Studies on African foreign policies, and the process involved with their formation, have received much less attention compared to other aspects of African studies. Most have been in-depth case studies illustrating how foreign policy decisions are centered on common concerns for the region, such as decolonization, nation building, economic and political autonomy, and Cold War competition. As such, most diplomacy is conducted with close neighbors, former colonial powers, or the super powers. Much is also conducted within intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). Interactions with multilateral institutions—the World Bank and IMF—also feature prominently. Most analyses indicate that foreign policy has been in the hands of a president, who has conducted it primarily as a means of consolidating or maintaining domestic rule. African foreign policies also tend to reflect the reality that most are small and weak states. A strand of empirical comparative foreign policy literature on Africa does exist, examining things such as UN voting or level of diplomatic activity. Finally, much literature on African foreign policies is embedded in African international relations and focuses on the choices of leaders within larger historic, material, ideological, and international contexts. Most scholars, but not all, eschew an analysis using a single paradigm: eclectic, historical approaches seem to be more common than either cross-national empirical studies or paradigmatically pristine approaches. With this in mind, African foreign policies must respond to, and evolve with, changing international and regional contexts, especially any with significant shifts in geopolitical power.
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African Foreign Policies
John James Quinn
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Mexican Foreign Policy
Jorge A. Schiavon
Mexican foreign policy should be analyzed in a comprehensive and systematic way. To do so, it is necessary to study the history of Mexican diplomacy, explaining how foreign policy has been used as a central instrument for the creation and consolidation of the Mexican national sovereign state. Then, it is necessary to examine the most relevant actors and institutions involved in the decision-making process and implementation of foreign policy, evaluating their powers, capacities, and actions. Based on this, it is possible to analyze the strategies and actions of Mexican foreign policy vis-à-vis the most important regions of the world (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa), with a special emphasis on its relationship with the United States, as well as its participation in multilateral and regional organizations.
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European Foreign Policy
Michael E. Smith
As a research field, European foreign policy (EFP) is defined as the study of how certain European states manage their foreign policy responsibilities, whether individually, through coordinated national foreign policies, or through EU policies and institutions. EFP effectively comprises at least three major research fields: traditional foreign policy analysis (FPA) or comparative foreign policy (CFP); theories of international relations (IR) or international cooperation; and the study of European integration. The critical link between these fields involves the growing role of the EU as a major reference point for “Europe,” so much so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish EU foreign policy from European foreign policy. There are two major phases in the emergence of EFP as a research field: the first recognition of European foreign policy cooperation and some very limited conceptual innovation; and the period surrounding the advent of the Single European Act, which placed European foreign policy cooperation on a new institutional path that resulted in the reforms under the Treaty on European Union. The study of EFP expanded considerably following the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union (TEU) of 1991. Several major empirical themes within these periods, which has persisted to the present-day EFP research agenda, include the status of EFP political influence relative to other global actors, particularly the US; a seeming disconnect between EFP procedures and substance; tensions between the economic/trade and political/security dimensions of EFP; and the relative inputs of European states versus EU institutional actors, particularly the European Commission.
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Think Tanks and Foreign Policy
Stuti Bhatnagar
The role of think tanks as policy actors has developed over time and created significant global scholarship. Widely understood as non-state policy actors, think tanks established either with or without the support of government have evolved in various political contexts with varied characteristics. They are avenues for the discussion of new policy ideas as well as used for the consolidation of existing understandings of global and national political issues. As ideational actors think tanks interact with policy frameworks at different levels, either in the framing stage or at the stage of consensus building towards certain policies. Intellectual elites at think tanks allow for the introduction of think tank ideas into the policy frames as well as the creation of public opinion towards foreign policy decisions. Think tank deliberations involve an interaction with policymakers, academic experts, business and social actors, as well as the media to disseminate ideas. Institutionally, think tanks in a wide variety of political contexts play a critical role in the making of foreign policy and bring closer attention to processes of state–society interactions in different political environments.
