantial literature produced, and emphasizing a perspective rooted in Latin America, SSC is analyzed with the goals of contributing to understand SSC from its conceptual formulation, link SSC to foreign policy considerations, and, finally, understand how SSC has affected the International Development Cooperation System.
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Middle East Foreign Policy
Manochehr Dorraj
The scholarly literature on Middle Eastern foreign policies has long treated the region as a pawn in the larger game of the great powers’ international rivalry for global supremacy. During the Cold War, Middle Eastern foreign policies were seen in terms of East-West confrontation, or as a replica of Western foreign policies. Over time, more sophisticated theories of Middle Eastern foreign policy have emerged. Two of the earliest theories that were applied to the study of Middle Eastern foreign policies were diplomatic political history and psychological approaches. Some scholars argue that the behavior of Middle Eastern states is reflective of some of the basic premises of the realist theory. Others, adopting a neorealist structural approach, contend that while Middle Eastern states may use the language of Islam and Pan-Arabism, power politics still lies at the core of their foreign policy. These scholars consider the shift in the regional and the global balance of power as the major explanatory factors for understanding foreign policy changes in the Middle East. Then there are those who conceptualize Middle Eastern foreign policies primarily in terms of dependency theory, the core-periphery power relations, and a struggle for the control of the region's oil and energy. Two other approaches to the study of Middle Eastern foreign policies are international political economy and bureaucratic politics. The Palestinian–Israeli conflict has been a major polarizing issue responsible for radicalization of regional politics and foreign policies in the Middle East.
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Poliheuristic Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis
Steven B. Redd, David Brulé, and Alex Mintz
Milton Friedman and Herbert Simon introduced two opposing “schools” of thought in decision-making: the “rational actor” approach and the “cognitive approach,” respectively. Friedman argued that theories should be judged based on the validity of their predictions (“outcome validity”), whereas Simon countered that more emphasis must be placed on “process validity.” Seeking to bridge the gap between the cognitive and rational approaches, in the early 1990s Alex Mintz and colleagues developed poliheuristic theory. The theory is based on five main processing characteristics of decision-making: nonholistic search, dimension-based processing, noncompensatory decision rules, satisficing behavior, and order-sensitive search. A key premise of poliheuristic theory is its reference to the political aspects of decision making in a foreign policy context. Poliheuristic theory is related to Applied Decision Analysis (ADA), an analytic procedure which can be applied to all levels of analysis in foreign policy decision-making: the leader, the group and the coalition. As a bridge between rational and cognitive decision models, poliheuristic theory is uniquely positioned to contribute to progress in the study of world politics. Indeed, despite being relatively new to the discipline of foreign policy analysis, it has enriched our understanding of both the process of decision-making and the outcome of decisions, for example, or the diversionary use of force, international bargaining and negotiation, coalition formation, and terrorists’ decisions. A number of avenues deserve attention in future research on poliheuristic theory, in particularl the use of a more decision-theoretic dataset for investigating its basic proposition as well as more large-N methodological studies.
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Operational Code Theory: Beliefs and Foreign Policy Decisions
Stephen G. Walker and Mark Schafer
The process of foreign policy decision making is influenced in large part by beliefs, along with the strategic interaction between actors engendered by their decisions and the resulting political outcomes. In this context, beliefs encompass three kinds of effects: the mirroring effects associated with the decision making situation, the steering effects that arise from this situation, and the learning effects of feedback. These effects are modeled using operational code analysis, although “operational code theory” more accurately describes an alliance of attribution and schema theories from psychology and game theory from economics applied to the domain of politics. This “theory complex” specifies belief-based solutions to the puzzles posed by diagnostic, decision making, and learning processes in world politics. The major social and intellectual dimensions of operational code theory can be traced to Nathan Leites’s seminal research on the Bolshevik operational code, The Operational Code of the Politburo. In the last half of the twentieth century, applications of operational code analysis have emphasized different cognitive, emotional, and motivational mechanisms as intellectual dimensions in explaining foreign policy decisions. The literature on operational code theory may be divided into four general waves of research: idiographic-interpretive studies, nomothetic-typological studies, quantitative-statistical studies, and formal modeling studies. The present trajectory of studies on operational code points to a number of important trends that straddle political psychology and game theory. For example, the psychological processes of mirroring, steering, and learning associated with operational code analysis have the potential to enrich our understanding of game-theoretic models of strategic interaction.