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Foreign Policy Analysis in Brazil: The Use of Middle-Range Theories
Feliciano de Sá Guimarães and Felipe Estre
Since its inception in the late 1950s, the field of foreign policy analysis in Brazil has been mostly problem driven. Furthermore, most of the studies are focused exclusively on the Brazilian context, without extending their conclusion beyond national boundaries. However, the analysis of more than 200 articles, published by Brazilian academics in local and international journals since the 1950s, reveals that new trends are emerging since the beginning of the 21st century. There is a steady increase of articles using foreign policy analysis tools and concepts, a growing number of comparative studies, and a tendency to develop middle-range theories that can be replicated elsewhere. Even though the use of middle-range theories is still incipient, the Brazilian international relations (IR) community could greatly benefit from it, fostering greater integration with the international IR community, refining the Brazilian foreign policy analysis, and reevaluating the “scientific exceptionalism” that has characterized Brazilian IR academic production.
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Foreign Policy of Colombia
María Catalina Monroy
The study of foreign policy of Colombia has traditionally followed a path of thick description of specific events and generalizations that have transcended from one generation to another. There is a tendency to claim that Colombia’s foreign policy is presidentialist or personalist, of low profile, and excessively pro-American. These are just a few examples of the conventional wisdom that has defined the study of Colombian foreign policy. Although the field of foreign policy analysis is only in its preliminary phase in Colombia, there is a growing interest among students and scholars to analytically examine foreign policy decision-making through multiple levels of analysis. The foreign policy of Colombia is best understood by tracing the direction and alignment of specific foreign policy decisions into respices, meaning “look at” or “upon.” The fact that Colombia has traditionally “looked upon” a foreign entity to formulate foreign policy poses different questions regarding how autonomous foreign policymaking in Colombia really is. On the one hand, the essence of Colombia’s foreign policy has traditionally been found in a juxtaposition of the country’s interests alongside those of the United States. On the other hand, as a consequence of the articulation of this foreign policy partnership between Colombia and the United States, security has been the most recurrent topic in Colombia’s foreign policy agenda-setting, given the problems of illicit drugs, armed conflict, terrorism, and, more recently, peace.
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Leadership and Foreign Policy Analysis
Thomas Preston
The classical literature on leadership—or at least the portion of it relevant to questions of foreign policy analysis—greatly evolved and changed over time from its beginnings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As new theoretical approaches and methodologies appeared, scholars eventually began to study the contextual nuances in this relationship between leaders and foreign policy. Yet, in its earliest incarnation, the literature was dominated by the “great man” theory of leadership, which suggested that leaders were “born, not made”—that people who became leaders were uniquely special and had personal qualities and characteristics setting them apart from non-leaders. Eventually, this fell out of favor with the rise of more situationally based theories and critiques pointing out the need to include both the person and the situation in order to explain leadership. Another strong tradition in the leadership literature historically has been the application of psychology and psychoanalytic theory to explain leadership styles and foreign policy actions. These approaches often employed in-depth psychobiographies of leaders to link their personalities, childhood socializations, or other experiences to subsequent patterns of behavior in life, styles of leadership, and foreign policy successes or failures. Yet another approach to the study of leadership follows a very different path towards understanding the concept and focuses instead upon not only the leader, but the follower as well.
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Culture and Foreign Policy Analysis
Andrea Grove
There are several conceptions of culture which have become dominant in foreign policy analysis (FPA) in particular: culture as the organization of meaning, culture as value preferences, and culture as templates for human strategy. Prior to the 1990s, the Cold War constraints of bipolarity had left little room for idiosyncratic domestic-level variables such as culture to affect FP. However, once systemic constraints lessened and the decision making milieu became more ambiguous, scholars increasingly turned to questions about culture and identity. Using classic frameworks as a jumping off point, early work on national role conception and operational code analysis incorporated culture as a significant filter for decision making. Operational code analysis is another early approach that had elements of culture as part of the decision making context. In addition, there are a few works that investigate culture and FP with a different focus than FPA. But perhaps one of the most notable elements of FPA studies exploring culture is the idea that it need not be viewed as explaining whatever cannot be explained by anything else. Instead of merely an alternative theoretical explanation of state behavior, use of culture in the post-Cold War revival and today reflects an effort not so much to refute neorealism but to look at different questions.