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Diversionary Theories of Conflict: The Promises and Challenges of an Opportunities Approach
Charity Butcher
Since the early 1990s, a significant amount of research has been dedicated to refining the causal mechanisms that lead to the diversionary use of force and the various conditions under which such diversionary actions are most likely. This article focuses specifically on the latter—highlighting the research on the various conditions that create opportunities for states to utilize diversionary tactics—while also emphasizing how these opportunities are connected to specific causal processes for diversionary conflict. While significant attention has been paid to the domestic factors that provide additional opportunities for or constraints on actors to utilize diversionary force, less research has considered the international and dyadic opportunities for diversionary force and the interaction and interplay of these domestic and international, or dyadic, factors. These international and dyadic factors specifically focus on those related to the potential target of diversionary conflict and are an important part of fully understanding the decision-making process of leaders contemplating diversionary tactics. Both the domestic and international opportunities for diversionary force identified in the literature will be considered, specifically those focusing on advancements made in understanding the international and dyadic dimensions of these opportunities and the characteristics of potential target states.
While the movement toward identifying various opportunities for diversionary behavior, both domestic and international, or dyadic, is an important pathway in diversionary research, this approach comes with some significant challenges. First, diversionary motivations are extremely hard to “prove” since leaders have incentives to hide these motives. This problem is compounded as more opportunities for diversionary force are added to the mix—as these opportunities may, in themselves, provide motives for war. For example, rivalry and territorial disputes are shown as international opportunities for diversionary force, yet these factors are also known to be two of the most prominent causes of war between states. Thus, parsing out diversionary motives from other fundamental national security motives becomes increasingly difficult.
While quantitative studies can help uncover broad patterns of potential diversionary behavior, they are less equipped to fully explain the ways that various domestic and international opportunities might interact. Nor can these studies demonstrate whether diversion was actual present within specific cases. Case studies can help fill these gaps by allowing more in-depth analysis of these potential diversionary opportunities. Overall, quantitative studies that help uncover patterns and qualitative studies that investigate diversionary tactics in a single case or set of cases are both important parts of the puzzle. To best understand diversionary conflict, researchers need to rely increasingly on both approaches.
Article
A History of International Communication Studies
Elizabeth C. Hanson
The intellectual impetus for international communication research has come from a variety of disciplines, notably political science, sociology, psychology, social psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and, of course, communication science and international relations. Although highly diverse in content, international communication scholarship, past and current, falls into distinct research traditions or areas of inquiry. The content and focus of these have changed over time in response to innovations in communication technologies and to the political environment.
The development and spread of radio and film in the 1920s and 1930s increased public awareness and scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the mass media and in issues regarding the impact on public opinion. The extensive use of propaganda as an instrument of policy by all sides in World War I, and the participation of social scientists in the development of this instrument, provided an impetus for the development of both mass communication and international communication studies. There was a heavy emphasis on the micro level effects, the process of persuasion. Strategic considerations prior to and during World War II reinforced this emphasis.
World War II became an important catalyst for research in mass communication. Analytical tools of communication research were applied to the tasks of mobilizing domestic public support for the war, understanding enemy propaganda, and developing psychological warfare techniques to influence the morale and opinion of allied and enemy populations.
During the Cold War, U.S foreign policy goals continued to shape the direction of much research in international communication, notably “winning hearts and minds” of strategically important populations in the context of the East-West conflict. As new states began to emerge from colonial empires, communication became an important component of research on development. “Development research” emphasized the role of the mass media in guiding and accelerating development. This paradigm shaped both national and international development programs throughout the 1960’s. It resurfaced in the 1980s with a focus on telecommunication, and again in the 1990s, in modified form under the comprehensive label “information and communication technologies for development.” Development communication met serious criticism in the 1970s as the more general modernization paradigm was challenged.
The emergence of new information and communication technologies in the 1990s inspired a vast literature on their impact on the global economy, foreign policy, the nation state and, more broadly, on their impact on power structures and social change. The beginning of the 21st century marks a transition point as the scholarship begins to respond to multiple new forms of communication and to new directions taken by the technologies that developed and spread in the latter part of the previous century
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The Geography of Diplomacy
Herman van der Wusten and Virginie Mamadouh
The fields of geography and diplomacy have traditionally been closely intertwined. Diplomacy is conventionally the conduct of statecraft in the nonviolent manifestations of external relations by a specific institution. These nonviolent manifestations can be variously merged with the use of armed force. The political order of the system of states—statecraft emanates from its separate entities—is deeply permeated by geography, notably by the application of territorial control. The art of diplomacy is inextricably linked to spatial perceptions, aims at place-based assets, and plays out in a given geographical context.
As the system of states has evolved by incremental increase, functional cooperation, fragmentations and mergers, and internal centralization and decentralization of separate states, the diplomatic institution has had to adapt. As more and more non-state parties commit themselves to transboundary relations or find themselves so implicated, diplomatic practice becomes more widely required, the core of the diplomatic institution still settled in the apparatus of states.