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Foreign Policy Analysis: Origins (1954–93) and Contestations
Valerie Hudson
A country’s foreign policy, also called its foreign relations, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve goals within its international relations (IR) milieu. The study of such strategic plans is called foreign policy analysis (FPA). The inception of foreign relations in human affairs and the need for foreign policy to deal with them is as old as the organization of human life in groups. In the twentieth century, due to global wars, international relations became a public concern as well as an important field of study and research. Gradually, various theories began to grow around international relations, international systems, and international politics, but the need for a theory of foreign policy continued to be neglected. The reason was that states used to keep their foreign policies under official secrecy and it was not considered appropriate for the public, as it is today, to know about these policies. However, although foreign policy formulation continued to remain a closely guarded process at the national level, wider access to governmental records and greater public interest provided more data for researchers to work on and, eventually, place international relations in a structured framework of political science.
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South Asia and Foreign Policy
Sumit Ganguly
There has been a pronounced dearth of scholarly literature on foreign and security policy in South Asia. Fortunately, there is a significant transformation under way. The amount of South Asian case materials that have been effectively integrated into the mainstream of the foreign and security policy literature is slowly expanding. Furthermore, the bulk of the scholarship on these subjects emanating from the region had been quintessentially devoid of theoretical substance. This, too, is undergoing a change. The neglect of South Asia is baffling considering that the region offers a rich array of cases pertaining to questions of comparative foreign policy, interstate conflicts, regional crises, and the effects of nuclear proliferation, among other issues. There are a variety of plausible reasons to explain the marginalization of South Asian foreign policy studies. One, at the level of the global system, the South Asian states (with the exception of Pakistan) sought to self-consciously exclude themselves from the tensions of the Cold War international order. Also, India was one of the principal exponents of the doctrine of nonalignment. After several decades of systematic neglect, however, there are signs that scholars are beginning to integrate the study of India and South Asia into the study of international relations, foreign policy, and strategic studies. This newfound scholarly interest in the South Asian region can be attributed to a host of actors, such as India’s remarkable economic growth of the past decade or so, Pakistan’s political fragility, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan.
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Role Theory and Foreign Policy
Cameron Thies
Role theory is an approach to the study of foreign policy that developed in the interdisciplinary field of social psychology and can be appropriately applied at the individual, state, and system level analyses. Role theory, which first attracted attention in the foreign policy literature after the publication of K. J. Holsti’s 1970 study of national role conception, does not refer to a single theory, but rather a family of theories, an approach, or perspective that begins with the concept of role as central to social life. The major independent variables in the study of roles include role expectations, role demands, role location, and audience effects (including cues). In addition, role theory contains its own model of social identity based on three crucial dimensions: status, value, and involvement. The 1987 publication of Stephen G. Walker’s edited volume, Role Theory and Foreign Policy Analysis, set the stage for further advances in the use of role theory in both the fields of foreign policy and international relations. According to Walker, role theory has a rich language of descriptive concepts, the organizational potential to bridge levels of analyses, and numerous explanatory advantages. This makes role theory an extremely valuable approach to foreign policy analysis. Role theory also offers a way of bringing greater integration between foreign policy analysis and international relations, especially through constructivist meta-theory.
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Methods of Foreign Policy Analysis
Philip B.K. Potter
Foreign policy analysis (FPA) is the study of how states, or the individuals that lead them, make foreign policy, execute foreign policy, and react to the foreign policies of other states. This topical breadth results in a subfield that encompasses a variety of questions and levels of analysis, and a correspondingly diverse set of methodological approaches. There are four methods which have become central in foreign policy analysis: archival research, content analysis, interviews, and focus groups. The first major phase of FPA research is termed “comparative foreign policy.” Proponents of comparative foreign policy sought to achieve comprehensive theories of foreign policy behavior through quantitative analysis of “events” data. An important strand of this behavioral work addressed the relationship between trade dependence and foreign policy compliance. On the other hand, second-generation FPA methodology largely abandoned universalized theory-building in favor of historical methods and qualitative analysis. Second-generation FPA researchers place particular emphasis on developing case study methodologies driven by social science principles. Meanwhile, the third-generation of FPA scholarship combines innovative quantitative and qualitative methods. Several methods of foreign policy analysis used by third-generation FPA researchers include computer assisted coding, experiments, simulation, surveys, network analysis, and prediction markets. Ultimately, additional attention should be given to determining the degree to which current methods of foreign policy analysis allow predictive or prescriptive conclusions. FPA scholars should also focus more in reengaging foreign policy analysis with the core of international relations research.