This article is consecutively concerned with different aspects of the overlap of geography and diplomacy. In the introduction the ways in which academic geographers have over time shed light on this common ground is briefly reviewed. The next section provides an inventory of the mappings of the diplomatic web to get a sense of its general cartography, followed by descriptions of the diplomatic niche, the places where diplomacy is practiced. In the diplomatic worldview and the geographic frame, the geographic notions that are relevant to the diplomatic institution are followed according to reasoning and travel practice. Finally, shifts in the practice, contents, and functions of diplomacy are dealt with over time, based on the major geographical forces that affect the system of states in and beyond which diplomacy operates.
Article
International Competition and Cooperation in the New Eastern Mediterranean
Zenonas Tziarras
In the 21st century and particularly during the 2010s, the Eastern Mediterranean acquired unprecedented attention and significance as a distinct geopolitical space with new international and security dynamics. This “new” Eastern Mediterranean geopolitical order was largely “constructed” by global and regional power shifts as well as local developments, such as the trajectory of Turkish foreign policy and the discovery of offshore hydrocarbon reserves. The result was a change in the region’s patterns of interstate conflict and cooperation. On the one hand, countries such as Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, and Israel became part of an emerging network of cooperation and security architecture. On the other hand, owing to its problematic relations with these states, Turkey remained an outsider wanting to “deconstruct” this new state of affairs and change it to its own benefit. As such, the new Eastern Mediterranean was ushered in during a period of geopolitical polarization that is more conducive to crisis rather than peace and stability and often transcends its boundaries.
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Israeli Foreign Policy
Aviad Rubin
The main principles of Israeli foreign policy emerged during the pre-state period and were shaped by Zionist ideology and the lessons of the Holocaust. The primary goal of this policy was, and still is, to secure a sovereign Jewish state in the land of Israel, and a safe haven for world Jewry. Another dominant factor in the shaping of the foreign policy of Israel was the need to encounter the country’s challenging geostrategic situation—small territory; lack of natural resources, until the discovery of natural gas depots in water in the Israeli exclusive economic zone during the last decade; fragile Jewish communities around the world; and a hostile neighborhood. Combined together, these considerations are the issues that rank high on the agenda of Israeli foreign policy and affect Israel’s relationship with the international community, ranging from the global superpowers to third world countries. After maintaining a relatively steady foreign policy program throughout the 20th century, in the 21st century the state made some significant policy shifts, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu’s consecutive governments. These included a halt in Israeli–Palestinian negotiations for peace; a high-profile campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program; more emphasis on the maritime domain; and strengthening ties with illiberal leaders around the world. In 2021, the seeming epilogue of Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister leaves an open question about the relative weight of structural and ideational factors vs. powerful political agents in the design of Israel’s foreign policy.
Article
International Insertion: A Non-Western Contribution to International Relations
Fabrício Chagas-Bastos
International insertion is a concept that comes from non-Western intellectual origins and can help individuals understand how peripheral and semi-peripheral countries behave in world politics, and their interests, core values, and strategies. International insertion also expands the knowledge to characterize how agency spaces are created by peripheral countries. Insertion is a necessary step to those countries attempting to transition from the condition of one who seeks to be recognized as part of, to one who is admitted as possessing and capable of seeking status and acting within political, economic, and military global hierarchies. In a nutshell, insertion means being recognized by the small group of gatekeeping states as a relevant part of the specific social networks that constitute the global hierarchy. The conceptualization of international insertion allows a robust middle-range explanation that considers multiple dimensions (political, economic, and military) of the national and international structural and contextual aspects these actors must translate to navigate world politics.
Article
The Politics of Regional Integration in Africa
Paul-Henri Bischoff
On the African continent, a commitment to Pan-African unity and multilateral organization exists next to a postcolonial society whose 54 Westphalian states interpret the commitment to unity and integration to different degrees. The tension between a long-term Pan-African vision for a unified continent that prospers and is economically self-empowered, and the national concerns of governing state-centered elites with immediate domestic security and political and economic interests, lies at the heart of the politics surrounding African integration and affects both the continent and its regions. The politics of integration demand that a patchwork of regionalisms be consolidated; states give up on multiple memberships; and designated regional economic communities (RECs) take the lead on integration or subordinate themselves to the strategy and complement the institutions of the African Union (AU). In the interest of widening the social base of regional organization, politics needs to recognize and give status to informal regional actors engaged in bottom-up regionalism. Of issue in the politics of integration and regionalism are themes of norm adaptation, norm implementation, intergovernmentalism and supra-nationality, democracy, and authoritarianism.