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Autonomy in Foreign Policy: A Latin American Contribution to International Relations Theory
María Cecilia Míguez
Autonomy is a concept constantly referred to in Latin American foreign policy analysis, especially with respect to Argentina and Brazil. As great powers continue to exert effective control over peripheral economies and their political decision making, autonomy emerges as a possibility for self-determination in the areas where hegemonic powers’ economic, political, and cultural interferences are expressed. Although this is not a new concept, the quest for autonomy within the “global periphery”—and elsewhere too—still remains relevant. Helio Jaguaribe and Juan Carlos Puig’s theoretical approaches are fundamental epistemological contributions to international relations (IR), not only in South America (where the theoretical approach was first developed) but also to the wider IR field outside the mainstream scholarship. In line with global historical changes, autonomy took on some subsequent new meanings, which led to new and heterogeneous formulations that transformed, and in certain cases also contradicted, the very genesis of the idea of autonomy. As a result, the so-called autonomy “with adjectives” emerged within IR peripheral debates. The 21st century witnessed the rebirth of the concept amid the rise of multilateralism and the new Latin American regionalism, which brought its relational character to the fore. Some of the new approaches to autonomy, especially from Brazil, used the concept as a methodological tool to understand the historical evolution of the country’s foreign policy. As such, autonomy and its theoretical reflection remain central to the analyses and interpretations of the international relations of peripheral countries, and it is in this sense that the autonomy can be highlighted broadly as a Latin American contribution to IR discipline. The concept of autonomy has a unique and foundational content referred to the discussion of the asymmetries in the global order. Studying autonomy is critical to understanding peripheral countries’ problems and dynamics.
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Canadian Foreign Policy in Historical Perspective
Kim Richard Nossal
The field of Canadian foreign policy is often characterized as multidisciplinary. An examination of the evolution of the literature on Canadian foreign policy over the course of the 20th century reveals a field that grew slowly during the two decades after World War I but developed substantially after World War II when Canada’s involvement in global politics shifted substantially when governments in Ottawa rejected a return to interwar isolationism and embraced internationalism. The Canadian foreign policy literature that developed in the 30 years after World War II was dominated by historians and “historically minded political scientists.” This pattern changed with the massification of the Canadian university system, with political scientists dominating the literature after the 1970s. However, the burgeoning literature in the field has been marked by considerable theoretical and methodological diversity, more undisciplined than multidisciplinary.
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East Asia and Foreign Policy
Enyu Zhang and Qingmin Zhang
The study of East Asian foreign policies has progressed in sync with mainstream international relations (IR) theories: (1) from perhaps an inadvertent or unconscious coincidence with realism during the Cold War to consciously using different theoretical tools to study the various aspects of East Asian foreign policies; and (2) from the dominance of realism to a diversity of theories in studying East Asian foreign policies. Nonetheless, the old issues from the Cold War have not been resolved; the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait remain two flashpoints in the region, with new twists that can derail regional stability and prosperity. New issues also have emerged and made East Asia most volatile. One issue is concerned with restructuring the balance of power in East Asia, particularly the dynamics among the major players, i.e. Japan, China, and the United States. Regionalism is another new topic in the study of East Asian foreign policies. A review of the current state of the field suggests that two complementary issues be given priority in the future. First, the foreign policy interests and strategies of individual small states vis-à-vis great powers in the region, particularly those in Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula. Second, what could really elevate the study of East Asian foreign policies in the general field of IR and foreign policy analysis is to continue exploring innovative analytical frameworks that can expand the boundaries of existing metatheories and paradigms.
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Latin American Foreign Policy
Amy Below
Latin American foreign policy has drawn the attention of scholars since the 1960s. Foreign policy–related literature began to surge in the 1980s and 1990s, with a focus on both economic and political development. As development in the region lagged behind that of its northern neighbors, Latin American had to rely on foreign aid, largely from the United States. In addition to foreign aid, two of the most prevalent topics discussed in the literature are trade/economic liberalization and regional economic integration (for example, Mercosur and NAFTA). During and after the Cold War, Latin America played a strategic foreign policy role as it became the object of a rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union hoping to expand their power and/or contain that of the other. This role was also explored in a considerably larger body of research, along with the decision of Latin American nations to diversify their foreign relations in the post–Cold War era. Furthermore, scholars have analyzed different regions/countries that have become new and/or expanded targets of Latin American foreign policy, including the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Despite the substantial amount of scholarship that has accumulated over the years, a unified theory of Latin American foreign policy remains elusive. Future research should therefore focus on the development of a theory that incorporates the multiple explanatory variables that influence foreign policy formulation and takes into account their relative importance and the effects on each other.
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Argentinian Foreign Policy
Federico Merke and Gisela Doval
If one could characterize Argentina's foreign policy in a single sentence, one could say that its typical feature has been its constant change. Throughout the country’s history, its foreign policy has alternated between Global North and Global South focuses, isolationism and international cooperation (or antagonism) , while also being just as ideologically varied. The reasons for this inconsistency are numerous and reflect the country’s unique domestic politics and international position. Economic vicissitudes and changing Great Power politics at the end of the Cold War have forced the Southern Cone nation to remain flexible in balancing its broader relations with those more regional while implementing mixed neoliberal and statist policies to maintain relative internal order.
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Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy Analysis: Public Opinion, Elections, Interest Groups, and the Media
Douglas C. Foyle and Douglas Van Belle
Societal factors such as public opinion, interest groups, and the media can influence foreign policy choices and behavior. To date, the public opinion and foreign policy literature has focused largely on data derived from the US, although this trend has begun to change in recent years. However, while much of the scholarly work suggests that public attitudes on foreign policy are both reasonable and structured, significant controversies exist over the public’s general influence on policy as well as the influence of elections on foreign policy. Meanwhile, the study of interest groups as a domestic source of foreign policy is dominated by two points of emphasis: ethnic groups acting as interest groups and the US case. These are most often considered together. This ethnic interest group literature stands largely apart from the literature on trade interest groups, which takes its inspiration from the economics literature. Finally, two aspects of media are specifically relevant to media and domestic sources of foreign policy. The first is the way the media serve as an arena of domestic political competition within democracies, and the second is the communicative role that media play in the formation of public opinions that are specific to and critical to foreign policy decision making.
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Human Rights and Foreign Policy Analysis
Shannon Lindsey Blanton and David L. Cingranelli
Foreign policy analysis emerged as a subfield ino the late 1950s and early 1960s, when scholars began to focus on substate factors and on the decision making process in evaluating foreign policy. It was during this time that the United States embarked on an effort to establish internationally recognized legal standards aimed at protecting individual human rights. The United Nations Charter and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) made human rights promotion the responsibility of all member nations. But it was only in the late 1970s that human rights became an important component of quantitative foreign policy analysis. Numerous developments, including the Helsinki Accords of 1975 and the International Human Rights Covenants in 1976, helped elevate human rights concerns in the U.S. foreign policy making process. The scholarly literature on the subject revolves around three key issues: whether governments should make the promotion of human rights a goal of their foreign policies; whether the increasing use of human rights language in foreign policy rhetoric has been translated by the United States and other countries into public policies that have been consistent with that rhetoric; and whether the foreign policies of OECD governments actually have led to improved human rights practices in less economically developed countries. While scholars have produced a considerable amount of work that examines the various influences on the policy making process—whether at the individual, institutional, or societal levels of analysis—relatively few of them have focused on human rights perse.
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Strategic Relationships in Post-Communist Foreign Policies
Jason E. Strakes, Mikhail A. Molchanov, and David J. Galbreath
To gain a comprehensive understanding of the relationships of elite/citizen preferences and strategies—and its consequent impact on the perceived role of their countries in the greater international system—it is necessary to put an emphasis on interactions within and across contrasting areas of the formerly communist world. Until recently, the systematic investigation of foreign policy-making processes has been a relatively neglected dimension within the general domain of post-communist studies. During the mid-to-late 1990s, various scholars addressed ideological redefinition in post-communist states. Other scholars have addressed the foreign policy trajectory of the newly independent states from the perspective of governance, institutional structure, and state capacity. Among the analytic tools that have been adopted to evaluate the international activities of post-communist states in recent years is the burgeoning concept of “multi-vector” foreign policy. However, due to the vast cross-regional scope and complexity of the former Soviet region, it has become more analytically useful to identify this group of countries in terms of their location in separate and respective geographic subregions. Two regional overviews provide a synthesis of the four analytic foci: national identity, political transition, rationality, and regionalism. The first offers an assessment of the foreign policy decisions and strategies of the Baltic republics since 1990–1. The second evaluates the foreign relations between the Russian Federation and the five independent republics of Central Asia.
